In a hybrid world, the x86 server business still continues to grow, and as Nutanix, Inc. moves forward with its hypervisor infrastructure, Lenovo Group Ltd. has become an integral part of the company’s go-to-market strategy. Lenovo and Nutanix will co-build and co-market products like the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), which will be shipped to Lenovo customers by default. This type of partnership is becoming the new normal throughout the industry.

In an interview on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, Scott Hawkins, executive director of Marketing at the Lenovo Data Center Group at Lenovo, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu) at the Nutanix .NEXT Conference at the Wynn in Las Vegas about the partnership and why it is a good fit.

Lenovo market momentum

Hawkins said that Lenovo is really happy with the Nutanix partnership. Analyzing the past six months since the partnership, he expressed that the growth Lenovo has had with its own organic development and through partnerships has given the company momentum, especially in the area of hyper-converged with Nutanix.

“A really great partnership, a real tribute to entrepreneurship of both of these companies who want to work together, very quickly,” said Hawkins.

Searching for a partner

Looking back to Lenovo’s product strategies, especially with hyper-converged, the company strategy was to be nimble and to find the best partner to go to market with, and that was Nutanix.

“We are open and flexible primarily because we don’t have 20 to 30 years of legacy histories of products that we have to protect. We’ve got a complete portfolio, server, storage, networking services and solutions, but in this space, there was really nothing that we had to protect,” Hawkins stated.

The company also wanted to go to market quickly, and the partnership announcement was made in November with product starting to ship in late January. Hawkins asserted that not many companies can do work together like that, but he pointed out that two companies are tightly integrated as far as development and go-to-market sales, making their goals attainable.

A strong value proposition

Noting that Nutanix has a stringent OEM policy, Miniman asked Hawkins about how the policy works for Lenovo and other possible competitors.

“Nutanix has a sound strategy of orchestrating that traffic of opportunity because … customers are going to look for solutions from multiple suppliers. So they’re going to satisfy that by partnering with a number of different suppliers. … For us, we support it. We feel we have a unique value proposition,” he explained.

According to in-house research, Hawkins believes that 60 to 80 percent of customers are going to acquire hyper-converged appliances within the next three years. Maintaining that there is an opportunity for all, he interprets the company’s value proposition as bringing the best hardware and a deeply integrated appliance, along with a long future roadmap with workload optimized models as tailoring a Lenovo/Nutanix solution.

Watch the full interview below to hear more about the partnership and where it is leading both companies in the future. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE