Dell EMC, Dell Technologies Inc.’s infrastructure group, has taken a sharp turn since Chad Sakac (pictured, right), president of the Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, originally described Nutanix Inc. as a “niche corner case for VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] only.”

Stu Miniman (@stu), joined by Dave Vellante (@dvellante), his co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, read the quote back to Sakac at Nutanix .NEXT in Washington, D.C. (* Disclosure below.)

Now a partner and reseller of Nutanix products, Dell EMC appears to have had a change of heart. “HCI [hyperconverged infrastructure] in general has moved absolutely out of any corner case segment whatsoever,” Sakac, joined by Nutanix President Sudheesh Nair (pictured, left), said. Every type of workload under the sun can run on HCI, Sakac stated.

In his role at Dell EMC (and simply EMC prior to the merger), Sakac charted the rise of HCI over other on-prem bases for hybrid cloud. First, the company’s enterprise hybrid cloud approach was ultra-liberal in terms of where customers could deploy. This resulted in too many choices and too much complexity for customers to manage, he explained. So Dell EMC pivoted to simpler, converged infrastructure for hybrid cloud. That was still too complex. Finally, the migration to HCI for hybrid began in earnest.

“HCI is fundamentally orders of magnitude easier to deploy, to scale, to version, etc.,” Sakac said.

Co-opetition in action

Both companies produce unique HCI appliances and balance cooperation and competition to serve customers, according to Nair. “We know that they have a tremendous amount of portfolio and some of them will overlap,” he said, adding that Dell EMC resales accounted for around nine percent of Nutanix’s revenue last quarter.

“The market is not in a zero-sum game,” Sakac noted.

The tight packaging of Nutanix’s appliances with software like the Calm.io control pane will help it compete in hybrid cloud, according to Nair. “The reason Amazon can deliver millisecond billing on Lambda stack is not because they are taking 10 different products; they have technology that is built to deliver that level of granularity,” he said.

Sakac agreed that Calm.io is a fine acquisition, but it is just that — an addition to a pre-existing product. Hybrid cloud is not either/or; from an HCI base, customers can pick and choose what they add on top, he explained. These add-ons might include the Pivotal Cloud Foundry development platform — a cloud-native platform for deploying and operating modern applications — or Kubernetes container orchestration management, he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE