Nutanix Inc. has made a string of announcements over the last few months, including the new $750-million investment from Bain Capital Private Equity, a partnership with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services as part of its hybrid multicloud vision with Nutanix Clusters, and a partnership with Google on desktop as a service. So how is Nutanix delivering on its overarching messaging and execution strategies to accommodate these cloud partnerships and running applications on a single platform?

Tarkan Maner (pictured, left), chief commercial officer of Nutanix Inc., and Rajiv Mirani (pictured, right), chief technology officer of Nutanix, spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Digital Experience. They discussed Nutanix’s recent partnerships, as well as a variety of topics concerning Nutanix’s offerings around applications and HCI. (* Disclosure below.)

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

We have a whole lot of stuff to go into [partnerships with cloud providers] … give us some of the highlights from your standpoint.

Maner: Obviously, we’re not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers as well. Tying that … big focus with our Citrix partnership … becomes a big one. And, obviously, you’re tying the Lenovo and [Hewlett Packard] partnerships to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It’s creating tons of opportunity.

Mirani: The theme around all these announcements is the same, really. It’s this ability to run any application, whether it’s the most demanding traditional applications … but also the more modern cloud native application. Any kind of application, we want the best platform, we want a platform that’s simple, seamless and secure.

How does that — building new apps, modernizing my apps — tie into the Nutanix discussion?

Mirani: [With introducing Karbon last year], we wanted to take the next step. Because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you’re building in the cloud. So we took the stand and said, ‘Look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP.’

And that’s really the genesis of Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service. We’ve taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere — public cloud, private cloud, anywhere.

You’ve got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate?

Maner: You play this game with rewording it a little bit. As you remember, we used to call [it] hyperconverged infrastructure, now we call it the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces [are] coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor. And from a software only perspective, we’re not owned by a hardware company, which is making a huge difference. [It] gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization and freedom of choice. Cloud, to us, is basically not a destination. It’s an operating model.

How do you make sure that Nutanix can live in these environments? How do you balance that? 

Mirani: We take the Nutanix stack — the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom — make it available so … the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full-speed access to cloud services. There’s things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. So, for us, it’s very, very important that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey. If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales.

So it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That’s been extremely important for us. And it’s really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. One thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE