 Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering .next conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to be joined on the program. Hi, two gentlemen from Intel. We have Michael Koalek, Mikhail Koalek, sorry. And Justin Wheeler, thank you both for joining us today. Mikhail, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been at Intel, a little bit about your background. How I might skip how long I've been at Intel, because I reveal how all I am. Well, I run sales with ISVs. So, as you can imagine, Nutanix is one of our top partners in Hyperconverged, and it's a pleasure to be here in Nice, and see all those crowds interested in software defined. So, happy to be here. All right, so you've been through a couple of cranks of more cycle, more and more loss. It's been a long 17 years now. Yeah, we say bring the Intel to Tiktok. We keep it moving. Yes, okay. Justin, same question for you. Tell us a little bit about your background and how long you've been at Intel. Yeah, I'm a storage solutions architect with the non-volatile memory solutions group, thankfully called NSG for short, one of the good uses for acronyms. So basically, I talk about anything flash, anything solutions orientated around storage. It's quite a broad range in subject, but very entertaining one, and one that I enjoy immensely as well. All right, so Mikhail, what brings Intel to the event? Of course, most of the Nutanix deployments run on some flavor of your processors, but maybe take us a little bit beyond that as to what the partnership looks like. Sure, I understand. So the reason we're working with Nutanix is because we believe that they're key partners to change the market of the software defined and the general data center into the hyper-converged. So we're working with the key partners and the fastest running rabbits like Nutanix to talk to our end customers for them to see the benefit of what is a hyper-converged, what is software defined at the center. And with Nutanix, we're able to turn those customers into the newest technologies the fastest. So it's more about the new technologies, it's more about the new workloads, new use cases. That's why we're here. We re-appreciate the business of Nutanix, but we're here to make it faster, better, bigger. Justin, you actually give a presentation here at the show. Sounds like it ties in a lot of those themes. Why don't you give us a little bit of thumbnail of what you were talking about? I mean, so basically, building what Mickey was saying, technologies evolve massively. The way that people are thinking about infrastructures, especially from a storage perspective, the agility that the new solutions provide around hyper-convergence, really the technology that enables that is the main part of what the talk was this morning. So NVMe becoming more mainstream as devices with the prevalence of U.2 and connectivity of choice in most servers nowadays. So really kind of like dropping the shackles of the old ways of doing things and how we fit in with that from CPU, storage and networking perspective. Yeah, if I heard in the keynote this morning, Skylake and NVMe were the two things that made me think of what your organization's doing, yes? Very much so. And I think we're still, we're actually at the bottom of the rung, as I mentioned in the conversation this morning. There's so much more development that can be done. It's an exciting time to be involved. And being in point with these guys, the Nutanix is one of the key things. This is storage central for us. The story that we have is very much hand in glove with what these guys want to achieve as well. Yeah, I'm curious. When we think about customers, one of the challenges they always have is upgrade cycles. And upgrade cycles have actually been useful for Intel, but when we go to hyper-converge, in some ways I think it would make it easier for how we manage those upgrades is there. Any commentary on that? Yeah, sure. And so we're working with Nutanix on an ongoing basis. And we had a very interesting meetings in Dubai two weeks ago when we sat with Nutanix, okay, how can we turn the customers using current infrastructure, which very often is already so for defined, but this is like a few years ago. And they just said, we need to go there with the demo kits. You know, you're talking about the small computers, three tiers, and we're just showing them, look, you just plug it in, you put a few workloads, Bob is your uncle. So that's how we can accelerate together the refresh, the replacements, and basically make their lives better and easier. I mean, the more of less story is something that most people's blood would run cold in, especially if you're on the sales side of things. But given, like I said, what Riko was saying there, you know, we've got munition nuts that we can actually go out and we can run what was previously considered an enterprise class storage solution on a couple of desktop PCs in effect now. You know, the agility is really the key thing here. You know, when you're talking about hyper-converged software defined, or converged solutions, whatever iteration you're looking at there, the agility this brings to you modern day nowadays is just fantastic. And it's a compelling story. And it's getting out there and telling the people about it. You know, shout it from the rooftops, but it's not just the technical, it's also the business case around it. It's handing glove again. Just, how does HV fit into that, Trevor? Is Intel pretty much agnostic on that or is there anything special from the hypervisor standpoint? No, I mean, that's one of the best things about Intel. I mean, previous jobs I've had, I've been one-trick pony or been only to talk about storage. I mean, as I said early on, we've got all three major components of any solution nowadays. So that's a network in computing storage. We work across them, same with the application perspective. Workloads for us, we don't have to be specific about it. We talk about what's good for the customer, what they want from their storage infrastructure. And it's not just from a technical perspective, it's how they view their business evolving. Again, we'd come back to the agility word. And it's very much what we're about. And it's exactly how we do it. So Intel is well-known and sometimes a little bit too well-known of putting a lot of benchmarks, also features. So what we're doing right now with all the hypervisors and basically the social-defined data centers is we're showing the use case benchmarks. So, dear customer, you have an SQL on your bare metal. Here's the benchmark. Here's how fast it's going. Here's more reliable than this. Or here's the disaster recovery stuff we have together. So we're no longer talking about the pure performance. We're talking about what is the value for end customer for implementing opt-ins, implementing Skylakes or any other technology. You've got commonality that needs to be maintained. People have invested a large amount of money in skill sets of individuals in their departments. You've got to take into consideration also their cloud strategy, whatever that may be, whether it be hybrid, whether that be full cloud, moving, migrating workloads and data in and out. It's a big part of it. So it's not a one solution fits all. Everyone's built differently. People will look at ESXi, they'll want Acropolis, they'll want KVM, they'll want Hyper-V. We play across all those. That's the fun part of the job. What feedback are you getting from customers at the event or just in general around Nutanix-based? What do we get? It's easy to deploy for starters. It's a highly skilled sales force, very good technical support. And we're trying to follow Nutanix. We have an engineering support on our side as well. So whatever, where we can help, whatever we can improve or increase velocity of those replacements, we're going together. But customers are generally happy with Nutanix, which we're very happy with because for us, again, one of the key partners to drive the hyper-convert infrastructure. I mean, as we mentioned earlier, on the story resounds, it's a good story to tell. You just got to look at the attendance here today to see how well-thought of Nutanix hours of company. And as I mentioned earlier, we're just at the bottom of the rung here. When you're actually talking about replacement of traditional tier one storage systems, to always a hyper-convergence, you want to make sure that that is something that's easy to deploy, easy to manage, cost-effective. There's not a lot not to like about Nutanix solution. So you can see that body attendance here. Everyone speaks very highly of it. And I think it's just a snapshot of the people that's here. Technically it makes sense, commercially it makes sense. Justin, any tips from your presentation, for customers is to help them just get things done even simpler than what they've been doing before? Well, I thought when you were talking about tips about the thing I was going to say, don't drink Red Bull before we give a good presentation. But no, consultative approach is really the way to go about it. Don't believe everything that you hear. I'm self-confessed, not a great fan of benchmark figures because they're unrealistic in many workloads that's out there nowadays. The key thing for us is come and talk to us, let us consult with you with our partners, understand your business, your workload. The deployment side of things comes very easy after that. You've got to do the groundwork, though. You can't just dismiss good design practice or good best practice. Yeah, I mean, for the entry point to start playing and doing things with Nutanix is pretty low. They make it easy to test things out. And almost every customer I talked to was like they had to prove themselves and it's a testament to Nutanix that they've got so many customers and they keep growing because if they couldn't deliver on what they said, they wouldn't be where they are. That is correct. The only thing is in a conversation with Nutanix, how can we help them to accelerate the deployments or accelerate the demo? So this is very beginning. They said that we actually don't want to use the full-fledged boxes because the customers don't want to give them back. So we have to have something smaller because they need to buy it some stage. So it was a very good comment that it means it works and Nutanix knows how to do it. Yeah, I think if I read, D'Rodge was like, he loves to say in that they can fit in a processor in the palm of his hand and we stick it in a drone. I think he wants to be able to deliver to the customer, have them demo it and then hold remote control, fly it back after a certain period of time. That's already possible for Intel Technology. It would be a pleasure to deploy it. I mean, as with everything, use the architectural sense. Everything that's sturdy in its last eight years has been built on solid foundations. You get the foundations right on any infrastructure and it's the same with that. It'll be there, you can build on it. You can continue on and then involve as business grows. So you've got to be able to build something that you can roll with. Yeah. Well, Justin, Mikhail, really appreciate you sharing with us the update on Intel's partnership with Nutanix. We'll be back here with lots more coverage from Nutanix.next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Thank you.