 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, hit the Cube, covering Dotnex Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to the Cube here at Nutanix Dotnex 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host this week have been Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Rodney Forman, who's the vice president of global channel sales at Nutanix. Thanks for joining us Rodney. Thank you. I've got Debra VanWerth, who's the senior vice president of alliances and inside sales at Sirius, not the radio, but the channel partner. And you got the last name right, so thank you very much. Good to see you. I'm glad I didn't lose that bet. You practice well. You practice well. Rodney, let's start with you. You're new to the role, a lot going on in the channel. I definitely noticed when I came to the show this year the X-Ball Hall has a whole area of the channel partners. There's obviously been channels since day one from Nutanix, but big emphasis here at the show. So tell us what's new and tell us what brought you to Nutanix. Yeah, so my background is I ran the cloud channel business at IBM for that, the middleware channel business for years. Join Nutanix in January. And since January, we've been making a lot of progress. We're evolving and changing our channel program to an industry leading channel charter that we can all be proud of and that will make our partners more successful in the market. I'm pleased with the event. We've got a record number of partners here. Last count was 1600. We had so many partners that the partner exchange keynote was overflowed and we had to stop letting people in. The room was over full and so we made some exciting announcements there, acknowledged the partners for all the new customers that are bringing Nutanix, helping us grow our market share. All of the success we're having with customers is in large part due to our partners because of successful implementations that our partners are driving. And I'm very, very excited to be a part of the Nutanix team and working with partners like Sirius who I worked with at IBM and now we're working together at Nutanix and driving a lot of success in the market together. Great, so Deborah, I got to know Sirius some through the virtualization community over the years. So give us a little bit about your background for those that don't know Sirius, give us some of that. So I've had the privilege, the distinct privilege of being at Sirius for a little over 21 years now. So I've seen a lot of change, internal and external and my role at Sirius is I have responsibility for all of our partnerships nationally as well as inside sales. A little bit of a two-pronged approach at Sirius. We have enjoyed and I actually look you in the eye and tell you we have sincerely enjoyed the partnership that we have with Nutanix because it is just that, it is a partnership. It's a win-win and it's something that started in late 2013 for us and it was something that our technology community, our technical and as well as our architecture folks actually take a look and said HCI could bring a lot of value to our client set and we entered into that partnership and it has been a phenomenal success for us. Hopefully you have seen the same and we see nothing but growth for both of us. And Debra, for those that don't know, tell us what Geo's is Sirius in, what's kind of the breadth of portfolio that you offer? So Sirius today continues to grow and we are North America basically. I like that one of the companies Sirius applied with Varl and they had the Varl on Madness Night. It was really great culture. So let's talk about the customer engagement. A lot of customers here, a lot of joint customers. Are we to the point that we're beyond the chicken and chicken discussion and customers are coming to Sirius and asking about HCI and Nutanix specifically or do you guys have to push out the message? You know it's funny, so if I may be candid, in 2013 I would tell you we were pushing, right? Here's Nutanix, here's what they do, here's what HCI is, here's the value of HCI to your environment. Today it's no longer like that, right? It's no longer in the corner with the lights blinking and hey, let's not tell anybody we're doing this. It is much more adopted, it's embraced, it's something that people are building off of. And what we're seeing with our clients is we're seeing a continual, my environment is complex, I need something that doesn't do just VDI but does beyond that. And I think interestingly enough, Nutanix has grown up, if I may say that, in that when we started, we were a VDI company, no more. Right, you're spanning across all workloads. I have to give the folks at Sirius credit because they continue to come up with innovative ways to apply our technology and different use cases, different customer types and industries. And they are bringing us a lot of new logos because of that innovative approach. So they're a very valuable partner to us from that perspective in that they're reaching customers that frankly our direct sales team couldn't reach with the bag of products they have to sell. They add value, they add innovation around our technology and then we're able to extend our reach into the market, leveraging Sirius. I'd like to go into the cloud conversation. So when I look at the channel, it was sometimes there was fear at the beginning days. There were plenty that had Microsoft practices that have worked along those lines. Today Amazon's working with them and of course Nutanix is expanding how it works in all of those environments. Deborah, if you can share, how does cloud fit into it? You know, kind of with and without Nutanix. I don't think you can leave this event without talking about cloud, right, in and of itself. So I mean, Sirius believes and will continue to believe in a hybrid world, right, hybrid IT. And I think cloud is an extremely important part of that conversation. I think where Nutanix is uniquely positioned is with their enterprise cloud and what they've done with not being just a VDI solution set anymore, they can span and help our customers share multiple workloads within a data center as well as and or within the cloud set. So it's an extremely important part of where we are today. More importantly, where we're going with cloud. So because I don't think anybody has it all set with cloud candidly. I think a lot of us are learning. But again, I think Nutanix is uniquely positioned today for that. Yeah, I agree with what Deb said, but you hit on something that's come out very strongly at this conference with some of our announcements around beam and era and flow, which is hybrid cloud. Customers have hybrid cloud environments and we bring together that private cloud and public cloud environments seamlessly. And now we provide some intelligence behind the decisions customers are making. How much is it really costing me to have a public cloud environment versus private cloud and where will my workloads run more effectively and efficiently at what cost? And this is going to be technology that Sirius will be able to leverage not only to sell in the market, but also add value into their solutions around cloud. So we're excited about being able to provide technology and tools that Sirius can use to extend their value proposition to be more competitive in the market as well. This is what Nutanix is doing so well to Rodney's point. They continue to innovate, right? Again, kind of what got them to where they are today is not going to be the same thing that kind of gets you to where you want to be as a company and you continue to innovate and we see that and we need that because ultimately at the end of the day our respective, our bosses if you would, are our clients. We have to make sure that we're making that complex environment less complex for them and much more open. Yeah, I mean, we're proud of being in that upper right in the Magic Quadrant, but let me tell you there's others that are in that Magic Quadrant behind us that want to take that spot back and we know that. So we have to continue innovation at a very fast pace which you're seeing from us to continue to move hopefully in a whole another zip code from our competitors which our partners benefit from and it allows them the freedom to sell more into the market, leveraging that innovation that we continue to drive. I don't see the rate and pace of that ending in any time soon. So Debra, let's talk a little bit about the values that Nutanix has brought with abstracting the software even further from the hardware after no longer becoming a appliance company, it's now a software company. What flexibility does that give serious when it got to talk to customers, when it talked to platforms that Nutanix has partnerships with? And platforms that they support but not necessarily have partnerships with? What are those customer conversations like? Yeah, this is interesting, especially from a company that started in 1980. We've had several conversations about this, so this will be good. Yeah, well, I'm going to make it short though, Rodney, how about that? But again, when you take a look at a customer environment now, I mean our job is to make sure that we're bringing best of breed technology but more importantly, that it's open and that's what Nutanix brings to the table. It's an open environment being able to utilize different technologies together to collaborate. I mean, just take a look at the floor today. Who would have thought that IBM and Nutanix would be sitting at the same table? Truly, and I say that in a very positive way. It enables us to take a great example as IBM and Nutanix. It enables us to take that strength and that power of IBM Power AIX, meld it with the Nutanix solution, being able to create a much more powerful and an open environment for them. So it's being able to be agnostic and an integrator for our clients. Wonder if you can expand a little bit. The Power one's something that not everybody fully understands. It's often starting with a different set of applications, adding AIX into there. What are you hearing from customers? What's so attractive? So I think with the announcement this week, I think it was a lot of a discussion before kicking tires. I think what you're going to see in the next 30 to 60 days are people are actually going to start allowing those conversations to go deeper and wider within their existing customer base. Because again, Sirius is privileged to have one of the largest, if not the largest in North America, IBM Power base. It enables us to go back in and have relevant conversations to say, let's get a little bit open with Nutanix as a software. So Stu, let's face it. Not every customer of IBM has the latest power system. Right? I mean, that's a fact. We've tried, Rodney, we've tried. Yeah, so that's opportunity for us. And I think the customers are going to be very excited about this offering because they have not all upgraded. A lot of them have old power sucking, you know, old power systems on AIX and they are welcoming this solution and opportunity to upgrade and modernize their data centers, leveraging this offering and certainly Sirius is a longtime top IBM partner and those customers, IBM customers, look to Sirius for solutions and look to Sirius to advance their infrastructure and modernize it. This is a great opportunity for both of us leveraging this announcement and what we're bringing out to the market with IBM. So outside of power, what's the exciting buzz at the show? What have customers that you guys talked to generally said, you know what? We got to have this tomorrow, right? So I have to be selfish a little bit. I'll tell you that the buzz for us and the 54 team members that are here from Sirius, I would tell you I'd be remiss not to thank Rodney and Sherry and the rest of the executive team for recognizing Sirius as the US partner of the year. That is quite a buzz and one that we will continue to discuss throughout the show. I tell you that for us right now when we take a look at the most opportunistic way of going back into our client sets now and offering a solution would be the IBM piece. The IBM Power AIX announcement is probably one of the key opportunities for us to go back in and offer value to our client sets. That's probably the biggest, the buzz for us today. Yeah, and I tell you that they should be very, very proud of this award because one of the things I did taking over the channel and leading into this event is we had a lot of awards before. I mean, it was like a nine-year-old soccer game. Everybody got a trophy and I reduced the number of awards down significantly because I wanted more press coverage, I wanted more recognition and I wanted it to mean something. So winning this award for Sirius, there was some tough competition, there are again some big partners and Sirius really comes to the top of the heap clearly with some of the investment and focus and what they're achieving in the market with us. So it's no longer a nine-year-old soccer trophy. I mean, they really accomplished something. Yeah, winning this award. So congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Rodney, so last thing I wanted to ask, it's competitive in the channel these days. Sirius has a broad spectrum of partners. What do you want people to take away from the show about Nutanix's commitment to the channel? Well, we announced a new channel charter, okay? And I call it a channel charter on purpose as opposed to a channel program for a reason because it's different. It's not the same old channel program with platinum, bronze and gold and the tiering and the same old thing. We have to differentiate ourselves in the market from other channel programs. We are evolving as a company to be that provider of solutions in the multi-cloud error, which means you can't have the same old channel programs anymore and deliver in that type of market and environment. So I'm excited about the channel charter we've defined and are rolling out into the market. It is clearly different than any other provider, different than our competitors. And it's going to help our partners, both large and small, to be effective in selling our solutions in the market with competitive rewards and financial benefits, as well as the ability to build skills, drive pipeline across our ecosystem of partners that we have for Nutanix. So I'm very excited about what we've announced and I think it's going to differentiate us from the rest. Debra, congratulations on the award. Thank you very much. Thank you for all the updates. Great to see, you know, it's the technology, the channel, everything maturing here. Thank you. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. 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