>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> And welcome back here on theCUBE, we continue our live coverage at Dell Technologies 2018. We are in Las Vegas, and we are in the Sands right now. 14,000 people strong attended this year's show. And great energy, great buzz here on the show floor. Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined now by Ben Gibson, who's the CMO at Nutanix, and Dan McConnell, Vice President over at Dell EMC. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. Good to have you here on theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> A lot of conversation about hyper, right, and hyper-converged and about some numbers that we've heard, that Dell's been talking about, that 60-plus percent of inquiries, discussions here from the customer is all about HCI. So how does that stack up with what you're hearing, first off, Ben or Dan, in the marketplace, and what's the driving force right now behind all that discussion? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's been, HCI, I guess the Nutanix partnership, we've been about four years, right? I'll jokingly say, back before HCI was cool. And more and more, what we've seen is in the early days it was, pick an application, okay, it's VDI. And that's kind of its starting point. But now, more and more, these discussions, it's not what app or what workload works for HCI. It's really which one doesn't work. I'm trying to throw everything I can on HCI. Which one should I park over here? So the interest has really, really flipped. And it's the ease of use, it's the flexibility, it's the incremental scale. So it's something that we've seen huge traction in on the Dell side. Obviously it's where our partnership with Nutanix, as well as some of our own solutions. It's tremendous growth. And year over year, we've seen stronger and stronger growth. So definitely getting traction. It's moving out of what is test and dev, and it's in core of the data center right now. >> And what's driving that, you think, in the marketplace? I mean, how's it responding, I guess to performance that it's seen from other early adopters, basically, and what's that motivation there? >> Yeah, John, you know, as Dan just said, there's a lot of growth in this space. And the market for hyper-converged in general, it's probably among, if not the top IT growth segment that we're seeing out there across the whole IT landscape. Analysts are pegging this as 60% or above year on year growth business, and the multi-billions of dollars. So I think what's motivating that interest, I think there's a huge surge that I think together we're seeing around data center modernization initiatives. There's a lot of need for application traffic growth and how our customers modernize their data center environments to keep up with that demand they're seeing, with the workloads that they're running on premise and those that they may be developing off prem and bringing it on prem or the like, it's really driving a lot of this hyper-convergence growth story that we're seeing out there in the market. >> So let's talk about some of the myths out in the market. Hyper-convergence, not enterprise-ready from a couple of different areas. One, let's talk about the relationship that Nutanix has with Dell. Global reach and scalability. Nutanix, not a hardware company. Nutanix is a software company. But the product is sold in a box. Those boxes have to be supported. How does Nutanix support global companies when you're a software company? >> Yeah, for us it is about software choice. But it's also about very strategic partnerships. And I count the Dell partnership we have as one that's been, in our history and moving forward, our most fruitful. It's about delivering different offerings in different ways for our customers to consume our joint hyper-convergent solutions. Just recently, we announced what we call XC Core, which now another option for Dell customers to take advantage of Nutanix HCI with Dell hardware and be able to consume via software license from Nutanix, buy and continue to buy their hardware platform from Dell, bring that all together in solution. So we have a real freedom of choice here that we drive out locally. It's a great combination with go-to-market reach with Dell, combined with innovation that we bring to the table together. And I think it's working really well, and promising. >> And even our services teams, to your point, have worked very closely together. Depending on which consumption model you choose, on the appliance side, we'll take L1, L2 support, on the Dell side. So as the products scale, we help that services aspect, that scalability, that reach. >> Yeah, so for a practical perspective, I'm a global company, I have retail shops in Germany, based out of the US, drive those out, who do I call in, how do I get support for that? >> The great news with this relationship is it's really the customer's choice and what their preference is. We have many customers where Dell is providing that global support model. We now have a new offering that allows the customer to choose whether they get their software support for HCI from Nutanix and continue their existing service relationships with Dell. The nice thing is we're not forcing customers in any one decision on this front, whatever suits their interests and their needs the best. >> So, next myth. HCI isn't ready for mission critical applications. Dell yesterday brought a customer that went head first and everything their mission critical systems, it's Celtic, a global hotelier, their reservation system, their big Oracle apps. Talk to me about the mission critical story, Nutanix, Dell together. >> One of the key, I don't know, just to exemplify this, we continue to get customer demand for four socket, recently, just released a four socket version of the XE Series. Four socket, that's database, what do you mean database on HCI? So yeah, it is continuing to grow into mission critical, exact status like 45 or 50% of HCI is deployed in the data center, all right. So, mission critical workloads, databases, there's no more mission critical than that. And the majority of them sitting right in the data center. So it's, that myth of non-data center, to the side project or VDI only, that might have been where it was two years ago, no longer. >> Yeah, I love myths because it makes for good marketing. We're seeing this trend. So obviously VDI was one of the first sweet spot workloads for HCI in it's infancy. We're seeing across our customer base now, and we talked about this in our New York Investor Day a few weeks ago, now we're seeing 60% plus of all workloads are tier one applications. Databases, other mission critical applications, that are running on HCI infrastructure, with Dell and Nutanix together. We've seen that really start to quickly shift over into that front. I think what the market should keep an eye out for is more and more not only customers running those tier one applications on HCI but you're going to start to see more and more of these major ISVs start to certify their major applications on HCI infrastructure. >> Poke at SAP Hana, I would love to see SAP Hana on Nutanix, that would be awesome. >> Ben Gibson: No comment at present >> Well you're kind of talking about trends in a way here, in terms of adoption, people wanting to do, I'm always kind of interested in the chicken and the egg. You're developing product, you're listening to customers, you're hearing their demands, and you're also trying to, perhaps develop in a vacuum, and give them new capabilities that they haven't dreamed up yet. So you do you work that in terms of that give and take and in your development responding to what the market wants and also driving the market to what you think it needs? >> I think what's proven to be very successful for Nutanix is, obviously we're very customer centric, we also have a strong opinion. Dheeraj our CEO talks about having a real strong opinion on architecture and vision for how do we innovate, how do we solve some problems that maybe our customers haven't faced yet? So I think it's a good balancing act. So we come to the table, we listen very carefully to our customers, we understand what their key challenges are but we come with an opinion as well. And so, conventional wisdom would say go down a certain direction architecturally well what if you collapse those three tier data center architectures, what if you move towards this hyper converged offering, how to you manage and automate and bring together more glue, if you will, across multi-cloud environments? That combines having a vision and a strong conviction of opinion about where it's headed combined with making sure there's always a check and balance what are our customers thinking, where are they seeing their challenges? >> No, absolutely. As customers step in to HCI we're seeing more and more people testing in different areas people looking to solve different problems with it. Typically, all around the agility, the scalability, the ease of use, but it is, like you said, there's a combination between opinionated and listening. Some of our best innovations have come directly from the customers. These are people who are using it in the field and are tripping over the new cases. So it's a balance. >> So Michael Dell on stage just talked about the ability of Dell to be able to run workloads wherever customers wanted run their workloads. So far we've talked about HCI, which is interesting, however we're going into a model where we need to run workloads in a data center, we need to run workloads outside a data center, and we need to manage that infrastructure. What's the Nutanix Dell story around managing workloads across hybrid clouds? >> I would say this is a big trend we're seeing in the market there's different terminology for it multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, right workload on right cloud platform at right time. When you start throwing those vectors in place it creates a lot of potential confusion and complexity, right? How do you determine what's the best cloud platform in terms of cost, in terms of the laws of phycics, in terms of latency, with SLAs with these workloads? In terms of laws of the land from governance and overall legal perspective. So you start to bring in, as the market moves towards multi-cloud, there's this vacuum that needs to be filled that we can fill here together. It's like how do you determine, what's the context, what's the right cost model for a particular workload that makes perfect sense to run on a public cloud platform, like an AWS or an Azure or a Google cloud? What other highly predictable workloads absolutely need to be run in a modernized data center environment powered by Nutanix plus Dell HCI? To me there's a lot of vacuum that can be filled by innovation with management, automation, context around making those decisions. And the last thing I will say, it's not just about technology innovation, it's an opportunity for our customers, I believe, to really evolve their careers to the next step. If you're an infrastructure manager and all of a sudden there's different platforms where the infrastructure resides, what better opportunity than to become that strategic consultant within your own enterprise to help make those decision with context and with good smarts behind it? >> I think you hit some good points. When you look at it, there's going to be multiple clouds and it's about enabling the choice and integrating with whatever the right cloud is for your needs. We've got virtue stream capabilities for tier one type cloud stuff all the way to Azure on the XE series we just integrated with OMS on the Azure side so we'll actually upload all of the stats and metrics into their log analytics solutions. It's enabling choice, enabling which cloud, there's going to be multiple clouds and different clouds are going to be optimized for different things so I think you'll see us embrace hybrid, embrace it across multiple clouds on the back end. I don't know if there's one size fits all. >> So opinionation, I think, is a great segue into what's important I think as IT managers are looking at solutions, there's no one vendor today that can that an end to end solution and say, you know, we're your one stop shop for hybrid cloud. So this is where opinion matters. What is Nutanix's opinion when it comes to how to deliver hybrid cloud? So this is what you will be judged on, can't be judged on the technology because the technology isn't there yet, but where's the vision? >> I think it starts and ends with make complexity, make the complexity with multiple cloud environments, with complicated legacy data center environments, make that all invisible. How do you radically reduce that complexity and we talk all about one click, one OS, any cloud. It's not just a nice marketing tag line I think it really stands for a principle and a vision around how do you make a lot of that complexity go away? So you can redirect a lot of these IT man hours over towards inventing more. We just launched a new campaign you're talking about freedom to invent, freedom to build the data center that you want to build. So it's about coming with that opinion that everything that was so complicated and the next big horizon is multi-cloud environments, how do you make that essentially disappear, go away, so you can reapply your IT resource to new things that can really impact the business. The last thing I'll say too, spiraling cloud cost, and so if you have a teenager at home and maybe you're brave enough to give that teenager the credit card and they're online gaming or doing something, so it's kind of that shock bill you get at the end of the month, depending on what workload you're running on what cloud platform you could have this teenager with the runaway credit card syndrome. So how do you simplify, or bring that context and visibility to the forefront to help make some of those smarter decisions? So that's some of the things that we like to think about in terms of removing barriers and empowering the customers to take back control of what could potentially become a rapidly disaggregated, chaotic environment. >> You just threw every parent off their mark right there. Oh my God the credit card! >> I've lived it. >> Are we going to hear some of this next week? I mean we've got your big show, you guys almost flip rolls, right? Dan you're hosting this week and for you Ben it's next week down in New Orleans. Give us a little sneak peak. >> We're really excited about next week. So Dan has been kind enough to host us here this week in Las Vegas, so it's a rough life next week >> New Orleans >> We go to New Orleans. We have our user conference we call .NEXT and Keith you're going to be joining us >> Keith: I will be there. >> theCube will be there >> Looking forward to theCube being there. So this is about bringing together it's a lot of early adopters, but increasingly it's about more and more customers that I would call more the early majority as you see hyper-converge start to surge, multi-cloud start to surge in terms of how do you fill that vacuum that's out there? That's what this conference is going to be all about. We'll have new announcements, we'll have innovations that we'll be demoing, and most importantly we're really about openness and this is about strategic partnerships. To the earlier point, show me a one stop shop that solve all this complexity and I'll show you unfulfilled promise. And so I think the work we're doing with Dell will be at the forefront talking about, hey, how are we working together to solve some pretty snarly issues here that we have to solve for our customers. >> Well, you're going to go home both of you and say it's been tough, two weeks on the road. You get no sympathy though, Las Vegas and New Orleans back to back. >> Not bad. >> It's a good way to go Dan and Ben thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you next week >> Thank you very much >> down in New Orleans theCube continues here, we are live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018.