>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with too many man, You're watching The Cube Life from Del Technology. World twenty nineteen were here with about fifteen thousand other people, about four thousand Del Technologies Partners. But how? And now for the first time, we're pleased to welcome the CEO of Virtus Dream. Rory Reid Worry. It's great to have you joining student me on the Cube today. >> It is Lisa. It's a pleasure and riel honor to be on the show today. >> So this morning's Kino we were talking before we went live starts with lots of energy news announcements, partnerships, collaboration, walking, you. You're in industry veteran, which will dig into, I'm sure during the segment. >> Thirty five years. >> Thirty five years. That's >> amazing. Thirty five years is how old tells going tto be tthe when the next week. >> Thirty five years. >> That's a magic number. Congratulations. Thank you Virtus Dream. Talk to us about the integration you lead those efforts. Massive acquisition. What's going on now? What's exciting? You >> Well, I think it's kind of amazing what happened in the integration. This is the largest Tak integration in the world. Sixty seven billion dollars. Shortly after Del goes private, they're going to acquire Delhi, M. C, I, E, M, C and V M, where the huge undertaking thousands of people work on it less than ten months from the time it was announced. October of fifteen. It goes live on September seven sixteen. That's amazing, and our customers reacted and are partners in a just a kn amazing way. It's almost like it didn't happen. You know, I'm biased. I think it went really well. But look at the numbers. Look at the reaction in the marketplace. The growth, the synergy, the revenue, the kinds of impact. And then you see today at Del Adele Technology World. Michael does a keynote. He talked about the impact. Karen comes up and talks about giving back and the work that we're doing around Pathetic and printing three D and artificial intelligence based your limbs. I If you're not fired up about that, you can't get energized. And then you top that off with just a GN amazing discussion about the partnership between VM wear and Del Technologies on the Del Cloud And then the work that we're doing with Microsoft and Satya comes on stage with Michael and >> Pie. I >> mean, this is a power pack woman, and we put this company just three years ago together and look at the kind of impact its house in the industry. Amazing, just amazing. >> So worry. Yeah, I think Jeff Clarke said it well this morning. He said, If you're into technology and can't get excited by what's going on, you know, May maybe you're you know, it's kind of you know, my words. Maybe you're not in the right space. You've got a few of the interesting pieces of the Del Technologies family they talk about. You know, the massive acquisition of DMC with V M. Where Purchase dream Not such a small acquisition itself. Over a billion dollars, one point two billion dollars to billion dollars. And, you know, I remember back Bhumi wasn't out that long ago either, for you know, it was less than a billion dollars, but it was a >> ***. *** is an amazing set of technology. I know you're going tohave Chris McNab on later today. Chris and I have worked on what he called the gloomy acceleration plan the last two years. Way with that team have put in a strategy around taking advantage of just an amazing set of technology. Boo Mi's cloud integration software, I believe, is the absolute best on the planet and the work that we've done. We've doubled that business in the last eighteen months. We've added probably a billion dollars of market valuation they've reached. They add thousands of customers every quarter to that portfolio, the reach and touch and how that's going to drive the way data and applications talk in the cloud era. It's just at the beginning of the impact there. And then you look at a company like Virtus Dream. It's the leader in mission Critical application Work loads on the cloud. This is a company born on the cloud. It's based on the cloud nine years ago. It's the one hand to shake. Customers choose us with their most important applications and data because they need to know that it's gonna work and that we have the experience to Planet Tau migrated, optimize it and bring it to the cloud to cloud of fire and that were the single hand to shake. What's different about us is we have an eye *** way had the infrastructure as a service. We have a software stack with extreme software. Take time. I get fired up about Bloomie's technology Virtus Stream Extreme software. Amazing. And then on top of that, you layer on a white glove said of application and professional services. Very cool. But what was the coolest? Where some of the announcements today and how we're playing with its all of'Em went bare VM were based on, uh, Virtus Dream. And when they announced the partnership with Azure and the idea of V M wear work, clothes on Azure that's actually running will be running and running on. And we've been working with Microsoft and IBM where a virtuous string and it's and then and then you know >> when you say it's running on Virtue Stream, Is it your data centers? Is it part of the soft? Oh no, The >> data, the data centers air all Adger. It's using our software and our technology team have built that said, a technology that we've been in partnership for months with Microsoft and IBM, where to create this offering as one of the Cloud Service partners foundational. It's pretty foundation and you know it. But at the end of a think about del technology is one in the ingredient brand. Sure, that's foundational. This is a company built for the next ten years. Del Technologies. And the impact it's gonna have in the industry is just beginning. Where is it going to go? You saw it this morning in the Kino. Michael has some big, big ideas, >> so worry. A lot of times we look at things in the industry and people is like, Oh, it's binary. It's public cloud or Private Cloud. I've worked with a lot of service providers, and when you look at the world multi cloud, it's really more of an end in putting. That is together. Many of the service providers that air You know where I am seeing her del partners before you know, three or four years ago Oh my gosh, A ws and Microsoft. Well, okay. A partner a little like us off, But Amazons, the enemy. And today it's well, I have our stuff and I'm partnering and I probably have connections between them. Help us. Paint is toe where virtue stream fits into this. You know this spectrum today? >> Your stew. You're on the right point about multi cloud. We just did a press release today at a virtuous stream where we partnered with Forrester. We do, ah, whole industry study on the cloud and the future of the cloud multi cloud ninety seven percent of customers. We spoke to that force or spoke to have a multi cloud strategy for their mission. Critical applications at eighty nine percent of them plan to increase their spend on multi cloud mission critical activities. How we play in that space is that we're the trusted player we've done over eighteen hundred ASAP migration. Where an epic health care leader go talk to Novaya. They asked them how it's gone on Virtus Dreams Cloud amazing set of mission critical capability. But what we're taking is there's this infrastructure is a service in the software stack on the services that software stack is extreme. What we want to do is enable that software stack to manage data and applications in a private environment, a public environment on Prem, and it's all based on the M where so it ties directly into Jeff and Pat's announcement This morning, where they talked about Veum, where being a platform and how they're going to create the Del Cloud on that platform. Virtus Dream is one of the destinations for mission critical workload, but because it's based on VM, where technology it seamlessly begins to integrate across that and allows us to manage data and applications linking our extreme software with the BM, where capabilities that allowed that data and the AP eyes to exchange data and flow freely in a multi cloud world, ninety seven percent of the customers and the forest to research we just released are going to go multi cloud for mission critical, not just based. This's for their most critical applications data >> so future your energy is outstanding in your enthusiasm for this. What are some of the early reactions that customers air having to some of this exciting, groundbreaking news that's coming out today? What do your expectations? >> Well, you know, I spent time with customers, uh, every week and we talk about it, but I've actually talked to customers this day today about it. They found the energy, the passion that the technology that was introduced this morning was sort of game changing because to Stu's point, they are going in a multi cloud era and they know it's going to be multi cloud. And there's going to be on Prem public private. It's gonna link altogether. They need the technology trusted advisors that can work with them, not with a single answer. That only fits one way. Adele Technologies. You want to run on Prem? We have those capabilities you want to run on public count. We have those technologies you want to run in a hybrid kind of solution or a private cloud. We're going to create the ability with these announcements today, tow link it together and create the ability to do it seamlessly, efficiently, productively, cost effectively that allows Our customers too dramatically transformed their business to take them on that digital transformation to disrupt their industries and win. Because when our customers win, we win. That's what we do. Adelle Technologies, we and able our customers to win, and it's all about the customers every single day. You talked about the integration when Michael said every day when we were doing the integration, he said on every decision. When we were building the company, we basically built a new company level by level, he said. The guiding principle that every decision is customer in How does this matter of the customer? How does it make a difference for the customer? And I think we live that everyday. There's fifty fifteen thousand of our closest friends here in Las Vegas there, pretty excited to be here. And why did they take that time? Because we're one of their trusted partners on their digital transformation journey. That's not a bad place to be. If you can't get excited about that, >> Yeah, I'm Rory in the wrong industry. It was amazing to me how fast that immigration work happened. We talked to Howard Elias a bunch along the journey. I'm glad we finally get to you, get you on the record for >> Howard's in the Be's and Guy. What an awesome partner. >> And so you know, one of them's dried. It's ten months is you know, if this thing had taken twenty four months, so much of the industry would have changed by the time from when you went into when you went out. So I guess How do you how do you look at kind of those massive waves versus you know where you need to be with products today in the market and where customers are because you know the danger. You say I want to listen to the customers. Well, you get the old saying if you ask customers they wanted, you know Ah, faster buggy. You know how right you are so right, You make sure you're, you know, hitting that next wave and keeping up with it. I look at you know, all the pieces you have of the puzzle that is the family and in different places along the spectrum. >> Well, I think there's, you know, there's value in the diversity of thought, right, and we talk about on Workforce. But it's a business. The idea that Del technologies is this group of businesses and all these experiences coming together and the interactions with customers from the smallest mom and pop shops farms toe all the way to the most Jake Ganic industry. Transformational companies. You were exposed to a lot of things, and with the kind of forty, one hundred and forty thousand professionals working together and with Michael's vision and the El Tee's vision, there's an ability to see that future, and he is always looking at the future. It's interesting. I worked for a lot of interesting people, but you know, Michael's ability to Teo understand data and of you, he said. It's about having a big year, right? Your ears be twice the size of your mouth. I mean, you gotta listen. And I seriously think he must have a tree of Keebler elves creating data and information. I've never seen so much someone with more data and information. And he he listens. He values the input. He's quick to make a decision, but the team rot rallies around that idea. How can we find that future? And if we make a mistake, let's fix it fast. Let's learn really quick. Make that decision, learn quickly, adjust and capture the opportunity. And it's all about speed and what matters to the customer. I've seen it firsthand. I've been here four years. I spent twenty three years at IBM. I spent five years in Lenovo as their CEO and president. I was CEO and president of Advanced Micro Devices. It's amazing environment where you create a place where technological leaders come every day to solve the most difficult solutions with the founder of the company. That's one of the industry icons, and it's just an amazing privilege and honor to be part of it. And I think you feel that from every person you talk to, that's part of Del Technologies. I am being part of that. Integration was one of the most proudest experiences of my life, and you know what we did way never ran it as an integration office. We kept the decisions with the line with the business, and we had a rapid pays to get through it and decided, and we learned quickly and we adjusted as we went. It wasn't perfect, but it wass pretty close. It's pretty close and I'm bias. I got it. I buy just But it was good. It was good. It was really a great thing. And Howard, amazing guy. But it was because people believed in the vision and they all work together. And when people work together, you can grow, do amazing and great thing. >> You're right. It's all about the people >> it is >> or it's been such a pleasure. Having you on the cute this afternoon was to me. I wish we had more time because I know we can keep talking about it. You're gonna have to come back >> anytime. You like me. It was a pleasure. And thank you so much for taking time to speak to me when you talk to boo me this afternoon, make sure you get into that technology's world. Vast cloud integration platform >> you got. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you. First to Minuteman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day one of our double sat coverage of Del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. This is the Cube Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our eighth year of covering EMC World, but now called Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier, your co-host on our set one and with my co-host Paul Gillin this week as well as Kieth Townshend and John Walls and Rebecca Knight on set two. Double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World with you. Thanks for joining us for three days of wall to wall coverage. Paul, so much to talk about here this week. Digital transformation, little bit boring theme, it's being played out in real time. But this is a historic moment because one, the Cube started at EMC World in 2010, eight years ago. But, this is the first official EMC World where it's Dell EMC World, kind of a mini event in Austin, but since Michael Dell took over, or I'm sorry, merger of equals, a combination. >> Paul: Combination, as they call it. >> (chuckling) Combination. This is the first instantiation of EMC World as Dell EMC World. Jeremy Burton's now the CMO of Dell Technologies which is the holding company for all the companies. It's the same EMC World flair, now the integrated content. Notable absent Cube alumni and executives from EMC. We'll talk about that in the EMC Mafia segment shortly, but (chuckling) your thoughts because now Michael Dell's puttin' the rubber to the road. Kind of nothing earth shattering in his keynote, but certainly private company, all guns blaring, smiling and dialing, he's got the swagger on stage. >> Well, Michael is nothing if not an optimist. He's always good at seeing a brighter future, and at his keynote this morning, as you said it was blissfully free of content, but it did talk a lot about digital transformation which is of course the buzzword of the year in the IT industry. Little surprised that Dell adopted the same buzzword that HP and Cisco and all these other big companies are adopting. What happened in the keynote is less interesting than how the mood changes here, and this is the coming out party for Dell EMC. Yeah, there was a conference last October, a month after the merger, but this is really, things have finally settled out, now six months later and it's a chance for customers and for the partners to get a sense of how well this is all working out. >> And one of the things I'm watching is how the story's unfolding 'cause now you're starting to see the big companies, certainly in the consolidation side of the business market of infrastructure and data center and enterprise IT, it's a consolidating mature market. It is transforming, there is a cloud story requirement, there are new software requirements, software defined data center, as well as new growth opportunities, so what I'm looking at is what is the story? What is Michael packaging and how does that compare to the competition? We're going to hear from HPE at HPE Discover coming up, the Cube will be covering that for the seventh consecutive year. We're seeing Amazon's story playing out in real time. Oracle's story, everyone's got their story. And it's certainly digital transformation but what's interesting is Michael's got the packaging. He's packaging it up, your thoughts. >> And Michael kind of dissed the cloud this morning, actually in his presentation. He said, you can't have a successful business, or your business is not going to grow as quickly if you're 100% cloud based. He was very much making a pitch for data center infrastructure. Really not surprising coming from Michael. One thing that will be a sub-theme here I think is how this merger is working out, and as we wrote on Silicon Angle this week, if you go back to the history of big mega mergers, particularly in the hardware industry, going back to Burroughs Sperry, DEC Compaq, HP Compaq, Wellfleet Synoptics and NCR AT&T. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Pretty much all disasters, and we really haven't seen a merger anywhere near this scale between two IT companies that has worked well. All indications are now that they're doing the right things, they even have some people on board with Dell EMC who went through some of those mergers. But it's going to be interesting to see how they break a pattern that has been decidedly negative. >> Great point, I loved your post by the way, and I would add that interesting observation, at least from my perspective is, as we sit down with these billionaires and interview them one-on-one on the Cube is, you look at Amazon, Andy Jasse and Jeff Bezos, Bezos in particular. Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, you have essentially captains of industry at the helm. Michael Dell is no spring chicken, but he's also not over the hill either, he's 51 years old. >> Paul: He's a kid relative to most leaders in this industry. >> You know, you hear Jeff Bezos talk and I was watching his talk in DC just this week, he's saying we're taking the long view. If you look at Amazon.com's CEO, Bezos, look at Michael Dell, look at what Ellison's doing, they're all playing the long game card. Now I don't know if that's a hedge against we don't have our story right, or give us more time to bake out our stuff, but I think what's different about Dell Technologies is, Michael's 33 years into the business, one trillion dollars later in sales and he's young, so I think that is a wild card. Ellison's still running the show, Bezos is still running the show, Dell's certainly running the show. I think the wild card on this is the fact that you got a strong founder, and a privately held company. >> And Ellison, it's questionable how long Ellison will be able to run the show, I mean he is over 70 at this point. Dell certainly will be around for a long time. You have to take a long term strategy. If you're not Amazon, you have to take a long term strategy 'cause what other choice do you have? You've lost in the short term, so it's not surprising to hear these guys going that way. I'll be interested to hear from Michael and from his team about the cloud and how they really design and differentiate its strategy. I think IBM has staked its position in cloud out pretty well. Even HPE has got a differentiated position. HPE of course has the configurable hardware, that's a point that Dell I think has to come back on, and the big question is software. John, as you pointed out the other day, VMware is worth more than HPE, by a substantial margin at this point. They've got this huge asset in VMware, not to mention Virtuestream and Pivotal and the other good software assets they acquired. What are they going to do with them? Are they just going to let 'em go free like Michael has done in the past, or are they going to try to mold these into some kind of coordinated whole? >> Well, great point one is on the HPE valuation thing market cap, VMware's actually worth more on market cap and public markets than HPE. Interesting, but not significant in my mind yet, but it does point to the fact that Michael Dell's rhetoric on stage today, he didn't take any shots at HP. Last year he took a big shot at HPE. It's been his rival from day one. I used to work at HP when he was just a mail order company selling white boxes and then he grew that business, obviously the rest is history, but no shot at HP because VMware has to work with HP. Right, (chuckling) so that's interesting. Two is, on the software side, Dell is a hardware company, let's face it. But they have more software now than they've ever had before so that is a good point, we're going to be getting into this date software defined data center to find out how much they actually have. A couple core themes that I see already popping out of the keynote, one, Pivotal. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry's instrumental in the keynotes. NSX was mentioned, Pat Gelsinger's going to be on tomorrow. NSX is VMware's secret play. If you look at what NSX is doing with the Amazon public cloud deal that they did recently this year, NSX could be the real lever in that intellectual property, that lock in, that kind of differentiation. The cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT is another message we heard all day today. To me, and your point about bashing cloud, I actually think that's a stake in the ground to kind of hold the line, because they have no cloud strategy. Now, their cloud strategy is kind of hand waiving right now with multi-cloud, which I buy, but multi-cloud is still a fantasy in my mind. Latencies are too low, there just isn't the kind of plumbing yet in place on the clouds for multi-cloud, but certainly hybrid-cloud I think will be multi-cloud roll, so those are the key things and then I'm going to ask Michael directly. You blew 60 billion dollars on this deal. Is there any cash left for M&A? >> Paul: Acquisitions, yeah. >> M&A right now is hot market, you can do some nice tuck ins, fill in the white spaces on the products. Get those software assets and really start cobbling together a growth strategy. There's no doubt in my mind, Paul, that they're going to win the mature, classic business school move of consolidated market. Own the consolidated market, and try to get a growth strategy. To me, that's going to be the big question. What is Dell Technologies and Dell EMC's growth strategy? >> And you would have to think it's either through M&A, perhaps an acquisition of HPE if the valuation continues to go down. Or it's in software It's a good point you made about VMware. Vmware also has a strategic alliance with IBM, so if you're Michael Dell, it's hard to give a compelling keynote speech these days because you can't really offend anybody. His companies now are in cahoots with all these other firms, and of course dissing the cloud is even dangerous because Cloud Foundry is such a critical part of the Pivotal strategy. I think it's an important point, you've got a company that is almost trying to reassemble the old IBM, the old IBM of the '80s which dominated every segment that was important Dell is almost doing that now, I mean the only piece they really don't have is networking. To make a big play, to become the mongo IT company in the world, can they raise the kind of funds for that? >> Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the cloud transition as well as what I'm calling the EMC mafia, folks that have been on the Cube and big executives at EMC. We'll get to that in a minute, but I just want to talk about that cloud play, because you're right, the growth strategy has to come from software. I just don't see the cloud growth yet for these guys, although Michael, in the hallway, conversations are growth in the cloud is doing really well for EMC, not sure. But on the growth strategy, Pivotal, Boo-Mee, Vmware, Virtuestream, and Software Converge Infrastructure are interesting plays, so I think that's where we have to look here. I still think there's a lot of holes in the product line. To me that's important. Now, trends so far, and what we're expecting to hear at the show is, some of my notes Paul, I'll share with you, and get your reaction on. All flash arrays are going to be big, continuing to grow that. Hyperconverge VX rail, we heard that on stage today, claiming to be number one. Power edge 14G. Again, back to speeds and feeds, (chuckling) you know. Storage. Storage is the bread and butter of EMC and now Dell EMC I still think is going to be a real critical beachhead that they going to continue to expand, storage is not going away. Obviously the ice lawn all flash is coming out, and then SSD's, data protection in the cloud. You're starting to see them going where their roots are. Cloud stuff is coming out of the data domain, kind of their core storage first, make sense strategy wise, while they buy their time to fill in the cloud. >> Well, it's a good point about storage. They have a comfortable lead in storage. According to the latest IDC figures, they're a good 15 points ahead of their next biggest competitor. They have a comfortable lead in the hyper converge infrastructure. Four different product lines in that area. These are beachheads that they have to shore up. They have to be sure that their market share doesn't erode in those areas. The question is where does the growth come from? You look at a company that's going through a very similar transition right now, Cisco, which has finally really bought in to software defined networking and is remaking its company around it. That company is having to change the whole culture in response to a technology trend. Now the same thing's going on in the data center. Everything's being remade as virtualized and Vmware is at the center of that, so Michael Dell has the asset to be able to lead that conversion, but are they psychologically going to get there? >> Great point. One, I would agree with you that the whole Cisco example proves the same channel that Dell EMC is. Can they move up the stack? In this case, they're hardware guys, can they add software. Cisco, they're transforming themselves to be more cloud native. The classic move's happening. Cisco have been trying to move up the stack for over a generation. They're plumbing guys, they're networking guys. These guys are hardware guys. Can they get the DNA to truly become software providers, not in the sense of selling software, just providing a software fabric that's going to be the key differentiators, because digital transformation is about IT transformation. That is certainly the reality, what we're seeing when you start to peel back the onions. And that to me is going to be the big discussion because as David Gooldun said on stage, apps provide the value. As the enterprises build more apps, you got to have a platform, you got to have a cohesive horizontal end to end software fabric, and the question is, do they have it? >> Well, they certainly have the foundation for it, I mean they have Pivotal, there's a whole developer community around Pivotal. Dell itself doesn't have a developer community, nor does EMC but they have elements of that to build upon. The interesting thing about the conversion to software, about software defined infrastructure, is that it requires thinking from an application perspective and that's not something hardware companies have ever been inclined to do. So, how does Michael Dell make that transition, has he made it himself, is there other leadership he's going to have to bring in who are going to make it for him? The whole leadership of the Dell EMC company right now is ex-Dell and EMC people, it's hardware guys. >> I'm going to put pressure on Dell, the question on software. But you wrote a two part series on SiliconAngle.com, worth checking out, getting a lot of viral buzz around open source and the value of open source, because if you look at say Cisco for instance, what they're doing with the cloud native strategy, they have actually pivoted and Chuck Robbins, the CEO has acknowledged, actually re-tweeted one of my tweets the other day, with as we were talking about this new program called DevNet Create. They're taking the developer program from Cisco and moving it into an open community model, which basically is the toe in the water for saying, we have to figure out open source. All the critical, big vendors that are transforming from called the old guard, as Amazon calls 'em, Amazon Web Services, Andy Jasse. Dell's an old guard guy, but still young, but they got to get to open source. What are you finding is the success parameters there because you got to play in the open source, be a contributing member. Again, back to the DNA of the culture, and two, there's real value there. >> Well, there's no question that open source has won when it comes to infrastructure. I mean, the biggest IT companies in the world which are Google and Facebook, are both built on open source platforms. Game over. This is where IT infrastructure is headed. Cisco, interesting case because they are an infrastructure company, and they are being eroded, their traditional market is being eroded by open source, they've chosen to embrace it through their developer community. Cisco is one company I would never bet against. They're such a great company. If anyone's going to make the transition, they will. Open source is still an infrastructure play. I don't see open source in the applications area being a major driver, but Dell is an infrastructure company, so you have to assume that everything they're doing in managing, in securing storage and servers is going to be under pressure from open source at some point. They have to embrace that as Cisco is doing. >> Paul, we had thought leader chat with some experts on our digital panel, software crowd chat, everyone knows crowdchat.net, check it out. And comment and conversation was taking place among the influential folks saying, what is a software company? You go back to the web, shrink wrapped, download software, to now fully SAS based and Saas now platform, what is a software company? So, the question was, is Facebook a software company? Or are they an app company? Which begs the question, you have to be a software company, but it's not the classic software company category, business model. You need software (chuckling) to run stuff, so you can be a hardware guy, like Michael Dell, and have Dell Technologies. You can be a network company like Cisco, but you've got to be a software company in the new way. >> Well, I spoke to a Forester analyst in writing that piece on open source who had a great point, he said Facebook and Google are two big successful software companies, neither of which makes. >> Any money. >> Any money, a little bit in Google's case licensing software. They created business models that have nothing to do with the traditional software model, but that have leveraged their expertise in the software that they've developed. And maybe that is the business model, ultimately the business model is building software in order to do something else with it that customers will pay for. >> I think you're on to something. I think your post illuminates that. I think that this is going to be one of those things where in the history books of the tech generation, as we're on our whatever wave of open source generation, this is it, it's not about the business model of the software, it's how the software's being used in the business model of the transformation. That is really really key. Paul, I want to just talk about, really quickly about my observation at EMC. A little bit of editorial moment here. Because, Dell took over. Dell EMC. We've interviewed now eight years, pretty much all the executives at EMC over the years, but there's an EMC mafia developing. There's a lot of people who have left EMC, that we know, we're friends with. Guy Churchwood, CJ DeSai, Josh Conn, Rich DePellatano, Brian Gallagher, BJ Jenkins, Sanjay Murchandani, and many more have left because of the consolidation. Certainly you can't, EMC's going to get consolidated down, but no major layoffs but still enough that some eagles have flown from the nest, as they say and are running other companies. So you have this EMC culture out there of very sales oriented, very customer centric, now running other companies, and I want to give a shout out to all those EMC alumni and mafia out there. Good luck on your new ventures, but the impact here to Dell is a mashup of the two cultures. What's your observation, what's your reaction of that. Have you heard anything? I have some thoughts, but I want to get your reaction because okay, some eagles fly away, you still got the worker bees inside EMC, and now Dell coming together. Thoughts on the culture clash. >> Well, I live in Boston, and so I've been through the acquisition of Prime Computer, through EMC acquiring Data General, through the DEC acquisition by Compaq. All of which were disasters, and all of which where the cultural issues were much bigger than the technology issues. So, I think that that is something that Dell has to be front and center for Michael Dell, is how do you mash up these two cultures. As you pointed out, EMC, very aggressive, take no prisoners, enterprise-oriented sales force. Their sales people make a lot of money. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone was EMC salespeople. >> John: Buying new houses. >> They were making a million dollars a year. And you've got Dell with its direct model, with its channeled model, and without a particularly strong roots in enterprise sales force and how do you coordinate those. It's not surprising to see people leaving. Of course, in the early days after an acquisition, choices get made, people get promoted and moved in new positions. Those who lose out tend to leave the company. But, I think the sales issue would be something to delve into too. Does Dell want to adopt EMC's sales style, or the other way around? Or is there some way that they can live both in harmony? >> You know, I follow a lot of companies in Silicon Valley as well, I'm out there on the west coast, left coast, as they say. Where all the crazy ones are, as they say. But I got to say, there's been some shrinkage on EMC, but for the most part, I haven't really heard any really negative horror stories. Actually, it's been going pretty well, and I think you bring up an issue of effectiveness with the sales folks. Dell's an efficiency guy, right so you got effectiveness and efficiency coming together. But I think they've handled it well. I really haven't heard any real horror stories. Again, I think that has to do with the founder being actively involved, they're a private company, so they have some room. And I think they've invested in making that happen, so I think generally, props to EMC folks and for the Dell folks on the acquisition. Still not clear the woods yet, it's going to surely be in the products and the revenue, but for the most part, we're going to unpack that. So Paul. >> But you can't, I just wanted to jump in just quickly. You can't minimize customer touch, and EMC was always a high touch company. Outstanding service, they put people on a plane in the middle of the night, charter a private jet in the middle of the night to get someone on site at a customer to fix a problem. As you mentioned, Dell is an efficiency company. That's not a very efficient way to operate. Can they absorb the best of EMC and the best of Dell at the same time? >> Yeah, well we'll certainly tell, I mean they got a lot of competition, Michael Dell saying on stage. (mumbling) startups, essentially what's he's saying is Amazon, there in my opinion, although that's not probly what he really meant but that's my interpretation. But I'm expecting to see the same old EMC world with a twist, and that is, we're doin' good, the messaging's out there, we're going to see how the products compare vis a vis the competition. I'm interested in Vmware piece. Paul, what are you looking forward to? >> I'm looking forward to hearing how this is all going, how this company is culturally, what kind of a cultural chimera they're putting together here that's going to make sense, that the market is going to understand. I also want to hear how they're going to differentiate in cloud, internet of things, we just heard a little bit about that this morning. That's something where I think you're seeing Cisco. The way Cisco's dealing with the cloud these days is to say, don't worry about it, it's all going IOT. It's all going to distributed intelligent devices, the cloud is already history, is what they're saying. So, does Dell have a similar differentiated position on that. I'm least interested in hearing about the new products because it's speeds and feeds. But really, how is this company going to dominate an industry, how is it going to get over some of the speed bumps that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes that have foiled so many merger attempts in the past. >> One of the tell signs that I look at a conference when I see a lot of AI washing. The good news is, there's not a lot of AI being talked about here, 'cause usually that's just lipstick on the pig, as they say. Except for the case of Google and Amazon Web Services, they do have some AI story, with some real products to back it up. For the most part, you're not seeing EMC glob on the whole machine learning, rah rah. They did talk about it but it wasn't like a big theme. I think they really talked about the packaging of the value. Of the brands together, comments around costs for public cloud, nice little ding there. I'm going to dig into the story. I'm going to really test the story, and I'm going to look at the customer traction. I really want to see who they have on stage, I really want to hear who's really going down the road, how that growth strategy, 'cause I think they're going to win the data consolidation market pretty handily, and the question between HPE and Dell, for instance, 'cause that's really to me the two big horses on the track. Who's going to win the growth. Who's going to be able to lock in their beachhead on the core market, traditional market, and have access to the growth of what cloud will bring and IOT and among other things. >> I think at this point, HP has a better story in that area with their configurable infrastructure, with their pay as you go on site model, really interesting models. I was at HP World in Europe in December, and I came away from that feeling like these guys have some unique talking points here. At least they have a strategy that I think I understand and that is different. Dell is still working through this huge merger and that's a big catch. >> Bottom line is, Dave Donatelli, who's an executive at Oracle told me, he also was an EMC executive, and HPE. The business of provisioning servers and storage (laughing) is not going to be the growth strategy. Now, it might be a component of the overall business model, like software, but ultimately, that business is in decline, and that's a fact. Okay, this is the Cube, bringing you all the coverage of the kickoff from day one at Dell EMC World 2017. Our eighth year, three days of wall to wall coverage. We have two sets, the blue set and the white set. Go to SiliconAngle.tv to find the coverage, also go on Twitter, follow us on the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, kickin' off Dell EMC World 2017, back with more, stay with us after this short break. (atmospheric instrumental music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's the CUBE from Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, Nvidia. And our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts: Dave Vellante and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is the CUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Holden Karau is here, principle software engineer with IBM. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you for having me. It's nice to be back. >> So, what's with Boo? >> So, Boo is my stuffed dog that I bring-- >> You've got to hold Boo up. >> Okay, yeah. >> Can't see Boo. >> So, this is Boo. Boo comes with me to all of my conferences in case I get stressed out. And she also hangs out normally on the podium while I'm giving the talk as well, just in case people get bored. You know, they can look at Boo. >> So, Boo is not some new open source project. >> No, no, Boo is not an open source project. But Boo is really cute. So, that counts for something. >> All right, so, what's new in your world of spark and machinery? >> So, there's a lot of really exciting things, right. Spark 2.0.0 came out, and that's really exciting because we finally got to get rid of some of the chunkier APIs. And data sets are just becoming sort of the core base of everything going forward in Spark. This is bringing the Spark Sequel engine to all sorts of places, right. So, the machine learning APIs are built on top of the data set API now. The streaming APIs are being built on top of the data set APIs. And this is starting to actually make it a lot easier for people to work together, I think. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy is when we can have people from different sort of profiles or roles work together. And so this support of data sets being everywhere in Spark now lets people with more of like a Sequel background still write stuff that's going to be used directly in sort of a production pipeline. And the engineers can build whatever, you know, production ready stuff they need on top of the Sequel expressions from the analysts and do some really cool stuff there. >> So, chunky API, what does that mean to a layperson? >> Sure, um, it means like, for example, there's this thing in Spark where one of the things you want to do is shuffle a whole bunch of data around and then look at all of the records associated with a given key, right? But, you know, when the APIs were first made, right, it was made by university students. Very smart university students, but you know, it started out as like a grad school project, right? And like, um, so finally with 2.0, we were about to get rid of things like places where we use traits like iterables rather than iterators. And because like these minor little drunky things it's like we had to keep supporting this old API, because you can't break people's code in a minor release, but when you do a big release like Spark 2.0, you can actually go, okay, you need to change your stuff now to start using Spark 2.0. But as a result of changing that in this one place, we're actually able to better support spilling to disk. And this is for people who have too much data to fit in memory even on the individual executors. So, being able to spill to disk more effectively is really important from a performance point of view. So, there's a lot of clean up of getting rid of things, which were sort of holding us back performance-wise. >> So, the value is there. Enough value to break the-- >> Yeah, enough value to break the APIs. And 1.6 will continue to be updated for people that are not ready to migrate right today. But for the people that are looking at it, it's definitely worth it, right? You get a bunch of real cool optimizations. >> One of the themes of this event of the last couple of years has been complexity. You guys wrote an article recently in SiliconANGLE some of the broken promises of open source, really the route of it, being complexity. So, Spark addresses that to a large degree. >> I think so. >> Maybe you could talk about that and explain to us sort of how and what the impact could be for businesses. >> So, I think Spark does a really good job of being really user-friendly, right? It has a Sequel engine for people that aren't comfortable with writing, you know, Scala or Java or Python code. But then on top of that, right, there's a lot of analysts that are really familiar with Python. And Spark actually exposes Python APIs and is working on exposing R APIs. And this is making it so that if you're working on Spark, you don't have to understand the internals in a lot of depth, right? There's some other streaming systems where to make them perform really well, you have to have a really deep mental model of what you're doing. But with Spark, it's much simpler and the APIs are cleaner, and they're exposed in the ways that people are already used to working with their data. And because it's exposed in ways that people are used to working with their data, they don't have to relearn large amounts of complexity. They just have to learn it in the few cases where they run into problems, right? Because it will work most of the time just with the sort of techniques that they're used to doing. So, I think that it's really cool. Especially structured streaming, which is new in Spark 2.0. And structured streaming makes it so that you can write sort of arbitrary Sequel expressions on streaming data, which is really awesome. Like, you can do aggregations without having to sit around and think about how to effectively do an aggregation over different microbatches. That's not a problem for you to worry about. That's a problem for the Spark developers to worry about. Which, unfortunately, is sometimes a problem for me to worry about, but you know, not too often. Boo helps out whenever it gets too stressful. >> First of all, a lot to learn. But there's been some great research done in places like Cornell and Penn and others about how the open source community collaborates and works together. And I'm wondering is the open source community that's building things like Spark, especially in a domain like Big Data, which the use cases themselves are so complex and so important. Are we starting to take some of the knowledge in the contributors, or developing, on how to collaborate and how to work together. And starting to find that way into the tools so that the whole thing starts to collaborate better? >> Yeah, I think, actually, if you look at Spark, you can see that there's a lot of sort of tools that are being built on top of Spark, which are also being built in similar models. I mean, the Apache Software Foundation is a really good tool for managing projects of a certain scale. You can see a lot of Spark-related projects that have also decided that become part of Apache Foundation is a good way to manage their governance and collaborate with different people. But then there's people that look at Spark and go like wow, there's a lot of overhead here. I don't think I'm going to have 500 people working on this project. I'm going to go and model my project after something a bit simpler, right? And I think that both of those are really valid ways of building open source tools on Spark. But it's really interesting seeing there's a Spark components page, essentially, a Spark packages list, for community to publish the work that they're doing on top of Spark. And it's really interesting to see all of the collaborations that are happening there. Especially even between vendors sometimes. You'll see people make tools, which help everyone's data access go faster. And it's open source. so you'll see it start to get contributed into other people's data access layers as well. >> So, pedagogy of how the open source community's work starting to find a way into the tools, so people who aren't in the community, but are focused on the outcomes are now able to not only gain the experience about how the big data works, but also how people on complex outcomes need to work. >> I think that's definitely happening. And you can see that a lot with, like, the collaboration layers that different people are building on top of Spark, like the different notebook solutions, are all very focused on ableing collaboration, right? Because if you're an analyst and you're writing some python code on your local machine, you're not going to, like, probably set up a get up recode to share that with everyone, right? But if you have a notebook and you can just send the link to your friends and be like hey, what's up, can you take a look at this? You can share your results more easily and you can also work together a lot more, more collaboratively. And then so data bricks is doing some great things. IBM as well. I'm sure there's other companies building great notebook solutions who I'm forgetting. But the notebooks, I think, are really empowering people to collaborate in ways that we haven't traditionally seen in the big data space before. >> So, collaboration, to stay on that theme. So, we had eight data scientists on a panel the other night and just talking about, collaboration came up, and the question is specifically from an application developer standpoint. As data becomes, you know, the new development kit, how much of a data scientist do you have to become or are you becoming as a developer? >> Right, so, my role is very different, right? Because I focus just on tools, mostly. So, my data science is mostly to make sure that what I'm doing is actually useful to other people. Because a lot of the people that consume my stuff are data scientists. So, for me, personally, like the answer is not a whole lot. But for a lot of my friends that are working in more traditional sort of data engineering roles where they're empowering specific use cases, they find themselves either working really closely with data scientists often to be like, okay, what are your requirements? What data do I need to be able to get to you so you can do your job? And, you know, sometimes if they find themselves blocking on the data scientists, they're like, how hard could it be? And it turns out, you know, statistics is actually pretty complicated. But sometimes, you know, they go ahead and pick up some of the tools on their own. And we get to see really cool things with really, really ugly graphs. 'Cause they do not know how to use graphing libraries. But, you know, it's really exciting. >> Machine learning is another big theme in this conference. Maybe you could share with us your perspectives on ML and what's happening there. >> So, I really thing machine learning is very powerful. And I think machine learning in Spark is also super powerful. And especially just like the traditional things is you down-sample your data. And you train a bunch of your models. And then, eventually, you're like okay, I think this is like the model that I want to like build for real. And then you go and you get your engineer to help you train it on your giant data set. But Spark and the notebooks that are built on top of it actually mean that it's entirely reasonable for data scientists to take the tools which are traditionally used by the data engineering roles, and just start directly applying them during their exploration phase. And so we're seeing a lot of really more interesting models come to life, right? Because if you're always working with down-sampled data, it's okay, right? Like you can do reasonable exploration on down-sampled data. But you can find some really cool sort of features that you wouldn't normally find once you're working with your full data set, right? 'Cause you're just not going to have that show up in your down-sampled data. And I think also streaming machine learning is a really interesting thing, right? Because we see there's a lot of IOT devices and stuff like that. And like the traditional machine learning thing is I'm going to build a model and then I'm going to deploy it. And then like a week later, I'll maybe consider building a new model. And then I'll deploy it. And then so very much it looks like the old software release processes as opposed to the more agile software release processes. And I think that streaming machine learning can look a lot more like, sort of the agile software development processes where it's like cool, I've got a bunch of labeled data from our contractors. I'm going to integrate that right away. And if I don't see any regression on my cross-validation set, we're just going to go ahead and deploy that today. And I think it's really exciting. I'm obviously a little biased, because some of my work right now is on enabling machine learning with structured streaming in Spark. So, I obviously think my work is useful. Otherwise I would be doing something else. But it's entirely possible. You know, everyone will be like Holden, your work is terrible. But I hope not. I hope people find it useful. >> Talking about sampling. In our first at Dupe World 2010, Albi Meta, he stopped by again today, of course, and he made the statement then. Sampling's dead. It's dead. Is sampling dead? >> Sampling didn't quite die. I think we're getting really close to killing sampling. Sampling will only be data once all of the data scientists in the organization have access to the same tools that the data engineers have been using, right? 'Cause otherwise you'll still be sampling. You'll still be implicitly doing your model selection on down-sampled data. And we'll still probably always find an excuse to sample data, because I'm lazy and sometimes I just want to develop on my laptop. But, you know, I think we're getting close to killing a lot more of sampling. >> Do you see an opportunity to start utilizing many of these tools to actually improve the process of building models, finding data sources, identifying individuals that need access to the data? Are we going to start turning big data on the problem of big data? >> No, that's really exciting. And so, okay, so this is something that I find really enjoyable. So, one of the things that traditionally, when everyone's doing their development on their laptop, right? You don't get to collect a lot of metrics about what they're doing, right? But once you start moving everyone into a sort of more integrated notebook environment, you can be like, okay, like, these are data sets that these different people are accessing. Like these are the things that I know about them. And you can actually train a recommendation algorithm on the data sets to recommend other data sets to people. And there are people that are starting to do this. And I think it's really powerful, right? Because it's like in small companies, maybe not super important, right? Because I'll just go an ask my coworker like hey, what data sets do I want to use? But if you're at a company like Google or IBM scale or even like a 500 person company, you're not going to know all of the data sets that are available for you to work with. And the machine will actually be able to make some really interesting recommendations there. >> All right, we have to leave it there. We're out of time. Holden, thanks very much. >> Thank you so much for having me and having Boo. >> Pleasure. All right, any time. Keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE. We're live from New York City. We'll be right back.