 Okay, we're back with the hybrid cloud power panel. I'm Dave Vellante. And with me are Eric Lockhart, who's the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, specialized Thomas Cornley, the senior vice president of products at Nutanix, and Indu Keri, who's the senior vice president of engineering, NCI and NC2 at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be here. Have it us. Eric, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, why not just put everything in the public cloud? Yeah, well, I mean, the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean, it has effectively infinite capacity, the ability to innovate without a lot of upfront costs, regions all over the world. So there is a trend towards public cloud, but not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons customers want to have assets on premise, you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise, but also take advantage of the cloud for bursting or regionality or expansion, especially coming out of the pandemic, we saw a lot of this from work from home and video conferencing and so on, driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. Yeah, it makes sense. I wanted to talk, if you could talk a little bit, I don't want to inundate people with the acronyms, but the Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure, what is that, what problems does it solve? Give us some color there, please. And so cloud clusters on Azure, which we actually call NC2 to make it simple and easy. So NC2 on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you think about hybrid cloud, highly desirable, customers want it, they know this is the right way to go for them, given that they want to have workloads on premises at the edge and in public clouds, but it's complicated, it's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you deal with is just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with, you have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise and dealing with different portals, networkings get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know, hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done with NC2 on Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as is to any Azure region where NC2 is available. Once it's running there, you keep the same operating model, right? And that's something that's actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simpler fashion, do it faster and basically do hybrid in a more class effective fashion for all your applications. And that's really what's special about NC2 on Azure today. So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So if I understand you correctly, it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? This is the key for us, right? It is when you think you're setting on premises, you're used to doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model to workload running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster deployed in NC2 on Azure, it's going to look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center. Using the same tools, using the same admin constructs to go and protect the workloads, make them highly available, do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you're in Azure and this is what we spent a lot of time working with Eric and his teams on is you actually have access now to all of the suite of Azure services natively from the workloads. So now you get the best of both worlds. And we bridge them together and you get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. Yeah, and as you alluded to, this has traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for quite some time. So, Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team and I'm sure this is not just a press release, or a PowerPoint, you had to do some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? So let me start with what's unique about this. And I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that. The best way to think about what we're delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds up the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you find that you start with something and then before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor your applications because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC2 allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud at which point you start the refactoring journey. And one of the things that you've done really well with the NC2 on Azure is that NC2 is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric, especially the software defined network in SDN piece. What that means is that you don't have to worry about connecting your NC2 cluster to Azure to some sort of a network pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC2 cluster. And that makes your refactoring journey so much easier. Your management plan looks the same. Your high performance notes like the NVME notes, they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the facts that you're doing something in the public cloud, all the Nutanix goodness that you're used to continue to receive that. There's a lot of secret sauce that we've had to develop as part of this journey. But if you had to pick one that really stands out, it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity of a public cloud in this case Azure and make it as familiar to Nutanix customers as the VPC construct, the virtual private cloud construct that allows them to really think of the on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's drawn on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I drew up that, if you really want to draw up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid after someone. And I would say I would add a third, do a cloud development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team and you're very grateful for their support. I need NC2 for my house. I live in a house that was built in it, 1687 and we connect all the new and it is a bolt-on. But the secret sauce, I mean, there's a lot there, but is it a pass layer? I mean, you didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud. You've done more than that, I'm inferring. You know, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of which you then obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road, if you have a containerized application, you'll actually be able to take it from on-prem and run it on a NC2. But the NC2 offer itself, the NC2 offering itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to, the high-performance storage that you define new tenants to begin with, the hypervisor that you're used to, the network constants that you're used to like micro-sedmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC2 in Azure, the same way that you're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console, also remains the same. That makes your security model easier, that makes your management challenge easier, that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board, that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they'll be able to otherwise. Great, thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now, Thomas, maybe we can get to the customers. What are the use cases that are gonna emerge for this solution? Yeah, I mean, we've had a solution for a while, and this is now new on Azure, it's gonna extend the reach of the solution and gets us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us, the first one, you know, if you talk about it is migration. You know, we see customers on the cloud journey, they're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on-premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end, they take the same concept that were around the application and we make them available now in the Azure region. You can do this for any applications, there's no change to the application, no networking change, the same IP config will work the same whether you're running on-premises or in Azure, the app stays exactly the same, manage the same way, protect it the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers for me to put it on, maybe I wanna go do something different or I wanna go and shut down the location on-premises. I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion, in a very fast manner, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud for what you're doing on-premises is disaster recovery. And something that we refer to as elastic disaster recovery. Being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on-premises workloads, but having that site sitting in Azure as a small site, just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on-demand in Azure to scale out the environment, fail over workloads, run them with performance, potentially split them back to on-premises and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again, optimize costs and take advantage of the elasticity that you get from public cloud models. Then the last one, building on top of that, is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases. Maybe running a large environment, typically desktop VDI environments that we see running on-premises. And I have a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access in the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on-premises, wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on-premises and get access to resources on-demand in Azure and basically move the workloads and now basically get combined desktop running on-premises, desktop running on-NC2 on Azure, same desktop images, same management, same services and do that as a burst use case during say your retailer that has to go and take care of a holiday season. Great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? Then very much complimenting the notion of look, I want to go to desktop as a service but right now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just want to be able to get access to resources on-demand in the right place at the right time. Makes sense. I mean, this is really all about supporting customers' digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations. And Eric, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? Well, the ultimate vision is really two-fold, I think. The one is to first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their administrators or to obviate their investment that they already have in platforms like Nutanix. And so the work the companies have done together here, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform but do so in conjunction with the advantages and capabilities of Azure. Now, secondly, it's really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure Arc, for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-premise up into the cloud and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in on-premise HCI. Got it, thank you. Last question, maybe each of you can just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric, you can bring us home. Sure. So the key takeaway is Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure is now GA. This is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going back years literally, right? So people have been wanting to go and see this. This is now live GA open for business and we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale. This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. Great, Indu. You know, Dave, in a prior life about seven or eight years ago, I was part of a team that took a popular tax preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had had NC2 then, it would have saved us half the money but more importantly would have gotten there in one third of the time. And that's really the value of this. Okay, Eric, bring us home, please. Yeah, I'll just point out that this is not something that's just both on or something we started yesterday. This is something the teams, both companies have been working on together for years really. And it's a way of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure cloud. And with the ultimate goal of again, providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on ramp to the cloud for customers who have significant investments in Nutanix clusters on premise. Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen, really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there. You're watching accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Organizations are increasingly moving towards a hybrid cloud model that contains a mix of on premises, public and private clouds. A recent study confirms 83% of businesses agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model. Despite its many benefits, deploying a hybrid cloud can be challenging, complex, slow and expensive, require different skills and tool sets and separate siloed management interfaces. In fact, 87% of surveyed enterprises believe that multicloud success will require simplified management of mixed infrastructures. With Nutanix and Microsoft, your hybrid cloud gets the best of both worlds, the predictable costs, performance, control and data sovereignty of a private cloud and the scalability, cloud services, ease of use and fractional economics of the public cloud. Whatever your use case, Nutanix cloud clusters simplifies IT operations, is faster and lowers risk for migration projects, lowers cloud TCO and provides investment optimization and offers effortless, limitless scale and flexibility. Choose NC2 to accelerate your business in the cloud and achieve true hybrid cloud success. Take a free self-guided 30 minute test drive of the solutions provisioning steps and use cases at Nutanix.com slash Azure TD. Okay, so we're just wrapping up Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft made possible by Nutanix, where we just heard how Nutanix is partnering with cloud and software leader Microsoft to enable customers to execute on a true hybrid cloud vision with actionable solutions. We pushed and got the answer that with NC2 on Azure, you get the same stack, the same performance, the same networking, the same automation, the same workflows across on-prem and Azure States, realizing the goal of simplifying and extending on-prem workloads to any Azure region to move apps without complicated refactoring and to be able to tap the full complement of native services that are available on Azure. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news related to this announcement and all things enterprise tech. Please go to nutanix.com there's of course information about this announcement and the partnership, but there's also a ton of resources to better understand the Nutanix product portfolio. There are white papers, videos and other valuable content. So check that out. This is Dave Vellante for Lisa Martin with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching the program and we'll see you next time.