 Live from Vienna, Austria. It's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. And we're back. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the show, a partner of Nutanix from the Lenovo IMEA group. It's Gin Luca Delios-Posti, who is the executive director of the data center group, as I said from Lenovo. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to all of you. Thank you very much. So I think a lot of our audience will know Lenovo. Lenovo had acquired a number of companies over the years, two big ones from IBM on the PC and the server division, but you know, brought us back from global company. Tell us, how long have you been there? What's your role? What's your background? What brought you to Lenovo? Okay, so I've been in Lenovo since three and a half, more or less. I came from part of Lenovo and I came from System X acquisition. Spent 25 years in the industries, starting from R&D in Alcatel Teletra, originally in Italy. So designing ADSL cards, all these kind of things, very, very R&D. Then moved to AMD. So deploy a part of the go-to market for AMD Optorum, so it was a big statement going 64B. Then I moved to Acer, Supermicro, and then basically joined Lenovo, building up organically the server's division, and then basically part of the System X acquisition. So my responsibility is, product solutions go to market for EMEA, for Lenovo, DCG, data center group. Okay, so your background and your position put you right in smack in the middle is where kind of compute and storage are all smashing together? Yes, yes, yes, architecture, CPU and so on and so on. That's clearly. The only difference that for Lenovo we didn't, of course, part of System X acquisition, we didn't acquire the storage part, right, so it's still remaining in IBM, for one specific reason as well, because Lenovo, now having storage legacy, can embrace much better the soft to define environment, right, specifically hyperconvergesy as evolution of soft to define, is of course extremely important for us because you can see us much better playing the storage market, different the others, they have legacy in the storage. So that's why a key element of evolution of storage, not really as was in the past, but evolution of soft to define storage and hyperconvergesy. Yeah, I actually had, I had Dave Lincoln on who's the general manager of the storage group back at the OpenStack show, and of course, since Lenovo doesn't own storage, it's through partnerships, number of solutions including the Nutanix OEM, maybe if you could lay out for us, where does Nutanix fit in that overall offering and then we'll go into the Nutanix. Yeah, so, but you know, that's absolutely. So the Nutanix offer is basically going specifically in each segment, in one single segment inside Lenovo. Why, because we distinguish between server classic product business and the storage business classic that is sun and soft to define storage. Hyperconvergesy as Nutanix being a mix of between the two things, servers and storage, we decided to have a specific group on top of hyperconvergesy. So that's why it's distinguished between the two because needs to have a specific different direction and setup and system organization, taking care of basically these new technologies in any case is going quite fast in the market. All right, so Jean-Luc, the OEM relationship been going for a while, was there anything new news as the partnership, any new announcements, how does five-bed-O impact what you're doing? Going to the secret source. No, first of all, we are extremely happy about the partnership. We see of course Nutanix in EMEA, specifically moving forward. Typically, no easy for an American startup, relative startup now for Nutanix, but EMEA market is very complex, different languages, different country, different cultures, and for startups coming from US exploring and the success for EMEA is no easy. I feel Lenovo is helping as well Nutanix and that's why Lenovo embraces Nutanix because our DNA in EMEA market is basically a presence in each of the country, and as well as we are indirect business compared to daily business. So it's helping us also for Nutanix to build up more relationship with the system partners and having basically much better footprint in overall the country. In term of evolution of our products, surely when we embrace Nutanix, we deploy a specific roadmap, all HX family, including express sellers. So I think we see each other really, brothers even more, let's say twins. That's basically something that make the two companies successful in the EMEA market. Okay, I've heard from Dell that they're also having success here in EMEA. Do you run up, you know, how many times you're going in with customers and saying, oh, I'm choosing between, you know, native Nutanix, Lenovo, Dell, or is it still mostly kind of the legacy if you will versus Nutanix? Yes, in fact, you know, this is one key point. Of course, we embrace Nutanix, partnership with Nutanix after Dell EMC, right? Is that fair to say? But we have seen that there are a lot of opportunity also for our existing Lenovo customers. And also because those customers, they are very loyal to Lenovo for certain reasons. Quality, reliability, service, supply chain, and so on. So yeah, we have seen also Nutanix and we see Dell EMC. I think, you know, the good, important things that we are embracing hyperconvergesy in the proper way. And as I said, compared to Dell EMC, now even better, we have nothing to protect. Dell EMC, they have to protect their storage business why we don't have, we don't need to do, right? So basically, we are more enthusiastic, proactive in their business that compared to the others. So we can win. Yeah, is there any metrics you can share as to adoption of Nutanix with Lenovo? Either number of units, percentage revenue growth or even just kind of growth in Europe versus worldwide. I think I feel that I can give you an idea how we are investing on Nutanix. Since we enable Nutanix in portfolio, Lenovo actually places quite a number of accounts per country, overall Europe. So it means that investment that Lenovo has done in having sales people focusing on hyperconverges. So it means Nutanix. It's quite substantial in number of people per country. So it means that we are in a good shape to make the right things, let me say. All right, we can't talk specific numbers. Tell me about the customers, what excites you? Let me say in 2030 people moving in that direction. So let me say, that's good. Specialized, so it means not specifically only broader but specialized in hyperconverges. Sure, what do you hear from customers? What brings Lenovo Nutanix solution to the table? What's exciting customers? The beauty when we discuss the customer that they want to have an alternative of the classic storage. They want to have an alternative of how they can employ much better flexible and agile solutions. And means that they want to understand also how they can do in a different way, as I say. When we talk about Nutanix and Lenovo, they see two key elements. Reliability, solid OEM in servers, with history behind, and as well as flexibility of Nutanix software. And then basically this is a good combination. So we are able to give to the customer, specifically large enterprise customer, those two key ingredients between good reliability of the product and flexibility of the hyperconverges. So that's for me, the two key element, that helping us to win, so. I was wondering if you could give me a little color. When we went to the US conference, the term hyperconvergence, a lot of people, they kind of understand and they hear about it. But the line I'd say is I've never talked to a CIO that said I've got a hyperconvergence problem. Cloud is something that we're all understanding grappling with. What's the typical enterprise customer in Europe? What's their mindset on these buzzwords? What's important to them? Digital transformation seems to be a global discussion, but as it turns to kind of infrastructure, what's driving their discussion? Where does it sit in priorities? Yeah, so that's a good question. So if you see end customers at the level, means global accounts, 1,000 employee up, surely they're looking carefully hyperconvergesy, they're looking also carefully cloud. The big dilemma right now is public versus hybrid, people are going hybrid, right? And of course hyperconvergesy is a first step to go basically in considering cloud softwares tax, right? And the further Nutanix is having clear roadmap in how they grow from the first hyperconverged setup and going to cloud softwares tax, surely is the right process to give to the enterprise customer such level of transition and roadmap, right? Of course, and users or enterprise customers specifically they need to understand how to move from classic way to do things, having operation management, server, storage and networking to go in a different environment that see in a one single box all the free items together potentially. So the way that they need to change is not really how to get flexibility of the hardware, but how to manage this new technology and then specifically on the cloud. In any case they are obliged to change the way they are managing all these kind of things because they need to go to the cloud hybrid or public that's up to them, but their way to take care products in their data center is surely different than what they are doing today. So that's basically what we see. What is the customer mindset? The discussion for so long is enterprise IT is very slow to change, they don't want to do new stuff. It feels like we're starting to get people trying things a little sooner, but what are your customers telling you? Of course customers that they are still a little bit want to understand, but still reluctant in the way they are approaching and they need a little bit more time in understanding the technology. They see the benefit, but I think as I say they are still not able to understand how they can manage compared to their classic way to do to take care of the data center. There are also other customers specifically who are building up new branch offices from scratch. Basically they see that this is the key value to basically deploy their IT infrastructure totally different than what has been done before, right? So we have two different ways of customers. Those that are a little bit more reluctant, by any case moving forward in understanding POC and then adoption. And those in reality they are a little bit smaller, but maybe with less legacy in the classic IT they are really looking to get enthusiastic and get adoption quite fast. That's why we see two different ways, a little bit more time and fast embracing. That's why I think Nutanix has been able to go fast in those customers, they were more ready to take new technology, hyper-commercy in their data center. What's exciting you in the marketplace today? What kind of gets you geared up and excited about what's happening? Personally, let me say Lenovo and personally I think that is the evolution in Europe about public cloud and hybrid cloud is one of the things that is most fascinating. And then the IoT side, because if you see the IoT looks like it can be purely public environment, in reality it's not. And- By the way, Wikibon, we've looked at this extensively and just the physics of data, edge computing will be critically important. You're a compute guy, you understand? Yeah, exactly. If all the data is being created at the edge, just the physics of moving all the data just isn't going to work, so. Absolutely, and then also there is the item that European Commission set up for the data protection. That is an item that in Europe is getting a little bit different in North America. So it means that those that do public cloud, they are in any case forced to have data center locally in the countries. But also how they're moving, enterprise companies are moving in hybrid is a part that they have to do it for feeling comfortable in weather application, load, identity, confidentiality, all these kind of things. But I see that sooner or later when they get more comfortable in their cloud environment, private cloud, they can move potentially much faster in the public too. So that is what is fascinating. And then the other side is the IoT environment, because still demanding, demanding as a digital transformation, a lot of computational power and as well as offering the public cloud. That is also, I think we are in a kind of age we're going to see in the next five, six years really big dynamics in the IT industry. Yeah, great, absolutely. There's no shortage of new things to get everybody excited for it. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix.NEXT conference in Vienna, Austria. You're watching theCUBE.