 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TVs. Live coverage from the Nutanix .NEXT Conference. Here in steamy Miami, I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Pleased to have back a CUBE alum, Travis Vigil, who's Executive Director of Product Management with Dell Storage. Travis, thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me, Stu. I'm very excited to be here. Very excited to be at the inaugural Nutanix user conference. Yeah, so Travis, you and I have been at a lot of events together. We've talked to you on theCUBE and off. You know, what's your take here? I mean, the vibe, you know, almost 1,000 people. You know, you always get the true believers that come out, but I mean, people are really excited about, it's about infrastructure. I mean, come on. It's amazing. I mean, honestly, you know, I've in my career have done first time user conferences with some pretty popular products and we really push to get to 300 customers at those events. And the fact that Nutanix was able to get, you know, north of 800 customers, kept the, you know, the sponsor representatives, you know, kept the Nutanix folks to a minimum. I mean, this is really about customer and partner interactions and it's just been a fantastic vibe. I mean, everything from the fact that they had two of their most loyal customers do the introduction at the beginning of the keynote yesterday, to D-Ridge's talk about empathy, to all of the great product announcements that Nutanix made and the subsequent announcements that we made alongside them with our XC series of product. It's just an amazing environment. Yeah, it's actually the first customer that was on there and it's interesting for me, you know, watch the storage industry for a lot of years and, you know, some of those storage shows, you know, this is, it's kind of a storage show, but it's really more than that. And then, you know, the announcements from Nutanix this week, you know, kind of positions them. As D-Ridge said, they're humbles. We're not a platform company yet. But, you know, what do you see? Kind of that changing role of how storage fits in, which obviously led to the OEM of Nutanix, so. You know, I think the storage aspect of what Nutanix does is absolutely critical to the success of software-defined and hyper-converged infrastructure type of offerings, web-scale type offerings. But, you know, when we partnered with Nutanix, when we came out with the XC series of product, it wasn't just as a storage offering. The storage team at Dell sponsored the introduction of it, but we know full and well that it is a solution, right? And a solution at many levels and evolving even further into the solution space. Solution first at the infrastructure layer, storage and compute. Dell is able to bring networking into the equation via some of our blueprint work. But the vision of where the company is going, the focus on the higher level management and orchestration, you know, I put on LinkedIn yesterday, I feel like I'm at the beginning of something very big. Just honored to be a part of it. I'm very excited that Dell has partnered with Nutanix with the XC series. Yeah, so yeah, it definitely has, you know, big ambitions and therefore if Nutanix can deliver, you know, this is a major change. They want to be, you know, a leader in software. Yes. Going forward, not just, as you said, it's not about the kind of hyper-convergence, you know, think of the box there. So it gives a little bit of insight. So some of those synergies, you talked about the networking that comes in, you know, Dell's got you in a very portfolio, including some of the software pieces, you know, is there swim lanes set up or, you know, how collaborative is it? It's very collaborative. So we have a team at Dell that is focused on doing the integration work, actually, you know, the platform integration work of the Nutanix OS onto Dell hardware and Dell PowerEdge servers, you know, industry-leading capabilities, industry-leading reliability, having that as the underpinning of any hyper-converge or any software-defined storage solution, but specifically, Nutanix with all the integration work we do is kind of the foundation. And above that, we are layering in increasing levels, you know, concentric circles expanding out from there, starting first with key applications. We have a heavy collaboration with our EUC team. We have an end-to-end cloud client, sorry, say that a couple times really fast, cloud client computing solution or VDI solution inclusive of endpoints, inclusive of networking, inclusive of some of the, you know, key software titles. And we're in the process of including Nutanix into our blueprint strategy, which, Stu, I believe you were at Analyst Conference recently, is that right? So I noticed people that were there, but I didn't personally get to go down there, so. I'm sorry, we will get you there next year. But at Analyst Conference, we came out with Blueprint, our point of view on Blueprint. And if you look at what we're doing, I mean, Dell very much acknowledges that there is kind of a segregated approach to IT. The Gartner analyst that spoke at the conference yesterday talked about bimodal IT. And if you look at what we're doing in our blueprint strategy, we have kind of small, medium, and large for both traditional and new IT. So. Yeah, so it's interesting. We've been talking this week with Nutanix, and one of the things that we've put forth is, can they be really a bridge underneath? Yes. I want to have a single architecture that the workloads can change on top of it, but underlying, I won't need to change that. Does that fit in that thinking, or do I have kind of the old way, new way, and never the two shall meet? No, I don't think it's never the two shall meet. But I do believe that there is a fair amount of investment made in the traditional way of doing things. And for many customers, building that, continuing to build out in that traditional way makes sense from an ROI perspective, makes sense from a skills perspective. We have many offerings in the Dell portfolio that address that particular architecture. But we are also working with industry leaders and we believe we have a pretty forward-looking customer-centric approach to enabling customers to make that transition. And from our perspective, with Dell being able to have solutions, I would contend industry leading to solutions on both sides of those approaches allows us to help be the bridge in addition to technologies like Nutanix. All right, so one of the things industry watchers have been wondering is, how is the relationship going? And I know you probably can't give me a revenue number, but give me some of the high points. What are the proof points? Not going down any million dollar deals yet. Where are we with Dell plus Nutanix sales motion? Yeah, first of all, from a relationship perspective, it's going absolutely fabulous. We had numerous, both Dell product executives and sales executives here at Dock Nets this week. From the leader of our preferred accounts division to the leader of our large enterprise division to the leader of our federal division. And the relationships have been, and are continuing to grow stronger in the field, right? And there's more of the relationship building happening here at this event. From a pipeline perspective, from a customer interest perspective, it's really been off the charts. For Dell, it's one of the fastest pipeline ramps that we've ever seen. And there is a sales cycle that we're going through. In early days, we closed a lot of POC, and early days, by the way, are like two quarters ago. Seems like ancient histories, but this was just two quarters ago. We spoke at Dell World, it was right after all that hard engineering work. I mean, your team's really partnered accelerated fast. I mean, nobody thought it would launch to GA that fast. Yeah, we announced last year in June, and we launched in November. It was a very short amount of time. So we saw a lot of initial POCs, and then we went through an underlying Intel transition going to the Haswell processor. And so we've seen a lot of those POCs that turn into actual deals recently. So, you know, we'd always like to see the sales revenue ramp faster, who wouldn't, but we're very pleased with the trajectory we're on, and we're also very pleased with the pipeline in front of us. Okay, great. So you talked about all the people here. I know there's a partner event this afternoon. Is that, is Dell participating in that? Yes, absolutely. And we participated heavily in the customer event as well. We were one of the sponsors. We had a very big booth on the floor. I just attended the Dell presentation, the hardware side of software defined, talking about some of the platform benefits that Dell brings via our PowerEdge server franchise. And it was, I'm told, it was the highest attendance of any of the sponsor events. We had almost 80 people there. Wow, congrats. So, you know, there is definitely an interest. That's great, especially, you know, getting to everybody's packing up and leaving, so having them stick around and do that. That's great. Talking, chance to talk to some of the users. You know, what's conversations around the show? Gives a little bit of, you know, flavor for what you've seen here in Miami. You know, I think, from my perspective, this reminds me a lot of, you know, early days at other companies that have gone on to be very successful in terms of that fanatical fan base, in terms of the type of IT administrator that you see is very forward-looking, you know, very leading edge, very inquisitive. You know, it's looking at a full, long-term solution in their environment. You know, I've had numerous discussions. I had discussions with one customer. They run an online retail property, and they have 100 notes, and he was one of the customers here. Just so, you know, it feels like, to me, the conversation is quickly shifting from, hey, this is a great platform, well, let me not use the platform. This is a great product for virtual desktop infrastructure, too. It's expanding to server virtualization, and it's expanding to some, you know, more database-type applications. So, like I said, I really feel like we're at the start of something big. Yeah, and actually, you know, of course the solution does more than VDI, but Dell's done a lot of work on that VDI stack. Talk about building the full stack. We actually did some, there's some research we did, and we had, as an example, some of the Dell solution, so, you know, what percentage of your, you know, kind of pipeline is in the VDI? What's not, you know, is, are you guys having as much success on the VDI as everybody else seems to be? Yeah, yeah, so VDI is definitely a strong conversation with the XC platform. Dell has brought value to the relationship in terms of endpoint devices. We have, I mentioned, the Cloud Client Computing Group that does a lot of our end-to-end reference architectures, tested and validated configurations for VDI stacks. And so being able to provide that cookbook, if you will, being able to provide that assurance that we've tested it and it'll work, really resonates with customers. So, you know, it's hard, you know, pipeline numbers are always a little bit hard to decipher, but I would estimate that roughly 50%, maybe a little bit more of the deals that we've closed so far, have been VDI focused. So, it's probably the slight majority, but we're seeing an increased interest in server virtualization probably as the next big concentric circle. All right, so Travis, I guess last question I have is really, you know, what's next, what should we expect to see from kind of the Dell plus Nutanix? Well, you know, we had a pretty big announcement here at the event. We announced, you know, GPU support for the first time. We announced a couple of new form factors, a short depth form factor, which will be very attractive for military deployments. So, we have a very strong fed practice at Dell. Nutanix has a very strong fed practice. We think that's going to be a very popular product for those deployments. We announced KVM support for the first time shipping from Dell. Nutanix has had it, but we just recently announced it. And we also announced one other thing, the storage heavy node, which is I believe is going to be a very big seller as well. I mean, the ability to start to differentiate nodes based on are they compute heavy or storage heavy will allow for much more flexibility in the offering. So, you know, I think you're going to see a tight alignment with Dell and Nutanix going forward. You're going to see, you know, our hardware platform continue to run in parallel with the Nutanix in innovation, especially on the software side. You're going to see us bring in more pieces of the equation via Dell blueprints and, you know, that single point of accountability for service and support, which is so important for customers. And, you know, we just think it's a bright future. All right, well Travis Vigil, really appreciate you coming back, sharing the, you know, where we are with the solution. Look forward to continued success of that partnership going forward. We'll be right back with our, you know, final guests here on theCUBE. Stay with us, thanks for watching. Thank you, Stu.