 In late 2009, when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI, Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak. Meaning, unlike converged infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single SKU that was very hardware centric, Nutanix was focused on creating HCI, hyper-converged infrastructure, which was a software-led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyper-converged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds, creating a cloud-like experience on-prem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud-first approach to IT. So the challenge becomes, how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your states. Hello and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft, made possible by Nutanix and produced by theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante, one of your hosts today. Now in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud-native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release, we sometimes call it a Barney deal, I love you, you love me, like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. Now in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alvaro Salis, who is the vice president of global ISD commercial solutions at Microsoft and Michael Leschica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornelli, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix and Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of engineering for NCI and NC2 at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and its salient features. Thanks for being with us, we hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. Hi everyone, welcome to our event, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alvaro Salis, the vice president of global ISV commercial solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Laschitzka, VP of business development, cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. Thank you, Lisa, looking forward. Yeah, so Alvaro, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens. What are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you, Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, are more important to be sure that every one of them as they transform themselves have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Alvaro, I was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? Great question, thank you. When you think about it, we're gonna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less use in Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in? The business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and over Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and these type of announcements will be a big part of what we're doing tonight. They're exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure talk to us about that for Nutanix's perspective and also give me a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership a couple of years ago. So we've been working on this for quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers' journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as Alvaro mentioned, in the current macroeconomic conditions, customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments and technology scale sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost of operations and keeping those things consistent costs on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they want to implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale, and modernizing their apps. And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on-prem footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons or this is a rather technical reason. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together I really do see our us together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy, but secure and really seamless. And really I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So the time it supports is known in the past where it's hyper-converged infrastructure and really breaking down the styles between networking, compute storage and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products in our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure and Microsoft, they're truly best-in-class cloud infrastructure with cutting-edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right? That's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications, whether they're on-prem, even in the cloud or even at the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer for our 20 customers. Let's take into that uniqueness of our bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure in the cloud. Talk to me a little from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the preview was oversubscribed. So the demand from your joint customers is clear. Thank you, Lisa and Michael. Personally, I'm very proud and the company were very proud of the work that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems, in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them opening more opportunities is extremely inspiring. And of course, the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we're generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity and the range of services, with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine all our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that everyone is gonna take can be simplified. You can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. And that's what our customers are asking us today, either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure or they're bringing their, you know, Kubernetes, Arc and Neighbor Kubernetes services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once I'm done. This is not that we build it, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution, sales, alliances that go to market teams to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta. As we mentioned, Alvaro, the preview was over subscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry. But what were some of the key things they came to these two companies looking to solve? Get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that they're able to do more with us? Maybe I could take that one out of Alvaro's beetle bind. But yeah, so like you mentioned, Lisa, we've had a great preview over subscribed. We had lots of, not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And we're obviously very pleased now to have GA and offer to everyone else. But one of our customers, Camperge, was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage density to an Azure to like I mentioned, reduce that work, workload migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure, but there's others where we want to lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCS and Citrix, where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix, providing that superior customer experience or whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC2 on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the work that we've done together. So this really kind of highlights the power of that, Alvaro, the power of the ISP ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. Absolutely, I mean, we still strongly believe that when you partner properly with an ISV, you get to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you're combining superpowers and you're solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have and Michael did a great job framing some of them and the difference that they have now by having NC2 on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. Alvaro, can you comment a little bit on the go-to market? Like how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? You know, when you think about the go-to market, a lot of that is we have teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, there will be also work on joint opportunities that we will manage, as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't want to go into too much detail but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience which the development teams have done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Alvaro said, you know, it's not just about the product integration it's really the full end-to-end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineers, but also how do we go and talk to customers with the value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for a customer so it doesn't really matter how the customer engages. They really see this as an end-to-end single solution across two companies. And that's so critical given just the natural challenges that organizations face and the dynamics of the macroeconomic environment that we're living in for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction. They want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud, but from an engagement perspective that sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Alvaro goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from the sales and marketing folks down to engineering down to support? Yeah, I think honestly, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot of alignment from day one. Of course, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience not just within the products, but again through the entire lifecycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's a new different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience. And now we're also focusing on solving real-world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's two bar drug negotiations working together. But I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on solving customer problems together. Yeah, well said, Michael. Overall, let me... Go ahead. No, I will say, Michael, I think that the one element that we complimented, I think the answer was super complete is the fact that we work together from the outside in, looking at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspiring, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls apart on its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and doing what we do best, which is combining our superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring it's been. And again, the response for the preview is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment. And I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question, guys, I wanna get both of your perspectives on. Michael, we'll start with you and then Alvaro will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these two superheroes together? Michael? Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North Star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adult, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC2 and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate. We mentioned, obviously, we announced the GA, that's GA in America's, but kind of the next need more immediate step over the next few months, look for us to continue expanding beyond America's and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, again, as Alvaro mentioned, it's working from kind of the customer's backwards. So we're not, no, we're not waiting for the GA. We're already working on the next set of solution saying, what are other problems that customers are facing, especially across as they're running their work across on-premises and public cloud? And what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them? It sounds really strongly that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at the center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Alvaro, last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? Well, thank you, Lisa, Michael. I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value. You know you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the partnership gets tested, where the right relationship gets built, where being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what the customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way, with the right quality everywhere which is never a small feast as you may imagine. You know, the world is a big place but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer-driven to keep and raise the bar on how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep innovating at their own pace in their own terms? Absolutely, that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the Announcement Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Avara, Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. Thank you for having me, Lisa, and thank you Avara for joining me. Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I'm looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah. Stay tuned. Exactly, thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned, there's more to come. We have, coming up next, a deeper conversation on the Announcement with Dave Vellante and Product Execs from both Nutanix and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.