 Sonic in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Tech World 2016, brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to all the enterprise tech, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Happy to be here at the Masonic for Lenovo Tech World 2016. Happy to have on the program for this segment. We've got Radhika Krishan, who's the general manager for conversion, hyper-converged infrastructure. Radhika, welcome back to the program. It's great to be here, thanks Stu. And I'm surprised, first time on the program, Sudesh Nair, sorry, who's the president of Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely, it's like the same radio. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Exactly, so the hyper-convergence, something near and dear to my heart, something I've been covering since before. The term came out, Wikibon's written a lot on it. You guys have an OEM partnership. Radhika, let's start with you. What led to Lenovo looking at this space and why the partnership with Nutanix? Yeah, that's a great question Stu. There is a very clear trend that's playing out in the industry today, where customers want to be able to provision applications a lot faster. They're demanding a lot more simplicity in their environment, much better manageability, and so on. And so that's driving this trend toward new IT, where while IT customers want all those benefits, they also want to minimize IT budgets. And hyper-convergence is a great way to solve that problem. And so as Lenovo was looking to make a foray into this market, it was very logical for us to try and get a jumpstart by partnering with the leader in the space. And in this instance, obviously that's Nutanix. So tell us about, you know, what's special about the partnership between Nutanix and Lenovo? It's about a couple of things. We are a software company, but we are a software company that has a lot of respect for hardware, because software doesn't run on thin air, right? And when you look around, the world is changing so fast, there are only two kinds of companies, the quick and the dead. It's as simple as that. We were looking for a company that understands hardware, support, scale, and understand the value of innovation. And when you look around, you can see that the philosophy that Lenovo has when it comes to how an enterprise data center should be built in the future, perfectly aligns with how we think about it. So it makes perfect sense for these companies to come together. So Siddish, I want you to explain something that you said. You said Nutanix is a software company. Now, I believe I understand why, but when I hear people out in the marketplace, they say, Nutanix, they sell some box, right? I mean, isn't that, you know, hyper-convergence is an appliance? People have kind of, they're stuck inside the box where they're thinking on that. Explain why they're wrong. See, you know, in Silicon Valley, it's all about software. People talk about software all the time. People don't care about hardware until something goes wrong, right? Think about it, servers were built as a stateless engine. The data was living in storage system that were built to be reliable, serviceable, all of that. What we have done with hyper-convergence, we combine those two things together. So when you bring the entire crown jewels of your business inside servers, you better know how to take care of things when stuff doesn't work. And what we wanted to make sure was to make sure that we do deliver the same type of serviceability and reliability for our customers. And to do that, you have to know how to deliver the best appliance form factor. And whether you do that with partnership or with hardware engineering, it's a secondary decision to make, but it's an important decision to make as well. And I would entirely attest to what Siddish just said, right? Which is, customers really want to be able to deploy this cool, innovative software over a platform that they can count on. And so reliability becomes paramount in that environment. The other thing as well that I'll point to Stu is that customers want integrated manageability. So there's more than just taking a X86 server and running a hyper-converged piece of software on top of it. You need to have the hooks. You need to have the ability to manage this as a holistic appliance as opposed to piecemeal. So I'll give an example. I think a couple of months ago, we had this very difficult problem that we were dealing with. And it was a hardware related issue. And it was so complex. Our engineers had to spend, I would say, two months trying to figure the problem out. We had AMI, the BIOS guys, the Intel guys, LSI, the controller folks, Supermicro, and Nutinix hardware platform engineers, all five groups spending almost a couple of months, days and nights figuring it out. Now imagine if the customers were getting software from one vendor and hardware from somebody else and some issue like that pops up. Where do they go? Who do they call? Should they spend time on the phone calling AMI and LSI? No, customers need reliability so that they can focus on application. And it requires partnerships like these. So that customers get the best quality of experience on the overall solution. So Radhika, you know the storage industry and storage tends to be something that is bought on risk, right? It's great to save some money, but you know, my business runs on my storage. So you know, where do we sit? How are customers in kind of their comfort level with some of these new models and where do you see transitions happening? Well actually it's pretty interesting to see how quickly hyperconvergence has caught on, Stu. You know, I mean there is a general perception in the marketplace that maybe this is much more optimized toward SMB type of deployments, you know, smaller scale, you know, tier two, tier three kind of workloads. In reality what we're saying, and you know, Sudheesh just obviously, you know, can attest to this as well, is this tendency of customers, fairly large enterprise customers to deploy this for, you know, tier one, tier two mainstream workloads, including, you know, their Oracle databases, their SAP environments. And clearly, you know, there is a set of value propositions that the hyperconverged platform is able to deliver to them that they value about their traditional, you know, piecemeal or three tier architecture. Yeah, absolutely. I've talked to many Nutanix customers. I've talked to service fighters. I mean, there's nobody better than a service fighter to talk about kind of the scale and you know, really the, you know, what the platform needs to be able to deliver on and I think Nutanix, what do you have? Over a hundred service providers today, Sudheesh? Yeah, a little more than that actually. Service fighters like this because they want flexibility. They want optionality and we provide that. Okay. And it's interesting too, you know, just in the few months that we've been in the marketplace that we've had the HX series of platforms in the marketplace, you know, we've had success across the globe. You know, there are large retail companies, you know, pharmaceutical companies, financial services companies. There's a very large bank in APAC that has now bought into the hyperconverged value proposition. They're essentially replacing, you know, their existing income and three tier architecture that they had entirely with the hyperconverged HX platforms. And they actually interestingly did a TCO study in a spot of their POC process. And they were able to demonstrate much higher value, you know, much lower TCO with the HX platforms vis-a-vis what they were using prior. Yeah, do you have any data today, Radhika, on who are you selling this to? Is this a storage sale? Is it a virtualization play? Is it from the application side on a project? Well, it actually tends to be a combination of all of those. As you know, you know, the lines are blurring, especially in large enterprise environments where there tends to be, you know, a lot of specialization around specific infrastructure components. We're increasingly starting to see these guys kind of come together as they make decisions. Oftentimes, you know, we do encounter the virtualization admin. They tend to be at the forefront of a lot of this. The application administrators also tend to have a say in what kind of platform they want, what kind of service levels they're looking to achieve. So it's really a combination of all of those. So Siddish, you've been involved in this hyperconverge since the early days too. I'm wondering, you know, what are you hearing out in the field, you know? Is competition now more, you know, hyperconverged against others? Is it still mostly talking about three-tier architecture versus the benefits of hyperconverged? What can you share? You used to call it server sand, right? We still do call it server sand, third generation server sand research. Shouldn't be up before your conference, so, absolutely. The way I think of it is to hyperconvergence is not that big a deal. What I mean by that is, you know, customers have three-tier architecture and we compress that into a single tier. Okay, not that big a deal. It's been around for a while. The real blueprint that customers are looking for to replete, I mean, to duplicate in their data center is what public cloud vendors are providing. The whole stack, including application. You know, vendors like Amazon and Azure, we call that enterprise cloud. But to deliver the blueprint, you do need the foundation because storage desegregated from where applications are living is a huge problem. So by doing hyperconvergence, we solve that first step. We built the foundation. But no one moves into a foundation. You have to build the whole house. And that's the journey that Lenovo Nutanix are embarking on. We believe that there are five, six different steps involved. One of them is a web-scale architecture-based hyperconvergence. Then you have to support containers. You have to support app mobility. You have to support capability to manage, orchestrate, visualize, automate, remediate, whether that's running on-prem or off-prem. And then, probably most importantly, you should also have an answer for the consumption model change that's happening from the public cloud. So we believe that if you can deliver that type of experience, that is customers today have one choice, which is live or take your data and go to cloud. We believe there's an opportunity to bring cloud to the data and then free up the application so that when they need to go public cloud, they can actually go and come back. And that's a global vision. In that context, hyperconverged is an important play. But I would say it's a step maybe two out of six or so. And I absolutely concur with that. So we definitely see the architecture as a means to an end, right? And the end is really, as Sudeesh mentioned, it's this vision of being able to derive the cost economics and the simplicity and the speed and agility that you get with the cloud deployment with an on-prem deployment. Because you still want the control, you still want the security benefits that on-prem delivers to you. But then you want to be able to do it with some of the other benefits that Amazon and other public clouds provide. And therefore, providing the base core platform is one step along the way. But obviously you need to build on top of that. And those are, by the way, some really cool collaboration projects that are underway between Nutanix and Windows as well. Great, yeah. Totally agree. It's customers who need business outcomes. They need to deliver on the business. Radhika, I was talking to Brian earlier. You guys have both the technology pieces and the applications. Is there any specific applications you guys are seeing as first movers for this tool of hyperconvergence that you would want to speak of? So definitely all server virtualized environments. There's this big move. And VDI comes up as the next obvious application. Interestingly, we're also starting to see relational databases moving to hyperconvergence. Historically, there has been some concern around needing to have highly optimized high performance storage underneath. It has become clear to a lot of customers that they can actually derive a lot more of the simplicity, manageability benefits. And so there are customers now deploying their SQL server and Oracle databases on hyperconverged platforms as well. Okay. Any update on the application? Do you want to share Siddish? I mean, SAP is a classic example. I mean, Lenovo rules that space. And Nutanix technology is now certified on SAP NetWeaver and we are working with them on the HANA certification and things like that. That's one example. But what's most important is that let's say you are deploying a SQL server. The business wants to deploy that and move on because that's what the customers care about. But think about the decision points that happens today as enterprise. There is the story, the performance bottlenecks, the eye of the multiparting, et cetera, all of those complexities. Nobody cares about any of those things. Imagine a situation where the only decision the customer makes is the deploying and the licensing. And the system takes that and deploys it in the most optimal way based on those couple of inputs. And that's what we call opinionated design and intent-based architecture. And that's where we are driving this so that the customer will say, I want to deploy a SQL server in production and that's it. And the system will actually design. Because it is production, I'm going to deploy the HA. Because it is production, I'm going to deploy a certain amount of flash as part of that. All of those decisions are made. So there's tremendous amount of opportunity for innovation to automate every single thing that can be automated in the entire decision chain. And that's an exciting journey. I think it's just the beginning of that. But in the next few years, you will see us, this technology landscape, making tremendous progress towards that. So Radhika, I'd like to give you the last word. When people think about Lenovo and the conversion, hyper-converged space, where do you guys expect to make your mark? Well, absolutely. We talked about earlier, too. The world is moving toward an IT consumption model that is highly simplified, very agile, very easy to deploy. And that is the kind of IT infrastructure we're looking to deliver. Our focus is really, you can say that it's anchored around three tenets, if you will. The first is around purpose-driven innovation. So we really are looking to focus on specific customer pain points and address those with innovation that we invest in. The second is really around flexibility, giving customers the latitude to choose from a variety of approaches, keeping in mind that one size doesn't fit all. And then the third is around the customer experience, which is really, think of it as the end-to-end. It isn't just about the product or the solution. It's about how you acquire product, how you deploy it, how you manage it, maintain it, upgrade it over its lifecycle. And so you can think of the investments and our strategies as really revolving around those three key tenets. Siddish and Radhika, thank you so much for joining. As Siddish said, there's only two types of people out there. They're the quick and the dead, so make sure to keep up with all the fast-facing change. Check out siliconangle.tv, cubeset, all the enterprise show, including Nutanix Next in Las Vegas at the win just the week after next. So stay tuned for lots more coverage here from Lenovo TechWorld 2016. You're watching theCUBE.