 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our live coverage at Dell Technologies 2018. We are in Las Vegas and we are in the sands right now, 14,000 people strong attending this year's show and great energy, great buzz here on the show floor. Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined now by Ben Gibson, the CMO Nutanix and Dan McConnell, Vice President of Dell EMC. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. Good to have you here on theCUBE. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, a lot of conversation about hyper, right? And hyperconverged, we're talking about some numbers that we've heard that Dell's been talking about that 60 plus percent of inquiries, discussions here from the customer is all about HCI. And so how does that stack up with what you're hearing first off, Ben or Dan in the marketplace? And what's the driving force right now behind all that discussion? Absolutely, yeah, it's been HCI. I guess the Nutanix partnership, we've been about four years, right? I'll jokingly say, back before HCI was cool. And more and more, what we've seen is in the early days, it was picking application, okay? It's VDI and that's kind of its starting point. But now more and more in all these discussions, it's not what app or what workload works for HCI. It's really which one doesn't work. I'm trying to throw everything I can on HCI. Which one should I park over here? So the interest has really, really flipped. And it's the ease of use, it's the flexibility, it's the incremental scale. So it's something that we've seen huge traction in on the Dell side, obviously to our partnership with Nutanix as well as some of our own solutions. It's tremendous growth. And year over year, we've seen stronger and stronger growth. So definitely getting traction, it's moving out of what is test and dev and it's in core of the data center right now. And what's driving that, you think, in the marketplace? How's it responding, I guess, to performance that it's seeing from early adopters, basically? And what's that motivation there? Yeah, John, you know, as Dan just said, there's a lot of growth in this space and the market for hyperconverge in general, it's probably among, if not the top IT growth segment that we're seeing out there across the whole IT landscape. Analysts are pegging this as 60% or above year on year growth business and the multi-billions of dollars. And so I think what's motivating that interest, I think there's a huge surge that I think together we're seeing around data center modernization initiatives. There's a lot of need for application traffic growth and how our customers modernize their data center environments to keep up with that demand they're seeing with the workloads that they're running on-premise and those that they may be developing off-prem and bring it on-prem or the like. It's really driving a lot of this hyperconvergence growth story that we're seeing out there in the market. So let's talk about some of the myths out in a market. Hyperconvergence not enterprise ready from a couple of different areas. One, let's talk about the relationship that Nutanix has with Dell. Global reach and scalability. Nutanix, not a hardware company. Nutanix is a software company, but the product is sold in a box. Those boxes have to be supported. How does Nutanix support global companies when you're a software company? Yeah, you know, for us it is about software choice, but it's also about very strategic partnerships, and I count the Dell partnership we have. It's one that's been in our history and moving forward, our most fruitful. It's about delivering different offerings and different ways for customers to consume our joint hyperconvergence solutions. Just recently we announced what we call XC-Core, which is now another option for Dell customers to take advantage of Nutanix HCI with Dell hardware and be able to consume by a software license from Nutanix, buy and continue to buy their hardware platform from Dell, bring that all together in solutions. So we have a real freedom of choice here that we drive out globally. It's a great combination with go-to-market reach with Dell, combined with innovation that we bring to the table together, and I think it's working really well in promising. And even our services teams, to your point, have worked very closely together, you know what? Depending on which consumption model you choose on the appliance side, we'll take L1, L2 support, we'll, you know, on the Dell side. So as the product scale, we help that services aspect, that scalability, that reach. Yeah, so from a practical perspective, you know, I'm a global company, I have retail shops in Germany, and based out of the U.S., you know, drive goes out. And who do I call and how do I get support for that? The great news with this relationship, it's really the customer's choice and what their preference is. We have many customers where Dell is providing that global support model. We now have a new offering that allows the customer to choose whether they get their software support for HCI from Nutanix and continue their existing service relationships with Dell. The nice thing is we're not forcing customers in any one decision on this run, whatever suits their interests, then their needs the best. So next myth, HCI isn't ready for mission critical applications. Dell yesterday brought a customer that went at first and everything in their mission critical systems is Celtic, a global hotelor, their reservation system, their big Oracle apps. Talk to me about the mission critical story, Nutanix, Dell together. You know, one of the key, I don't know, just to exemplify this, we continue to get customer demand for a foresocket. Recently, just released a foresocket version of the XC series. Foresocket, that's database. What do you mean, database on HCI? So yeah, it is continuing to grow into mission critical. Exact status, like 45 to 50% of HCI is deployed in the data center, right? So mission critical workloads, databases, there's no more mission critical than that. And majority of them sitting right in the data center. So it's, there is, that myth of non-data center kind of to the side project or VDI only, that might have been where it was two years ago, no longer. Yeah, I love myths because it makes for good marketing. Right, and we're seeing this trend. So obviously VDI was one of the first, you know, sweet spot workloads for HCI in its infancy. We're seeing across our customer rates now and we talked about this in our New York investor day a few weeks ago. Now we're seeing 60% plus of all workloads are tier one applications, databases, other mission critical applications that are running on HCI infrastructure with Dell and Nutanix together. And so we've seen that really start to quickly shift over into that front. I think what the market should keep an eye out for is more and more, not only customers running those tier one applications on HCI, but you're going to start to see more and more of these major ISVs start to certify their major applications on HCI infrastructure. It's already running there. Poke at SAP HANA, I would love to see SAP HANA on Nutanix, that would be awesome. No comment at present. Well, you're kind of talking about trends in a way here, right? I mean, in terms of adoption of people wanting to do, I'm always kind of interested about the chicken and the egg. I mean, you're developing product, you're listening to customers, you hear their demands, and you're also trying to perhaps develop in a vacuum and give them new capabilities that they haven't dreamed of yet. So how do you work that in terms of that give and take and in your development responding to what the market wants and also driving the market to what you think it needs? I think what's proven to be very successful for Nutanix is obviously we're very customer centric. We also have a strong opinion. Deer is our CEO, talks about having a real strong opinion on architecture and vision for how do we innovate? How do we solve some problems that maybe our customers haven't faced yet? And so I think it's a good balancing act. And so we come to the table, we listen very carefully to our customers, we understand what their key challenges are, but we come with an opinion as well, right? So conventional wisdom would say, go down a certain direction architectually. Well, what if you collapse those three tier data center architectures? What if you move towards this hyperconverge offering? How do you manage and automate and bring together more glue, if you will, across multi-cloud environments? That combines having a vision and a strong conviction of opinion of where it's headed, combined with making sure there's always a check and balance. What are customers thinking? Where are they seeing their challenges? No, absolutely. And as customers step in the HCI, we're seeing more and more people testing in different areas, people looking to solve different problems with it, typically all around the agility, the scalability, the ease of use. But it is like you said, there's a combination between opinionated and listening. Some of our best innovations have come directly from the customers. These are people that are using it in the field, that are tripping over the new cases. So it's a balance. So Michael Dale on stage just, they talked about the ability of Dale to be able to run workloads wherever customers wanted to run their workloads. So far we've talked about HCI, which is interesting. However, we're going into a model where we need to run workloads in a data center. We need to run workloads outside data center, and we need to manage that infrastructure. What's the Nutanix Dale story around managing workloads across hybrid cloud? Yeah, I would say this is a big trend that we're seeing in the market. There's different terminology for multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, right workload on right cloud platform at right time. And when you start throwing those vectors in place, it creates a lot of potential confusion and complexity. How do you determine what's the best cloud platform in terms of cost, in terms of the laws of physics, in terms of latency with SLAs with these workloads? In terms of laws of the land, from governance and overall legal perspective, so you start to bring in as the market moves towards multi-cloud, there's this vacuum I think that has to be filled that we can fill here together. It's like, okay, how do you determine what's the context? What's the right cost model for a particular workload that makes perfect sense to run on a public cloud platform like an AWS or an Azure or a Google cloud? What other highly predictable workloads absolutely need to be run in a modernized data center environment powered by Nutanix plus Dell HCI? So to me, there's a lot of vacuum that can be filled by innovation and management, automation, context around making those decisions. And the last thing I will say, it's not just about technology innovation, it's an opportunity for our customers, I believe, to really evolve their careers to the next step. If you're an infrastructure manager and all of a sudden there's different platforms where the infrastructure resides, what better opportunity then to become that strategic consultant within your own enterprise to help make those decisions with context and with good smarts behind it? And I think you've hit some good point. I mean, when you look at it, there's going to be multiple clouds, right? And it's about enabling the choice and integrating with whatever the right cloud is for your needs, whether it's, we've got virtue stream capabilities for tier one type cloud stuff, all the way to Azure, on the XC series we just integrated with OMS on the Azure side. So it will actually upload all of the stats and metrics into their log analytics solution. So it's enabling choice, enabling which cloud, there's going to be multiple clouds and different clouds are going to be optimized for different things. So I think you'll see us embrace hybrid, embrace it across multiple clouds on the back end. So it's, I don't know if there's one size fits all. So Opinion Nation, I think is a great segue into what's important, I think as IT managers are looking at solutions, there's no one vendor today that can take an end to end solution and say, you know what, we're your one stop shop for a hybrid cloud. So this is where opinion matters. What is Nutanix's opinion when it comes to how to deliver hybrid cloud? So this is what you will be judged on. Can't be judged on the technology because technology isn't there yet, but where's the vision? Yeah, I think it starts and ends with make complexity, make the complexity with multiple cloud environments, with complicated legacy data center environments, make that all invisible, right? How do you radically reduce that complexity? And we talked all the time about one click, one OS, any cloud. And it's not just a nice marketing tagline. I think it really stands for a principle and a vision around how do you make a lot of that complexity go away? So you can redirect a lot of these IT man hours over towards inventing more, right? We just launched a new campaign, you're talking about freedom to invent, freedom to build the data center you wanted to build. And so it's about coming with that opinion that everything that was so complicated and the next big horizon is multi cloud environments. How do you make that essentially disappear so you can reapply your IT resource to new things that can really impact the business? The last thing I'll say too, spiraling cloud cost, right? And so if you have a teenager at home and maybe you're brave enough to get that teenager the credit card in their online gaming or doing something, so it's kind of that shock bill you get at the end of the month. Depending on what workload you're running on what cloud platform, you could have this teenager with the runaway credit card syndrome. And so how do you simplify or bring that context of visibility to the forefront to help make some of those smarter decisions? So that's some of the things that we like to think about in terms of removing barriers and empowering the customers to take back control of what could potentially become a rapidly disaggregated chaotic environment. You just threw every parent author mark right there. Oh my God, the credit card. Are we going to hear some of this next week? I mean, you've got your big show. You guys almost flip rolls, right? Dan, you're hosting this week and for you, Bennett, it's next week down in New Orleans. Give us a little sneak peek. Yeah, you know, we're really excited about next week, you know, so Dan has been kind enough to host us here this week in Las Vegas. So it's a rough life next week. New Orleans. We go to New Orleans. And so we have our user conference. We call .next. And Keith, you're going to be joining us. We'll be next week with that. The queue will be there. Looking forward for the queue being there. And so this is about bringing together. It's a lot of early adopters, but increasingly it's about more and more customers that I would call more the early majority. As you see, hyperconverged start to surge, multi-cloud start to surge in terms of how do you fill that vacuum that's out there? That's what this conference is going to be all about. We'll have new announcements. We'll have innovations that we'll be demoing. And most importantly, we're really about openness. And this is about strategic partnerships. And to the earlier point, show me a one-stop shop to solve all this complexity. And I'll show you unfulfilled promise. And so I think the work we're doing with Dell will be at the forefront talking about, hey, how are we working together to solve some pretty snarly issues here that we have to solve for our customers? Well, you're going to go home, both of you. You're going to say, man, it's been tough. Two weeks on the road, you get no sympathy, though, I think with Las Vegas and New Orleans back to back. Not bad, huh? It's a good way to go. Dan, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you very much. To Dan in New Orleans. TheCube continues here. We are live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018.