 Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, Laura Padillas here. She's the Senior Director of Alliances at Nutanix. Laura, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here, first time. The first women in tech guests this week. Really, I am honored and saddened as well. Yeah, right, the penultimate guest. Well, thank you very much for being here. So the ecosystem, it's burgeoning around us. Got to feel good about that, a lot of momentum. Yeah, so we started our first Elevate Technology and Lines program last year at last.next with about 10 partners signed up and we're not over 50 partners who have signed up to our ecosystem and we're really excited this year because this year is going to be another revision to our program. We're talking a lot more about the platform story with partners, just like as you've been hearing Sunil and Diraj and everyone talk about our platform is really important to the Nutanix story overall. Our partners are now going to move from working with us and interoperability story to working in us and really writing to those APIs and helping us build that platform. What makes a platform a platform? Well, I think what it is is really what I just mentioned. Before partners would kind of run in a VM on us and really just interoperate with us without really truly integration, what you're going to see now is partners being able to, we're going to open up our platform and some APIs around networking and security and prism. So partners can now feed data and information into Nutanix to be able to visualize that more do visualization, do orchestration and now customers are going to be able to really look at us as a platform for all these other technologies such as Commvault who's written to our APIs for backup, right? And now I've integrated with our snapshots and also at the hypervisor layer as well. Citrix, we talked about our Citrix integration with ZenApps and desktop and MCS as well as Acropolis hypervisor, those all are engineering level integrations that are going to help customers really be able to roll out solutions in a much more seamless manner on Nutanix. Can you talk about the evolution of the partnership of ethos, the programs? I'm sure in the early days there was a lot of push, hey, we gotta go get some partners, get people to write to our platform. As you guys ascend into the stratosphere, you probably get a lot more inbound. What's the balance? How are you adjudicating there? Yeah, that's a great question. I think we're all still trying to figure it out and find what the best way is to balance all the partners. We do get tons of requests, which is great. What we're trying to do is really figure out from customers what are the use cases that they want to see on Nutanix? Where are the product gaps that our partners are helping to fill on our platform? So reaching out both to partners who help us address some of those concerns from customers, as well as those different product areas that we think we need to fill that we need to partner versus build today. So some examples of that are V-Armor, like you talked to V-Armor and Illumio, who help with the micro segmentation and security story. I talked about Commvault with backup. You know, you're going to see also with our Asterix release, which Rajah talked about in our keynote, much more opening up of different frameworks and APIs around networking. So you're going to be able to see some of our partners like Brocade and Juniper, Rista, some of our networking partners being able to do more visualization and feed more information into Prism. So again, we're prioritizing partners who are doing more of that engineering level work and working with us to really build that platform story versus just interoperability. When you talk about that mix of the partners in the ecosystem, I'm curious, how many partners are coming to you because Nutanix is something different. And therefore the customers that are looking for some modern infrastructure are open to something new. I mean, many of the partners you talk about are startups themselves. Right, right. So could we be your question? So you know, how many of the partners are coming to you because there's customers that are willing to try something different versus, you know, just the typical vendors that are just trying to say, okay, I just want to increase my market share. Yeah, so actually the former is most of the case, right? So we have everything from companies like F5, who have been around for a really long time, a really strong install base saying that they want to modernize and move more from legacy three tier sand and support their customers into modernizing their data center. So we get a lot of partners who want to do that and come to us just because they see a trend and their customers are moving that way so they need to align with that. That's probably what we see most of versus just companies coming to us just for no other reason. Okay, so can you unpack for us a little bit the Elevate program itself? Sure. What does the partner get? What do they have to put into it? Absolutely, so what we have is a program with three different levels. The new program, it's really open to anyone to end from entry level point of view can join the program, very low barrier to entry. Again, they'll just have to do some interoperability testing. We have a program called Nutanix Ready. They'll do some testing on there. If they interoperate and they have at least one joint customer a year do the testing, then they can stay in the program. Now, if they actually want to graduate up the program, they're going to have to support the Acropolis hypervisor and they're going to also have to support right to our APIs and these will also be Nutanix Ready, but they'll get different designation. So Acropolis or HV designation, as well as an integrated designation with tags. They'll have to do an appropriate test kit and some development work to be able to get those tags within the Nutanix Ready program. And then also be able to have at least three to five referenceable customers invest in marketing funding with us and as well as do some training as well if they actually want to move on up in the program. Now, as a reward for that work, we're spending a whole bunch of time on supporting partners now on go-to-market. So how do they engage with our channel? How are they able to build joint programs together and roll that out once they have a solution? Sales kits, marketing plans, marketing programs, field marketing, us spending time on annual business plans with them, measuring that in regards to ROI, executive sponsorship. So once they do that work, we'll reward them with much more of our time and hopefully ROI in the business. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've seen a bunch of Nutanix Ready pins around the conference here. Yeah, absolutely, uh-huh. How much training certification things, what's going on at the show for the partners? Yeah, so earlier this week, there was a boot camp for people who wanted to actually do MPX training, more technical training. At the show this year, we're doing an Alliance Summit actually right now from one to five that's really showing partners how they can engage more with us from go-to-market to support, to technical, and helping them start really outlining out that business plan. There's tons of opportunities we've built for partners to be able to meet with us, to sponsor the show and meet our customers, so tons of different areas for involvement. So how do you measure success? Is it number of partners, productivity of the partners? Yeah, yeah. Other subjective, objective terms? Yeah, so a few things. One is partners who integrate with Acropolis Hypervisor HV and integrated. We're measuring that as a milestone this year. Also, it is a return from Pipeline in different marketing activities that just demand gen programs, as well as closed business together. And the partner, how would you characterize the partner? So you mentioned, like for instance, Commvault and Backup, Rubrik, you see those guys here integrating. What other types of partners? Is it all technology partners in the technology, elevate technology as pure technology partners? Yes, I just run the technology alliance. Okay, so no channel partners are in there, is that right? No, we work with them on the go-to-market piece, but the program's for technology partners. And is there a line between sort of pure technology, sometimes integrators look like technology guys, are you guys pretty strict about that? Yeah, I would say the definition is a company that has their own product that they sell in market could be a technology alliance partner, versus a partner like an SI that would integrate products together and that roll that out. Do you quantify how many you have at this point? How many technology partners? Do you share that, yeah. Yeah, I think we have like 50, 53 partners. 53, okay, and it's probably growing like this. Mm-hmm, yeah, absolutely. If you set, you know, targets, I mean you don't have to share them with us, but is it more just the productivity of those partners? Exactly, yeah. We don't necessarily set targets. I mean, if we have 50 amazing partners, I'm happy with that. I don't need to have a hundred. I think, again, we're really aligning that what we think makes the most sense to our business is going to help our customers use us more as a platform, be stickier from a use case point of view. And predominantly US partners, I presume? No, it's global. And we have partners like Kopersky, that's a Russian security company, you know, to US partners. Great, so what's next? I mean, what should we be looking for? Out of the program? No, I think just the things I touched on already, you know, really aligning much more with the platform story. How do we use our partners to differentiate us from some of our competitors? And how do we also help use our partners to add more value to our product and our platform? And so I think you're going to see much more of those use cases and customer stories. Yes, I'm curious, you have AHV in there for kind of that higher level. I mean, most of those partners you mentioned, they're also doing VMware, Microsoft's also a partner of yours. I know like on the NPX certification, you've got to do two environments. So how do you balance that, you know, kind of competitive differentiation versus, you know, that company's business? Yeah, I mean, for us, we see AHV as, you know, important piece of our platform story, you know, allowing our customers to be able to really, you know, open, really that open infrastructure. I mean, we move from, you know, making storage invisible to, you know, compute invisible and in the hyper-converged story to now, which is really kind of the enterprise cloud and thinking about being able to open our customers up and be able to really use this more as a platform. And so we would encourage our partners to also think of AHV as another industry-leading hypervisor that we think adoption will grow fast enough that they would spend time writing to that and integrating to it just like they would ESX or Hyper-V. Now, from a customer point of view too, you know, that gives also customers choice, right? If they want to be able to use Nutanix with any of those hypervisors, they're able to do that now. So our partners should support that story. What are you hearing at the events? I mean, what are the partners asking you for? What are the conversations like? I mean, I think one thing our partners constantly ask for is more engagement with us and with our customers. So I think the show really lets them do that, right? They've had some really great customer conversations. They've got to meet with our executives. They've got to meet with all of us and really start working out plans for next year and the future. And so I think those are the main things that we are hoping the show gave them. And how about things like joint engineering? How does that decision get made as to whether or not that actually should be done, can be done? Yeah, I mean, we get those requests all the time. So I think it just all comes back to use case and market opportunity. You know, if we think of that, if there's a huge market opportunity for a specific use case and customers are going to demand it, then we'll work with a partner to build that engineering level. So what happens? So a partner will come to you and say, hey, I got this great idea. We integrate this huge market of you. It's just going to be unbelievable. And say, okay, great. Let's put pen to paper and do a business case and we'll vet it and test it. That's what we'll do. And you guys agree and you'll either shoot it down or say, wow, this is great. Let's go. And then at that point, both sides will allocate engineering resources and make a plan. Absolutely, yeah. If we think the business case makes sense, we will. Is it common to do that? Or is it more one way? I want to say it's common. It's common to get the requests, but it does take a while to vet them out and but we don't do that with everyone just because of bandwidth. So we have to prioritize. Right, but something like, I think I heard joint engineering with Microsoft, for example. So with Microsoft is a great example. So Microsoft, we launched our CPS product together. There's obviously engineering level and engagement there. Commvault and Juliena level engagement. Again, because they support our propolis hypervisor, they're the first backup partner to support a propolis AHV. So why that was really important. And so in Citrix, again, I mean, VDI is still a huge use case for us as a company. And again, they're supporting AHV again. There was engineering level and engagement there as well. So in the Commvault integration, that says they're really the only backup company now that can back up all platforms. All hypervisors that are utilizing Nutanix infrastructure. Exactly, right. That's interesting. Yeah. All right, so time to market. You're going to get a flood of other people doing that now, which is great. We are, which is great, yeah. So you're going to get a lot of inbound increase on this. Excellent. All right, Laura, well, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. I know you got to run, but appreciate your time. Great, thank you guys so much. All right, you're welcome. Okay, thanks. Thanks everybody. Stu and I will be back with our last guest and then to wrap before the big keynotes that we actually, it was just for me, we are not broadcasting because there's some super secret stuff going on with magic, but keep right there. We're back right after this word.