>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin joined by John Troyer, and we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, distinguished alumni Bask Iyer, the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware. Bask it's great to have you here. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> So we were joking before we went on that we're right next to the therapy dog area, so always nice to have a technology conversation populated with dogs barking. >> No I like the dogs better if you want to talk about dogs or guitar, I would rather prefer that over >> Oh I could talk about that all day. So talk to us about, you are the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware, first Dell Technologies World, 14,000 attendees >> Right. >> In person. >> Yep. >> 6,500 technology and solutions partners here, another expected 30,000+ people engaging with the livestream, the on-demand videos. Big, big focus this week. Love to get your perspective on the role of the CIO, the role that you have now, you know you a few years ago, it was truly all about technology, now it's really about your involvement in the corporate strategy. Talk to us about the vision that you're setting, with Michael Dell, with your peers in IT and other stakeholders at Dell Technologies. >> Okay. No it's a great event I love this. A lot of these are colleagues, other CIOs. So they know, they want to know really do you use it inside Dell. A lot more credibility when you talk real stories about how you use it in Dell. The first thing is when I started this career there was no such title as CIO. That itself is pretty new. We were just the geeks who kind of ran everything. And then you became head of IT. So it was very strongly technical, and then they said you needed leadership and business skills, the pendulum swung one way to all business and leadership skills and no technology, and then came back to we should need both of that. And then you have business and general management, so every year the job changes. What I'm finding though, which is good and bad, is nothing goes away. You still need to know the technology, you still need to know the business skills, soft skills, still need to be a general manager. What is now is a lot more on the strategy. So the importance of strategy though is you never talk strategy if your operations is not good. Right nobody cares. But if your operations is somewhat good, you better not talk about operations. So I tell people don't keep on saying your trains are running on time. It has to run on time, if it doesn't, if it runs recently on time, talk about strategy. So now it's an important job to do that, and your question about in a technology company, I am the customer. I'm probably one of the very few people who actually signed a purchase order within Dell Tech to buy Dell or EMC or VMware. So they're interested in the customer's perspective. So you're the internal voice of the customer. We are also using all the tech that we make, and we need to give feedback to the developers and the R&D folks. So we call it drink our own champagne, but not our own Kool-Aid, you know what I mean. >> I like that. >> So sometimes you get carried away by the marketing things that we do. The challenge though is you working with Michael Dell, you're working with Pat Gelsinger and everybody else, and thousands of engineering fellows and so on, who know IT, who've invented a lot of things in IT. So you cannot really keep up with them. You know you need to know enough to hold your own, but if you try to compete with them, that is not a good thing. So luckily for me I was a good B student, I'm comfortable with A students around me. So you have you to be comfortable that you're not the smartest one in the room, but you're still contributing. That's the change you have. It is surreal to go in front of a Pat or Michael or other people and talk about digital transformation. And they're making eye contact they want to know how, what do you mean by digital transformation? How do you do it internally? What's your plan? So every once in a while you pinch yourself and say I can't believe this is happening. But it does happen. >> So Bask, I mean digital transformation is a theme of the show, right? >> Yeah. >> Make it real. As you talk with other CIOS, do they feel like they have a seat at that table? Are they the driver, are they the implementer? You start to hear more about a Chief Digital Officer, is that, does the CIO became the CDO, are they different? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah I'm very strong on the fact there's a again if the CIO focus only on operations and cost, then people say your trains are running on time lets get somebody clever to do the innovation and digital. You don't want to leave that, that is the cream of the crop. So I think if you're a good CIO, you want to be the Chief Digital Officer for the company. You don't want to have two CFOs, one for Wall Street and one for doing the real work. You don't want to have two salesperson, one for putting the numbers and one actually selling. So you need to have one technology person. Some companies may be so complex that you may consider that. I started as a chief Digital Officer in Hunnewell, ended up as the CIO for Hunnewell for example, but you need to have people who are very collaborative, those two have to work very closely together. It's very difficult to find one person who's collaborative and nonpolitical to be a leader of an IT organization. To find two and working as a team is complicated. So that's what I want. So I'm not a big supporter of that although I could see why it would happen, if you will. Okay. >> Lisa: So drinking your own champagne I like that by the way, you are in this role, it's interesting that you say you still kind of feel like you're pinching yourself when you're talking to a Michael Dell or a Pat Gelsinger, but you're up there having to implement digital transformation within Dell Technologies and all the companies underneath. >> Sure. >> That's a pretty big seat at the table. How are you sort of embodying the theme of this event and making digital transformation real for Dell Technologies? >> So I go very practical and I give, yesterday I talked to my fellow CIOs on the mistakes I've made. Right I came as the VMware CIO, we've already done this journey in a couple of years ahead of time. So wouldn't it be a cut and paste? Given the hybrid cloud, given the best end user environment possible and you're done. You already have that start. But I made the same mistake every CIO makes, we preach this but we don't follow it. It's not just the technology, it's people, process, culture, and technology, and I jumped on the technology, and I'm kicking myself to say, first three months didn't make a whole lot of progress. I was just yelling like a madman to say why is it not getting done. And then you have to go back into I have to hire the right people. So lets talk a few things. I made changes to the leadership team. Certain people were not comfortable in the pace of change. We did it respectfully but we had to have people who can actually lead the change. That was first. Then we called something about putting T back in IT. Which a long time in IT what we have done is we've outsourced, off shored, treated IT as a commodity and then we have program managers and leaders. Every magazine asked us to do that. Well, guess what we've been wrong. I think I've been wrong, doing that. You do need technologies right now. You cannot do digital transformation without understanding the technology. So we have to staff internally, we have to get good folks. Still manage the cost right, that doesn't go away, but you have to do the right thing. So IT, first get the right people, the process for it, what it dawned on me is we are talking about Agile and DevOps and continuous development. Those are all IT, geeky terMs. Those are not business terms. Those are not business terms even in Dell technology. Because there are manufacturing folks and HR folks and finance folks and so on. So I looked at fast experience of somebody like Hunnewell or GE. Remember they adopted Lean Six Sigma some kind of process to transform their company. And even me who's an IT geek had to go through a green-belt certification or a black-belt certification. And I revolted I said why would I do that, I'm an engineer why would I go through this stupid course, but it was required otherwise you don't get promoted. So now you need a prescriptive process to change the culture. So digital transformation needed that. Luckily for us we took the pivotal way, which we have within our company. We made it the Dell Digital way, since you still have to write it in your own language if you will. That is the process we use, we train our folks and our customers, our clients as I call them, customer is the person who buys the products from us, client is all the colleagues. So finance folks have to know what Dell Digital way is. You cannot do requirements the old way, and throw it over the wall and expect me to develop. You have to get into the room, With me and draw it on the wall and be able to design it together. So that's been a good change. And the culture changes with us because initially people are thinking, this guy's coming from Silicon Valley, he's not going to stay here, he's going to do all these things, he's going to get either fired or leave. So people try to run out the clock a little bit. So it takes a little bit of time to work on the culture and say innovation is not only demanded from you, but you have to keep the trains running on time. You have to chew gum and walk at the same time. So that's the process we go through. >> I love what you just described Bask because both in terms of culture and in technology, that actually makes for an interesting set of IT careers, right. That turns IT into a very interesting career again. >> Right. >> Many of my colleagues are IT pros, do you have any advice for somebody who is maybe in the start, the middle of their career, maybe specializing in something but they have I think this dream at the end of the tunnel, maybe the CIO is where they want to be. What do you see, how do I prep to be a CIO now, to be a CIO in say ten years? >> I'd tell him are you crazy? (laughs) Do you know what you're getting into? But here's what there's some truth to it. Getting a job is really easy I think. Doing the job is very difficult. So I tell 'em, get prepared for the job. Also, you should have some passion for technology. If you're a sportswriter, I mean I'm into sports, so you can give me all the magazines you want, I can see all the videos, I can watch 'em all day long. I can retire just watching sports all day long, or playing occasionally. You have to have the passion in technology because things keep coming at you. So we think Blockchain is cool by the time it get off the seed it's going to be something else. You have to be interested and passionate to keep up with that, right. So first thing is can you keep up with the change. Are you actually interested in it? Michael Dell sends you a text in the middle of the night, I don't think he expects me to react but I do. Because he's reading something and he's hearing something from the customers. You need to be interested in learning. So I said you have to be a lifelong learner, passionate on technology, and also learn the ropes because I always felt when I was younger I wasn't given the opportunities at the right time. I felt like am I going to die before I become a vice president or a CIO or whatever? It felt to me that it took a little longer than I wanted it to but thank god because once you got the job you were prepared for it. So that's one of the things I tell people is get prepared. Get into learning. Also the job changes all the time so I can't really write a book on it. You have to almost be like a chameleon in a sense. You got to learn so the last few years was technology, then it was business, then it was soft skills, transformation, ERP implementation, now it's business strategy, it's not going to stop. Technology is going to keep coming as a wave. So be ready for adapting and adopting to the changes if you will, right. >> I'm glad that you brought up people because it's not just systems and processes, none of this comes to fruition, companies don't transform IT, transform digitally, deliver more differentiated products without the people. We had some folks on earlier I think day one with Dell EMC Education Services, we've talked to the Channel folks about the things that they're enabling and one of the things that I think is really important that you brought up is all the things you said, I made all these mistakes. But those are opportunities not just for you to learn and grow, but also for you to share with the people that look at you and say I want to be Bask Iyer on stage. >> Yeah. >> You know in a few years because it's really all about being brave enough to say you know what I didn't know this, or I made a mistake, actually maybe it wasn't a mistake, maybe if I didn't go this path I wouldn't have learned and gotten more solidification under my feet to be able to be up there and get a text from a Michael Dell [Bask] That's right. >> In the middle of the night. >> That's right. >> So your advice to the next generation I think is key but I also really respect identification of hey all the things that maybe I did them wrong and encouraging more people as they want to grow their careers to not be afraid to go I don't know this. This this is an opportunity for me to learn. >> Yeah you cannot be the I wish I was the smartest room in Dell Technology, you know that is not possible. You're not even talking about the senior managers you have to talk to the fellows and engineers we have who I just nod and pretend like I know what they're talking about, it's just amazing. So you need a little bit of the humility I think to learn what you want to learn. But have the confidence right. You cannot have nothing and come and work here because I always tell people working in a tech company versus being a CIO of a regular company and I've done both, it's like getting to a batting cage and all of a sudden the balls are coming at 150 miles an hour. You better be prepared to face it. So you have to figure out can I face a ball at 40 miles or 60 miles or 150 miles. So you need to prepare yourself to get there. But having said that though, we are all learning. We are all growing, we all make mistakes. In fact I learn a lot from my millennial kids. They seem to know more about this than I do. I learn a lot and I do something called reverse mentoring in Silicon Valley, which is all the people from LinkedIn, Google, they want to learn from me because they think I'm the greatest CIO whatever, and I want to learn from them. I ended up at the end of the session learning a lot more from them and I feel actually guilty that the mentoring session has gone the other way but, that's what keeps it's interesting is the minute you feel like you know everything or you've done it, very risky in a technology profession, especially in a CIO profession. >> Lisa: So wrapping up the show here, talk to us about some of the things, and in the spirit of learning, what are some of the things that you've heard from customers about, whether it's the new product announcements or new partnerships or just the new areas that Dell Technologies is going in, what has the feedback been like? >> People love the fact that they saw Pat onstage and talk about VMware and Dell working together. People want to see the independence of VMware as well, and they want Dell and VMware working together. They want to see both. They want to make sure that there is the fierce independence that VMware is known for, and the fact that they're working together. That was good to hear because if you do one or the other people get freaked out. The fact that the best private cloud in the world is getting hooked up to the best public clouds in the world, that's a good message for people because they don't want to be locked into a cloud discussion or other kind of stuff. So you want to have the freedom to do that. A lot of people are now expressing interest in IOT and other kind of places and why the edge is important again. What tends to happen in my profession is we talk about IOT last year, this year we talk about AI and ML, guarantee next year's going to be something else. The technology sweet spot takes three, four, five years to hit. So if you just chasing the next wave because you want to be cool and fun you're missing out on opportunity to leverage this. So lot of buzz around the whole world is going to be wired, everything's going to have sensors, the amount of data that comes in and how to manage it and secure it. A lot of CIOs are saying we should get on top of that. Before it's done to us. Lot of buzz on that. I freaked out. I, like any other geek, went to the show to see the cool techs that everybody has. I went to the Dell booths to see the latest laptops because sometimes they don't show us the latest things >> (laughs) >> they keep it for the show. And then Michael Dell is in the booth. He didn't think it was funny but I thought Michael Dell in a Dell booth in Dell World, that's like you want to go buy a Mustang and you find Mr. Ford in the dealership. So I thought it was hilarious and I was shocked and he was just amused to say why do you think that is so funny. But it's nice to have a founder who's like an icon in the industry. Is he listening? Let me stop. (laughs) >> (laughs) He is a big fan of theCUBE. >> Thank you, then I'm not going to say anything nice about him. >> So, last question You talked about last year was IOT, now it's AI and ML, next year's going to be something else, are the people that are chasing those trends the ones that need the therapy dogs the most? (laughs) >> Yeah I think so because you know we have no time for anything these days, we are chasing the next shiny object. When AI and IOT come together, this is going to be fascinating for me. I worked on industry controls and so on, but if every wall could talk, and every object could talk to you what it would be telling you? And humans cannot comprehend it, because the wall is going to tell you so many things. So and so walked by, so and so sat here, whatever. You need artificial intelligence to filter it and say, you know Eric Clapton was here because that's the only thing maybe you want to know. I don't want to know about anything else. That requires AI to process and say this is what Bask would be interested in. And the rest of it doesn't really matter. So this combination I think is very powerful and I'm pretty excited about what if everything, what if dogs could talk, what if walls could talk, What if thermostat could talk >> Oh I'm waiting for that. >> So it's going to happen in our lifetime, pretty soon. >> Lisa: Well Bask thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights of how you're leading the charge as the CIO, right up there with Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger and all those big cheeses, but also how you're bringing the technology to the people and really like you said drinking the champagne. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for your time. >> Thank you for the time. >> And we thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live day three of Dell Technologies World, right next to the dog therapy center if you need a little break, come say hi and stop by and see some dogs. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer, stick around we'll be right back after a short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey. Welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is the Cube's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2017. Now I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube with my partner Dave Vellante co-host. Eighth year of Cube coverage at VMworld's since 2010, we've been documenting the evolution of VMware. Next guest is Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Vmware and Dell. Big time CIO, been in the field. Been in working, real practitioner. Now at the company. Going to the cloud. Hybrid cloud. Bask great to see you. >> Good to see you. Yeah. >> So, Pat Kelson's keynote really relevant. I just want to say, you know our conversation last year and even the year before, you're like Nostradamus. You're like predicting the future. We talk about IoT's and now IoT edge. Are you helping messaging it with Vmware, I mean? >> Well my background having working in Honeywell and so on is that and I saw IoT as a big opportunity. So, it was easy for me to see that it was going to be big but I didn't see, think it was this big. But I'm messaging more with CIOs, more than Vmware to say you're going to miss this wave. It looks like a lot of CIOs are so focused on business IT, they're missing IoT. So, my message is here's a great opportunity for you to get ahead of don't miss it. >> I want to talk about waves cause last year we really made and then you look at what Pat Kelson did last year. We were commenting that he gave the speech of his life. Was that two years ago I can't remember. He really was like under a lot of pressure. His toggle was like a 42, very low. Is he the right guy? He made some bets. Pat's a wave guy. He's all about the waves cause he said, "If you're not out for that next wave, you become drift wood." So, I got to ask you the question. By the way, he's got the great wave slide here. From a customer perspective, they're watching here, Gelsinger lay out a great vision, the stock price is booming, strategy is clear. Andy Jassy from Amazon comes on stage. There is clarity in this direction and the waves that you are on. Now customers have to make the choice of bets, they're looking at the waves and saying what are my bets; The question I have for you what bets are customers making now as CIO and what should they look at, in what sequence, how do they attack those bets and which are the right bets? >> So I think the cloud is a big bet. People don't want to talk about cloud because they think we have been talking about it for a long time but enterprise hasn't really gone much in the journey. There is still a lot of data centers running virtual machines which is great but you really don't have a private cloud set up and then this burst capacity do go to public cloud and so very few people have examples of that. There are some people but not the large majority. What happens in IT is, when you get spooked when you see a public cloud and a private cloud and your not sure which way it's going. So the nice thing about this announcement is that thing's mystery is out right. So you want to go to public cloud here's the way to get it. You want to stay in your private cloud here's the way you can stay in your private cloud. Plus moving legacy applications people never talk about legacy. They always talk about you know if you and I are building a new company to go to a public cloud, do cloud ready, pretty easy. But I have some old applications even in a technology company, how do I move it? So I think that as a customer when I look at past message they said that make sense to me, I can choose to run it on my data center, go to a private cloud and go into Amazon. >> I got to ask you, I know Dave was jumping he's got some good private cloud data to talk about. About a true private cloud data. You mentioned how hard it is to move legacy apps, can you give some illustration and some color to how hard it is. Because a lot of people in the press analyst even startups, It's so easy, I want to just win the enterprise. If it's a clean sheet of paper I get that but there is a lot of important things. How hard is it to really deal with this legacy data center environment in the path to hybrid and public cloud? >> Well there is still, you know people think of, if you think of an ERP, people have four or five ERPs still. You know you were just imagining everybody is just on one nice SAP or one nice Oracle. There are several instances and the reason we haven' migrating to one is not because is not because we don't know how to do it, there is an ROI you know, do I invest the money, do I do this right now, do I get the people, another $400 million to invest in an ERP system. >> Risky. >> Very risky. So you got a lot of these. You've got PeopleSoft which has different versions. You got HR systems, sale systems. So that's what in a lot of data centers believe it or not. How do you move it? Then when you go to a public cloud the guy says are you cloud ready? No you're not. You got a legacy system. >> What's that? >> You just don't want to run this. You want to run it in the most efficient way within a container. So I think people don't see that. The other thing they don't see is at scale it is expensive sometimes to go to public cloud. If you and I are starting a company, we won't build a data center we can probably go to the public cloud. But if I have scale, I already have data centers that I am running at scale and not everything is unpredictable. A lot of business IT is very predictable workloads, right. I know what I need to buy next year generally. So what burst capacity am I looking for? Not everybody requires that, so that's another reason. Security both ways right, people say that public cloud is more secure but there is a lot of regulatory bodies who want you to show and there is a lot of work that I have to certify to show that. So what [CIS 00:05:30] is trying to do is to say we will try to go cloud where we can but there is still 80% 90% of your stuff running in a data center. Help me bridge that. >> Well we talk about cloud, private cloud, we coin this term true private cloud and the basic concept is bring the cloud model to your data. >> Right. >> We tell our CIOs, look don't try to form your business and fit it into the cloud. Fit the cloud into your business wherever the data lives. >> Yeah. >> Is that a reasonable way to look at it and is that what you're doing with your business? >> Yeah, so I'd define it a even more simply. I'd kind of say if you have a lot of people running your data center, you don't have a cloud. I mean the whole point of cloud is automation. The reason public clouds are cheaper or better is because it is highly automated. So that's the trick. If you have people in the data center then it's not a cloud. So get your data center modernized. I define it as private cloud you can call it whatever you want, you can call it automation. But get it automated. Then the scale comes up and your cost comes down. But then when you want burst capacity you don't have to build servers for that you can go to the public cloud for burst capacity. But the big point for me is, people ought to sit down and figure out a strategy. Few years ago people said don't go into infrastructure just outsource it. So we all outsource it and that became a mess. Sooner or later you got to figure out what you need to do. You can't just outsource it, put it in the cloud, not think about it, make it go away. So you see a lot of CIOs coming back and saying I want that but I also want to fix this, how do I automate? I want to get the cost down. That's how I define a private cloud don't have too much cost. >> So are you running a private cloud or? >> Not only am I, I should be modest but I'm not going to be. I think we run one of the best private clouds there is for VMware. Everything that you see in Vmware, the hands on labs you see there is all running on a private cloud at scale. We are extending the cloud to now Dell Technologies. We are taking the same model and cut and paste it. Imagine how much leverage you get from EMC and Dell Data Centers when you extend the private cloud. So for a company like us it's a sure bet. >> So what is it look like underneath? I mean you got vSan running. >> Yeah. You have vSan, NSX everything we talk about. >> Have you thrown out all your arrays? >> No, you don't throw out all our arrays but vSan is. What you see in the market is happening in my data center. So vSan is, there is more and more vSan nodes now but your mission critical SAP and Oracle stuff that I don't want to necessarily save dollars I would want something that is mission critical, proven, ready, certified, etc. So the other things don't go away but your storage is growing. As the storage grows you see a lot more of the vSan growing with that. I use to have a lot of vSan, a lot of NSX. >> You know how many clusters you have now? Probably a zillion. I mean a pretty large number. >> It's a large number of clusters. >> It's just a, the reason I don't know is every month they just amazingly growing. Last year when we talked about it when you asked the question about vSan there was only a few left in my data center. So I deliberately dint talk a whole lot about it. Now it's taking on like fire. >> Yeah >> Right, as the reliability increases, the cost value proposition is taking off. >> Your talking about tens of thousands of vms and petabytes of data. >> Yeah, multiple petabytes of data. Over 60% of that is growing. The growth mark is really large in the vSan as well. >> I got to ask you the journey for the CIO and the CXOs out there, cause there's multiple CXOs. You've got chief security officers, some say chief economic officer because of crypto currency block chains coming around the corner. We got to talk about block chains because next year it's going to be in the wave slide. Cause decentralization is all about block chain. There should be a computing areas there. They all want to get in, they don't want to screw up. I need the head room but I don't want to make any move too early to get over my skis or foreclose an opportunity. So what's the path, Are they getting there house in order with the private cloud as a stepping stone to hybrid cloud. What are some of the day in life of the CIO right now because what we're seeing with the data is true private cloud on premise is growing really well. It's not declining in any capacity. That where the action is right now more than hybrid clouds. >> Yeah >> What's the CIO doing, is that the trend that you see, what's going on in their world? >> Well there are three or four things going. Then their SAS application that compute is going with that SAS vendor. So that is happening a bit. But I see the private cloud growing. Right, you know, I don't see it disappearing anywhere and I talked to my other CIOs and say should I be saying this or is it true or not? And everybody say yes it is growing and so is SAS and so is public cloud. But you know, a big majority of Vmware Compute is run on a private cloud and so I see it grow. So what the CIO's would look for is I want to run my private cloud efficiently but I also want to I don't want to have this large boxes for burst capacity. Say I have a Thanksgiving sale or a Christmas sale I don't want to have boxes sitting doing nothing. Can I take advantage of the public cloud for that and then cloud ready when I want to do some experiments on the newer development, let me try it on the public cloud. My feeling is my stats tells me and you guys are the experts on it is. If you have a scale at some scale, if your on a good private cloud the costs are going to be better for you. That's what my experience tells me. >> Because some of the things are predictable like hey retail seasons here, I can go burst in the cloud for that. >> Right. >> Then everything else kind of overflow to the cloud auto scaling. >> The key is labor. >> Yeah >> You could take labor out. So I just want to share some numbers with you guys. >> Sure. >> We so, what we call the true private cloud you're calling private cloud. >> Yeah. >> Growing at 33% vs the infrastructure as a service for the public cloud going at 15%. >> Wow. >> It's a 10 year forecast. We have true private cloud at 230 billion. The infrastructure as a service public cloud at 150 billion. So the biggest market growing the fastest to your point, SAS is bigger than both. >> Right. >> That's growing really really fast but it's the IT labor piece $150 billion coming out of labor going into, then their R&D and shifting to analytics and >> Value. >> Transformations, value producing things. >> I think that is the transformation. The transformation is labor is going out, automation is coming in. So I can put that on DevOps or the business kind of transformation projects. That's good to see. That's where intuitively as a practitioner I say, but it's good to have the data. I'm going to go read it up and see. That makes a lot of sense to me. >> Pat Gelsinger actually made a quote on the keynote I thought this is why I was honed in on that is that. He actually said shifting to value activities. That's analytics, you called vendor R&D which is basically a way to fund some of the new project where the hybrid and public are being operationalize to be predictable to some level. >> Sure exactly. >> But I totally see that the hybrid cloud is stalled in my opinion you guys can comment on it but based on my anecdotal hundreds of shows we go to it's hyped up beyond all recognition. >> Yeah. >> But it's happening after private cloud is set up because the operating model of the clouds got to get set up and it's just a law for the enterprises. >> Good points, maybe bursting, maybe some DR, but it's not a federated, set a federated apps or is it. >> At least I don't see it that way. I mean so things should be simple but not simpler is what they say. You got to get your house in order. I mean you can't, I mean I made the mistake of saying let's just outsource it because I don't want to think about it. This is the same thing that we are talking about let's just put it all in the cloud. What do you mean, I mean there are legacy apps. You still have them running at a good cost. You still have to know it. So I'm little old fashioned that way to say your house in order and have the options open for burst and other kind of things that you want to do. >> Well digital transformation also has a lot of pressure on top line revenues. So now >> Yeah. >> You can't just put the paint a side and not look at it. >> Sure. >> Put it in the corner. >> But look, IoT, we talked about this. You're going to have to set your whole business being censored. That needs a lot of late latency and other kind of issues lot of data. You need to be better have a good private cloud story for the IoT. Not everything can be put on the public cloud to make it happen. They just don't have the latency. There's law of physics still. So like a car is going to be a data center more less right, you need to make a response in a very short time. Factories have to have responsive systems and robotics. You can't go traverse the internet, go get a data from a public cloud, come back to make a decision on robot. So don't ignore as all I'm saying. Do everything but don't ignore it. >> The future, let's talk about future. AI is here, that's all also hyped up beyond all recognition but I love AI because it's got a software aspect to it. Machine learning super relevant. Block chain, Pat Gelsinger in his keynote really address and I thought a really clever way to weave this in, decentralization. >> Yeah. >> I see we all know it distributed computing is. >> Sure. >> Centralized database can be hacked. Distribution and decentralization around blockchain is interesting. So if we're putting our futuristic hats on. >> Yeah. >> What is IT look like in a totally non controllable, fully instrumented, blockchain crypto currency market? Is there going to be IT coins? I want some IT. >> I think so, I mean it's exciting, the only the thing with blockchain in enterprise is not the technology, it's our ability to think creatively on it. Right we are not able to envision these kind of things yet. It'll come in a year, I think it's our. We have to sit down and think about how to take advantage of that it's pretty exciting and you know we still have simple issues on you know. We know we can't centralize everything. That we've tried for years and years and years it's gone already. Now I want to decentralized, perhaps use technology like this to make sure I can still control what I want to control right. So the thing with block chain internally when I talk to people is, don't show me a proof of concept of technology I get the tech. What is the use case? >> Yeah. >> So we have to use our brains and I think in 6 months we will have it. We're just not there yet completed . >> That's where the destruction vector will be. >> Right. >> If anyone is doing in IT coin token you can say I'm interested. >> IoT we talked last time it looked like vaporware and now we have examples and every bodies doing it. I think block chain is definitely there. >> I mean supply chain could be applied to network with packets as we would say at the edge. Bask thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Sure, thank you. >> Great stuff good to see you. Cube coverage live here in Las Vegas with Vmworld 2017. We'll be right back with more coverage after this break. Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. (uptempo techno music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with our guest host inside the community, Keith Townsend who's with CTO advisors, and our next guest is Bask Iyer, who's the SVP and CIO of VMware. Both of you, welcome to theCUBE. Your first host as an analyst here on theCUBE, Keith, thanks for coming on. Bask, great to see you again. >> Thank you, good to see you. >> You're not like just any old CIO. You're at VMware, it's a big company, it's a vendor in the landscape, but you also have been on the other side. You've been a practitioner, you've run for over decades, real infrastructure, really going back through the cycles of innovation. Now you're on this side serving customers on the other in this transformation stage. What a couple years it's been. Since last year when you were on theCUBE, we talked about digital transformation, eating your own dog food. First question is, what's changed this year with VMware? Obviously, a lot going on with the technologies, post-federation world. What's going on technically in the landscape for VMware? 'Cause I know you guys do a lot of early stuff inside VMware. >> Yeah, so, I think we are eating even more dog food. In fact, we are calling it drinking your own champagne because I don't like dog food, even if you make it, I'm not going to eat dog food. I've been drinking a lot of champagne. What that puts you as an IT practitioner is, I mean, you're showcasing private cloud, you're showcasing hybrid, and most of the things that we are talking about we have influence from inside. You can go to the executive staff and say, "I need to go to Amazon, I need to go to Google, "I need to connect, "I cannot be locked into a single cloud strategy "or a device strategy," and so on. I feel like our team is very much part of it. Our team is also getting more into new product development. We've developed a whole line of mobile technologies right now that makes it easier to sell something like AirWatch. It's easier to always talk about applications. Here's what you can do with applications on the mobile side. >> A lot of, certainly VMware as a company has changed, but some big executives have departed. Carl, Bill Fog, among others. Sanjay is still there, but he had the AirWatch, but now, this any cloud, any application, any device. This is not a new messaging, but there's been some product turnover. V sphere has been changing, V cloud air, we're not hearing much about that, more management layer. How has that impacted some of the champagne or your own internal incubation of the technologies? What's new there, what's shifted? >> Yeah, so what you are seeing is the change in technology is even faster, and I keep telling my team is yesterday's news wraps fish. So unless it changes, why are we here? I love the fact that we are pushing technology. The thing I see in my experience is technology always changes, but the last few years, it's faster and faster, and I don't think it's going to slow down. What has changed from last year to this year is we were the leaders in private cloud last time. I came and talked about how VMworld has one of the biggest private clouds. All the hands-on lab is run on our private clouds. But we want to go beyond that, we want to go from private cloud, hook it to the public cloud, or any cloud. I want to come back. And if you think about, when I talk to the CIO friends, while they like every cloud provider, they don't want to necessarily be locked into anybody. It's a big fear everybody has, and for people who don't believe it can happen, I've been here long enough. In the 2000, we had these guys called ASPs, if you remember. >> John: Applicant Service Providers. >> Artifice migrated to the ASP providers, and a lot of them went out of business because they lowered, they were all competing for the bottom line. Not that that's going to happen in the public cloud story, but different workloads have different needs, and you want to provide the maximum flexibility as possible. If you run a private cloud effectively, even as of today, it's definitely more cost-effective than any public cloud, but you may not want to do that. So, what do you go and tell my colleagues to say, you want a public cloud, you got it. You want Amazon, you got it. You want IBM, you got it. >> John: Choice. >> Choice. And I think VMware, if you remember, made our mark by giving the choice for you, so you can in on HP, you can go in Dell, you can go in on NetApp, you can go in on EMC. Even when EMC was the owner, still the owner, we still did not exclude you from running it on a competitive. >> And that built the ecosystem, basically. >> That built the ecosystem, the things that you see here. And Michael reiterated it today, so we are going to be available on every cloud, every platform, that helps, it creates a lot of money for people. And for CIO, just go back into the practitioner, that's what I want. I may stick to a vendor, but don't lock me in. That should be my choice. >> So, talking about fast change, VMware, infrastructure-focused company from the outside, internally, you have to deal with both developers and infrastructure guys. Martin Casedel famously said that developers are much more involved with that purchasing cycle. How has the relationship with your internal developers and your infrastructure folks? >> It's very good. I mean, but I can see Martin's point. I've worked on other companies where the developers actually worked around the infrastructure folks, because you won't get the things provisioned on time. If you run an effective infrastructure, which we do, I actually challenged my developers, developers reporting to me as well, and say, "Do whatever you want, "because I want to know what you like doing." And a lot of them work on our infrastructure because it is effective. If you do a good job, people will want to use somebody who manages (indistinct talking), but it's not true in most of the cases. Most of our infrastructure is still run the old IT way, where people just say, you know, it's going to take me years. I have to fill out the paperwork for me to get the virtual machine, I'm out of here. What I internally see is my developers actually do a lot of development, continuous development. We roll out ASAP, not that it's a big use, everybody seems to do it. But we have zero issues on infrastructure. I mean, we never talked about infrastructure, we never talked about is this going to be available, not available, how does disaster recovery work? That's what developers want. They want to just worry about continuous improvement, continuous development, does it work on mobile. Infrastructure should just handle it, right? We're able to do that internally, but I'm also telling people use Docker. I mean, it's a good one, use Containers. Use Amazon web services, use IBM. 'Cause you don't want to restrict-- >> The freedom of choice is really, >> The freedom of choice is very important. The developers are in charge. >> Bask: Exactly. >> We're pretty much on that whole. >> That's like invisible infrastructure is there to support what developers do. >> Invisible infrastructure is invisible only until it's broken. But your point is well taken, yeah. >> DevOps is great, but you still need five-nines ops, so operational focus we've seen this year, where I'm kind of smelling the theme this year is all about Dev, the operational side of cloud. So I got to ask you, we were in our, last week at a meeting at SiliconANGLE offices, we're talking about, oh, VMware. And I'm like, guys, it's all about the SDDC experience. They're like, what the hell's SDDC? Okay, it's a software defiant data center. But that was the theme a couple years ago, and then, someone else raised their hand, and what the hell does SDDC mean anyway? I want to ask you what does SDDC experience, we heard it on the keynote, actually mean? >> So, I think Ragoud defined it well as in order to react to the needs of today, you cannot hope to put in a hardware and hope that box runs. You need to free the intelligence away from the box. Let me give a practical example. You get attacks from security. Typically, their response is buy my box, put it in, and it'll take care of it. Humans cannot respond to the speed at which these attacks are happening, so you have to write algorithms, so that's software. So, the attacks to be done in software. The configuration has to be done in software. The whole idea is freeing the intelligence from all the boxes you have, and define a software layer on top of it because software will trump hardware. I mean, you need good hardware, let's not, I mean, things have to run some way. >> One experience is the guy gets to go to the beach because everything's automated? That's one experience, automated. >> That's one experience, yeah, I just think you get more work. I always say you should hire smart but lazy people because they will automate what they're doing. But what ends up happening is no good deed goes unpunished, so you just get more to do. But look, in my own case, I did every job in IT. I started in hardware, automated it, people said can you do software? Yeah, I can do it. Well, you automated this. Can you do DSEIO, can you do end-user computing? Can you run real estate, can you run shared services, can you do this? Your job becomes bigger. I don't think I'm going to sit on the beach, but you're doing more-- >> Yeah, but you're freed, essentially. I use that as a metaphor, but the idea of the beach is being excited about not being in the weeds fixing stuff and being, tired all the time. >> See, I get to do this, right? I talk to customers. The only reason I get to do this is because my infrastructure's working. If it's not working, I'm not mistaken, I have to go back and fix it. If you free up your time, then you go talk to your customers, your advisory panel. They've given me internet of things as another business unit to run. It's exciting, you're getting to the front office but I never forget it's because your back office is working. >> Stole a little bit about thunder by mentioning internet of things. Talking to customers and one of the things when I talk to customers is internet of things. What are some of the challenges you've had internally around internet of things and how has VMware solved some of those challenges. >> Yeah, so a lot of internet of things. It's coming out of hype cycle now into reality so a lot of talks where how do you control the home thermostat. Your Amazon Echo device and so and so, but what is happening now is buildings have to be automated and they have to get another 30% more efficiency. You only get 30% more efficiency. It's not just turning the light bulbs off and on when you want. You want to know what's your occupancy and do I really need this bigger building all the time. That requires intelligence. So if you have intelligence, you can really figure out do I need 400 buildings or do you need only 100 buildings. And the reason I picked something Monday as buildings is that's where a lot of people spend a lot of their money in actual buildings. For example, so the thing I tell from the IT standpoint is I think we have gone from kind of pilot stages to now you're going to get go to scale. When you get to scale, it's not fun anymore. It has to work all the time. It has to be secure. So I was talking to a bunch of CIOs a week ago and I told them how many of you have multi printers. Multi scanners and the multi devices. Everybody says that. So how many of you know that they send information on whether the toner is out to the manufacturer? Everybody puts their hands up. How many of you know that it's not sending the whole thing that you're standing over to the manufacturer? And people said, "Does it happen?" I said, I don't know. I don't know if it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen. >> John: It's a question. >> This is where you need to pay attention because your coffee machine is going to say you're out of coffee beans. Are they just sending that information or not? If you take it seriously, manufacturing. The folks actually work around IT sometimes because they don't want IT to slow it down. So if IT doesn't get involved internal things right now. Define the architecture and so on. You're opening a door for shadow IT. >> I want to just drill down that you mention IT going slow but that's exactly the point. Machine learning AI and software. There's been a huge acceleration of things like asking those kinds of questions and the infrastructure has been slowing. Certainly the network has, so for all the CXO out there. Whether it's CIO, chief data officer, chief compliant. There's a lot of CXO's out there. They're trying to figure it out. So what's you're advice to them and looking at the message of multi cloud and inter clouding and all that stuff. They got a job to do. At the end of the day they don't really care what a VMware is doing in the business. They want to know what their business is doing. How do they apply the stuff going on here at VMworld if you had to look at this VMworld this year and talk to the CXOs. What's in it for them? What's your thoughts? >> The first thing I say is have the curiosity. What happens in my job is I hear so many vaperware that you become skeptical. The problem with skeptical and being too pragmatic is your mind becomes close. So when you look at interrupt things you say, ah, is that really going to to happen. I got things to do. I can't worry about it. You can't have that. That's how you let the sass get out of your hand. That's how you come back later on the cloud. That's why BYD happened. Because we started to think Blackberry is good enough. You don't need any other phones. So you need to have this open mindset, so internal things, I tell people. >> John: Be opened. >> Be open. There's a tornado coming here and you better be involved. Now to be involved you have to take a solution for them. You can't go and say stop all projects. Let me look at architectural. Let me review them. So I tell them go with an architecture. So couple of things I tell them is there's so many gateways, so many sensors, you need to go with some ways to manage these gateways. Because like it or not they're coming to you and they're going to expect you to manage it. After the initial set up is done, they're going to say, "Hey, IT guy, you run it for me." You better be there. Go with an architect, so it's a private cloud, public cloud or it's a combination. How you manage Edge? So I tell people to get involved and there's couple of things that we're doing is manage your gateways with software. Go with the cloud in the box for IoTs, so people can give it to our manufacturing guy or your operations guy. You need to take something there. You need to be involved. >> So balancing the hopeful and the optimist. I'm hopeful that this may happen with the pragmatic. I got to make it make it run at scale, which is good. This is all about scale now with cloud. It kind of brings back the kind of looking back at history of IT which you would certainly be involved in. Lived personally is you see a sprawl of something. PCs, LANs whatever and then consolidation. Single throat to choke. Single pane of glass. These are the buzz words. We're seeing that now. We're seeing there's been a sprawl of APIs, a sprawl of microservices. A sprawl of mobile. Now are we getting to that phase where we got to manage it. >> Bask: Yeah. So you're hearing things like single, choke to throat, single pane of glass for management. What's your thoughts on that and this is really mind boggling to the customer because the CXOs are out there going. Hell, I still got to get top line revenue in these new apps for my banking app or my oil and gas application. So right now we're in a really interesting position. How do you describe that environment and what do you prescribe specifically to that CXO? >> It's a challenge or opportunity depending on how you look at it. It's very exciting to me that you have all these things exploring and there's so much more you can do in the business. So if you're an IT practitioner or CTO, this is a good time to be excited and add value to it. If you get too pragmatic, you're going to lose it or if you're a blocker. Say please hang on. Let me define the architecture for you. Let me do this for you. You're going to lose it because people are going to work around you. And my belief is the CIOs I meet right now are a lot more progressive. They realize the mistakes they made by being a little to pragmatic sometimes on technology. Not getting on it and they are jumping onboard. So the hope is I'm at a stage in my career where I want to make sure my community of CIOs do the right thing and I'm telling them this is coming. >> So you're seeing progressive mindset now-- >> I'm seeing very, very progressive minds. I see a ton more CIOs who are acting like the digital guys, pushing it and so on. The other thing to remember is, it's not always about technology. You can do the pilots but to make a change. You need people, process and technology and the CIOs are best equipped to do that. So the best for the company is to make sure you get the right CIOs. The people that are involved in the technology change start going around. >> So from a technology perspective. A lot of great news from, at least exciting news coming from Pat this morning. >> Yeah. Cloud services, cloud foundation. With your team internally, which product or what direction are you most excited to enable your team? >> Anything that makes my development go faster, I'm excited so that's why I'm interested in cloud foundation and cloud services, very much because I don't have to think about where to go and I can do it faster, good, right. The things I'm very excited about is you haven't seen the end user computing announcement which comes tomorrow or the day after. It's fantastic. I believe that enterprise mobility has not really not happened. I mean you've got what two to three million applications on the android store and the app has gone up to three million on the Apple store. But you go to most enterprises, they'll just give the email and calendar. >> John: Right. >> Email and calendar, we give access in 1999 with Blackberrys because for 17 years, You're still getting email and a calendar on your iPhone now instead of the Blackberry. That's not good progress. People haven't been created to look at mobilized enterprise platforms to develop. That's going to change. I think people are going to wake up and say how we make productive on the phone. I challenge my team and we come up the 50 yard at productivity applications. That should take a long time to develop and I can show sometime. When I showed the VCI, they also didn't want it. They wanted to go to one place to approve all the purchase orders. They don't want to go to SAP and Oracle and Sales Force and 40 different places to approve. So the mobile the revolution I think is starting to happen. In enterprise it's very, very light. You'll see that. I mean you don't want to be carrying necessarily these when you're traveling, right. >> I want to ask you, we have about a minute left and more of a personnel kind of conversation we're seeing in the industry. And one of the things that we're very passionate about SiliconANGLE is our new fellowship with the Crown Truth, our partner. We have this new fellowship called the Tech truth where we're funding fellowships in journalism. We're also going to be at the Anita Borg conflict in November for the third year. Where we're funding a special assignment on women in tech. >> Bask: Yeah. >> IT has been one of those areas where it's been mostly male dominated like developers. But yet IT isn't the old stack and rack anymore like it used to be. It's changing, shifting. How has the role of STEM and Women in Tech in science changed IT? Can you share some, I know you're involved with Anita Borg. >> Bask: Yeah. >> Thoughts on that because this is again, it's not just the IT anymore. IT is now at a global stance. Your thoughts on women in tech. >> Yeah, in the sense. We haven't done enough. I mean we are, most companies are talking and I guess compared to where we were. We make progress. It's not good enough. Having 20% in tech when you can go up to 50% is not good. The thing with STEM I say sometimes, we say we support science and sometimes we mislead women. I know a lot of people with science degrees, women with science degrees in biology or something else who are not getting employment like the coders. So we got to get through the language. Are you looking for coders? Are you looking for STEM? >> Coders. >> Right. >> Well now you have different analytics and you sort of. There's new stuff going on that's interesting. Right, I mean like coders. Not to say biology, doctors. >> I think it's really unfair if you tell people we let science possible and women actually go to classes. And they come out, the first question we ask is do you know Python? Do you know this? I'm not saying it's right or wrong that's what the industry is doing. >> John: Yeah. >> And you need to actually respect every science but if not, don't mislead people. So that's one. Silicon Valley has a problem with older gentlemen, older people. >> John: Agism. >> Agism, so that's an issue. There are not too many African Americans in Silicon Valley. So these are the elephants. I think the first steps is we haven't talk about these things. People are afraid to talk about it. That's not a good sign. You got to come back and put it, I mean, Anita Borg, I liked them because they're put the show on the table. Which is the first step and it's like an alcoholic. You are to say I'm basking in alcoholic. If you don't even say that. We're not solving it. >> I got to tell you. I was there last year. This will be our third year. It is 12,000 women and it's a great time. It's the great time-- >> Yeah, my daughter's is going. I wanted to go alone but we have to do more. So I don't want to sound down on the last minute. We've made definite progress but if you go to most Silicon Valley companies, we can't say we've done it. >> Well my wife and I just talked about men from Mars, that whole stick, but the role of IT is a lot. First there is a lot of women that are involved in tech but necessarily coding as you said, because a lot of roles in IT are changing. For instance, the data science role moves to data analyst which by the way is the F ford base. So that's kind of becoming an IT role. >> Right. Very interesting some of these jobs personas per say-- >> Yeah, yeah so last one I'll leave it with you is they could log the help desk. We used outsource the help desk. We used to treat it as not important whatever and then we find that a lot of knowledge workers are struggling for simple stuff. That can fit in my PC so that I can do my job. So we brought it back like how the Apple have genius bars. We have our own things inside but we recruited it from a organization call You're Up. And what they do is there are a lot of kids from under privileged families who don't get to finish high school. So why can't they work on help desk? Why do you need a degree? Why can't they go to a finishing school? I've worked with a lot of them. They're very passionate about what they do, very satisfying so we can talk for hours, 'cause I'm very passionate about this. We should do more with under privileged folks. We should do more with diversity in the true sense of the word. >> We'd love to have you. We're going to recruit you as a volunteer for our theCUBE team in Silicon Valley. We're doing a lot of coverage there. Certainly the fellowship has been great and we're going to be at Anita Borg Grace Hopper celebration in Houston. theCUBE will there. I'm John Furrier here with Keith Townsend. Here live at VMworld breaking it down sharing all the data. CIOs are really interested in the Cloud and certainly got the play book. Bask thanks so much for sharing your insight again. Great, great insight. Thanks for sharing the data. >> Thank you John for sharing-- >> We'll be right back with more live coverage from Las Vegas from VMworld 2012. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (uptempo techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day three in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We have been here for three days, there's over 14,000 people here, 30,000 plus more engaging with video content livestream on demand. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, not just back to theCUBE, but back today for a second appearance, he's so in demand, Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Vice President, Servers and Systems Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, welcome back! >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be here. >> So, you have so much energy for day three, but so much excitement, lots of announcements. >> Ravi: Yes. >> The theme of this event, "Make It Real," is provocative. We've heard a lot of >> Yes it is. >> Lisa: Interpretations about what that means for different customers and different industries who are looking to take advantage of emerging technologies: AI, machine learning, deep learning, IoT, to make digital transformation real. What's going on in the world of AI and machine learning? >> Lisa, a lot. Now, having said that, I don't think there's a single industry in the, in any part of the world today that we talk to that's not interested in AI, machine learning, for that matter, deep learning. Why is that so? Just think about the fact that each one of us today is probably creating and generating two and a half times more data than a year ago. It's huge. I mean, when I started out, people used to think megabytes is huge, then it went to terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and now I think very soon we're going to talk about zettabytes, right? I'll leave it to you guys to talk about the number of zeros, but setting that aside, data by itself again, the second they went, so of much of data is being created, data in my view has absolutely no value until you create information out of it. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> And that's where I think companies are becoming more aware of the fact that you need to start getting some information out of it, wherein starts the whole engine, first of all about going about collecting all of the data. And we have all kinds of data. We have got structured data, unstructured data, and now it's important that we actually get all of the disparate data into a format that can now be executed upon. So that's first and foremost what customers are trying to figure out. And then from there comes all the elements that the data analytics part, and then you can go into the machine learning and deep learning. So that's the way people are looking at it, and you made an interesting comment, Lisa, which is making it real. This is where people are looking at things beyond the buzzwords, right? It's sufficed to say AI is not a new term. I recall as a kid, we used to talk about AI. But now is when businesses are depending on it to ensure they have the competitive edge. >> So, Ravi, you know the pendulum swings, right, and ten years ago, >> It does. >> John: Software is eating the world and the cloud is coming, and at one point it looked like a future of undifferentiated x86 compute somewhere. It turns out, hardware actually matters, and as our application and data needs have grown, the hardware matters. >> It does. >> John: And so, part of your portfolio is the PowerEdge set of PowerEdge servers. I mean, how are you approaching that of making the needs of this new generation of software, this massive data parallelism and throughput real? >> Great question, John. It's interesting, yes, the pendulum keeps swinging, right? And the beauty is, as... It's my only hope that, as the pendulum swings, we're actually learning, too, and we're not making the same thing, the same mistakes. Thankfully, we are not. Now, when people talk about cloud, guess what? To your point, it has to run on something, software has to run on something. So, obviously the hardware. Now, to keep up with the changing tide and the needs, some of the recent things we have done, as an example, with our R840 launch yesterday, you know, NVMe is the talk of the town, too, talking about some of the new technologies. And customers want us to go out and provide a better way and a faster way for them to get access to the data in a much more faster way closer to the compute, so that's where the NVMe drives come in. We have got 24 NVMe drives on R840 today, which is two times more than the closest competitor. More into the R940xa; xa stands for extreme acceleration. Again, we have never had an xa product, this is the first of its kind that we are bringing out, and the beauty of this is, we wanted to makes sure there is a one to one relationship between the GPU and the CPU. So, for every CPU you have a GPU. It's a one to one relationship. If you look at the R940 we introduced earlier, it had, just to give the context to your question, John, it had, it could support four CPUs but only two GPUs. So if we are, think of it this way, if we are doubling the number of GPUs, and that's not it, we are actually enabling our customers to add up to eight FPGAs if they want. Nobody else does it, and this goes back to, I think Lisa, I think when we start to talk about FPGAs, too, and therein comes the issue, wherein customers don't have the flexibility in most of the cases in a lot of products out there. We have decided that flexibility has to be given to our customers because the changing, workload's changing, technologies, and even most customers today, they go in thinking that that's all they need, but sooner or later they realize that they need more than what they planned for. So our goal is to ensure that there is enough of scalability and headroom to enable that to happen. So that's how we, as PowerEdge Team, are building servers today, which actually enables us to provide our customers with an ability to have a headroom and at the same time give them the flexibility to change, whether it is NVMe drives or any kind of SSD drive, GPUs, FPGAs, so there's all the flexibility built into it along with ease of management. >> A couple things that you mention that I think are really important is that data doesn't have any value unless you're able to extract insights from it. >> Ravi: Yeah. >> Companies that are transforming digitally well are able to combine and recombine the same data using it as catalysts across many different applications within a business, that agility is key, that speed is key. >> Ravi: Yes. >> How are you, what are some of the things that you're hearing from the 14,000 plus people that I'm sure are all lined up to want to talk to you this week about what, for example, PowerEdge is going to enable them to do? You talked about flexibility, you talked about speed, what are some of the real applications that you're hearing feedback-wise from some of these new features that you've announced? >> Oh, great, so I think, again, an excellent question in terms of how the customers are reacting to and what are we doing. So now, talking about AI machine learning, think of it this way, right, the permutations and combinations are way too many. And the reason I say that is, keeping the hardware aside, when you talk about frameworks that are available today for most of the AI or machine learnings applications, people talk about TensorFlow, people talk about Caffe2, people talk about CNTK, I mean, there's a whole plethora of frameworks. And then there are different neural network methodologies, right? You hear of DNN, deep neural network, right? And then you hear of things called RNN, there is something called CNN, my point is, there is so many permutations and combinations in the mix that what our customers have come back and told us, going back to where we were earlier, talking about the flexibility in the architecture that we are providing, where we provide seamless scalability on any of the vectors, that they actually love that we are giving them the flexibility because when there are so many software options with frameworks and every other methodology, we wanted to make sure that we also provided the flexibility and the scalability. And our scalability comes in, whether it is the I/O connectability, we talked about PowerEdge MX that's going to be coming up soon that was a preview, but that's where we talked about something called the kinetic infrastructure, which essentially enables our customers to go out and run multiple workloads on the same modular infrastructure. Never happened before, right? Or, you know, the seamless way we do it now is a lot better than anything else. Likewise, to go back into the R940xa. We have the ability to go out and support hard drives, SSDs, FPGAs, GPUs, so the feedback has been that our customers are really excited about the fact that we're giving them the flexibility and agility to go out and match to the needs of their different workloads and the different options they have. So, they love it. >> Ravi, I was talking to some of your team yesterday and I was really impressed as they talked about the product development cycle. They said that we start with the customers and we start with applications. >> Ravi: Yes. >> And then we figure out what technologies are now appropriate to build in what combinations. They don't just start from let's throw the newest thing in because we can. As you talk to CIOs and enterprise architects, it used to be if you just do a server refresh and just check the box and push the button, now you've got to look at cloud readiness and what I keep on prim and what I keep off prim and what's going to fit my applications. What are you hearing from customers and how are you trying to educate them on how to approach their next refresh, well, I think even refresh is probably a bad frame, their next set of applications that they're going to have to build in this digital transformation? >> You know, John, this is actually no different, I mean let's step aside from the compute world for a minute, let's pick up an automobile industry, right? If you get into the automobile industry, a family might say they need a sedan, or a family of five or six with young kids might say they want a minivan, right? And maybe now the kids are grown up or you're still in your 20s or 30s and some of the folks would love to have a sports car, like the McLaren that up >> I'll take that one! >> Ravi: On the stage with Jeff; I know, I would love that too, right? (Lisa laughing) So my point is, when people are trying to decide on what is it they really want to buy, they actually know what they're looking for, right? A family of four doesn't go in and say, "I need a two-seat car," for example. It's a similar thing here, as people start looking at the workload first, they come in and start looking at mapping, "Hey, this is the kind of workload we have now," now let's start looking at what infrastructure can we provide behind it? You know, even if you look at our, something that we have announced in the past, but the 740xd. So, we have a 740 version and 740xd version; xd there stands for extreme density. So, if customers want a 2-CPU box, a 2-U box, a server, but they want more storage, then they have xd version. But they decide that storage is not really crucial, they just need the compute, then we provide the 740 on its own, the R740. So my point being that, accentuating the point you raised, is it's always nice to look at the application, look at what its needs are, whether it's memory, whether it's storage, whether it's the GPUs, the CPUs, and then look at how it transposes itself over the next few years because you really don't want to acquire something and then really decide later that you've run out of room. It's like buying a home and then you know you're going to have your kids or you're going to raise a family, you don't probably want to start off with a single bedroom and you know you're going to have a family in a couple of years. My point again being that, that is where the planning becomes absolutely important. So we are planning, and the planning phase is crucial because once you have that right, you now can rest at ease for the next few years and as we do that, one of the other fundamental design principles of PowerEdge is that we want to really support the platforms for multiple generations. Case in point, when we came out with our PowerEdge m1000e, we said that we will guarantee support for three generations of processors. We actually are up to the fifth generation as we speak right now. And our customers love it, because nobody really wants to go ahead and buy more servers every few years if they can go back with their investment they have made and ensure that there is room to grow. So, to your point, absolutely the right spot to start is start looking at the workload, start looking, once you have pegged it, then start looking at really at growing and what your needs could be. And then start connecting the dots and I think you would be coming out with the better outcome for the long run. >> We had the opportunity to talk, John and I just an hour or two ago, with the CIO, with Bask Iyer, and one of the things that was interesting is we talked to him about how the role of the CIO is changing to be really part of corporate strategy, >> Ravi: Yeah. >> And business strategy; as you talk with customers about building this infrastructure, to set them up for the flexibility and the agility that they need, allowing them to make the right decisions for what they need but also scale it over time, how much are you seeing the boots on the street that you're talking to have to sell this up the stack as this is fundamental to transforming IT, which is fundamental to transforming our business into a digital business? >> Very, very true. By the way, Bask is a great friend and a collaborator, we certainly look to, as the saying goes, "Eat your own dog food." So we work with Bask and team very closely because, as a CIO for a large corporation himself, we learn a lot; there's nothing better than trying to walk in the shoes of our customers so, going back to the comment you made, Lisa, is most of the, by the way, most of the customers today, the CIOs, who are now becoming not cost centers, they're becoming profit centers >> Profit centers, >> Lisa: That's what Michael Dell said on Monday. >> Absolutely, and he's absolutely right, Michael is absolutely right because most of the organizations we speak to today on an average, I would think that the number of CIOs we talk to has probably been dialed up, because we see the kind of questions that they're being asked of, right, to the point that we're making earlier, they're not looking at making point purchases for something that will satisfy them for the next 12 months or 18 months. They're looking at the next horizon, they're looking at a long-term strategy, and then they're looking back at the ROI. So what is it I'm able to go back in and provide to my customers internally, whether it is in terms of the number of users or the performance, whatever the SLAs, the Service Level Agreements may be internally, that's what they're looking for. So, towards that end, the whole concept of ROI and TCO, the total cost of ownership and the return of investment nowadays is probably a much bigger talking point that we need to support with the right factoids. I think that's becoming crucial, and the CIOs are getting more engaged in the discussions than ever in the past, and so it's just not about feeds and speeds, which I guess anyone can look at spec sheets, not as exciting, but at things beyond that that I think are getting more crucial. >> Well, Bask said, "Drinking your own champagne, eating your own dog food." I like champagne and dogs, although I'll go with both. >> I, why not. I just... >> We've got the therapy dogs next door. >> Therapy dogs, exactly. >> Lisa: Isn't that fantastic? >> They're great, they're great. >> So, last question in the last 30 seconds or so, biggest event, 14,000 as I said, expected live over the last three days, and tens of thousands more engaging, any one thing really stand out to you at this inaugural Dell Technologies World? >> The most important thing that has stuck for me is that human progress is indeed possible through technology. And this is the best showcase possible, and when you can enable human progress, which cuts across boundaries of nationality, and boundaries of any other kind, I think we are in the winning streak. >> Well said. Ravi, thanks so much for coming back today, couple times in hanging out with us on theCUBE and sharing some of the insights that you're seeing and that you're enabling your customers to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa; thank you, John, it's been awesome. It's always wonderful being with you guys, so thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE again. Lisa Martin with John Troyer live, day three of Dell Technologies World. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's three day coverage of VM World 2017. This is day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Wikibon analysts Peter Burris and Stu Miniman. Peter, head of research, Wikibon.com, Stu Miniman, analyst. Guys, and cohost too on stage two, we have two sets. Day one and we've got two more days, Stu. 27 videos, a lot of content, keynote is up. Gelsinger's on stage with Mike O'Dell. Your thoughts? >> Yes, so, John, first of all, last year, you know, we've been doing this show for a lot of years. Last year, the energy was a little off, you know? We talked about on the intro, there's rumors about management change, everything like that? Energy's up. The attendance isn't up much, but, there's a lot of good discussions. People are digging into, kind of this whole, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world. The keynote this morning, they've got, you know, folks from Google Cloud, up on stage. It's supposed to be the biggest announcement in the platform, in the last four years. I think we'll dig into that some. I'm not sure if it's the biggest announcement. >> Was there an applause? >> There was actually a bigger applause when Andy Jassy got on stage yesterday, than there was when they announced that, you know, VMware and Pivotal are now part of the Cloud Native Container Foundation, so, you know. CNCF, you know, three weeks, a few weeks ago, Amazon joined the CNCF, Microsoft part of the CNCF. Good step. Cubernetti's absolutely hugely important. VM and Pivotal, they'll want to ride that wave, participate in that wave, but, I'm not sure that they're, you know, that the leading edge of it, I like NSX's plugging into it, they're starting to figure out all of those internetworking pieces. But it's not the one I think, you know, we'll come a year from now and say oh, jeez, remember when they announced PKS, That's the thing that really changed the landscape. >> Yeah, I think the Google announcement was a little bit, seemed desperate to me, although very important, I said it's more of a long game on my tweet stream. But I think they try to force that a little bit. Certainly, I personally don't think it was a good move for them to do that at this stage and try to hype it up given the impact that Jassy had. And also Jassy's jab, a little bit, at some of these optical deals, we used to call them Barney deals, named after the cartoon. Barney, you know, they love each other, but no real deal there. Jassy, he's hinting that most of these cloud deals are optical, not a lot of meat behind it, unlike their deal. >> You know, I'm going to be the contrarian in this one, guys. I'm not going to say it's the most important infrastructure deal in the last four years. I think that's very true, Stu. But I will say this: our research when the AWS VMware deal was announced last October, was that it was an important deal, and it was going to have a material impact on the industry. Because it promised a way for a lot of VM customers to get to the cloud. And now we're seeing that happen. But we also observed that it became pretty clear, it was kind of obvious, that AWS had a lot to gain in that. And VMware was, I don't want to say desperate, but VMware was holding on and trying to remain relevant as we go through these transitions. I think a great thing about this conference is that VMware is demonstrating, is transforming. But think about this Google deal. Who gets the most out of this deal? >> John: VMware. >> VMware, but Google needs this really bad. Google really needs that enterprise presence. And VMware is in a great position relative to the Google deal. So VMware has not got a couple of companies that it can kind of-- >> You're shaking your head. >> Yeah, so here's the thing I'd say: while Google Cloud is standing up there, this is not VMware saying use Google Cloud. This is Pivotal and VMware saying we're fully integrated with Cooper Netties, which means that if I have Pivotal and VMware using PKS, it is now fully compatible with GKE. But that is very different from what we're seeing with Amazon. I talked to a VMware and Amazon joint customer this morning and he said I've got my data center. We've been using AWS for four years. And my data center guys are kind of slow. VMware and AWS allows them to be agile. They have the operating model. They have the tools. They like to use this. As opposed to Cooper Netties. That changes. You don't talk to a lot of people at VMware that are like, oh yeah, hey, I'm ready for microservices. I'm going to refactor all my applications. VMware, from day one, was like I'm going to take my applications, I want to, without changing a lot of code, move it in there. So, we've been talking for years on this show. You know, where are the developers? Are they here? Cooper Netties, all about the developers. I didn't hear a strong developer push in the announcement this morning. So, that's where I think it's still very different. >> It's a good conversation. I think Pete is right. Google does need this. But here's the nuance that's kind of in this game. It came from the VMware Cloud Native group. So Cloud Native certainly is strategy for VMware to play. VMware doesn't want to have just Amazon. They need to be multicloud. So-- They need to be multicloud, but I don't think that they should be playing the cards. This is a long game. The Cooper Nettiers that you know and I know, it's really difficult. People want to make it simple. There needs to be cross compatibility on, with application workloads. Very strategic, very important. Not a lot of meat on the bone. Okay, they're shipping commercial version of Google. Big deal. >> Most container implementations are running in a virtual machine. They just are. >> John: Yeah, true. >> This is an important deal for users. And that's the most important thing. >> Potential users that are going to be in the evolution of where this is going. To Stu's point, I think that where this connects is, the conversation here is: I'm just trying to get my act together on the on prim true private cloud. >> We're seeing the industry start to reform. So, again, Stu, you're right. It's not the most important thing in four years. But it's not also something to be-- >> It's a strategic enchant. It's very important. >> But it's also got near term implications. That for anyone who's doing container-based development, is running that whole thing inside of VM, and along comes VMware that says, hey you know what, we're going to bring industrial strength to this. It's a good thing. >> It's a good thing. Again, we all have a good conversation. This is a frothy conversation. I love it. Which means it's relevant to you guys out there. I think its timing is interesting. Again, I would have done a strategic play on this one. I would have done a strategic intent. The shipping stuff, okay cool. But you guys are on it. We will be monitoring it. Peter, I've got to ask you the question, and let's kick off Day Two. You guys have been beavering away for two days now here in analyst sessions, meeting all the executives, what's your observation? What's your take away so far? >> Well, the thing that we talked about, we did the wrap up yesterday, and now the analyst day came a couple of things. The first thing I'll say is that: when you pull back the covers of any new VMware initiative, increasingly you find NSX staring back at you. And it didn't used to be that way. So, increasingly, you're finding that NSX is becoming that kind of crown jewel. And that plays into this notion of VMware wanting to be the multicloud orchestrator using NSX as kind of a cross-multicloud technology. The second thing is that it's always interesting to observe how software technology, we talk about software technology in abstraction or independent of hardware. But the two always do move together. And we talked about yesterday about how vSAN has become such an important technology industry, Stu. And the observation we made, and isn't it interesting, that vSAN's importance grew just as people started doing flash-based storage arrays. And so those two things are becoming much more important in the aggregate universe here. And the third thing here is VMware is trying to do more around simplification through the cloud foundation, but they have to make sure it doesn't just look like a new marketecture, a new set of marketing. >> I want to throw some controversy out there. Stu, I heard some hallway conversations all last night, and the theme pretty much was this. I'm kind of paraphrasing multiple conversations. Love the direction, love vSAN, love all this NSX stuff. I do agree NSX is looking like the crown jewel. Clouding over the top. Orchestration is going to be the battleground for middleware. Great, I love that. But now, I'm an operations guy. I have VMware and I've got to go to the cloud in a big way. I've got to manage all this stuff. I have operational stacks merging together that have not been tested into multiple configurations with VMs, hardware stacks, software stacks, jamming together untested. This is a new pain point, and a slow point. We're slowing people down. Stu, do you agree? >> Yeah, really interesting point, because let's look at vSAN and NSX. vSAN, I can hand that to a virtualization admin, and they can get running pretty fast on that. Actually, I have one of the executives from VMware, he's like, we save money for customers really fast. NSX, a little bit more of a longer game. A little bit more complicated. Especially when you start getting into it. This whole interfabric between clouds, this is not an easy button for multicloud or anything like that. But NSX is really cool. John, we've been watching since day one. I mean, I remember when you and I interviewed Martín Cansado right after the acquisition. You know, huge acquisition, and as Pat Gelsinger said in the keynote yesterday, what vsphere was in the last 20 years, NSX will be for the next decade or more. So, absolutely, we kind of understand where the battlegrounds are. The devil's always in the details. >> Is it stable, Stu. Is this stuff stable? >> No, none of it is stable. But we're in the midst of a significant transformation, so we shouldn't expect stability. >> You're implying the outcome for the customers is significantly there to make the investment? >> Stu's right. This isn't plug and play world. There's a lot of work going on and what users are looking for now is who in the technology companies are going to make and sustain the investments to drive simplification. And VMware is in the mix. One of the other things we said last night, John, is that, if you look back, there have been very few technology companies that have successfully made a major transformation. IBM did it in the early 1990s. Microsoft has done it a couple of times. We may be witnessing VMware making a pretty significant transformation here. >> This show's not a dud, that's for sure, no doubt. VMworld and reinvent will probably become the two most important shows in cloud, hands down. Obviously besides from the international stuff-- >> Peter: That's important. >> You know, Microsoft, I'm seeing not a lot of clarity around Microsoft. Google, they're trying to get that cloud event going. Again, it's a great cloud wars going on, guys. So this is going to be crazy. >> Peter: It's starting to take shape. >> Well, you mentioned simplicity. Michael Dell's coming on. One of things I'm going to ask him, and I'd love to get your thoughts on what we should ask him. I'm going to ask him how do you make this shit simple? That ultimately, in the era of all this stuff jamming together, stacks, hardware stacks, software stacks, seamless operational capability, new developers coming on board, edge of the network. >> One of the things, a critique I have for Dell the company, is they want to give you choice. You're going to talk to Michael, and he's going to say Azure Stack, I've got that solution. AWS, VMware's got that solution. We've got the VMware solutions. We've got virtu-stream over here and everything. Customers want opinionated offerings to help them through that. Because, oh my gosh, I figured out the virtualization stuff, and I'm figuring out some of the networking security fees, I've got containers and there's other stuff coming from the future, and oh my God, security is beating me over the head nonstop. And now you want to be a major player in that? Yeah, how can they help customers get in the right swim lanes, help customers get comfortable in the deep end? >> Peter just talked about what I think is kind of key, he just mentioned plug and play. I'll just go a step further. This general purpose computing market is over. Nothing is general purpose anymore. Those things that you need to bolt on, but you have a unique requirement by corporations and enterprises-- >> I'll push on that a second, and I'll give you the question I would ask. If we look at the big picture, the big picture goes like this, the first fifty years of the computing industry were dominated by an OLTP-oriented model of how you use computers. Highly imperative programming. The tool sets were set up that way. Single database manager. You serialize everything from the database manager. That is the model that drove the first 50 years. We're in the middle of something totally different right now. We really don't know what it is. We conceived the peace parts with the coming together. It's going to be more hunks of programming, more declarative, distributed data, we're not going to serialize the same way. We can see what it's going to look like. But it's unclear exactly what shape it's going to take. The question I would ask, and I think it kind of builds on what you said, is what is Dell's commitment to the cloud's experience on 2022? We know what the cloud experience is today. The cloud experience today is defined by Amazon. They've done an absolutely magnificent job. Nobody thought they could do it except for Amazon. And they did it. And they did an absolutely magnificent job of it. But what's the cloud experience of 2022? We say it's going to be true private cloud, hybrid cloud, and a set of methods and a computing model that starts with data and finishes with outcome. What is Michael Dell say it's going to be? >> I was just going to say, Peter, that is The Question you talk about. When we think about the mega-merger of Dell, EMZ, and Vmware, at the end of the day, Michael wants to pull through more servers. But it's that operating model that's going to drive things. So, will VMware really be able to fix their management stack. Peter, when I became an analyst seven years ago, I was like, well anytime I can say back security and management are broken and they still suck, right? And so the question is, five years from now, will we, you know, be able to day hey, VMware is really doing some awesome things, Pivotal is really bringing this together, Dell technology's really front and center to help that experience. >> I was going to ask him who he's voting for, Mayweather or McGregor, in the fight night. >> Mike Tyson, right? >> Put you over to Mike Tyson. All right, serious question to end this. Peter, I know this is something near and dear to your heart, and Stu, at Wikibon, you guys are really, there's a lot of end user conversations, how should end users start preparing themselves. Because Pat Gelsinger's still laying out the narrative of today is the last day, the shortest time, whatever his quote was, it's going to get faster. And to your point of all this work that needs to get done on the investment, the customer environment is going to get crazier and harrier and more complex. What are end user enterprise customers having to do? >> So if I'm a CIO I'm doing three things. The first thing I'm doing is I'm introducing the core principles that are related to Agile. So I'm telling my people, culturally, we're going to me empirical, we're going to use data to make decisions, we're going to be iterative, we're going to cycle, and we're going to be really opportunistic. We're going to be very willing to break down sacred cows. That's the first thing I'm doing. The second things I'm doing is I'm starting to introduce a set of etics that say if we can put it in the public cloud, we will put in in the public cloud. But we have to use iterative, empirical, and opportunistic to recognize that we won't always be able to put it in the public cloud. And we have to be prepared to be able to do stuff on-premise, because we are going to be doing things on-premise. The third thing that I'm going to do, and I think this is really important, is that IT, for the last n number of years, has been focused on taking costs out of the business. David Floyer talks about this a lot, the idea of automation. Well, increasingly IT is going to be asked to find ways to add revenue to the business. That's kind of where a lot of his digital engagement goes. What that boils down to, ultimately, is that the history of working, collaborating, has been based on taking costs out driven by procurement, and this notion of strategic relationships has been kind of a fraud, has been kind of something we just say. So the third thing is: you're going to have to start focusing on what it really means to be strategic. Vendor management, to truly partner, to transfer and control intellectual property boundaries and how that happens. So those are the three things I think CIOs absolutely must start doing. >> And that is what Andy Jassy's been hinting around is optical illusions, is whether its vendor. Where's the partnerships? Where's the coding? Great observation, Peter, I've got to say that was phenomenal. I would agree. I mean, this is ultimately coming to a new era with computing with AI, IOT Edge. I think Pat Gelsinger laid out the wave slide beautifully yesterday. >> We're throwing the computing industry up in the air right now and seeing where it's going to land. It's time to start shaping that into the new model of how we're going to think through problems and how we're going to solve problems with technology. >> And we had the CIO perspective yesterday with Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of VMware. He said, John, look it, some things in IT are recognizable. There are certain patterns. We know when retail has spiked. So, yeah, I'll do bursting of the cloud, but most things can be patternized, and that's okay. Some things will always be unrecognizable. But it's not always that dynamic. Once you get that nailed down, that's where the true private cloud report comes in. Congratulations, by the way, on the true private cloud report from Wikibon. It's going viral here on the show. >> Some great work from Stu and David Floyer for many years. >> Great work. It's going viral. Talk of the town here in Vegas. Congratulations, Stu. >> Well, thank you. It's something, we've been having this conversation in this community specifically at VMworld for years. Because it was that air gap between I virtualized and that helped utilization to I really need to get to that operating model of the cloud. I interviewed a consultant from Australia last year on the other set. And he said a lot of the companies he still talks to is IT is still a call center. And we've been talking for years about moving from just being a call center to really partnering with a business. Or, you know, Jeremy Burton, who I interview recently, he's like no It's driving the business. And it's great that there are some companies that fully transformed and they are engaging in that or at least they tell a good story. But there's a lot of customers that are still working on their own journey. And that's what shows like this are all about. >> So really quick John. So the way I describe that is when you think about cost benefit, when you think about productivity, it's how much work am I going to get done for how much cost? The cost is the denominator. What we like to say is that IT has to start taking on a numerator mentality. What benefits am I going to create? What opportunities am I going to create? What revenue am I going to help create? Got to think on the numerator side of the equation. >> You guys are doing some great work. You know, a lot of analysts are always pumping in reports: Oh, you got to see this. And then pushing out to the analyst relationship. If you're in this business, whether you're a CXO, an advisor, or you work for a company and you don't read that true private cloud report, you possibly could be fired. It's really game-changing. It's like the software reading the world memo. This is the marketplace that's hot right now. True Private Cloud Report by Wikibon. Check it out. The Cube Day Two Coverage continues. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2017. This is the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas on day one of the event, a really exciting, high energy general session kicked things off. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined by two folks from VMware. We've got Cube alumni Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM of the storage and availability BU. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Good to be here. >> Lisa: And we've also got Matt Amdur, your first time on the Cube, principle VMware chief architect. >> Thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you guys here so been waiting with baited breath, a lot of folks have, for what are VMware and AWS going to actually announce product-wise. Really exciting to see Pat Gelsinger on stage with Andy Jassy today. Talk to us about, as the world of hyper-converged infrastructure is changing, what does VMware cloud on AWS mean for, not just VMware customers, but new opportunities for VMware? >> Yeah, that's a great question Lisa. Let me get it started. You know, I think my biggest takeaway from the exciting keynote, a couple of things. One is private cloud is sexy again. You know, so we've been talking about cloud a lot, but there is so much opportunity and tremendous growth associated with private cloud, and certainly hyper-converged infrastructure being the next generation architecture shift is going to drive a lot of the modernization of our customers' private environment, so that's certainly very exciting. The other aspect of the excitement is how that same architecture and consistent operating model is extending into the cloud with our AWS relationship, and this is also why I have my colleague, Matt, here, because he's been the brain behind a lot of the things we're doing on AWS. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Yanbing, and I tell you, for years, it was like, ah, storage is sexy, storage is hot. Cloud's kind of sexy and hot, so we found a way to kind of connect storage into that. Matt, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what happened here. This isn't just, oh, you know, we're not layering, you know, VMware on top of the infrastructure as a service that they have. Last year, we kind of dug in a little bit with Cloud Foundation. Talk to us, what did it take to get this VMware cloud onto AWS, bring us inside a little bit, the sausage making if you would. >> I think Andy talked about this a little bit at the keynote this morning, where it's really been an incredible, collaborative effort between both engineering organizations, and it's taken a lot of effort from a huge number of people on both sides to really pull this off, and so you know, as we started looking at it, I think one of the challenges that we faced, and Andy mentioned this this morning was there was this really binary decision for customers. If you had vSphere workload, do you want them to bring them to the public cloud? There was nothing that was compatible. And so, we really sat down with Amazon and said, okay, how can we take advantage of the physical infrastructure and scale that Amazon built and provides today, and make it compatible with vSphere, and if you look at what we've done with VSAN on premise as an HCI solution, it's become a sort of ubiquitous storage platform, and it offers customers an operational and a management experience for how they think about managing their storage, and we can take that and uplift it into the cloud by doing the heavy lifting of how do we make VSAN run, scale, and operate on top of AWS's physical infrastructure. >> One of the things that I found was really interesting this morning was seeing the, I couldn't see it from where I was sitting, the sort of NASCAR slide of customers that were in beta. Talk to us a little about some of the pain points that you're helping with VMware cloud and AWS. What are some of those key pain points that those customers were facing that from an engineering perspective you took into the design of the solution? >> Sure, so I think if you look at it, some of the benefits that we see with public cloud infrastructure that our customers really want to take advantage of are flexibility and elasticity. One of the challenges that you have on premise today is if you need new hardware, you have to order it, it's got to ship on a truck, someone's got to rack it and hook it up, and if you're trying to operate and keep pace with your competition, and you have a need to allocate a lot of capacity to drive a project forward, that can be a huge impediment, and so what we wanted to do is make it really easy for our customers to configure, deploy, and provision our software. And so, one of the really interesting things about VMware managed cloud on AWS is that it's a managed service, so some of the things that, you know, we've talked about VCF and the things that we've done on premise to streamline physical infrastructure management is taken to the next level. Customers don't have to worry about managing the vSphere software lifecycle. VMware is now going to do that for them, and Amazon is going to manage the physical infrastructure, and that removes a lot of burdens and gives customers the opportunity to focus on their core business. >> If you think about, you know, Stu, you touched on Cloud Foundation, we were using Cloud Foundation to automate how our customer consumed the entire software-defined data center stack. And you think about moving that same goodness into, you know, the VMware cloud on database, and you know, really removing a lot of the complexity around managing your own infrastructure. And so that customer can truly focus on their value adds, through, you know, developing the next generation of applications that enable their business. It's been a great extension of what we're solving on premise to the public cloud. >> Yeah, I wonder if we can drill in a little bit deeper on this. So you know, most customers I think understand, okay, if I needed to set up a VSAN environment right, I got to get my servers, how long it takes, what skill set I had, virtualization admins have been doing this for a few years now, and congratulations, you've got the number up near 10,000 customers, which is, you know, great milestone there. Walk us through, you know, when we're saying okay, I want to spin it up. If I know, swipe a credit card and turn on a VM, is it as fast? And what is that base configuration, what kind of scale can it go to? >> Sure, so to start with, what was announced today for initial availability, you can come to the VMware portal, so if you come to our portal, you give us your credit card, obviously, and then you can provision between four and 16 nodes. So you pick how many nodes you want. And you give us a little bit of networking-related information so we can understand how to lay out IP address ranges so we're not going to conflict with what you have on premise. And then you click provision, and in a few hours you'll have a fully stood up SDDC. And so that's going to include a vCenter instance that we've installed, all of the ESXOs we've provisioned from Amazon, we install ESX, we configure VSAN for you. And it's basically like getting a brand new vSphere deployment, and you can start provisioning your VM workload as soon as it's ready. And then once it's there, if you want to grow your cluster, you can dynamically add hosts, on the order of about 10 minutes. And if you want to remove capacity, you can remove hosts as well. So it gives you that elasticity and flexibility from the public cloud. >> Awesome, so we're early with some of the early customers. I'm curious, do you have any compare contrast as to what they like about, you know, doing it the Amazon, you know, VMware cloud on Amazon versus my own data center? Of course there's things I could say, okay, I could spin it up faster, but I could turn it off and then not have to pay for it. What, are we at the point we understand some of those use cases to tell why they might do one versus the other? >> Yeah, I think lots of the customers interested in this new model are really liking that common operating experience. It has some of the flex of customers you've heard about this morning, you know, Medtronic for example. They are a VMware Cloud Foundation customer. They are running entire, you know, SDDC through VMware Cloud Foundation, but because they really enjoy that experience and that simplicity that brings, now they're extending that into the cloud. So they're also one of the earlier customers for VMware cloud on AWS. So having that common operational experience is a big value prop to our customers. >> And I think we really see customers wanting both, right? The customers, you mentioned before, the private cloud is sexy again. The customers who have a lot of workloads, that makes sense to run in a private cloud. But they also want the flexibility of how they can take advantage of public cloud resources. And so depending on the problem that they're trying to solve, they view this as a complement to their existing infrastructure. >> And I have to think, some of the services I have available are a little different. Things like disaster recovery, if I'm doing it in kind of that cloud operating model, a little different. I now have Amazon services I can use, and VMware announced a whole, what was it, seven new SaaS services which kind of spanned some of those environments. >> Yeah, so the SaaS services we announced, they are truly across cloud. Cause they not only limit to a vSphere power cloud, they truly are extending into this cross-cloud, multi-cloud world of, you know, heterogeneous type of cloud environments. And now, you know, you spoke about DR, and certainly for someone coming from the storage and availability background, you know, in terms of our, BU's role that we're playing in our cloud relationship, you know, certainly we are trying to provide the best storage infrastructure as part of our cloud service. But we are also looking at what are the next levels of data-related services, whether it's data mobility, application mobility, disaster recovery, or the futures of other aspects of data management. And that's what we've been focusing on. You know, we have lots of customers, you know, even thinking about what's happening with, you know, Hurricane Harvey, I still remember the Hurricane Sandy days. A lot of our site recovery manager customers told us, you know, how SRM has saved their day. We're seeing the power of a disaster recovery solution. And now with the cloud, you can totally leverage the economics and the flexibility and scalability that cloud has to offer. So those are all the directions we're working on. >> So we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the closure of the Dell acquisition of EMC and its companies. Would love to understand, looking at this great announcement today, VMware cloud on AWS, from a differentiation perspective, what does this provide to VMware as part of Dell EMC, this big partnership with AWS? >> Yeah, so let me, you know, maybe take it back a step, not just the AWS relationship but really look more broadly, what we're doing together with Dell. And certainly, you know, starting with the storage business, we're doing amazing work around our entire portfolio of software defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure. And the good thing is, as Stu pointed out, we're seeing tremendous growth in our core business around VSAN. You know, 10,000 customers, expanding rapidly. But we're truly firing from multiple cylinders of both consuming it as a software model as well as working with partner like Dell EMC, TurnKey appliance, such VxRail. They're seeing tremendous success. So we are extending into our partnership around data protection. This is why I'll be coming to the Cube with Matt Felon to talk about all the great things we're doing around data protection collaboration, both for on prem as well as in the VMware cloud for AWS. So lots of things happening in different parts of the business unit. So but coming back to VMware on AWS, I think we're thinking about leveraging the strength of our portfolios, say this is not just a full VMware stack, but there is some of the Dell technology IPs we're pulling in. So for example data protection, they're part of our ecosystem, being one of the very first partners, enabling data protection on top of AWS. Yeah, so Matt, anything to add? >> Yeah, I think, you know, when we look to what's made us so successful on premise, it's been that extended storage ecosystem of which Dell EMC is a huge part of. And we continue to see that value as we go to the cloud. Yanbing mentioned backup and disaster recovery as sort of the obvious starting points, but I think beyond that there's a bunch of technology that they have that's equally applicable whether or not you're running on premise or the public cloud. And the tighter we can integrate and the more we can take advantage of it, the more value we can derive for our customers. >> So VSAN 6.6 is now out. You know, any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight there, and any roadmap items that you can share that are being kind of publicly discussed, you know, here at VMworld? >> So yeah, 6.6 was definitely a big hit, you know, with encryption and also lots of the cloud analytics and things we were doing has been really hitting, you know, the hard core of what our customers are looking for. So going forward with VSAN, we talked about AWS, our relationship with AWS for a long time, but the fundamental product-level innovation is happening inside VSAN as well. One of the big focus is really looking at our next generation architecture that truly enables the leverage of all the new device technology. You know, I keep saying, a software defined product is really driven by sometimes hardware innovation, and that's very true for VSAN. So at the foundational layer, we're looking at new hardware innovations and how to best leverage that. But moving up the stack, we're also looking at cloud analytics and, you know, proactive maintenance. I was just talking to one of our customers about what it takes to support, provide support in 2017. It's all these automatic intelligence, proactive, you know, you heard Pat talk about Skyline. This is a new proactive support approach we've provided, and there will be a lot of cloud analytics that's driving technology like that. >> I was going to say, on the analytics side, what are you hearing from customers with respect to what they're needing on analytics as they have this big decision to make about cloud, private, public, hybrid, what are some of the analytics needs that you're starting to hear from customers that would then be incorporated into that roadmap? >> So from our view, we're looking at lots of the infrastructure-level analytics. Certainly there is also lots of the application-level analytics. But from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to Matt's earlier point, customers do not want to really worry about their, you know, the plumbing around their infrastructure. So we're gathering analytics, we're pumping them into the cloud, we're performing, you know, intelligent analysis so that we can proactively provide intelligence and support back to our customers. >> I think it really, it helps customers to understand things about how their using their storage, how they're using their data, what applications are consuming storage, who needs IOPs, who has latency constraints, all that type of data. And being able to package that up and show it to customers in real time and help them both understand what they're currently doing and future planning, we see a lot of value in. >> Matt, I'm curious, one of the challenges you have as a software product is you need to be able to live in lots of different environments. Amazon is kind of a different beast, you know, they hyper-optimize is what I said. There's kind of misconception now. They're oh, they take, you know, white box and do this. I said, no, they will build a very specific architecture and build 10,000 nodes or more. Without sharing any trade secrets, any lessons learned or anything, you know, that kind of is like, wow, this was, you know, an interesting challenge and here's what we learned when you talk cause the challenge of our time is building distributed architectures. And I'd have to think that porting over to Amazon was not a, you know, oh, yeah, I looked at the code and everything worked day one. So what can you share? >> I think goes back to sort of the really interesting and tight collaboration from the engineering aspects. And it's really been phenomenal to see the level of detail that Amazon has in terms of how they operationalize hardware and what they can tell us about the hardware that they're building for us. And so I think it really highlights some of the value that you see in the public cloud, which is, it's not just about having physical infrastructure hosted somewhere else. It's about having a company like AWS that's understood how to deploy, monitor, and operate it at scale. And that goes to everything from how they think about, you know, the clips that are holding power cables into servers to how they think about SSDs and how they roll our firmware changes. And so from an engineering standpoint, it's been a great collaboration to help us see the level of detail that they go to there, and then we're able to take that into account for how we design and build solutions. >> Yeah, we are definitely taking all that learning into, you know, how to build cloud scale solutions that truly empower, you know, cloud scale operations. And lots of the operation learning, you know, that we get from this exercise has been just tremendous. >> Yeah, well one of the bits of news I saw is that VMware's IT is now running predominantly or all on VSAN, right? What can you tell us about that? Are there still storage arrays somewhere inside the IT? >> So we're extremely excited about this, and we have a visionary CIO, Bask Iyer, I know he was a Cube guest as well. So he's been really pushing this notion of VMware running on top of VMware. So we have 119 clusters, you know, 30,000 VMs, probably close to 1,000 hosts, and seven petabytes of data running on VSAN. And so if VSAN as a product doesn't hold up, you know, I get to experience it firsthand. So it's been pretty phenomenal to see that happen. We are also deliberately running a range of different versions of VSAN. There's, you know, some that are GA versions. There are some that are cloud edition that's yet to be made GA to our customers. So this really helps us develop much more robust software. If you see what's happening here in the hands on lab, that's being powered by VSAN as well behind the scenes. >> VMware's done a great job of leveraging kind of core competencies, like VSAN for the software defined data center. As you mentioned, 10,000 customers, I think Pat said adding 100 a week, >> Yanbing: Yeah. not sure if I heard that correctly. Wow, that's phenomenal. So as, and another thing that he said that was interesting, right before we wrap up here, is we're moving from data centers to centers of data. As customers are transitioning and really kind of figuring out what flavors of cloud are ideal for them, are you seeing any industries really leading the charge with respect to, for example, VMware cloud on AWS? Are you seeing it in, you know, we saw Medtronic, but health care, financial services, any industry specificities that you're seeing that are really leading edge that need this type of infrastructure? >> I think it's happening across many different industries. So tomorrow, I'm going to be in a session called Modernizing Data Center, but there is also lots of emphasis what's happening on the edge. So I have been exposed to customers from health care, customers from, airline customers, so we're going to be probably talking about examples of airbus 380, you know, the biggest airplane that's been ever built, and they have 300,000 sensors on the plane that's generating tons of data, and those data are being processed by technology like VSAN. And just, you know, stories across different industry. And I think that data center to edge story is very powerful. And this is also why the next generation architecture such as HCI make it happen. Clearly we've seen tremendous adoption in the data center. Now we're seeing adoption in the cloud. And I have to say, it's not just the VMware cloud on AWS. We have about 300 cloud provider partners to VMware that's adopted and deployed VSAN to different degrees. And now we're seeing it go to the edge. We have some amazing announcement this morning around HCI accelerator kit that is really providing a much more affordable solution to enable really edge use case. >> Fantastic, well tremendous momentum, great growth, we wish you guys the best of luck. Congratulations on everything announced today. And we hope you have a great rest of the show. Yanbing Li, Matt Amdur, thanks so much for joining us on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Woman: Absolutely. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live from day one at VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.