Maintaining customer relationships during tech transitions can be very difficult if a business doesn’t have the support of their partners. They are likely to require assistance with maintenance, implementation, and even everyday technology solutions.

Company partners can help transitions occur smoothly so they can quickly go back to servicing customers’ needs, according to Phil Davis (pictured, right), chief sales officer and president of hybrid information technology at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Co., and Chris Kaddaras (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Americas and EMEA at Nutanix Inc.

Davis and Kaddaras spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT event in Anaheim, California. They discussed how the HPE and Nutanix partnership will make things easier for customers, the latest system offerings from both companies, and the kinds of customers the companies seek to serve (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: I know the HP Channel well, and there, they love … wrapping services around an offering. Talk about how this impacts the services side.

Davis: You look at a lot of our partners, and the hardware-only business is getting pressure. So, a lot of our partners are … trying to move more and more into services. And you’re right; there’s a whole suite of services the partners can wrap around us … because all these workloads are run on some sort of legacy environment.

So, when they do bring in a hyperconverged [solution], they need to move the workloads; so partners can help with that. Supporting maintenance, implementation, you know, all the way through to kind of day-to-day break-fix.

Knight: This partnership between Nutanix and HPE is two weeks old. Explain to our viewers about it and how it came about. 

Davis: If you think about what’s going on in the public cloud, customers want to be able to scale up or scale down and pay as they go, so HPE has been leading with an offering we call GreenLake. It’s a billion-dollar business growing over 50% a year; so that kind of shows you the interest in it. We also offer the Nutanix solution on our infrastructure and then wrap that with a consumption model service that allows customers that flexibility.

Furrier: So, you’re selling Nutanix with your GreenLake?

Davis: Embedded in the GreenLake offering. That’s correct.

Furrier: And Nutanix is selling Compute with their Salesforce?

Kaddaras: Yes, with our DX solution with HPE Compute.

Furrier: Nutanix has a channel-generated opportunity. Their challenge is when they do a POC, they usually win the business. That’s a direct sales model. That’s favored Nutanix for their success. This is going to bring a lot of mojo to the channel, bringing HPE and Nutanix together for this unique solution. I’m sure the reaction’s been positive. Are they seeing up-step in more POCs and more action with customers?

Kaddaras: We’re seeing a lot. We have a list that’s now starting to get towards 100 customers that we think we can align together. There’re also multiple go-to markets. We have GreenLake opportunities. We have DX opportunities, which is Nutanix on HP.

We also have a lot of opportunities around Nutanix software only on HP Compute that a lot of customers want to consume as well, but in a different way. So, we’re seeing that really start to scale. We haven’t done the first POC of DX because it hasn’t released to the market yet. We are doing POCs on software only on HPE servers, but the DX solution we’ll be releasing in the next few months.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT 2019 event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE