Kelly Ciccone, head of sales for Silicon Valley Enterprise, Google Cloud, and Michal Lesiczka, VP for cloud and databases partner ecosystem at Nutanix, join theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT 2025 to discuss a strategic alliance reshaping the multicloud landscape. The conversation centers on a new bare-metal offering from Google Cloud, integrated with Nutanix Cloud Clusters.
Ciccone and Lesiczka outline how the partnership delivers greater customer flexibility, especially for enterprises looking to diversify beyond traditional virtualization models. They highlight how joint innovations support seamless workload management across environments.
The discussion also explores the accelerating role of AI in cloud migration strategies. As platforms evolve, the companies aim to make hybrid and multicloud adoption more accessible and adaptive.
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Kelly Ciccone, Google Cloud & Michal Lesiczka, Nutanix
Kelly Ciccone, head of sales for Silicon Valley Enterprise, Google Cloud, and Michal Lesiczka, VP for cloud and databases partner ecosystem at Nutanix, join theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT 2025 to discuss a strategic alliance reshaping the multicloud landscape. The conversation centers on a new bare-metal offering from Google Cloud, integrated with Nutanix Cloud Clusters.
Ciccone and Lesiczka outline how the partnership delivers greater customer flexibility, especially for enterprises looking to diversify beyond traditional virtualization models. They highlight how joint innovations support seamless workload management across environments.
The discussion also explores the accelerating role of AI in cloud migration strategies. As platforms evolve, the companies aim to make hybrid and multicloud adoption more accessible and adaptive.
Kelly Ciccone, Google Cloud & Michal Lesiczka, Nutanix
Kelly Ciccone
Sales Leader, Silicon Valley EnterpriseGoogle Cloud
Michal Lesiczka
VP, Cloud & Databases Partner EcosystemNutanix
Kelly Ciccone, head of sales for Silicon Valley Enterprise, Google Cloud, and Michal Lesiczka, VP for cloud and databases partner ecosystem at Nutanix, join theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT 2025 to discuss a strategic alliance reshaping the multicloud landscape. The conversation centers on a new bare-metal offering from Google Cloud, integrated with Nutanix Cloud Clusters.
Ciccone and Lesiczka outline how the partnership delivers greater customer flexibility, especially for enterprises looking to diversify beyond traditional vi...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is the new partnership and announcement that Google made regarding their bare-metal service?add
What are the steps to take in order to participate in the public preview of this new feature mentioned by Rajiv in the keynote presentation?add
What are some of the goals in Google Cloud that are being worked towards?add
Kelly Ciccone, Google Cloud & Michal Lesiczka, Nutanix
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>> Welcome back everyone to the Live Cube coverage here in Washington DC for Google Next 2025. I'm John Furrier, your host. Bob Laliberte, analyst at the Cube. Welcome back everyone.
Bob Laliberte
>> Google.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Good to be here.
Bob Laliberte
>> Nutanix. Nutanix. Nutanix.
Kelly Ciccone
>> We were just talking about it.
Bob Laliberte
>> .>> Hold on. Hold on. Nutanix Next. Should we cut? No, we're live. We're live. I love live Google Next and Nutanix launched. Yeah, the next Nutanix.
Kelly Ciccone
>> The next is this.>> Welcome back to Next. So seriously, Nutanix Next 2025. Google Next 2025 just happened a couple weeks ago. You guys had a preview. Michal from Nutanix, thanks for coming on.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah, thank you.>> Kelly from Google.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Great to be here.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Glad to be here as well.>> All right, so you just saw that failed intro. Let's get into, I got thick skin. I've done so many interviews, I handle it. The Nutanix Cloud from solution, obviously multi-cloud is a big part of the strategy. You guys had a huge successful Google Next. What is the preview? Talk about the relationship between Google and Nutanix.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah, so the relationship is actually quite new. We just embarked on a partnership jointly together. Google announced recently, but I think it was about last year, about preview for their bare-metal service. So Kelly, maybe you can touch upon a little bit more what that is. And then of course we were very excited about that announcement, given that Nutanix is all about offering customers choice and running their workloads wherever they want them to run. And so hearing that Google's providing a bare-metal service and we're able to take advantage of that, extend our cloud cluster solution to that, and provide customers with more choice in which they want to work with. Kelly, maybe I'll let you kind of touch upon a little bit more what the launch is exactly, and I can also talk about what we're doing there.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Yeah, I would say it's interesting. During the keynote, one thing that really stood out to me was choice and optionality. And so I think going into this partnership that we've been working on kind of behind the scenes for the last year or so, customers are looking for alternatives to VMware, and they're looking for alternatives to take that journey to the cloud. And I think this bare-metal solution and NC2 on GCP will be part of that journey. A lot of customers aren't ready to move hundreds, if not thousands, of apps right away, so taking this partnership to the next level. We're the third hyperscaler, third but not least. So we're excited to take those learnings, and we are here the next several days with our PM team and our go-to-market team to talk to joint customers. We did a lot of that at Google Next. And so just trying to glean more of the use cases and set the stage and tone for what workloads we can support in the long term, not just on Z3.>> And one of the things that I've seen here at Nutanix Next 2025 is the platform conversation, and key to that is run anywhere, build once, run anywhere. So multi-cloud, super-cloud, what would we call super-cloud. But multi-cloud, that's a key criteria, and not just from a VMware perspective to the cloud, other workloads.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Yes.>> That was a big theme that Google Next 2025 where you're starting to see that distributed computing architecture. That's a big part of Rajiv's talk.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Correct.>> The containers, the cloud native. How does that fit in? What were some of the preview highlights? Where are you in the status of it? How do people get involved? What are some of the mechanics of the relationship? Can you share that?
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do so. When we talk to customers, it's a pretty common theme that we hear, which is I have, obviously, an existing infrastructure. Very few times we run into a customer say, "I have nothing." Then it's like, well then you have a lot of freedom of choice.>> You have needs.
Michal Lesiczka
>> And it usually tends to be VM-based workloads on premises. And then the question is, like, okay, what's that single platform that allows me to modernize and then accelerate, rapidly accelerate, right? But the first kind of starting point is where we hear is that migration piece? So let's say I want to take advantage of Google's latest innovations with AI in the cloud. Well, I can't do that if I can't get to the cloud. Or if I spend five years trying to migrate to the cloud, that's a long time before I can innovate, and that's just not acceptable for our customers. So that's why we always talk about modernization. How do we help customers get to, let's say in this case, Google Cloud, leverage the latest and greatest services to evolve their applications. But it starts with migration. And this is kind of where Nutanix cloud clusters and our relationship starts with. So a lot of the early conversations with customers are how do we help them migrate to the cloud?>> Is there a requirement, I know it's private previews. This a sign-up process, so is it open to everyone or you guys have a filtered criteria? What are some of the requirements on this preview?
Michal Lesiczka
>> So our criteria is actually pretty...>> Broad?
Michal Lesiczka
>> Pretty broad. So reach out to your Google rep or your Nutanix rep, show your interest, and then we'll evaluate based on the scenarios and workloads that you're trying to enable. We'll see that we can support those. But we're pretty quickly moving to public preview. So Rajiv in our keynote earlier mentioned that this is coming late 2025, so we're planning in the next few months open it up to public preview where anyone can go start trying out the service here.
Kelly Ciccone
>> I'd say some of the lower-hanging fruit are, we're in regions where a lot of hyperscalers are not, like KSA. So I would say there's kind of gravitational pull to folks who are looking to get into those regions. But also we're not going to get away without talking about AI. And the advent of AI, it's super interesting. I manage a team of ISVs. There's some model LLM builders in that classification of customers. And it's super interesting because customers have data on-prem. They're using Google for training and they might be using AWS for inferencing. And I think this is an opportunity for Nutanix to kind of be that management layer. They have the prowess with the management aspect of it, the simplicity, and then we've got the robust infrastructure and, of course, the AI innovation to kind of enable and accelerate those AI workloads.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Well, and the compute power.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Of course.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Because the biggest problem with AI is on-premises, it's really hard to get sufficient compute power and, of course, storage capacity, electricity, and so forth. So that's an ideal use case for the public cloud, right?
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. And one of your other announcements at Google Next was the fact that you developed the Cloud WAN networking environment, which is going to enable organizations that are globally enabling them to get and leverage that backbone, so a high-performance network to connect up all of their device. So if you're on that cloud, if you're at a remote location, being able to leverage that to move your traffic around and being able to keep everything-
Michal Lesiczka
>> And you actually bring up a really good point, and it comes to really how we are developing the solution Nutanix, cloud clusters with Google and how we deploy it, which is this is a solution that is actually fully deployed and managed within the customer tenant. So that means whatever the private networking that you have set up across your on-premises edge in a public cloud can easily apply to this solution. When you think about, hey, how do I take the solution now and extend to additional cloud-native services within Google? And how do I now make sure I govern that and operate that in a single consistent manner? It's really rapidly, you can apply everything that you have and everything you're leveraging from Google or you have already in place. So that's actually a very unique thing that actually applies to Nutanix cloud cluster that we haven't at least seen anywhere else from other vendors.>> What's the big storyline on this deal for people just learning about the relationship? Obviously the platform, we heard the news today from Rajiv. What's this joint story? What's the relationship like? What's next? What are you working on, besides getting the public preview out as fast as possible?
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah, so I think, again, I think that the big story is now we're enabling you optionality with Google Cloud. We know we've seen, actually, a lot of demand. We actually have already our first few private preview customers deploying and trying out the solution. We see the demand in the list of people signing up for preview just growing rapidly. So we know the demand is there. We know that customers obviously wanted this solution. There's a set of customers are taking a big bet with Google Cloud. So there was this huge demand, pent up demand for making sure that we're offering that. So I think the biggest news is that, hey, we've enabled your ability to migrate, modernize with Google Cloud, and get going. And I think the next kind of step is look forward to seeing more unique offerings new from us. So things like getting smart around your TCO as you think about the public cloud. So things like, for example, naturally backup restore, right? That's a great cloud story because you can go and put your backups up in Google Cloud storage. And then let's say a disaster happens, you quickly hydrate that cluster. Well, that might end up happening in Google Cloud. So look for more unique cases that we're going to "jointly develop" that just help improve your TCO and really allow it to get very intelligent with your workload placement. Right?
Bob Laliberte
>> And is a lot of this being driven by organizations looking to modernize, get off of VMs, move to Kubernetes?
Michal Lesiczka
>> Correct. And then that creates a new challenge, right, because now you have, okay, well, I have VMs. I have Kubernetes. I don't want to go train my people on three different things to manage one environment. So again, as you guys heard with Rajiv in the keynote, it's all about that single, consistent platform to build, operate, and also govern. Making sure I'm not exposing my surface area to attack.
Kelly Ciccone
>> And migrate.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Correct, yeah.
Kelly Ciccone
>> I thought the Nutanix move was a really compelling piece of that, and accelerating those moves as well.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah, I think move's going to be consistent a hit for customers with that step zero. I suspect that a lot of folks will also leverage that too with Google Cloud and Nutanix.>> I mean, Google Cloud has taken advantage of all the AI. In fact, they have the same DNA that Nutanix has. They think about AI for their products inside and make it better, how they use it in the market, and how customers use it. Kind of the three kind of priorities that was laid out earlier in the Cube. The thing about the AI is it abstracts away all that integration layers. So migration used to be a pain in the butt, if you go back a few years, grinding out, very brittle.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Yeah.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Correct.>> I'm not saying you pave it over with AI, but AI kind of puts the, it's like the mortar between the bricks and helps people. You guys have had great success with that. This is a perfect storm for what used to be hard.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Yeah.
Michal Lesiczka
>> It's still hard, right? But I agree, definitely there's been a lot more assistance.>> Legacy systems are hanging around because they can connect to the new clusters.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Correct, correct, correct.
Michal Lesiczka
>> And with, as we all know, with migrations to that first 95% feels simple and that last 5% gets very, very difficult. And that's where it ends up taking the bulk of your time, that last 5%. So getting intelligent and understanding dependencies and leveraging different tools to help with that and being just smart, which work we need, which sequence and so forth. Right.>> That's awesome. Kelly, what are some of your goals in Google Cloud? What are you working on? You get your whole team there. What's your mission?
Kelly Ciccone
>> Yeah, I mean it's interesting. I think there's the admittance of there's no winner take all in the cloud space. And I think when we talk to enterprise customers, putting them at ease, we're not here to say rip and replace. That's a feudal argument. So I think what we're focused on is kind of meeting customers where they are. And I think Nutanix, on the journey modernization, is part of that story along with other partnerships. Of course, AI I think is key. I think it's a very fluid landscape and it's trying to stay on top of it. In the ISB business that I run, it's interesting, I think last year it was kind of like we got to build our own AI models and now people are really walking away from that and saying, "No, I don't have to do that. We're going to take advantage of Gemini and OpenAI and the best of breed models," and kind of build their ecosystem around that. So I think that shift and that paradigm shift has been super eye-opening. And so supporting people where they are, I think, is critical to success.>> Hybrid.
Bob Laliberte
>> Makes sense.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Hybrid. Totally.>> And the hybrid on-premise in the cloud.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Especially in enterprise, right?
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, obviously seeing a lot of that. I'm wondering when you think about the cloud clusters, if you're seeing any impact from, obviously the elephant in the room, some of the tariffs, things like that, that are going on. Any shift to the cloud that organizations are doing from that perspective?
Michal Lesiczka
>> No, I think that's a great observation. So I think that when I think about that in general, maybe the headwinds and terrorists and some of the things that might be the most recent ones, if you will. But I don't think it's any easier for organizations to think about modernization, migration and the headwinds they're facing today than five years before, even before then. So when I think about things like AI is being put a lot of pressure. So tell me which CIO doesn't get a pressure saying, "Hey, I need you yesterday leveraging AI and I need a 30% improvement in the workforce," or whatever that number may be, right?>> Good luck with that.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Or, "Hey, I need to cut cost but I still need you to deliver what we agreed to deliver." So I think in general, more so than ever, organizations are seeing a ton of pressure to do more with less. Now you have things like tariffs coming in, and for some special manufacturing and goods companies, that obviously introduces new complexities. So I think this is where customers are getting a ton of pressure saying, "Hey, how do I quickly modernize and be able to leverage AI, be able to leverage these latest and greatest services?" And I do think a lot of those will come from hyperscalers like Google Cloud. So how do I get there? And so this is where I think the demand is just growing more and more for Nutanix cloud customers to be able to help me ease along that journey. Right?>> Michal Kelly, thank you for coming on. The Cube here at Nutanix Next 2025.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Thanks for having us.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Thank you for having us.>> I almost said '24. Google Next was a couple weeks ago. Thanks for coming on. The ecosystem's growing. A lot of new action, a lot of more integrated partnerships, tightly coupled. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.
Michal Lesiczka
>> Thank you for having us.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Thanks for having us.
Bob Laliberte
>> Thank you.
Kelly Ciccone
>> Cheers.>> I'm John Furrier. Yes, we are here at Nutanix Next with Bob Laliberte. Thanks for watching.
Bob Laliberte
Michal Lesiczka