>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at the Nutanix .Next Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, but a partnership we've been talking about since the early days of Nutanix. Bernie Hannon, Strategic Alliance Director with Citrix, and Raghu Nandan, Senior Director of Product Management, Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining me. Happy to be here. Great to be here. AlL right, so Bernie, let's start with you, how long have you been with Citrix, a little bit of background and when will you start working for Nutanix? (Bernie laughs) Ten years at Citrix, and we'll see about Nutanix. But no, I'm Strategic Alliances Director. I manage our alliance partnership with Nutanix, and I've been doing that now for about two-and-a-half years. AlL right, Raghu, little bit about your background, and you must have worked for Citrix before, right? I did, coincidentally, work at Citrix for a while, pretty close to ten years, actually, and I've been at Nutanix for almost three years now. I'm part of the product team, managing the full-stack journey that we've been on, building beyond software-defined storage with the Ember virtualization with AHB, the ops, artistration layers on top, and coincidentally, given the background with Citrix it was the first logical place for us to start to make Citrix a tailored-fit for the particular full stack offering,. That's what we've been working on too. Yeah, and let's talk about that Bernie. 'Cause most people for a couple of years, it was like oh, well Nutanix, they're that little VDI company, and do that, and that of course was a strong partnership between Citrix and Nutanix, but, it's much more that. So maybe, give us a little bit, kind of, the breath and depth of the partnership. Well, yeah, so, Nutanix was not shy about letting us know that they shared a common vision about what HCI could do, and what a partnership together could do to be able to strengthen or to further each others' strategies. And it was really all about trying to simplify the customer experience with EDI. And that's always been a challenge for our customers. And Nutanix, very quickly, was able to demonstrate that they could make deploying Citrix on the infrastructure so much easier for customers. And that's really what we've been about working on since we started this partnership. Yeah, and it's been the perfect-tailored workload like I said before, right. So we're on this journey of re-platforming the data center and collapsing as many silos as possible while bringing that public cloud-like consumption margin where people in the IT departments can go focus on applications and services and more business-oriented functions and kind of let IT be a functional thing without spending inordinate amounts of time. While we started our journey as a company with EDI, we've expanded certainly to a bunch of other workloads. But, when we brought this next new concept to the marketplace in September of 2015 by embrating the scavian derived HyperWiser as a built in part of the overall solution, Citrix was a natural place for us to start and that's kind of what we've been working on in that dimension. Yeah, Cloud has been a strategy, it's gone through a lot of changes in the industry but last year I talked to Christian Riley little bit about Citrix Cloud. Nutanix has had the Enterprise Cloud rolling out various pieces. Maybe you could both speak a little bit to kind of, those Cloud strategies. Sure, from a Citrix standpoint, we've been busy migrating our customers from the perpetual license model to a subscription model. And to leverage that through our Citrix Cloud, where we've moved the Citrix control plane up into the Cloud as a service. So, again, another step in making the whole process of deploying Citrix even easier. So, that's really been our strategy. And working with Nutanix we've made that process even easier through the automation tools that they've developed and now, shortly with the next release, Nutanix solutions are going to come Citrix Cloud ready. And that essentially means that customers can not only have the benefits of that subscription model, but they'll also be able to have the benefits of being able to manage Citrix as a service in Citrix Cloud and get the best of both worlds. And that for our customers is really a true hybrid cloud experience. And the Enterprise Cloud for us as Nutanix is really a fabric that kind of envelops the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge, right in pleasing to use the disperse Cloud. And in the context of Citrix like Bernie said while Citrix Cloud makes the deployment of the entire Citrix software start, a non-hassle experience for customers, there is still something to be said for the actual infrastructure where the user re-amps a provision. This is the classic use case for hybrid in a sense because it all comes all the desktops and service bottlenecks where you have users on campus logging onto desktops in the public Cloud, yet the applications they need to access are having to help them back into the Enterprise Data Center and this combination of the Citrix Cloud and on tram Nutanix infrastructure, that just in one click plugs to the Citrix Cloud, lets people experience the best of both worlds. This zero, kind of like a one minute deployment of Citrix software stock and a one click experience from Prism to connect the infrastructure to start provisioning the stops and you can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes. Yeah. How does management play between the two of your companies, the management layer? The management layer from a Citrix Cloud standpoint, or? So talked a little bit about Prism there, to talking about how Comm fits in. Citrix has a number of software pieces. Just trynna understand, kind of, the boundaries overlaps integrations. That's really where Comm has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent, right. So the whole idea is that from the start, with just a couple of clicks, you're able to make the connection to Citrix Cloud, register and then drop the Citrix Cloud connector onto a Nutanix infrastructure and from there Prism is really managing that management experience. It's really two dimensions right. So think of the Citrix management layer as everything that encapsulates the policies, the governance models, everything around the performance expectations of VDI. Who gets what kind of a desktop, what kind of a profile, persistent, non persistent, all those kinds of things. Seamlessly plugs into Prism, which manages the rest of the infrastructure, physical, virtual, with ops and orchestration. So, I don't have to worry about this user needs a graphics enabled desktop, where would I go provision this? The system just automatically detects that. Or I have this thousand user environment and I don't quite know whether I've provisioned the right amount of compute and memory to the right kinds of users. Prism just tells you through behavioral learning, these users VM seem under provision, these users VM seem over provision. So you're getting the best ROI, in terms of your infrastructure span. So think of Prism as everything that manages the physical data central infrastructure including virtualizing and ops. And the Citrix management stack just plugs into that to layer on the governance policies on top. And then things that Citrix does in the background, in terms of managing the scale out. And making sure that everything is kept evergreen. And that the tools are always being refreshed. That happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. Great, Nutanix has been announced at their last show the Google Cloud partnership. My understanding, there's potential intersections between GCP, Citrix and Nutanix, talk to us a little bit about what we would see going forward, how those potentially play together. So Citrix has a new partnership with Google, Google Cloud platform, and our Citrix workspace and environment, the entire digital desktop now is available to deploy onto Citrix. I'm sorry, onto Google Cloud platform. And we believe that with a vergening partnership that's taking place with Nutanix and Google Cloud platform that there's an opportunity in the future to develop some new stories, better together, so it's something that we're just beginning to explore now, but we think there's a lot of possibilities there. I mean, I'll give you a classic example, right, last week I was speaking with a customer that's running Citrix on Nutanix and they're running it for a certain number of users, let's say a few thousand users, and every year at holiday season, they have these three or 400 contracting employees that come online, that they need extra capacity for these temporary desktops. And this combination of Citrix with Google Cloud platform and the Jorte Cloud services provides the perfect solution in which you could create on demand capacity for kind of, burst expectation of resources and once the contract was (mumbles), the environment shrinks back. So this is a start of a journey and we'll figure some things out, but there are some pretty strong synergies for the three to come together to solve for those kinds of interesting use cases. Great example and we think there's a lot more like those to come. Okay, want to give you both the last word. Either customers, any customer story you can tell, or anything else we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Well, from a Citrix standpoint, I have to say that they are really appreciative of the partnership that we have with Nutanix. I think they feel good knowing that it's an alliance partnership that we have with Nutanix. So that they can make their investments with confidence. They've had a relationship with Citrix for a long time. And there's trust that goes with that. And in the Citrix name. And the fact that we have a strong alliance partnership, makes them feel good investing in Nutanix and then seeing how that better together story is really unfolding for them. And it's a great partnership for several reasons, but I think the single most important reason is the amount of customer delight it offers. When people bring Citrix and Nutanix together. And I've lost count of the number of customers that are appreciative of how much better their environments are. And we are super excited about how much further we can take that journey with this combination of Citrix Cloud with this one take experience within Prism. Yeah it's not just a promise if it's actually being delivered in this thing, it's actually happening. Bernie and Raghu, thank you so much for giving us the update on the partnership there. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.