 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. We're back at Nutanix.NEXT, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage of NEXTConf. Kirk Skagen is here. He's the president of the Lenovo Data Center Infrastructure Group, and Siddish Nair, the president of Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante. This is Stu Miniman. We're part of the nerd herd here at the conference. So Kirk, let's start with you. We've been talking, of course, Nutanix all week. You guys got the great booth. We've been looking at your booth all week. Transform, last week you guys had a big conference. That's right. Lenovo, obviously undergoing major transformations as are your customers and your partners. Give us the update, how's it going? Well, it was a big event for us. We've been working for about two and a half years since the acquisition of the IBM X-Series team. And so we launched basically our beta-gist data center portfolio in history. About 14 new servers, seven new storage boxes, five new network machines, and probably more importantly to our relationship, we announced two big new brands. So ThinkSystem is kind of for the traditional infrastructure, and then Think Agile and our appliances with Nutanix for hyper-conversion infrastructure. So Siddish, you guys have been talking to analysts and your community about what I call choice. You have a lot of different choices of partners, of even now processor types, hypervisors, et cetera. So talk about how that's important to your partnership strategy generally, and specifically unpack some of the Lenovo specifics. I think it is important to have a point of view when you're talking to customers nowadays. The problem is, is the point of view about your own company's thought process, Wall Street, expectations, or the point of view is driven by what is right for the customer. Take it for example, an SSD, a commodity SSD from Samsung or Toshiba. If you take that SSD and put it inside a server and try to sell it, you probably will get X dollars for it. That same SSD, if you put it inside a high-end SAM, you can probably take like 10X more there, right? Where do you think you are going to? Those are the days. Right? Even now, so the thing is, where do you think you will be going first? What will you be trying to sell first? The thing I like about Lenovo is that they've made a decision that it is going to be a software-defined world, but hardware does matter. Reliability matters, support matters. And along with Lenovo, we are able to go to customers and completely re-transform or change their architecture without being caged by any sort of Wall Street expectation that goes counter to what is right for customers. So Kirk, I know there are many milestones you talked about at Lenovo Transform. I think if I remember right, one of them is the 20 millionth X86 server is going to be shipping sometime in the next couple of weeks. That's right. You want to think agile line to kind of look at software to find, how does Nutanix fit into that? You've been OEMing them since before you launched this branding, so tell us how that came together to the new line. Yeah, so I think we're celebrating this year 25 years in X86 servers, and so you're right. We are looking at a software-defined world, and what I constantly hear is that Lenovo's getting pulled in because we don't have a legacy infrastructure of a big sand business or a big router business, so we're kind of unencumbered by that, but we're shipping our 20 millionth X86 server in July, basically next month. But with Nutanix, what we're basically doing is we're tightly integrating our management software with their Prism software. We're looking at integrating some of the network topology work now with innovation because rather than kind of a legacy network that people are used to now, when we move to a hyper-conversion infrastructure, some of that, those pain points move on to networking, but we've been innovating together now for almost two years, and I think we're crossing almost 300 customer deployments now, almost 200% growth since we started, and at least Lenovo's goal is we're going to be Nutanix's largest growing OEM partner this year. So talk more about that innovation strategy, because you know the general consensus is, wow, it's X86, they're all the same. How do you guys differentiate from an innovation standpoint? Well, we talked about it transform as our legacy now is we're number one in customer satisfaction and Lenovo on X86 systems in actually 21 to 22 categories, and that's a third party survey that's done across like 700 customers in 20 countries, number one in reliability. So we're building off of this infrastructure, off of a really strong customer base, so what we're trying to do on Think Agile is completely redefine the customer experience from the way you configure the system, we can now do a configure to order in three weeks, which we think is about half of what anyone else in the industry can do relative to our competitors, and then we're innovating down at the manageability layer, the networking stack, all of those pieces to really build the best solution together. There's an interesting kind of, two differing things if I look at Lenovo and your partnership, number one is, Kirk says they don't have any legacy, but one of the reasons you're in OEM with them is because they do have, they've got history, they've got brand, they've got channel, how do those come together in the partnership? So remember, I think before HCI, servers used to be a stateless machine. VMware will move the VMs back and forth because the data lives somewhere else in the storage system. So what you expect out of the server when it comes to reliability and serviceability are very different. What we did with HCI when we came out for the first time, we took the reliable storage piece, sharded into smaller segments and moved them inside the servers. All of a sudden, the reliability of the server has become exponentially more important. A portability, serviceability, how you do things like firmware management, all of those things become important now because your entire core banking application is running inside bunch of servers. There is no fan sitting behind protecting all of this. One of the reasons why Lenovo's X-Clarity product is one of the first apps on our App Store is because we want to make sure that customers have a fully integrated soup to nuts experience of not just managing the product but also experiencing the day one and day two upgrades, replacement, failure replacement, all of those things. So between our relationship with Lenovo's hardware and engineering plus the support, we are able to deliver a one plus one equals three sort of experience for our customers. So Siddish, I heard almost 300 customers you're at. Can you give us a little bit of kind of either verticals or geographies that you're being successful with? What we have seen with Lenovo that is a little different from the rest of the business that we do is that majority of the business is coming from large customers. And second, I would say financial sector is where the biggest initial momentum seem to be. And the repeat business is following the same pattern that the customers who buy are coming back and buying again. In fact, one of the largest financial institutions in the country in New York bought last quarter a defense size, a seven figure plus deal, and they'll probably come back and buy again this quarter. So that pickup is happening really fast and customers are happy with the overall experience. And it's also about the courting process, the shipping process that you talk about. These are all simple things, but these are extremely important in the customer buying experience. Yeah, I think from our perspective, I mean we operate in over 160 countries. A lot of people don't realize we have over 10,000 support specialists that call with more than a 90% customer sat rating. So when we're bringing in Think Agile, what we're bundling now with Think Agile and the Nutanix appliances is premier customer support. So you don't even go to an automated system. You go directly to a local language speaking person on the phone immediately and you get one vendor to support you across your server, your storage, your networking in the whole configuration. So that has gotten customers like for us, Jiffy Lube, Callaway, Beam Centauri, who's the third largest premium spirits vendor in the world, one of the largest Japanese auto manufacturers. I mean, I think it's been across all verticals that we've seen success together. Absolutely, I was in Asia last week and two weeks ago and the business that is tremendously picking up speed and it goes to the story. They have local language support, local marketing, local channel enablement. Those things matter significantly. I know it's very strong in all of these areas. We live in a world that's data driven. Data is the new oil. You got to monetize your data. You guys have big volumes and a lot of data. In relation to partnerships in this day and age, what role does the data play? Is there an integration of data? Is there a way to get more value on how are you getting? I know there's a way. How are you getting more value out of the data that you share with your job customers? I'll start and maybe Kirk can chime in as well. One of the areas, this is an extremely important question. Don't think of this as a hardware and infrastructure software play. This is about what customers want and one area, for example, SAP. One of the largest SAP's partner is Lenovo. And by partnering with Lenovo, we are now able to deliver, in fact, there is a specific product series that we've built for Lenovo HANA customers called Bridge to HANA, where we deliver certified HANA platform on Lenovo, along with the Nutanix software as a protection and testing environment right next to that. By wrapping the Lenovo's SAP expertise, the hardware expertise, Nutanix's infrastructure expertise, the customers can have a single one-stop shop for analytics, ERP, and everything, right? So those kind of experiences are what customers are looking for. Yeah, so I think one of the reasons people are coming to Lenovo is we're not trying to compete with them necessarily far up the stack, like we think some of our competitors are doing. But if you look at SAP, we're excited because we've had a relationship in software defined with SAP since probably eight years ago. We were actually blazing the trail, I think, with them on software defined. And we got rid of the legacy sand out of that solution probably in 2010, started eliminating some of the costs associated with that. And now we're proud that SAP runs Lenovo and Lenovo runs SAP. And we're starting to pull some big customers together like V-Grass, which is one of the largest, fastest growing clothing manufacturers in China. But we're not trying to hoard the data and use the data or compete with our customers on data. Absolutely. Hey guys, we're out of time, but just the last question relates to the future, right? Where you guys want to take this? Couple of years down the road, where are we going to see this partnership, what's your shared vision? Again, you saw today, we moved from that hyperconverge to a multi-cloud world. A multi-cloud world where we are redefining what hybrid cloud really means. There is a lot of work to be done to bring applications, infrastructure, and end users together. And partners like Lenovo is how we are going to get there. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is just the beginning. We're looking to a transposable world. Hyperconverge is one path along the way. We've been participating in public cloud. Now the world is moving to hybrid cloud and we've got great partnerships. We'll see strong growth with both companies for the next few years. Can't do it alone. Kurt, Sadeesh, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, thanks for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Nutanix.next. We'll be right back.