 The last decade of cloud computing introduced and popularized an operating model that emphasized simplified IT infrastructure provisioning and management. As well, it ushered in an era of consumption based pricing and much more facile IT management generally. Now these principles they've bled into traditional data centers which have increasingly become software led, programmable and DevOps centric. Now as we enter the post isolation era, it's ironic that not only are IT executives pursuing hybrid strategies, but everyone is talking about hybrid, hybrid work, hybrid teams, hybrid events, hybrid meetings, the world has gone hybrid. And the cloud is no exception. The cloud is expanding, public cloud models are pushing to the data center and the edge on premises infrastructure is connecting to public clouds and managing data workflows and infrastructure across clouds and out to the edge. Now most leading technology executives that I speak with they're essentially architecting their own clouds. And what I mean by that is they're envisioning and building an abstraction layer that hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and manages workloads intelligently. The end customer doesn't know or care where the data is as long as it's secure, properly governed and can be accessed quickly all irrespective of physical location. Now for the most part this vision can't be bought off the shelf, it needs to be built by placing bets on key technology partners and leveraging the so-called API economy. In other words, picking technology vendors that I trust and programmatically codifying and automating where possible my organizational edicts and business requirements into my own cloud to uniquely support my application portfolio and my modern business processes which by the way are rapidly evolving. Now a key to enabling this vision is optionality meaning not getting locked into one single technology platform but rather having the confidence that as technology evolves, which it always does I can focus my energies on adding value to my business through process innovation and human capital growth. Hello everyone and welcome to this CUBE Conversation and video exclusive on a major new industry development and partnership that's designed to maximize customer infrastructure options and move the new era of hybrid cloud computing forward. We have two industry leaders joining us today. Monica Kumar is the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Cloud Go To Market from Nutanix and David Farrell is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Red Hat. Folks, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. Good to be here. Thank you so much. All right, so Red Hat is the poster child for open source success and it's executing on a strategy based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL and OpenShift, the industry's leading container platform to drive cloud like experiences. Nutanix is a pioneering company and was the first to truly envision and successfully bring to market a cloud operating model to data center infrastructure. So you two are getting together and forming a deeper, more substantive relationship. So Monica, tell us about the hard news. What's the scoop? Yeah, of course. So first of all, I'm so excited to be here with David Farrell from Red Hat. And for those of you who may not know this, I have a very deep personal connection with Red Hat from my previous role as well. I've been working with Red Hat since the early 2000s. So it gives me great pleasure to be here on behalf of Nutanix and with David from Red Hat to be announcing a formal strategic partnership to deliver open hybrid multi-cloud solutions. Now let me explain to you what I mean by that. This partnership that we're announcing today is going to enable best in class solutions for buildings, scaling, and managing containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in of course, hyperconverged infrastructure environments. So the collaboration is going to bring together these industry leading technologies, enabling and integrating Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux onto the Nutanix Cloud Platform which includes our well-known Nutanix AOS and AHV hypervisor technologies. Now the question is why are we doing all this? It's because of, as you said, Dave, the rapid evolution of hybrid cloud strategies and adoption of containers and Kubernetes in our customer base to develop, deploy, and manage apps. And what we're hearing from our customers is that they want this integration between Red Hat technologies and Nutanix solutions. Okay, thank you, Monica. So big news, David, from Red Hat's perspective, okay, so Red Hat, Nutanix, both leaders in their respective fields. David, what spurred the decision to partner from your standpoint? Yeah, and listen, let me echo Monica's comments as well. So we're really excited about the partnership with Nutanix and we're excited because Nutanix is the leader in hybrid cloud infrastructure but we're even more excited because this is what customers have been asking us to do. And that's really at the core of the decision. I think both teams, both companies have been listening to customers and we've got a groundswell of enterprise customers around the world that are asking us to come together, bring our technologies together from a certification perspective, which Monica spoke about, right, is number one. So RHEL and OpenShift being certified on top of AHV, right, to provide the best in class service for enterprise-grade applications. But there's more to it than just the certification, like customers are looking for a world-class integrated support experience as well as they go into production. So we also have integrated support, right? So customers can contact Nutanix, they can contact Red Hat and having that seamless, that seamless experience is really, really critical in something that our customers have been asking us for. And then we'll continue to work from a roadmap perspective as well, from an engineering perspective to make sure that our roadmaps are aligned and that customers have assurance over time and continuity over time so that they can make investments that they know are going to pay off and be safe investments and scalable investments over the long arc of their technology horizons. So those are kind of our view of why this is good for customers. And back to your points, David, it's about choice and optionality, right? And choice and consistency. And I think the verdict is in now in the industry that hybrid is the future, right? Everybody kind of agrees on that, right? And certain applications and certain workloads are going to run on-prem or there's going to run in the public cloud. And customers need choice to be able to decide what's the right destination for those workloads. And that's what Red Hat's all about. That's what Red Hat's all about, what OpenShift is all about, is that it runs on any cloud infrastructure and now it runs on Nutanix HCI. So I like that too, one virtual throat to choke or maybe better put, maybe one virtual hand to shake. So David, staying with you, maybe you could talk about some of the other key terms of the partnership. Maybe focus on joint solutions that customers can expect. And I'm particularly interested in the engineering collaboration. I know there's a go-to-market component, but the engineering collaboration and technology innovation that we can expect. Yeah, so there's a few components to it, David. One is obviously as I talked about roadmap, right? And that's our technology teams coming together and looking at the existing roadmaps for RHEL and OpenShift, but also adjacent capabilities that are coming from the Red Hat portfolio and capabilities that are coming from our ISV ecosystems and our respective ecosystems. This is a big win for our partners as well that have been asking us to work together. So we'll continue to keep the radar up about what some of those functionalities and capabilities ought to be, whether we make them or somebody else makes them to pull into the strategy, if you will. The second big principle around joint engineering is going to be around customer experience, right? So for example, we're starting off with the agnostic installer. By the way, this is coming Thursday, right? I think we're live on Thursday the 29th, right? So this is in market, it is GA, it's available today the 29th, right? And then we will move to the UPI, so sorry, to the IPI installer in the second half of this year, right? To provide a more automated experience. And then I think on the Nutanix side, Monica can talk to this, that Nutanix is building APIs to also automate installation, right? So first and foremost, we're all about getting the solution and getting the jointly engineered technologies working together and providing a superior customer experience for our customers that are deploying Red Hat on top of Nutanix. And that's going to be the guiding driver, if you will, for how we work together. Yeah, and let me add to that. Like you said, the engineering is already bearing fruit for our customers, right? As of today, when we announcing, we already have certified versions of Red Hat Linux with AHV number one. Number two, as you said, the Agnostic installer is available. We will make the automated installer available so any customer can deploy OpenShift using the Nutanix Cloud platform in the very near future, right? Those are the two sort of the beginnings of the engineering. And this is going to, this is a long-term partnership. So we will continue to evolve the different configurations that we, you know, that we test and that we validate as well as we go on. So I'm really excited about the fact that we're going to be offering customers fully-tested, validated configurations to deploy. I always like this. David, if I may just go in there as well. I mean, so that's on the engineering side, right? But there'll also be an important thing. Customers expect us to cooperate and to engage proactively as we face them, right? So that both the Red Hat, part of the agreement is that both the Red Hat and the Nutanix field teams, right? The customer teams will also be enabled, right? We'll do technical enablement for our teams, stand up proof of technologies, right? So that we're burning in some of the technology, if you will, and working out the kinks before the customer has to, right? And this is also a key value proposition is we're doing this work upstream, both in the engineering teams and in the field engagement teams, so that customers can get, you know, time to market, if you will, and speed of solution deployment. Got it. So we'd love to talk about the sweet spot, the ideal customer profile, ICP. So is there a particular type of customer monica that stands to benefit most from the partnership and the certifications that you're committing to? Yeah, I mean, if you look at, you know, cloud-native app development, that's happening across all types of segments, but particularly, you know, enterprise customers running in all industries, practically running tier one applications or building custom applications in the cloud would be a great focus for this. Customers who are maturing their cloud-native journeys and want to build and run cloud-native workloads at scale would be another type of audience. I mean, when you think about the gamut of customers, we serve jointly together, it's all the way from, you know, mid-sized customers who may want a complete solution that's built for them to enterprise customers and even global accounts that are actually doing a lot of custom application development and then deploying things at scale. So really, I mean, anybody who's developing applications, anybody who's running workloads, you know, database workloads, applications that they're building, analytics workloads, I think for all of them, this is a very beneficial solution. And I would say specifically from a Nutanix customer perspective, we've had a demand for, you know, the certification with AHV and REL for a long time. So that's something our customers are very much looking forward to. We have a large number of customers who already are deploying that configuration and now they know it's fully tested, fully supported and there's an ongoing roadmap from both companies supported. And then as far as the opening shift goes, we are super excited about the possibilities of providing that optionality to customers and really meeting them at every level of their journey to the cloud. So you got the product level certifications. That to me is all about, you know, trust and it's kind of table stakes. But if I have that now, I can lean in. What other kind of value dimensions should we be thinking about with regard to this partnership? I mean, obviously, you know, cost savings, you know, speed, things like that, but maybe you can sort of add more color to that. Yeah, well, absolutely. Look, I mean, anytime there's joint, there's integration, there is complexity that's taken out of deployment from the customer's hands and the vendors who the work upfront that results in a lot of different benefits, including productivity benefits, speed to market benefits, total cost of ownership benefits, as you said. So we expect that the fact that the two companies are now going to do all this work upfront for our customers, they'll be able to deploy and do things that we're doing, you know, much faster than before, right? So that's, you know, definitely, we believe in then also joint support. I think David mentioned that. The fact that we are offering joint support as well to our customers will be problem solving together. So the seamless support experience will provide faster resolution for our joint customers. Great, David, I wonder if you could kind of share your view of what, you know, the thinking about the Nutanix cloud platform, what makes it well suited for supporting open shift and cloud native workloads? Well, I think the, first off, they're the leader, right? They bring up, they bring the most trusted and tried HCI environment in the industry to bear for customers, right? And they deliver on the promises that Monica just went through, right? Around simplicity, around ease of use, around scalability, around optionality, right? And they take that complexity away. And that's what customers, I think are telling both Red Hat and Nutanix and really everybody for that matter, right? Is that they want to focus on the business outcomes, on the business value, on the applications that differentiate them. And Nutanix really takes away a lot of that complexity for the customer at the infrastructure level, right? And then RHEL and OpenShift and Red Hat do that as well, both at the infrastructure level and at the application level, right? So when it comes to simplicity and when it comes to choice but consistency, both Nutanix and Red Hat have that at the core of how we build and how we engineer products that we take to market to remove that complexity so that customers can move quickly, more cost effectively and have that optionality that they're after. Yeah, David, if I may add to that and thank you again for saying the things you said, that's exactly why our customers choose us. One of the key factors is our distributed architecture as well. Because of the ways architected, the Nutanix Cloud platform delivers an environment that's highly scalable and resilient and it's well suited for enterprise deployments of Red Hat OpenShift at scale. The platform also includes fully integrated unified storage which addresses many of the challenging problems faced by operators routinely in configuring and managing storage for stateful containers, for example. So there's a lot of goodness there and the combination of Red Hat, both REL and OpenShift and Nutanix Cloud Platform, I believe offers really unparalleled value to our customers in terms of the technology we bring and the integration we bring to our customers. Okay, great, last question. David, maybe you first and then Monica you can bring us home. Where do you guys want to see this partnership going? We want to see where it's going. We want to see it going where customers are getting the most value of course, right? And we would like to see obviously adoption, right? So anytime two leaders like ourselves come together it's all about delivering for the customer. We've got a long list of customers that have been asking us as Monica said to do this and it's overwhelming, right? So we're responding to that. We've got a pipeline of customers that we're already beginning to engage on. And so we'll measure our progress based upon adoption, right? And how customers adopt the solution, the shared solution as we go forward, how they're feeding back to us the value that they're getting and also encouraging them to engage with us around the roadmap and where we take the solution, right? So I think those are ways that we'll be focused on adoption and satisfaction around it across the marketplace in the degree of interaction and input we get from customers with respect to the roadmap. Monica, how do you feel about it? Yeah, what success looked like, Monica? Yeah, look, we all know that technology is a means to an end, right? And the end is solving customer problems, as David said. For us, success will be when we have many, many, many, many joint happy customers that are getting benefit from our platform. To me, this is just the beginning of our relationship to help customers. The best is yet to come. I'm super excited, as I said, for many reasons but specifically because we know there's a huge demand out there for this integrated solution between Red Hat and Nutanix and we'll start delivering it to our customers. So we'll be working very closely with our customers to see how the adoption goes and we want to delight them with our joint solution. That's our goal. Thank you. Well, David, you kind of alluded to it. Customers have been looking forward to this for quite some time and a number of us have been thinking about this happening. And to me, the key is you're actually putting some real muscle behind it as seen in the engineering resources. And you got to have that type of commitment before you really go forward. Otherwise, it's just kind of, yeah, a nice press release, nice party deal. This isn't. So congratulations on figuring this out. Good luck. And we'll be really excited to watch your progress. Appreciate you guys coming to theCUBE. Okay, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.