 Live from San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Welcome back to The Cube. My name's Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here are SiliconANGLE TVs, live, wall-to-wall coverage, VMworld 2014 here in San Francisco, California. Our fifth year at the show. Those of us that have been at the show many times, we will call VMworld a marathon. Voices are a little hoarse. You're getting a little worn down. Got a bottle of water next to us to make sure we get through. But for those of us in the Boston area, we're at, like, Harkbrate Hill. So a little bit further up to slog through it, and then the end is in sight. We're talking a lot about end-user computing today. We had Chris Wolfon. We're going to have Sanjay Poon in on a little bit later. It's really, if you look at VMware's vision, it's the area that has probably changed the most in the last 12 to 18 months. So we're going to talk a lot about VDI in this segment. Joining me, I've got Courtney Burry, who's the senior director of product marketing with VMware. First time on The Cube. Appreciate you joining us. First time here. Thank you very much. And Sachin Chedda, director of solutions marketing with Nutanix. We just had your CEO on talking about the announcement of the latest round of funding in a $2 to $3 billion valuation. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Great. Sachin, maybe you could start. Tell us a little bit about what's your role with Nutanix and your relationship with VMware? So I'm the director of solutions marketing at Nutanix. I've been with the company for some time, but my background has been in the infrastructure space. So over the last decade or so, I've worked on things like processors, storage systems, et cetera, product management, and now I'm in product and solutions here at Nutanix. I've been working with Courtney over the past couple of companies, and one of the things that I realized when I came to Nutanix was this was an ideal solution for VDI, and more specifically for end user computing with Horizon 6. And that's where we ended up collaborating to produce something common with Horizon 6 and Nutanix web scale infrastructure. So Courtney, we've been covering for many years, as you said. We've had theCUBE now for the fifth year, and VMware always talks about its ecosystem and the partners that help enable it. There are some out there that kind of oversimplifies the things, and they say, oh, last year, you came out, and this year it's Evo Rail, and that means that VMware's just going to do it all by themselves, that partnerships don't matter, we're just going to take over the entire world. Can you kind of set that up for us? How does VMware look at its partner ecosystem in the VDI space? Yeah, I mean, I think our partner ecosystem is critical to our overall success, and we actually see phenomenal growth in the VDI space with the introduction of Horizon 6, and actually, particularly to a lot of industries out there that are really seeing a need due to security and compliance mandates, or to really trying to drive down costs in the overall industry to really adopting this overall technology. So the pie is continuing to grow, and we see our collaboration with Newtonix as really another choice for our customers to be able to embrace, to really simplify the overall deployment of those desktops within their environment, and really get that linear scalability as they grow over time. All right, so Courtney, you've been in the group for a while. Yeah. A whole new management team came in. Yes. You know, really invigorated direction. Yes. Sanjay's keynote, I thought, was really impressive. Yes. One of the, some of the people I heard watching it said, wow, in many ways it looked like Citrix, which to me said, wow, that gap is closed. So can you tell me, what have you been seeing in the last kind of 12 months or so? What has changed in the marketplace? What has changed with VMware? So you know, you said a year makes a big difference. We feel like a year has made a huge difference for end user computing as a whole within our group. Sanjay is on fire. He's obviously made a lot of great changes to the overall team since he's come on board. And it's just been really driven around innovation. First we acquired Destone. We've done some fantastic work with NVIDIA and with Google. We acquired the largest enterprise mobility management company in AirWatch. And you just saw last week us acquire another company in Cloud Volumes to allow us to really provide those just in time delivery of applications out there to our desktop users. So fantastic amount of innovation. And what we're really seeing out there in the industry is a lot more demand for virtual desktops out there. I think a lot of security and compliance mandates in industries like financial services and healthcare and government are really driving the need. It used to be that virtual desktops were just about task workers. And that is no longer the case. We now have support for 3D graphics and that's really driving a lot of demand in new verticals like manufacturing out there. So it's really, really exciting. Yeah, that's great. So Sachin, you know, first of all, I'm wondering if you can comment on the themes of the thing. Of course, you know, VDO has early use cases that we saw on the Verge players and especially Nutanix start with. So you know, what's changed in the recent time? So I would echo what Courtney said there. So there are a couple of different areas where VDI has really taken off. I'd first focus on the verticals. So we do see a lot of adoption in education. People are now seeing as the first way to deploy desktops, et cetera, and also to give access through the likes of, you know, your tablet, PCs, et cetera. What I've heard mobility has been just killer need in the education space. Absolutely. Absolutely. And change from where they used to be with the static desktops and the labs, et cetera. Now it's pretty much work and study anywhere you can. Another place that we see quite a bit of this adoption has been around the government. A lot of efficiencies are to be gained around the management, around the day to day operations associated with that. And that's where we're definitely seeing a lot of implementations of VDI. And this is also the year where we are introducing VDI assurance like VDI on a desktop basis. And that has changed also the paradigm for a lot of folks in the enterprise space where they're looking at VDI as a way to basically enable special projects. For example, onboarding contractors, securing environments, et cetera. But they don't want to have the risk associated with the actual infrastructure. And it has been working very closely with them to cut the risk associated with that. All right. So you mentioned VDI assurance. There's a couple other announcements. Do you want to just give us a quick encapsulation on the announcements? Absolutely. We introduced what is known as the Nutanix per user desktop pricing. And what this essentially is a offering where we actually take out the actual concept of sizing and the uncertainty associated with sizing. So customers go in, they actually decide what are the different user profiles they want to support. And they tell that to their reseller, to their Nutanix representative. And then we take that configuration and create actual proper configurations. And with VDI assurance, we assure that the customer will get the performance they need associated with their environment. So it is truly an assurance of the actual desktop itself. And from a customer's perspective, this is huge de-risking of their actual deployment because they no longer have to worry about certain performance, the uncertainties associated with VCPU calculations that's taken care of by Nutanix. And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing such a huge adoption in the industry. It's because now it's easier than it's ever been before. It's user experience is phenomenal. Now you can do things you never were able to do on a virtual desktop. And actually it's not just about virtual desktops, it's now about being able to deliver applications as well with RDS-hosted applications. And it's also about making it cheaper than ever before. We're actually getting to those economies of scale where it's actually cheaper than managing a physical endpoint in environments today. So it's huge for customers. So I see a lot of the touch points that you guys are working together. Both of your companies have made announcements regarding cloud adoption. I'm wondering, is there any overlap today or is that kind of a future roadmap? You've got Destone and Nutanix is starting to put pieces into the cloud. So just from an industry standpoint, where do you see kind of the desktop as a service? And are there synergies there between the companies? Yeah. Go ahead. So I'll definitely say that there's definitely opportunities for us to work together. I mean, even if you look at the enterprises, they are now looking at models where even if they have desktop on-premises, they're looking at cloud-based models. And Horizon 6 actually is a very good platform for starting down that path. And as Courtney mentioned, the whole application-oriented virtualization or application delivery is a big starting point for some of that. And then over time, I'm imagining that we'll definitely collaborate on the actual service provider-style model. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, you can have a single plane in the cloud to manage all of those desktops and put an appliance like a Nutanix appliance on-prem within those distributed locations, and that user can auto, you know, basically access their desktop from that appliance, but everything is managed back in the data center, centrally through that plane. And really, that's a model where I think a lot of customers are looking to move to, where it really simplifies everything for them. Hey, Courtney, you know, it's refreshing this conversation for me. I remember the first year when I came in 2010, everybody's just arguing over their cost for desktop. And I got the lowest cost. I'm going to save you money. And desktop virtualization is a complex discussion. In the Twitter sphere, a big joke is, now the year of VDI, have you heard? We say that every year. Yeah, exactly. So what are the real discussion points? What are you hearing the customer? How are they making their decision points? And what's kind of the biggest thing that they can gain from it when they first adopt? So I think the discussion around desktop virtualization, it's actually become a bigger discussion. It's about getting access to all of those applications and all of your files in a single place across devices, locations, mediums, and connections. A desktop is one way to get to those assets. Really at the end of the day, you want a secure virtual workspace to be able to access those. So people are really seeing that big picture. And I think where VMware really sees that vision going is being able to tie in all the goodness of the software-defined data center, really supporting users across all those devices to get to their Windows legacy applications, their mobile applications, their web-based applications, or their desktops and their files. And then also taking advantage of that flexible delivery. So if you want to secure it and manage it and control it on-prem and leverage Newtonics to do that, you can do so. If you want to leverage it through the cloud, you can do so. And if you want to have a hybrid model, well, we're going to support that as well. So really, I think customers are looking for that flexible choice. They're looking for a simpler way to manage all of this. They're looking for a much more cost-effective way to do so. And I think, together, we're really providing them with that opportunity. Yeah, and I wanted to also add a couple of points. So I want to use an example to illustrate what is really driving virtualization of the application of the desktop here. So we have a common customer, Circo. Circo is a large services-oriented organization. They do call services. They do a lot of variety of different IT-oriented projects or service-oriented projects for the public sector. And they have deployed Newtonics with Horizon. And in their deployment that they talk about publicly in a case study that we have together, they talked about how they had to be on the path where they did not know what the endpoint was, but they had a business initiative. And that business initiative was to bring this to a certain function in the government. And essentially, this would be an environment that was distributed across multiple cities. They really had very little information in perspective to really make this happen. And if they were to go down to the desktop model or just the static VM model, it would have been a very hard process for them to actually get through this, in which case they actually ended up going down the path of saying, okay, we're going to take a model where we start small and then we scale only as the need demands. And we're able to do so on multiple different sites, leveraging some horizon as well as from a replication perspective, management perspective, from a scalability perspective. And today, they're at close to 4,000 desktops across multiple different sites. And again, this is against a scalable model so they can grow the same architecture to close to 10,000 if not higher number of desktops without re-architecting their entire environment. And that's a huge testament to why desktop virtualization works because it would not be possible if they had not done it that way. Great. So, yeah, it's been great to see that transition to be when is it going to pick up to the real deployments across lots of industries, many more keeping at it. Courtney, we talked about the partnership. And from a commitment standpoint, it sounds like VMware sees great value in the partners. Lots of announcements at the show with many others. From a roadmap standpoint, what kind of commitment does VMware have? What can we expect to see going forward that are proof points of VMware staying close with the partners? Well, you know, we work closely with our partners day in and day out. And I know Sachin at the beginning of the show mentioned that we've been working together for two years and that work will only continue. There is a huge effort, a lot of validations continuing between our ecosystem partners and VMware to really drive and simplify solutions for our customers. Because at the end of the day, they don't want point products. They want a solution to solve a specific problem or a specific challenge they're facing in their environment. Be that BYOD and mobility, be that for their contact centers, be that for remote office, branch office sites. And so, you can expect to see a lot of collaboration from our team and from VMware in general with partners like Newtonix as we move forward to really ensure that customers have those solutions. All right, Sachin, I want to give you the last word. We're getting the hook. Oh, really? I don't get the last one. I do want to point out that we actually announced our joint reference architecture here at the conference. And there are a couple of stats that are worth noting. So we have released a joint reference architecture with VMware. It is jointly validated in that we both companies know that this is a known good functional reference architecture that could be used. And we're talking about an architecture that essentially is built on Horizon 6 with Vue. We have, again, both virtual desktops and RDS or virtualized applications as a part of this reference architecture. And what's good about this or what really stands out about this reference architecture, it is truly a linearly scaling reference architecture. The architecture starts off with as few as 300 users and it scales all the way to tens of thousands of users from a scalability perspective. And we're talking about very high density. So essentially think of running 400 users or so in a 2U. And that's both the compute infrastructure and the storage infrastructure. And what's interesting is that you can definitely mix and match the whole concept of desktop and application virtualization. And the whole project itself took less than a month to validate. And this includes extensive testing, et cetera. So in a real world deployment, we're talking about weeks, not months, to deploy thousands and thousands of users. It's not less. So Sachin and Courtney, I know there's lots more we could go into if we had time. But we'll have to pick it up next time we have a chance to chat. So thanks so much for sharing all the updates here. And we will be right back with our continuous coverage from VMworld right after this quick break.