 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in London, England. You Piscar is my co-host for two days of live coverage and happy to welcome back to the program Dan McConnell who's the vice president of Open HCI Solutions at Dell EMC. Dan, great to see you again. Great to be back. Always, always a pleasure to see you guys. Yeah, so Dan, actually the first time I met you, the same time I first met you was at the Vienna show two years ago. Dell has multi-year partnership with Nutanix. I see a state side here and there at some Dell events also. But Dell is Nutanix, biggest partner as an OEM, so give us the state of the state. Just actually just crossed, I think last quarter crossed over a billion dollars in sales. And I think overall, I think Deirdre said that three billion dollars worth of total sales, so a billion of that through Dell, that's pretty impressive. Yep, yep, and it's, you know, I jokingly say, biggest quarter ever, you know, every quarter is the biggest quarter ever, you know, and we expect Q4 yet to be the biggest quarter ever. So it's a strong business, continues to grow, over 2,000 customers and growing, continues to be a good partnership. It's funny, you say, but it's not joking, it is every quarter is the biggest quarter ever, despite some people in the marketplace, oh well, that relationship's dead, right? So talk to us a little bit about the portfolio and where it fits, because obviously the revenue numbers speak for themselves, the customers and the like, so. Absolutely, yeah, I guess my easiest way to describe it is HCI is, it's a style of architecture, right? Just like in the old three-tier land, we had multiple arrays and our servers support multiple operating systems, just like in HCI, we're going to address the market with a portfolio. We've got more than one product, it is a portfolio to address the whole market. So, you know, the partnership continues, strong focus on enabling the Nutanix stack, you know, we're going to be the best hardware infrastructure solution for the Nutanix stack. It's a portfolio approach, it's what makes us the leader in HCI across all of our products, and it will continue forward. So, I know we always get that we've got multiple HCI products, which one will win, HCI is a style of architecture. We're going to have a portfolio. Yeah, we saw that in the CI space, we see it in every market, there's, you know, especially storage, there's never been somebody that tend to get more than 20 or 30% of the market. So, what makes it special? You know, running Nutanix on Dell, what makes it special? Why would customers want to do that? Let's see, how long do we have? Easiest description here, one, I'll focus on LCM, life cycle management, the thing that is core to Nutanix, ease of use, one click, I'll use the one click. We actually have the best integration into their overall LCM package. It literally is, one click, from the Prism UI to update all of the server firmware as well, and it's cluster aware. So, we know how to evacuate, we know how to flash stuff, bring it and repatriate the data. So, it's actually, it's something we have that no one else has. We are, once again, like I said before, we will be the best hardware platform, best infrastructure to fit in to the Nutanix stack. I'll say stack these days, because what was once HCI is now a list of single word products that is a pretty big stack and growing. So, zooming into the LCM bit a little bit, so back when I was at a customer, I built IS platforms, and that whole operational pain of keeping hardware up to date, keeping the firmwares up to date. That sounds like a very operational benefit for the teams working with those products. So, how does this work into freeing up time for people doing other stuff on that platform? That is what I would say, that is the whole goal. I hate to fall into catchphrases, but invisible infrastructure. The goal is to make the entire infrastructure easy to use, simple, invisible, such that more and more, IT is becoming the differentiation piece for businesses, focusing much more up stack in how to innovate around the business logic side of the equation, as opposed to the infrastructure componentry. So, as IT becomes an innovation engine for customers, they need that focus more towards the business, less towards the bits and bytes of the infrastructure. All of what we do is focus to enable that. So, even if you're talking about making infrastructure invisible, making it easy to operate and manage, there's still a lot going on in the infrastructure space, specifically around hardware, and around running applications. So, one of the things I learned is that you are now certified to run SAP on top of it. So, please explain how that works, what it means for customers. Absolutely, absolutely. I don't know, we sat in places like this four years ago and people would ask, well, what workloads are good for HCI, and we'd say, you know, test Dev and VDI, and nowadays it's everywhere. You know, it's what workloads aren't good for HCI, and I would have told you two years ago, well, big databases, blah, blah, blah, but at this point, everything's within HCI. HCI has been the style of infrastructure that can run any workload, and our certification with SAP is just a huge instantiation with that. Matter of fact, I believe we are the only one that has a two socket and a four socket certified from an HCI perspective. Something we're very proud of, something we'll continue to lean into moving forward. Yeah, yeah, Dan, absolutely. When I've been talking to customers, it's those edge cases. It was, you know, my AS 400, I haven't migrated over because I'm actually going to modernize and put that stuff in the cloud or things like that. So, any application, you know, on HCI today, Nutanix hasn't been sitting still though. We've been listening for the last two days, really growing the portfolio. What is the increase in products? What does that mean to the offerings from Dell? Sure, obviously, we'll keep up with the Intel heartbeat, you know, things like, we have a pretty big refresh coming up here early next year with what Intel calls Cascade Lake, and also not just keeping up with the generations, but as Nutanix evolves, things like buckets, you probably heard buckets mentioned this week. We've got some hardware platforms. I won't pre-announce any of my PowerEdge brethren platforms, but we have some hardware platforms that are focused much more around storage density. So, obviously, a great fit for something like buckets. So, we'll look at, as Nutanix matures, what is the best fit hardware for that stack? Yeah, and maybe there's been some updates as to how you handle the hardware and software working with Nutanix. Maybe explain how that works now. Absolutely. So, we've got, you know, we call it XC Series and XC Core. Series is the appliance. It continues on just as it was. It is, you know, software licensed and packaged with the hardware, and then recently we announced something called XC Core, which has all of the goodness of the pre-installation, all the software comes on it, it's easy to use, but the licensing, you can bring your own licensing, so to speak, from Nutanix. So, the flexibility to either get a licensing with the hardware in an appliance form or bring your own license in XC Core, as is what we call it. Yeah, that's really interesting. When I think back a year ago was when Nutanix started talking about moving to all software. And, you know, one of the things I said is like, hey, this is a great opportunity for Dell and Lenovo just to pull everyone in, but it's not that simple, right? Some are still going to want to buy the software from Nutanix. Have you seen much change in your business and interactions with customers in the field after that change, or how's it gone? The short answer is no. Yeah. And before the formal introduction of Core, we were, you know, we had, we called them ELAs. Yeah. You know, we had large customers that were buying things in different forms, which is why we went to go do Core. We saw this trend happening. And with their shift to software, it just made sense. So, you know, the engagements with customers can continue to be, I'd say, almost in an appliance form, even though they're buying the software directly through Nutanix. So it's a similar engagement, similar go-to-market, different fulfillment model. Dan, how about looking forward? What do you see for the portfolio overall and any places specifically we should be watching? You mentioned buckets. Anything else from the Nutanix side? Sure, sure. I, you know, I obviously continue the LCM focus. Well, one, I'll start with SAP. Continue focus. We're going to lean into SAP. We see that, and broader, what I would call enterprise workloads. But also, the Intel refresh coming up from a hardware perspective, you'll see Cascade Lake roll out across all the platforms. Also, you'll see us potentially introduce some new denser storage platforms for things like buckets. So, continuing to drive the portfolio forward, offering it both in an appliance perspective as well as a core perspective. So it's a really broad portfolio today and you'll see that continuing forward. Yeah, just to actually see, you mentioned that there was a big focus talking about, you know, the new memory type of options, new things like NVMe, you know, I know I've heard lots from Dell as to where they're going. So potentially that's areas where I would see that and some of the cloud native applications and the like, see the natural fit for Nutanix plus Dell in the future. Sure, absolutely. You'll see, you know, incorporation of NVMe, some of the storage class memory stuff. So without pre-announcing, so to speak, I obviously Dell from a hardware perspective keen focus on these upcoming technologies and how to enable them. We work tightly with Nutanix on how to integrate them into the stack. So you will definitely see us take advantage of things like NVMe, things like storage class memory. It, you know, it's, technology never sits still, right? And we're going to, you know, the partnership we have between Nutanix and Dell helps us keep on the edge of that. Sorry, I'm going to use the edge for it. All right, if we had another hour, Dan, we would go there and talk about where that fits. But I think we do have to leave it there. Thanks so much, Dan, for the updates. As always, congratulations on the progress and look forward to hearing the best quarter ever, you know, in the future. And thanks so much for watching theCUBE. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix 2018 EU in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman.