>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.