>> "theCube" presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, Welcome back to "theCube's" continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening. About seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well-attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including APEX. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante are going to unpack more of APEX with our next two Cube alumni who are returning, Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of APEX product marketing joins us, and Chad Dunn, VP of product management APEX. Guys, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> It is really great to be back. >> So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, APEX has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akanksha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. >> Yeah. So it's been an exciting week like you said. APEX just for sort of background is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions, we introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and then the conversations we've had, you know, over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of clouds, you know, on-premises, in a co-lo, on the far edge, at a hyperscale or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a pain point... This is very real pain point for them. And our goal in our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different, you know, silos of data, if you will. It's something that they really want more of from us. >> Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on APEX, we have seen the threat landscape massively change. >> It increases every day. >> It increases every day, ransomware is no longer a... Is it going to happen too? It's a matter of when? >> Yes. >> Talk to us about the influence of the customer of this being the first full stack solution on APEX. >> Sure, like I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber techs. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation, it's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important into our customers. And we're finding that, you know, many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as-a-service solution, like the one that we're offering really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as-a-service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2000 of these, and making that a standardized offering with T-shirt sizing, subscription basis, really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. >> All right, so we have Chad in product management, Akanksha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this, that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were, that internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that, but how did it change how you manage, you know, deploy the life cycle of the product and communicate that. >> I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us. And a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on. And it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a north star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. One, we know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using cyber recovery solution as an example, yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. That those are a different set of personas for us to market to, to communicate with, whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a... I mean, events like this are great, and we certainly love to be back in person, but in as-a-service model, you want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always on-marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. >> On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry, Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization and any industry with respect to the cybersecurity in that threat landscape is brand reputation. >> Yeah. >> Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have... We're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation than persona change? >> It is certainly part of it. But, you know, we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So, you know, it is a sea level discussion to, you know, understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of, you know, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And you know, if you look at APEX overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those. And I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to, you know, consuming by the drip, consuming APEX, consuming as-a-service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical, and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally, from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're, you know, developing product in APEX today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in APEX. I came from the HCI business. And I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to 4 billion in pretty quickly. So, Hey, let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this. But it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office. Because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years. And this is all very new to us. So it's pretty amazing journey. >> I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, "Eh, it's not cloud." >> No. >> Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? >> Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say... I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers... Where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively, and our data and your data shows it, that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments, by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years... You know, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race, but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services, and our infrastructure is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. >> Yeah. Well, you know, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. You know, I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know it is all about multi-cloud, and you know that we're, you know, absolutely embracing it from, you know, Project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud, to what we're doing with APEX and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where the data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations, using that platform that we've created for APEX. And that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly, and then provide more day two management optimization operation of the solutions by our customers. >> Okay. Sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. And I got to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super-cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera, or are there APEX specific differentiators? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are absolutely the Dell differentiators of the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team, and the expertise that they've built, which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market and this offer. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for APEX against the traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us. And it's one that our customers in the past year have retreated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract the way that complexity from our customers, so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about. And then not really worry about the peace parts, whether it's the hardware, the software, or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue, you know, some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that. And it's more of a... You know, that complexity is still there. And what we hear from our customers is, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right. And we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. >> Yeah. Like I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions, right? So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance computer as-a-service, MLOps as-a-service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered, but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. >> Well, the high velocity these days is critical. As we've seen the last two years, things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. >> And the transparency. Right? So going back to his example, having that price transparency. You can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console. In a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware, and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we are hearing... I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment, but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process, allow them to focus in other areas. >> Oh, absolutely. That time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability, to your point, Akanksha, to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business for... Add value, move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whit on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud. A lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. But what Dell wants to do is change that, multi-cloud by design. Is APEX going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. >> We absolutely will be. So if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed services. Whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is since you're in those clouds, you want access to your data and you want it centrally, so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds, but you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your compute on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty, it could be policy compliance, it could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere, very seamless for our customers, right? So it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. >> The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, "Dave, this was a really good show for us." And they probably had a quasi competitive solution. I don't really know. But like a lot of customers and, you know, got a lot of leads out of it. So it's the hot topic and that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you... You really... You've always been security conscious. But I never really full cracked the security solution. And now here it is in APEX, it's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? >> It really started back in 2014, specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where, you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio, from a software and storage perspective and say, "Hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology." So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air gaped imutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like APEX that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing and operating was really a natural fit. So you know, we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. >> Great. Awesome. >> Akanksha, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in APEX? You know, when I think about ransomware in data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out, customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell's huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon APEX? >> Yeah So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. You know, for example, in specific verticals. They may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the APEX portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer, you know, some of our services, if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there and then offer it to their end customers. They could host APEX offers in their own data center or in a co-lo data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an APEX solution, where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage, you know, some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing and join the go-to market. So I think the answer is lots of ways for partners to engage with APEX. And we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways. And I think cyber recovery is no different. >> Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with APEX. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue. And it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partner so far. Thank you for joining "theCube" and telling us what's going on. And we can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. >> Yes indeed. >> Absolutely. Thank you very much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCube's" coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> All right, welcome back to "the Cube's" coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of COVID-19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of "the Cube" and we have here the award winners for the best EDU solution from NorthBay Solutions, Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and the University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton, PhD and Data Privacy Officer of University of Pittsburgh IT. Thanks for coming on gentlemen, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys had got the award for? And talk about how it all came about. >> Yeah, thank you for asking and it's been a pleasure working with Chad and the entire UPitt team. So as we entered this whole COVID situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual, that budgets were very tight, but nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. So we devised a solution which we called jam sessions, AWS jam sessions, and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things, but we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused two week engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad and UPitt team, it was around a data lake and they had been, and Chad will certainly speak to this in much more detail, but the whole notion here was how does a customer get started? How does, a customer prove the efficacy of AWS, prove that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form, in this case, a data lake solution and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint rep prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework, and ideally by the time we're done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work, learn by doing, if you will, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing, and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case would be the implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >> Chad, talk about the relationship with NorthBay Solutions. Obviously you're a customer, you guys are partnering on this, so it's kind of you're partnering, but also they're helping you. Talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >> Yeah, so I would say the challenge that I think a lot of people in my role are faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that I really don't want to invest any further in. So I know the cloud's in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So we had zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said "Because of our inexperience, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn." So what I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our skilling up. You know, what gaps do we have? And AWS has just so many different components that we also needed help just zeroing in on for our need, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to NorthBay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. We made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was of course, to meet our deliverables, but also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how it got started and then I think it was very successful engagement after that. >> Talk about the jam sessions, because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace with rapid innovation, now more than ever with virtual workforces at home, given the situation. You know, rapid agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session? What was the approach? Jim you laid a little bit about it out, but Chad, what's your take on the jam sessions? How does it all work? >> I mean, it was great, because of large teams that NorthBay brought and the variety of skills they brought, and then they just had a playbook that worked. They broke us up into different groups, from the people who'd be making the data pipeline, to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. So that part worked really well, and yes, this rapid iterative development. Like right now with our current kind of process and our current tool, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts, to our data scientists, because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer and I don't want to be giving that answer, so what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we select the right tools so that we can say, "We'll be two weeks from start to finish" and you'll be able to make those data available. So the engagement with NorthBay, the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that once you have the skills and you have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about for us. >> Jim, I'll get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud, when you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, They're pretty savvy, right? They know limitations, but when you get the cloud, it's like if a car versus a horse, right? Got to go from point A to point B, but again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together and what were the key learnings? >> Yeah, so John, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people on the U-PIT side that wanted to really learn and had a thirst for learning. And then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in an actual use case that we're trying to jointly implement. A couple of things that we've learned that are really important. One is although we have structure and we have a syllabi and we have sort of a pattern of execution, we can never lose sight of the fact that every customer is different. Every team member is different. And in fact, Chad, in this case had team members, some had more skills on AWS than others. So we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of used our general formula for the two weeks. Week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of AWS, the solution we're building and then week two is really meant to sort of mold the clay together and really take this solution that we're trying to execute around and tailor it to the customer so that we're addressing the specific needs, both from their team member perspective and the institution's perspective in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending the day with a recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge and then when we're addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done, so if there is anxiety, or folks feel like they're falling behind, we want to make sure we knew that, we wanted to address that quickly, either that evening, or the next morning, recalibrate and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that, and Chad and entire U-Pit team did a phenomenal job with this, was really preparation. So we have a set of preliminary set of activities that we work with our customers to sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And since we're doing this virtually, we don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical construct of organizing rooms and chairs and tables and all that. We're doing all that virtually. So Chad and the team were tremendous in getting all the preparatory work done Thinking about what's involved in a data lake, it's the data and security and access and things our team needed to work with their team and the prescription and the formula that we use is really three critical things. One is our team members have to be adept at educating on a virtual whiteboard, in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side development. That's the whole goal and we want team members to build trust and relationships side by side. And then thirdly, and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring, so that as Chad's team members were executing, we could guide them as we go. And really those three ingredients were really key. >> Chad, talk about the data lake and the outcome as you guys went through this. What was the results of the data Lake? How did it all turn out? >> Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we were looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one, prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema mart model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business, but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. So there was a second component of it that I said, I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools, so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say "Hey, by investing in this, here's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it." So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging AWS comprehend was key. And the idea here was there are, unfortunately, it's not as relevant today with COVID, but there are events happening all around campus and how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar. Well, with a price of natural language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major, so that we can then bubble these up to a student "Hey, do you know of all these thousands of events here are the 10 you might be most interested in." We can't do that right now, but using these tools, using the skills that that NorthBay helped us develop by working side by side will help us get there. >> A beautiful thing is with these jam sessions, once you get some success, you go for the next one. This sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this is really kind of what I like about the story is you guys did the jam session, first of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, as you guys looked at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project, right? You can get people together, you go to the cloud, get more agile, get the proof points, show it, double down on it, playbook, check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you? Any expectations that were met, or things that were new that came out of this? 'Cause this is something that is everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this, or deal with current COVID as it evolves? And then when I come out of it, I want to have a growth strategy, I want to have a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, it's a good question and I was a little concerned about it at first, because when we had first begun conversations with NorthBay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. Then of course COVID happened. Our campus is closed, nobody's permitted to be there and so we had to just pivot to a hundred percent virtual. I have to say, I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress. It didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that NorthBay had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it and Jim can certainly talk to that, But those morning stand-ups for each group that's working, the end of day report outs, right? Those were the things I was joining in on I wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication, the transparency that was provided was key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule they already had set up at North Bay, We didn't have any problems having it a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do virtual engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >> You know, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on this, 'cause I think this is a huge point that's not just represented here and illustrated with the example of the success of the EDU solution you guys got the award for, but in a way COVID exposes all the people that have been relying on waterfall based processes. You've got to be in a room and argue things out, or have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time and when you have a virtual space and an agile process, yeah you make some adjustments, but if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully virtually. >> Yeah, it's certainly, you know, the key is always preparation and our team did a phenomenal job at making sure that we could deliver equal to, or better than, virtual experience than we could an on-site experience, but John you're absolutely right. What it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're in a physical room together, but you can't take for granted virtually. Even interpersonal relationships and how those are built and the trust that's built. As much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did really phenomenal AWS work, foundationally it all comes down to trust and as Chad said, transparency. And it's often hard to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that and we spent time with Chad and other team members, understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and the experiential journey, a little bit about them personally. So I think the reality in the in the short and near term is that everything's going to be virtual. NorthBay delivers much of their large scale projects virtually now. We have a whole methodology around that and it's proven actually it's made us better at what we do quite frankly. >> Yeah it definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity in the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and this certainly has been around, the benefits of there, but still you have the mentality of "we have to do it ourselves", "not invented here", "It's a managed service", "It's security". There's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really looked for it. But the reality is is that there are benefits. For the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons with COVID and other reasons, What's your advice to them? Why cloud? What's the bet? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad, as people sitting there going "okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going" What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >> So I would say, and Jim knows this, we at Pitt have a big vision for data, a whole universe of data where just everything is made available and I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right? That's going to evolve over time, so if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver, or I'm going to invest too much money for the value I'm getting. By moving to the cloud, what that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. And then, of course, all the questions about, scalability and extensibility, right? We can just keep growing and if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just stop and we're no longer spending on that particular area and we can direct that money to a different component of the cloud. So just not being locked in to a huge expensive product is really key, I think. >> Jim, your thoughts on why cloud and why now? Obviously it's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayer sitting on the fence? >> Yeah, it's a really important question, John and I think Chad had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is agility. Whether that's agility with respect to if you're in a competitive market place, Agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment we all know we're in, particularly in the IT world. Agility from a cost perspective. So agility is a theme that comes through and through over and over and over again, and as Chad rightfully said, most companies and most organizations they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing, or what the demands are going to be on their services, so agility is really, is really key. And the second one is, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out before you can start and really our mantra in the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing. Pick a use case, pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be and just start the process. You'll learn as you go and not everything is the right fit for cloud. There were some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be be appropriate, but by and large, if you start by doing and in fact, through jam session, learn by doing, you'll start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to them, where they can leverage the best bang for the buck, if you will. And ultimately deliver on the value that IT is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, speed of cost reduction, speed of future rollout. You know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data, right? He and the team are sitting there trying to figure how to give it to them quickly. So speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days. >> Yeah and Chad also mentioned scale too, cause he's trying to scale up as key and again, getting the cloud muscles going for the teams and culture is critical because matching that incentives, I think the alignment is critical point. So congratulations gentlemen on a great award, best EDU solution. Chad, while I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts, but your industry expert PhD hat on, because one of the things we've been reporting on is in the EDU space, higher ed and other areas, with people having different education policies, the new reality is with virtualized students and faculty, alumni and community, the expectations and the data flows are different, right? So you had stuff that people used, systems, legacy systems, kind of as a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again, create that alignment of what can we do development wise, because I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure this kind of thinking going on around "Okay, as we go forward, how do we find out what classes to attend if they're not onsite?" This is another jam session. So I see more and more things happening, pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >> My take, so when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring break to be virtual for our students, like a lot of universities did. And you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that and you find all the weaknesses. And we had finished the engagement, I think, with NorthBay by that point, or were in it and seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, might end up the way I envisioned the future state, I can now point to these specific things and give specific examples about how we would have been able to more effectively respond when these new demands on data came up, when new data flows were being created very quickly and able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. So that was really key and this whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging and at Pitt we're really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and all the technology that's involved in that. And, you know, I've already got, I've had more unique data requests come to my desk since COVID than in the previous five years, you know? >> New patterns, new opportunities to write software and it's great to see you guys focused on that hierarchy of needs. I really appreciate it. I want to just share with you a funny story, not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in a higher ed university out here in California and it wasn't official business, was just more riffing on the future and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had like an abstraction layer that had leveraged Canvas, Zoom and Discord?" All the kids are on Discord if they're gamers. So you go "Okay, why discord? It's a hang space." People, it's connective tissue. "Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos?" You know, Canvas doesn't support certain things and Canvas is the software that most universities use, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on, but that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. Are you guys having that kind of feeling too? I mean, how do you see this new ideation, rapid prototype? I only think it's going to get faster and accelerated. >> As Chad said, his requests are we're multiplying, I'm sure and people aren't, you know, folks are not willing to wait. We're in a hurry up, 'hurry up, I want it now' mentality these days with both college attendees as well as those of us who are trying to deliver on that promise. And I think John, I think you're absolutely right and I think that whether it be the fail fast mantra, or whether it be can we make even make this work, right? Does it have legs? Is it is even viable? And is it even cost-effective? I can tell you that we do a lot of work in Ed tech, we do a lot of work in other industries as well And what the the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with as a result of COVID, is they've all had to try to innovate. So we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, today, yesterday, not six months from now. So I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that can be sustained, or tolerated any longer and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, "Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How can we go work together side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most robust, but we need it tomorrow." And that's really the spirit of the whole notion of jam session. >> And new expectations means new solutions. Chad, we'll give you the final word. Going forward, you're on this wave right now, you got new things coming at you you're getting that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >> I'm optimistic. It really is, it's an exciting time to be in this role, the progress we've made in the calendar year 2020, despite the challenges we've been faced with, with COVID and budget issues, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my belief that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >> Awesome! Best EDU solution award for AWS public sector. Congratulations to NorthBay Solutions. Jim Keller, president, and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights and again, the wave is here, new expectations, new solutions, clouds there, and you guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session, thanks. >> Thank you, John. Chad, pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. >> See you soon. >> This is "the Cube" coverage of AWS public sector partner awards. I'm John Furrier, host of "the Cube". Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of covert 19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube, and we have here the award winners for the best CDU solution from North based loses. Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burden PhD in data privacy officer of University of Pittsburgh. Thanks for coming on, gentlemen. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. >>So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys have got the award for and talk about how it all came about? >>Yeah. Thank you for asking. And, uh, it's been a pleasure Worldwide chat and the entire you pitch team. So? So as we as we enter this this this whole covitz situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual. The budgets were very tight, but Nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. Um, So So we devised a solution which which we call jam sessions, AWS jam sessions and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things. But we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused, too. Weak engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad on the pitch team, it was around a data lake and they had been channels certainly speak to this in much more detail. But the whole notion here was how do you How does the customer get started out? Is how does a customer prove the efficacy of AWS proved that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form in this case, a data lake solution, and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use, which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint sap prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework. And ideally, by the time we're done with the two weeks, um, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work. Learn by doing if you will, um, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case be Thea implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >>Talk about the relationship with the North based solutions. So your customer, you guys were partnering on this, so it's kind of your partnering, but also your they're helping you talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >>Yeah, so I was faced with a challenge that I think a lot of people in my role is faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that, um I really don't want to invest any further. And so I know the clouds in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So it has zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said, you know, because of our inexperience, you know, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn. What I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out, that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our still skilling up. You know what gaps do we have? And you know, aws has so many different components. But we also needed help zeroing in on or our need. You know, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to North Bay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. Um, you know, we made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was, of course, to meet our deliverables. But it also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how we got started on then. It was very successful engagement after that >>talk about the jam sessions because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace, with rapid innovation now more than ever, with virtual workforces at home given situation, rapid, agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session was the approach. Give me a little bit about of it out, but what's your take on the jam sessions? Had it all has it all work? >>It was great because of the large team that north a broad and the variety of skills they brought and then they just had a playbook that worked, right? They broke us up into different groups from the people who be making the data pipeline to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. Um, so that part works really well. And, yes, this rapid iterative development, You know, right now, with our current kind of process in our current tools, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts who are data scientists because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer. And I don't want to be giving that answer. So what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we still like the right tools so that we can pay, you know, will be two weeks from start to finish and you know you'll be able to make the data available. So the engagement with North of the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that. You know, once you have the skills and have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about. We're out, >>Jim. I want get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud When you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, they're not. They're pretty savvy. They know the limitations. But when you get the cloud, it's like a car versus a horse or, you know, get a go from point A to point B. But again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together And what were the key learnings? >>Yeah. So, uh, John, you know, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people, um, on the it side that wanted to wanted to really learn and had had a thirst for learning. Um, and then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in the actual use case that we're trying to jointly jointly implement a couple of things that we've learned that they're they're really important. One is, although we have structure, we have a Silla by and we have sort of a pattern of execution. We never lose sight of the fact that every customer's different. Every team members different and in fact chat in this case that team members some had more skills on AWS than others, so we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of use our general formula for for the two weeks one week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of aws solution we're building, um, and then we two is really meant to sort of multiple together and really take this the solution that we're trying to execute around, um, and tailor it to the customer. So they were addressing the specific needs both from their team member of perspective and, uh, and the institutions perspective, Um, in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending today with the recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge. And then we were addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done. So if there is anxiety or folks feel like they're falling behind, you want to make sure we knew that we want to address that quickly that evening or the next morning, recalibrate and and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that and Chad, the entire Cube team did a phenomenal job of this was really preparation. So we want to We we We have a set of preliminary set of activities that we that we work with our customers sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And with this we're doing this virtually. We don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical constructive of organizing rooms and shares and tables. All of that, we're doing all that virtually so. Joe and the team were tremendous and getting all the preparatory work done. The thing about was involved in a data lake. It's the data and security and access of things Our team needed to work with their team and the prescription that in the formula that we use is really 33 critical things. One is our team members have to be adept that educating on a white board in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side element. That's that's the whole goal. And then we want team members to to build trust and relationship side by side and then, thirdly and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring. So as Chad's team members were executing, UI could guide them as we go. And those really those three ingredients really >>talk about the Data Lake on the outcome. As you guys went through this, what was the results of the Data Lake? How did it all? How'd it all turn out? >>Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we're looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema Martin model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. There was a second component of it that I said, I want I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say, Hey, you know, by investing in this year's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it. So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging aws comprehend with key and And the idea here was there are unfortunately relevant today with Cove it. But there are events happening all around campus. And how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar will live pricing national language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major so that we can then bubble these up to a student. Hey, you know of all these thousands of events here and you might be most interested in you can't do that right now, but using these tools using the skills that north they helped us develop working side by side will help us get there, >>you know, beautiful thing is with these jam sessions. You want to get some success, You go for the next one. You get this Sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version as well. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this >>is >>really kind of What I like about this story is you guys did the jam session. First of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, You know, as you guys look at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project. You get people together, you have the cloud get more agile, get the proof points, show it double down on it. Playbook check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you any expectations that were met or things that were new that came out of this? Because this is something that everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this or deal with current Cove it as it evolves and when I come out of it. I don't have a growth strategy in a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on? >>Yeah, so, yeah, you know, it's a good question. And I was a little concerned about it at first, cause when we had first begun conversations with North Bay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. And of course, Cove. It happened. Our campuses closed. Nobody's permitted to be there. And so we had to just pivot to 100% virtual. I have to say I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress that didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that North they had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it, and Jim can certainly part of that. But you know those morning stand ups for each group that's working the end of day worn out right? That's what those were the things I was joining in on, you know, it wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication the transparency that was provided with key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule, they already have set up North Bay. We didn't see we didn't have any problems having a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do for two engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >>You know, Jim O. Negative thoughts that I think is a huge point that's not just representing with here and illustrate with the example of the success of the EU solution. You guys got the award for, but in a way, covert exposes all the people that are been relying on waterfall based processes. You got to be in a room and argue things out. Our have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time when you when you have a virtual space and an agile process, you make some adjustments. But if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully? Virtually. >>Yeah, I know it is. Certainly, um, the key is always preparation and on our team did a phenomenal job of making sure that we could deliver equal to or better than virtual experience than we could on site and on site experience. But, John, you're right. You're absolutely right. But it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're when you're in a physical room together, you can't take for granted virtually, um, even even interpersonal relationships and how those were built and the trust that's built in. And this whole, as much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did you really phenomenal aws work, foundational Lee. It all comes down to trust it, as Chad said, transparency, and it's hard, often hard to to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that. And we spent time with Chad and other team members understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and experiential journey a little bit about them personally, right? So so I think. Look, I think the reality in the short and near term is that everything is gonna be virtual North Bay delivers much of their large scale projects. Virtually now, we have a whole methodology around that, and, um, and it's proven. Actually, it's made us better at what we do. >>Yeah, definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and there certainly has been around the benefits of there. But still you have, you know, mentality of, you know, we have to do it ourselves, not invented here. It's a managed services security. You know, there's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really look for it. Um, but the reality is, is that there are benefits for the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons we cove it and other reasons. What's your advice to them? Why cloud, what's the what's the bet? What comes? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad? Is people sitting there going? Okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going What's your What's your What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >>Yeah, so I would say it. And Jim does this, you know, we have a big vision for data, you know, the whole universe of data. Where does everything is made available? And, um, I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right, That's going to evolve over time. So if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver. Or I'm gonna invest too much money for the value in getting what? By moving to the cloud. What that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. Um And then, of course, all the questions that you have availability and acceptability, right? We can just keep growing. And if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just we're no longer spending on that particular area, and we contract that money to a different components of the cloud, so just not being locked into a huge expense up front is really key, I think, >>Jim, your thoughts on Why Cloud? Why now? It's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayers sitting on the fence who are? >>Yeah, it's It's a really important question, John and I think that had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is, um, agility. Whether that's agility with respect to your in a competitive marketplace, place agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment will go nowhere in particularly in the I t world, um, agility from a cost perspective. So So agility is a theme that comes through and through, over and over and over again in this change, right? So, he said, most companies and most organizations don't they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing or what the demands are gonna be on their services. The agility is really is really key, and the 2nd 1 is, you know, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out. You could start and really our mantra and the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing, um, pick a use case, Pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be. And just start the process you learn as you go. Um, and you know, not everything is the right fit for cloud. There are some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be might be appropriate. But by and large, if you if you start by doing And in fact, you know the jam session, learn by doing, and you start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to that where they can leverage the best of this bang for the buck if you will, um, and ultimately deliver on the value that that I t is is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, Speed of cost reduction, speed of feature rollout. Um, you know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data. Right? And the team we're sitting there trying to figure how to give it to him quickly. Um, so speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days >>and channels. You mentioned scale too, because he's trying to scale up as key and again getting the cloud muscles going for the teams. And culture is critical because, you know, matching that incentives. I think the alignment is critical. Point point. So congratulations, gentlemen. On great award best edu solution, Chad, While I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts. Put your industry expert PhD hat on because, you know, one of the things we've been reporting on is a lot of in the edu space higher ed in other areas with people having different education policies. The new reality is with virtual virtualized students and faculty alumni nine in community, the expectations and the data flows are different. Right? So you you had stuff that people use systems, legacy systems, >>kind of. >>It's a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again create that alignment of what can we do? Development wise? I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure there's kind of thinking going on around. Okay. As we go forward, how >>do >>we find out who's what. Classes to attend if they're not on site this another jam session. So I see more, more things happening pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >>Um, I take, you know, So when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring. Great toe. Be virtual for our students, Like a lot of universities dead. And, um, you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that. And you find all the weaknesses And we had finished the engagement. I think north by that point, or it were in it. And, um, seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, the way I envision the future state, I can now point to the specific things and get specific examples of how we would have been able to more effectively on when these new demands on data came up when new data flows were being created very quickly and, you know, able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. Um, so that was really key. And then, you know, it's a This whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works, and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging, you know, and that if it were really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and older technology that's involved in that? And, you know, I've already got you know, I've had more unique data requests. >>My desk >>is coded and in the previous five years, you know, >>new patterns, new opportunities to write software. And it's great to see you guys focused on the hierarchy of needs. Really appreciate. I want to just share a funny story. Not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in Higher Ed University out here in California, and it was wasn't official. Business was just more riffing on the future, and I said, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you have, like an abstraction layer that had leverage, canvas, zoom and discord and all the kids are on discourse, their game received. Okay, why discord? It's the hang space people are his connective tissue Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos? So canvas doesn't support certain things? And campuses? The software. Most companies never say years, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on. But that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. You guys having that kind of feeling to? How do you see this new ideation? Rapid prototyping. I only think it's gonna get faster. Accelerated >>It was. Chad said, you know, his requests are multiplying. I'm sure on people are you know, folks are not willing to wait, you know, we're in a hurry up. Hurry up. I wanted now mentality these days with with both, um college attendees as well as those of us. We're trying to deliver on that promise. And I think, John, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that, um, whether it be the fail fast mantra or whether it be can we may even make this work right? Doesn't have lakes, is it is even viable. Um, and is it even cost effective? I can tell you that the we do a lot of work in tech. We do a lot of work in other industries as well. And what what the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with and as a result of coaches, they've all had to try to innovate. Um, so we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed, of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, Today, yesterday, not not six months from now. So the the I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that could be sustained or tolerated any longer. And and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How we go work together, side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant. It may not be the most robust, but we need. We need it kind of tomorrow, and that's really the spirit of the whole. The whole notion of transition >>and new expectations means new solutions that will give you the final word going forward. You're on this wave right now. You got new things coming at you. You get in that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >>I'm optimistic it really It's an exciting time to be in this role. The progress we've made in the county or 2020 despite the challenges we've been faced with with, um cove it and budget issues. Um, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my I believe that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >>Awesome. Best Edu solution award for AWS Public sector Congratulations and North based solutions. Jim Keller, President and University of Pittsburgh Chadbourne. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights. And again, the wave is here. New expectation, new solutions. Clouds There. You guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session. Thanks. >>Thank you, John. Pleasure. Thank you. Through >>the cube coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

live from San Francisco celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage it's the cube covering vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome to day two of the cubes coverage of VMworld 2019 double vowels two sets going on on our other set day Volante and John Fourier they're talking to Michael Dell they're talking to passenger but over here we know where the hot action is talking about even Steve Young you know the Hall of Fame quarterback from the 49ers knows what hyper-converged infrastructure is and they're from well I'm excited to welcome back to the program Chad Dunn who is the vice president of product management and hyper-converged infrastructure for Delly MC Chad great to see you great to be back soon and also I want to also welcome my guest host for this segment who is Bobby Allen coming up to us from Charlotte North Carolina a cube alum now flipping the desk and gonna be asking some questions with me so Chad well my first question is why did you put me up against Michael and Pat well because we knew you could take it you know some people would be like oh that's the other Chad even but Ron you know HCI you know still a big story it's a big piece of what goes into VMware's vfc yeah story there you know VMware's talking about there's 20,000 deployments that they have a v san and i believe you might know who the number one partner is in the number one solution set out of those 20 thousands I think I might and I think that's also the leading product in terms of volume and the leading product in terms of revenue in the hyper-converged market as a blast so I will give you a second you know give us some of the you know you know the the drum beat the chest thumping of how the VX RL product line and and your portfolio is doing the the portfolio is doing great and the integration of V CF on VX rail is just throwing gasoline on to the fire in terms of adoption you know we see hyper-converged now mainstream moving into the data center mission-critical applications are being run on it infrastructure as a service right alongside container as a service so a few things that we announced this week in addition to you know the latest update of VCF on rail we added fibre channel 2 to V X rail a move that people are very is very polarizing move for people to chat why we have people who continue to love their primary storage arrays that are fiber channel connected and very often we're selling to someone who's refreshing servers but they have life left on the the array they want to preserve it they want to migrate data so they demanded fiber channel we gave them fiber right so if I understand this though it's that I've seen certain HD eyes where there's like you know a faucet on the side that I can plug in I scuzzy now you're just saying there's that it's not like you haven't a V X rail that is you know fiber dole baked in through and through so there's a server architect there's still v Santa at the core of VX rail but we give you the option now attaching primary storage either in the context of VCF or or in standalone other big news is we've recently refreshed a product line to the next generation of Xeon processor the cascade Lake version that gives us about a 28 to 30 percent performance increase and Intel opt in cache drives so there are lots of hardware updates along with software updates that that accelerate our LCM or lifecycle management process so Chad thank you for the update but I've got a different question I want to go in a different direction I talk to customers all the time cxos what would you tell the ciock so who's who's scared to invest more in the data center because public cloud seems like the one is in its sales but obviously Dell has a story to tell how do you help them defend their their turf well III I don't think they should get territorial about that every customer that I engaged with has a hybrid cloud strategy and very often it's more than one public cloud there's always a champion challenger relationship right we as CX know you want to keep your vendors honest correct right so you may have multiple public clouds you may have multiple infrastructure providers but VMware and in VCF on the X rail can be that common thread between the two so I can use tools like VMware Cloud Health to determine where it makes sense to run the workload I think very seamlessly move that workload from a VCF on VX rail deployment into a public cloud when it makes sense I can bring it back when it makes sense I can move it to Amazon to Azure to Google to any one of the VMware cloud providers and really hedge my bets right in terms of where it's best to run that workload so we encourage public cloud are you seeing customers actually take advantage of those capabilities yet or is it something they're still kind of waiting to see how that develops in terms of hybrid multi-cloud we see customers taking advantage of it right away so I'll give you an example I have a large retail customer right now and they've got about 900 different workloads that are existing virtual machines so they're looking at how they either refactor those into cloud native and move them into the cloud or whether they rationalize some of those away which is sort of a natural process with the Dell technologies cloud platform which is based on VCF on the X rail they can effectively put off that decision and they can move those workloads into the public cloud as virtual machines and start to enjoy those economics while they decide which ones to refactor while they decide which ones to rationalize away yeah so chata tell tech world we talked a bunch about how I have you know V X rel is the underpinning for the VMware cloud on Dell EMC right here at the show you know we talk a lot about cloud and even you know kubernetes was mentioned just a few times a couple of times in the keynote there was some guy in the audience you know Hootin Hollerin about some of that but you know help us you know draw the line you know where your customers today what are they starting to do and you know where does that put this portfolio extend to in the future great well first of all I'm gonna do a session tomorrow morning at 9:30 and we're gonna be talking about the business aspect of containers of service and kubernetes to customers so a good session to check out if if the viewers can but from our perspective we see customers at different points in that journey toward container as a service or cloud native on their premises or in a hybrid cloud scenario and it's funny one of the slides that I'll do tomorrow says that about 71 percent of customers are spending their budgets on operating their infrastructures and services are traditional VMs when they want to be able to reinvest some of that money and move to cloud native now this is almost the exact same slide and same percentage that we use you know five six eight years ago to talk about keeping the lights on with 70 percent of IT budgets it was 8020 back then so it's the exact same dynamic we're seeing it really be mainstreamed now every dtw or EMC world that I would go to I would always ask how much of your workload is cloud native they would always say 1% how much is it going to be in five years they say we have no idea now they're telling us about what those projects are and and they're rapidly adopting them but the nice thing about the VCF on rail is you can create workload domains that are traditional infrastructure as a service with virtual machines but you can also spin up container as a service workload domain with d KS and NS xt and so as you start to refactor those applications and there's that balance changes you simply increase the number and the size of your cloud native workload domains and you shrink your infrastructure as a service so you're in an ideal spot to be able to run virtual infrastructure workload domains virtual desktop workload domains cloud native workload domains consistent operating model across-the-board consistent hardware layer which is VX rail so you get those economics and as your business demands change you as an IT operator are able to serve those DevOps organizations within your company because if you're not providing them a kubernetes dial-tone they're gonna find it right and you're gonna see shadow IT spring up and they're gonna be in the public cloud before you know what happens so Chad want one of the things that I'm curious about so this is a software conference obviously right we're talking about a lot of the goodness that's hypervisor and above yep what would you say to the person who says doesn't matter what sort of hardware I'm running is that a commodity what is Dells differentiate a value in this software-defined world if I wanted to be a smart aleck I would tell you to look at some of the other hyper-converged competitors who went software only and then go take a look at their market cap but if I wanted to be serious I would say that hardware really does matter and when you look at you know how we need to lifecycle manage that infrastructure and make it seamless and effortless for the customer it means that you need to think about that hardware layer so if I look inside a PowerEdge server for example there are between nine and twelve different programmable parts from BIOS to HBAs to drive firmware backplane power supply you name it all those things have dependencies on the software drivers that you use being able to look at that all in context and be able to update that all at once so users don't have to worry about the bits and bytes of drivers and and firmware compatibility really saves them money saves them time and effort and lets them concentrate on things they're gonna differentiate their business and we see customers making that switch daily now and understanding that they can now redeploy some of that cost and resources toward things that are more differentiated like you know moving to cloud native so Chad what about the folks that have a they've got a Dell footprint they've got some other competitors and that how do you help them where there may be in the midst of changing over right they've got some other manufacturers that provided hardware before some of that story may not be as consistent so what can they do when they may be in the midst of a change over so you really need to look at what that operating expense savings is gonna be so we we certainly want to get as much life out of that existing infrastructure as we can and then provide migration fibre channel and and IP attached storage is an example of that right where people are not necessarily ready to move away from those arrays so say great right continue to leverage those assets but also if it's an existing VC on infrastructure based on bare metal servers the migration from one VC on environment to another is a pretty seamless one right because you preserve that storage policy based management as you make the migration so you know it typically is a pretty easy migration for customers to move on to hyper conversion they think and obviously we'll provide whatever professional services are necessary right if you look it by the way and I'll plug VMware since I'm at at VMworld if you look at VMware HDX if we're doing migration across these environments either to or from a public cloud or from a legacy environment to a next-generation HCI environment that's one of the coolest tools out there for doing that migration and preserving all the policies security and Software Defined Networking policies and micro segmentation from one environment to the other so really impressed with with what VMware has done there yeah definitely a theme we've heard it this show is you know VMware talk to their install base and says oh my gosh you look at all these cloud native things out there and kubernetes is super hard so you know we're gonna build it enable it in there um when I've looked at the you know Dell and VMware family there's been a few different kubernetes options out there help gives a little clarity where that fits into your world and you know where we are today where it's going kind of yeah future yeah there has been a sort of a dichotomy of you know cloud native ins inside VMware and cloud native inside pivotal for example and we've worked with with both of those organizations in fact we've been very successful with what platform and container as a service on the x rail going to market with pivotal but now that PKS is moving into VMware and really all of pivotal is moving into VMware it sort of unifies that strategy and if you look at the acquisitions that VMware is making with hep tio and others and actually embedding kubernetes into ESX I I mean that's a game changer an absolutely game-changer so now we have all of the the software assets to you know build run and manage cloud native were closed all within the VMware portfolio now the great thing about VX rail is we inherit all that work natively and build that natively into our hyper-converged platform so you know we sort of get that for free so you know not only can we now be the the leading hyper-converged infrastructure player for infrastructure as a service of traditional VMs we now can expand that and be the number one player in the new container world and you know as you saw with the the performance discussion that Pat had yesterday they actually see these things running faster in a virtualized ESXi environment than we do on bare metal only single digits but that's pretty impressive right it's very counter intuitive right so we're really happy to be able to take advantage of that and we have still have the pivotal labs team which really gets engaged with these customers to make it more transformational in terms of how they develop and how they deliver applications to their end users and by the way I mean not to preview something that's pretty far down the road we're looking at how we change up how we deliver software updates in VX rail and how we architect the software to make it a continuous integration continuous delivery pipeline because we need to make the infrastructure more intelligent and more agile and products like VX rail ace which we just announced a dtw does exactly that right it gives us the ability to pull back telemetry from VX rail apply machine learning and in an artificial intelligence to it in our own cloud and then push that data back out to our VX rail users to Auto remediating problems so the infrastructure is going to get more agile and it's going to get more intelligent as we go yeah um we've been talking a bit about some of the future stuff before we go but want to bring back to you know one of the core things that we wanted to do in this space it was simplification how do we make it super easy when I talk to most people that do HCI it's like you know where is that it's like I don't know it got installed and I've never touched it since then my understanding you're doing some things even on the management side to make things even easier there's some virtual reality in there too no we like to think everything is real reality yeah we are doing things to to even further simplify our lifecycle management process to make that that infrastructure something that that operators don't need to worry about so we're now doing pre staging of updates future scheduling of updates pause and resume of updates to fit within customers maintenance windows more effectively we'll be doing updates that are delivered via the cloud through the ACE platform coming up in in a release that's that's about to ship so again the idea is to you know simultaneously make the the product more flexible but maintain the simplicity because as I said we've moved into these core data center deployments where people are buying you know six hundred eight hundred thousand units at a time and deploying its scale and they expect flexibility you know all the flexibility you would get with an ESXi server with all the simplification and and day 2 operations that you get from HDI so we're in a constant state of trying to balance those two things and optimize for both use cases and by the way at the same time software-defined networking containers are coming at us at light speed the VMware has acquired more more companies in the last three months and then I can name I can name them all so it's a very fast-moving space yeah I don't think I can keep over the last week all right Bobby final question I guess quick sound bite what should people know about VMware cloud on Dale that they don't know VMware cloud on Dell EMC formerly project to mention right the extension of the MC on the customer premises I think this is incredibly strategic for us and for VMware because it gives you that cloud consumption model on-premises in an operating expense model so just into two initial access with that beta customers are turned up and the feedback has been extremely positive vmware dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on VX rail really off to the races on that right we've had huge uptake in that we're seeing deals of literally hundreds of nodes at a time data centers at a time are consuming this deploying it we're demoing it here at the show if you go to the nvidia booth all the VDI demos are being run on VCF on VX rail that's sitting over in a hotel across the street it's a very hot hotel room cuz we get a lot of GPUs in those but it's also something that users can actually go see it live and working nice alright and just a quick tip for you if you haven't made it to VM world or even if you came here Chad mentioned he's doing a session this week they do make all of those available to people out there and of course all of our content is always available on the cube net Chad Dunn always great to catch up with you Bobby Allen thanks so much for joining me for this segment and my audience as always thanks for watching the Q

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world here in Sin City I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Stu minimun we have Chadds a catch he is the SVP PKS and Deltek Alliance at pivotal thank you so much for coming back on the cube Rebekah it is my pleasure Stu as always this is a big anniversary actually this isn't he I'm glad you brought it up this is this is Mark's 10 years of the cube at Dell technologies world and you're a cube MVP I want to hear you break it down for us would listen down this milestone when when when you guys started doing this I'm not sure whether anyone knew whether there was gonna be a season two but you know I think at these events distilling down what's happening bring in people with diverse points of view you guys have always made it real shared the perspective of the ecosystem challenged us to keep it a no-spin zone which i think is a great formula yeah Chad thank you so much first of all you know one of the things we do come in opinionated but one of the things we want is we want guests with opinions and luckily you've always brought it we love having you on the program and boy have things changed a lot in the last 10 years so I want to get your view on the keynote so I mean Chad you and I go back way we we were colleagues back at EMC I remember when you were acquired into the company we worked on like I scuzzy stuff which nobody even talks anymore of my scuzzy storage networking the dark art of that stuff but VMware was something that you know it really was a lifter for both of our careers I think it was really interesting to see how central VMware is to the strategy that we saw how it fits into multi cloud I just got a note from Dave Volante said you know Pat Geller drew up on there talking about multi cloud and you know let's not think that Microsoft obviates the need for AWS Atos is the first the big cloud and absolutely VMware's working with them so I'd love to get your take on you know VMware and the multi cloud and VMware with delve as opposed to VMware with EMC there's a lot to unpack in that yeah we've got like an hour so the first thing that I think is interesting is that history and context gives perspective but ditch context and dick ditch history and if you think of the now and the market the customer no longer wants servers network storage they don't want virtualization they don't even want things like RDS and ec2 and we still want the emotion right you know the the reality is is that with every customer that I see they're looking for things that only the Giants in increasingly vertically integrated stacks can do so think about the whole keynote through that context right basically you saw Dell EMC and VMware more aligned than ever and again you and I have the history in the context of years of EMC VMware I remember the first time I did a vien the first time played with ESX 3.0 and virtual Center 100 and 200 and going is gonna change the universe but fast-forward to now people are like I want an easy button for the whole stack Dell EMC says this is the common building block VX rail my former baby is now grown up and it's the standardized way to deploy the VMware stack on Brentt Project I mention is moved out of a hypothetical into beta management of that lifecycle as a cloud service and you'll notice that Michael started it in the keynote kubernetes is central to that vision our efforts between pivotal and VMware in the kubernetes universe is singular the objective is to make that whole stack simple to deploy consume grow etc etc now Chad I needed a comment on one thing so I seem to remember back another project you worked on that was going to start as a managed server and that turned into Acadia which turned into VCE which turned into a product because the customer gave very clear feedback that most of them didn't want it so why is it is it different now what's different now what changed in a decade the customer wants the outcome in the historical like you know that's a Wayback Machine right so circa 2010 the way you built a private cloud was an assemblage of server network computes virtualization in separate components delivering that as an outcome as a managed service even for VCE CPS D etc etc there we did it amazingly for about 3,000 customers but it was held together with services and human that's not software what's adapted is that the software-defined data center is now much more mature and it's possible for us to literally roll in a rack of VX rails manage it via dimension do full lifecycle updates not via NRC em but via button click in a window that is necessary for that degree of simplification now if we had stopped there in the keynote we'd be missing the mark because basically the customers have said I want a common multi cloud hybrid cloud operating model with consistent control consistent infrastructure can consistent kubernetes consistent developer abstractions and I thought it was a pretty big deal to see Microsoft join what VMware's been doing with AWS and you know we were there at the Google announcement at Google next you know just a couple weeks back so I think that we're moving into a face to be a little opinionated here where customers wanting an outcome are going to look at Deltek Microsoft Amazon sometimes Google and go tell us how we bring ourselves to the digital future it's interesting because that means what things that people don't like which is vertically integrated stacks they don't like industry consolidation they don't like optionality being reduced but if you want an outcome frankly increasingly what's happening is consolidation at this layer and a blossoming ecosystem above it so so where where where will that bring us I mean I think I think you're absolutely right in you you started talking about how we're sort of putting aside history and perspective and now let's bring it back into the conversation yeah what does that mean I think I think that for human beings watching the era of doing cool things assembling things that run VMS even things that run kubernetes and containers is increasingly turning into an a realm where you have to let go so that you can do things that matter increasingly the ecosystems are hyper standardizing those stacks and delivering them as a service in a public cloud and on-premises our objective and I think it's something that only Deltek really is in a position to do is to do that in a way which is open multi-cloud and yet also deeply integrated and what I would say is again to anybody watching is if you're deep passion is in building cool things build cool things but on top of that stuff so chat great set up for the question I have kubernetes I've argued for a number of years is something that the average customer shouldn't need to worry about it's something that should be baked into the platform all the public clouds have it VMware has it your babies PKS today help help us reconcile the statement you were just making and what PKS because I know it's really cool tech and there's lots of pieces and lots of smart people work on it but so you know how does that fit so a stew again you and I go back aways do you remember you remember the state of virtualization circa 2006 sure you'd show up to the VM world and it would be filled with people deeply passionate at the time it was like three four thousand people we're gonna change the world with virtualization all of them were doing weird science projects very few of them could say and I'm running this in production to you know do bla and I'm making the hospital run better right but they'd be like look at how cool this is the technology matured a lot and if you look at the time frame 2010 which was vSphere for if my timing is right it was the first year where it was like kind of for reals right and people started to talk about hey I can do cool stuff kubernetes is currently in the 2006 of virtualization so I've been doing this now for a year we as del tech are now the number two contributor to kubernetes right after Google more than RedHat more than RedHat is that combining all the pieces we have basically drove and so hard towards this point because we think it's essential now you've got the help to your team as part of that that's a big that is a big part of the strategy right how do we make contributions for the native upstream community and lead that charge via be a good citizen of that ecosystem one two we will make PKS Enterprise PKS in a central PKS the best simplest curated way to make this work that said kubernetes has three major release over three months PKS 1.4 using one dot 13.5 came out last week 1.5 with beta support for Windows is just arriving and we did a beta last week three months from now there's gonna be another major release I'm doing a session that basically says and I'm the I'm a cheerleader I'm like a superfan this is currently like juggling flaming chainsaws right yeah it's it's like you were like what and I'm like yeah so the CNC F which is the ecosystem around kubernetes kubernetes on its own is just like a base component you need to have this and this and this and this has 647 things on the landscape landing page that means if you take five minutes per you would spend a week without sleep without eating like the Game of Thrones watching last night's no food no sleeping no bathroom breaks today Chad five minutes each today and you would get a chance to learn all of those but to really deeply understand what they do you can't do with that in five minutes that's six months of work people need that market to consolidate mature industrialize and we're doing it having having been part of the VX rail envy san ramp being part of the NSX ramp the vSphere ramp the converged infrastructure ramp what's happening with kubernetes and with peak s exceeds the ramp curves for all of those so if you're a customer and you're thinking about do I need this kubernetes thing the answer is yes we have 50 of the Fortune 500 customers now using peak s people are doing it for real but it's still early days now some people may go that's scary and I'm gonna take a timeout I wouldn't do that I would say that just like virtualization 2006 those people who were there at vmworld got a ton of value leveraged and learning and now it's like an industry standard we are going to make kubernetes part of the VMware software defined data center and you heard Pat and Michael talk about it so it sounds like it's going in the direction that you that you believe thumbs up thumbs up from Chad sockets you heard it here first thumbs up it's been it's been a really exciting year and this year we are gonna take that momentum and accelerate it to the moon and beyond but we can't wait to have you back at this table this time next year for Season eleven thank you so much for returning to the queue Rebecca thank you I'm Rebecca Knight first amendment we will have much more from the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit [Music]

>> Live (lively music) from Las Vegas it's the Cube covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment we have Chad Duncan, Managing Director of Financial Services Technology Advisory Cloud Lead North America at Accenture, it's quite a long title. (laughs) And Jim Good, Senior Director Product and Portfolio Delivery at Capital One. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So we're talking today about Capital One's migration to the Cloud, but Jim, let's start out with Capital One the bank and why moving to the Cloud was a business imperative for you. >> Essentially, as we look at Capital One, we have national reach and in credit cards, people are very familiar with that, but we also wanted national reach in banking services too. And the approach we're using is not to go the old fashioned way, bricks and mortar, but it's to actually go more into the way people like to interact with their financial services partners and that's through mobile devices. And the only way to really get the kind of innovation you need, and to get the features to customers that they want on a regular basis is to be a very nimble, and use strategies like DevOps, et cetera. And the Cloud really puts us in the position to do that. By the dynamic provisioning of infrastructure, all the different things that our Agile practices can take advantage of so that we can regularly deliver new features to customers that they want. >> So, Agile delivery, you mentioned Agile. What is it about Capital One's culture in terms of it's approach to innovation that sort of enables that? >> Well we've adopted Agile a number of years ago and this is something where we'd like to really empower teams to work with the business to deliver these features on a recurring basis, regular releases. That's ingrained in our culture. I don't think we'd be able to actually do this Cloud migration without that structure because the teams themselves are doing the work. The teams themselves now have control over the infrastructure. No more centralized group doing all the work for them. It's really distributed to the teams. And so that's really become what's expected of our teams that they can actually deploy when they need to and actually build as needed. Again, without the Cloud, without the AWS services that we're using, we simply would not be able to realize that and the teams could not innovate the way that they are. >> Chad, in terms of you, you've been working with Capital One for a few years now on this migration. What would you say about this company and about how it's migration has gone? >> Their innovation strategy right? They want to be innovative, you heard Jim talk a little bit about that just now, and how they go to market for their customers. How they create new service offerings for their customers. Be their new cafes. Right? They don't have typical branches. You walk into a cafe, you can get a cup of coffee, yes there's financial advisors in there, but that's not the main focus it's not walking into a traditional branch bank. So taking that, if you think about that theme across all of their different product sets, and being able to very quickly and iteratively roll out new products to the market, and services that customers are desiring and really kind of being a disruptor in the industry. Frankly, is the approach that they're taking. >> And is Accenture says, we are living in this age of epic disruption so >> Epic disruption. >> (laughing) Exactly. So Jim, one of the challenges in the migrating legacy platforms is this lack of megadata metadata, I'm sorry. (laughs) Megadata. >> There's megadata. >> There is megadata. >> (laughing) I think we need the aid of the U.S. house bans to talk about that. >> The mega needs meta. (all laughing) >> But this lack of metadata, so how do you overcome that obstacle? >> Well it's been one of the more challenging things that we face. We have a lot of legacy systems that we're kind of unwinding and migrating to the cloud. We're building new platforms for those new services of those. There's been a lot of rolling up the sleeves work just to understand what all this is the old fashioned way. But, what we're really able to do now because as we move things to the Cloud as we move new applications to the Cloud, we're able to use information that's now available to us that was not available to us before. VPC Flow Logs for example, from Amazon, allow us to know what are the connections between all these different services, and we've been able to use some of their tools and other tools that we've developed internally to start to visualize this in a much better way. Would not have been able to do that in our legacy setup. And so this is something that now we're actually using to aid the migrations, to understand how things connect in a much better way. And really, looking forward, we're in a much better place and we now know what we have, and we're able to track it very well. >> So Chad, Capital One is making it sound like it is pretty easy, (laughing) but we know that moving to the Cloud is actually really hard for so many financial institutions. Why has Capital One been able to succeed at a time when so many other banks are really struggling to do this? >> Yeah, I think about it in a couple of ways. They're not afraid to lead and innovate and fail fast, right? So you get out there, you talked about an MVP, and how you would stand up a new surface offering, or one of the applications in the cloud, right? Go ahead and do that, get some momentum, get people excited about the progress that's being made. That's one thing. And really understanding that security shouldn't be an issue, right? There's ways to secure your data in the Cloud. You can run core banking in the Cloud, Capital One's doing that, right? So, there's things like that that some other institutions sort of have analysis paralysis and they're like, "Well I don't know if I can secure my data, "I don't know if I can get the throughput that I need." The data latency may be an issue for banking and really bring the right architects to the table and do that. Capital one did a great job from the beginning of getting their people trained and certified in the Cloud technologies. A lot, mostly with AWS, right? Frankly. And really making that a culture of their organization. They don't consider themselves a financial services institution really. They consider themselves a technology company. >> Yep. >> And that's the culture. When you walk into a Capital One building, not a bank ... >> A Pete's cafe. (laughs) Right? Yeah. >> People center. >> The center, yes right, and headquarters building. You feel like you're walking through a technology company. You don't feel like you're in a bank. And setting that culture and that expectation with all of the Capital One associates I think is a huge key to your success and how you guys were able to get everybody on board. >> Yes. >> You had your CEO your CIO all talking about we're moving to Cloud. We're going to close our data centers. We're going to be all-in in public Cloud and that's the marching orders. And that's the drum beat, right? And you kind of feel that when you're there. >> And also from our inception, we've been a test and learn company and culture. That is what we have built Capital One on is finding out what customers really want, responding to that and iterating, and iterating, and iterating in different offerings. And it's no different with how we've approached our migration to the Cloud. We're going to set the minimum viable product as far as outcomes are concerned. We're going to test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. We learn from those, it's the fail fast kind of mentality, and we learn from some of those failures and adjust. And it's been, again, it really does fit our culture very well historically. >> And that's how, because there are so many trade-offs involved when you're thinking about these things. And is that how you sort of stick with the minimum viable product? This test and learn ethos? >> Well the test and learn is a way to get there. The minimum viable product is like this is our goal let's kind of be focused there so we can get to that. It takes some discipline to be able to say no there's shiny objects over here and over here, but if we go that way it's going to take us a little bit off track. So we spend a lot of time discussing what is MVP for the migration, for an application, whatever it might be, and sticking to that and making sure we stay true to that. So we have regular reviews at a team level, at a program level, to make sure we're staying the course and driving toward that. >> And that's critical. So many of our customers think they have to have it all thought out, all planned out, the entire strategy, all of the different dependencies mapped out, how we're going to develop this in the Cloud and they never get anywhere. Because you can't absorb all of that at once. So you start small, you gain, you iterate, and you go from there. >> When you're talking about getting inside the brains of customers and figuring out what they want and then delivering that, when we think about the bank of the future Capital One has this digital first strategy, what do you envision? For how people will interact with their financial services institution? >> Well I have four kids and they're all in their 20s and so I observe them a lot and I learn from them a lot and I can see what people want to do. They want to use their mobile devices. That's what they want to be able to do. They want to have access to their information at their fingertips, when they want it. The cafes Chad mentioned are kind of our big step toward, it's an educational offering more than anything else. Like here's how you can do that, here's the things you can do with this. It's not a sales oriented thing, it's an educational oriented thing so people can understand what tools they have available, understand what products we have available to help them, and then go about their lives the way they want. >> Great. What are some of the most exciting applications coming down the pipeline in terms of this new way of banking that Capital One is showing us? >> Do you want to take this one? >> We've actually built our primary customer servicing application that our customers use every day native in the Cloud. And we're continuing to iterate on that so I think you don't have to look much further than our mobile app to see what we're super excited about and what we already offer to folks. And again, that's been enabled by our migration to the Cloud so it's going to continue to iterate, we continue to learn from our customers what they want, what new features they want, we continue to build those out. >> Great. >> And even from a call center perspective you guys are using Amazon connect, right? >> Yes we are. >> To man your call centers and that has enabled a different way to interact with the customer. You have more data at your fingertips. You're learning some of the patterns from your customer calls in a way that you've not been able to do that in the past. So enabling some of that data is also been effective and kind of servicing those accounts and having that very good interaction with your customer. >> Great. Chad, Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show it was really fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (lively music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> 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 Vegas, everybody. We're rocking. We are rocking. Dave Vellante here with Keith Townsend. This is theCUBE, the leader, get into it! Live tech coverage. (laughing) >> We in the club! >> We are in the club. The Chads are here, Chad Dunn, Chad Sakac. Chad Dunn is VP of Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, and Chad Sakac, needs no introduction, although new role with Pivotal. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Awesome. >> It's exciting man, it's great to be back, like come on, some things change, some things stay the same. It's always good to be on theCUBE. >> So tell us about the new role, let's start there. I know you've talked a lot about it, but you haven't with me, so. >> Yeah, so, in a nutshell, as I was trying to think what do I do next in my career? You know, we had built amazing things in the converged platform and solutions division, VxRail, massive success. >> Dunn: Yep. >> Those things moving into the parts of Dell EMC for more scale and velocity, which is simple. If you imagine the future of tomorrow, you'd go and say, what percentage of infrastructure going to be hyper-converged? Answer, a lot, and it's going to need to have a velocity that's very similar to a server, because what percentage of servers are going to be HCI? Answer, a lot. And so it was a very natural kind of, time to go and say, how do we optimize this thing? And then that gave me a weird, unique, once in a lifetime moment, where I could go and say, what do I want to do? My wife said, I'm telling you a long answer, and you probably want the short one. My wife said-- >> Dunn: You don't know any other kind. (laughing) >> This is Chad skills. >> "Chad, you've been on the road for 13 years, "your children are now 12 and 14, "they're going to be here in the nest "for like another four years, "take time off, I'll go out to work, "you be a stay-at-home dad." That was actually, like, option A. Option B was, there's so much cool stuff going on in the ecosystem, join a startup, do a CEO gig, whatever, and then stay in the family and a ton of support from Michael and from Jeff Clarke and from Pat Gelsinger and Rob Mee, and there was, like, do this at Dell EMC, do this at VMware, do this at Pivotal. And what I realized was the Pivotal thing gave me the opportunity to do the startup-like thing, discover some new parts of my own career, so move up the stack, and do one thing that I've always done, which is be at the intersection of the companies. Because PKS is, fundamentally, an effort that is 50/50, VMware and Pivotal, just like VxRail is a 50/50, VMware, Dell EMC effort. >> Right, right. >> So it was the obvious choice and then I had to have that uncomfortable discussion with my wife that said, "Unfortunately, sweetheart, "I'm back on the road." She said, "Fine! "But at least take one month off "before you go from one thing to the other." We went to Hawaii, surfed. >> Oh nice. >> It was awesome. >> You bring the kids? >> Oh, yeah. >> Beautiful. >> It was awesome. But in any case, it's a, you know, in the same way that when we started VxRail, we were like, how do we go from a market where we're currently not the leader, and quickly accelerate, become number one, in a two-year period? And that requires running fast and iterating. The same thing goes with PKS, PCF and PAS is number one for that universe, but we're not currently number one for the enterprise container distribution. So, that's OK, I like that, now I'm determined and stubborn to make sure that PKS is the best enterprise Kubernetes and container platform. >> Chad D, you were talking off camera about the interest in VxRail, sounds like it's off the charts. >> Absolutely. I mean a ridiculous number of customer meetings that we have here at the show this week. I think it's over 200 customer meetings, just on VxRail, and VxRack SDDC, you know, the VMware hyper-converged stack. And, you know, more and more on Pivotal PCF and PKS. >> Yeah so let's talk about that. You got the guys that are sort of, born Cloud-native and the guys that are trying to transform, they need infrastructure to help them do both, they need partnerships, so lay it out for us. >> So, Keith, you and I have gone on Twitter and talked about this, there's this nature amongst the IT ecosystem, where everybody wants the answer to be A or B. >> Keith: Yes, we do. >> Right, A or B. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yeah A sucks, B is awesome. And you know, debates raged about, you remember like, the era of Doka is going to destroy VMware, you remember that? >> I remember that, seems like just yesterday. >> Because it was just yesterday. (laughing) But what's happened now is everyone's realized that's stupid, that the reality is that Kernel-Mode VMs and containers are going to co-exist, and in fact, the majority of containers are actually going to be deployed on Kernel-Mode hypervisors. >> Netflix's biggest story is optimizations from AWS. They're able to save tons of money by running containers inside of VMs. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Dunn: Absolutely. >> And, you know, I was laughed at a couple of years ago, when I said, you know what, containers and VMs go together, like peanut-butter and jelly, and it does. >> It does and so, look, does it change what people want from the Kernel-Mode virtualization layer? Yeah. So, things like DRS, that are really important if all you do is a Kernel-Mode VM is less important, when resource management is done by something like Kubernetes, but that's a refinement. And so, what we're trying to do now is now that everyone's gotten over the emotion, and what I call the bar-fights, where we're getting into stupid arguments, you know, that are not about something that matters, and now people are getting down to the brass tacks of, how do I make this go? They're realizing, I'm going to use off-prem and on-prem, I'm going to have Kernel Mode VM's and I'm going to have containers, how do I make that work, how do I build a hybrid model that will work for both of those scenarios? And then, frankly, our job as IT practitioners and the vendor ecosystem is to make this as easy as we can. >> Well, you guys know this better than I do, people want to use existing processes and procedures, they don't want to throw that stuff out, I mean I think of it, I remember Big Data and Hadoop that the killer application was sequel. Right, I mean even in the Blockchain world now. >> Sakac: Yep. >> Everybody's talking about writing in JavaScript, right, you've got expertise built up, you don't throw that away. >> No, and I think when you look at the people who are trying to deploy containers on premises, they don't want to worry about the infrastructure, right, they want to look at the new, play with the new, cool things, they want to play with Kubernetes, they want to play with containers as service. They don't want to talk about, OK, well what infrastructure do I need, how do I make those choices? They want something that is very much automated and very much scale-out so it can react the same way that their application does. >> So let's talk about that, let's talk about VxRail, Kubernetes, PKS. If I'm a Cloud-Native guy, I don't care about infrastructure but there has to be infrastructure. So where's the meeting of that conversation? Dell technologies run best on Dell technologies. >> So, again, I'm going to try and force myself to give short answers, because it's so not natural for me. I'm sorry, fellas. When Pivotal engages with the customer, we go and we say, "We give you a platform, PaaS, PKS "and the Function Service," and they say, "What should I run it on?" And the first answer that comes out of someone's mouth is it doesn't matter, you can run it on any cloud you want, which is true on one level. But then if you look at our on-premises projects, the thing that's the biggest holdup is infrastructure that is too rigid, too slow, doesn't work right, is busted. And they're like, damn it, if I want to focus my energies elsewhere, I have to have a base-stack that is just easy and done, right? >> So, help break up the long chat answers. One argument is, you know what, just give someone 128 gig VM, a bunch of vCPUs, and that simplifies the infrastructure. Where does that break? >> It breaks immediately when someone says, I need to add more total compute, or storage, or network, or memory, to my Kubernetes pot. Kubernetes goes, great, I'd like to basically make the cluster bigger, because I've got this resource demand. Then it looks down and says, infrastructure, are you there? And if the answer is, no, it's like, wah wah. Right? (laughing) So what we've managed to do is we've managed with VxRail to go and say, we've made an easy button based off of the customer-standard which is the VMware stack, it's not only something they can count on, they can easily add it, so if they want to add raw compute, storage, or network. It also adds in small increments, so you don't have to have a giant block of infrastructure to go in, you know, so you can grow your Kubernetes cluster, you can grow your physical infrastructure, simple, easy, done. And the biggest part is that Kubernetes makes deploying containers easy, however, PKS makes deploying and versioning Kubernetes easy, VxRail makes deploying and versioning the vSphere stack easy. Easy, plus easy, plus easy, equals easy. >> So is it like a quasi-elastic-beanstalk here? >> Elastic beanstalk, OK. (laughs) >> Is that fair? >> Or maybe a plastic beanstalk, where, you know, it could hold its shape. >> You know, elastic beanstalk is a PaaS, right, but the long and the short of it is is that if you get the abstraction that you need, Kernel Mode VM or container, the container is in a VM, if the whole stack is prescriptive and easy and works, then you can redeploy time, money, and resources, on the things that matter. And that Pivotal ready architecture, which is PCF, on VxRail, is that easy button on-prem. >> So, Chad, the production staff may regret me asking this question, but I have to know this. You're known in the industry for these blog polls talking about face-melting technologies. (laughing) What is face-melting about PKS, and VxRail, gimme some classic Chad. >> I'll give you face-melting. Facemelting to someone who's looking at a container platform and you're looking at Kubernetes is that without them knowing, without them knowing or doing anything, the Bosch part of what PKS does- >> Keith: Oh, Bosch. >> Is basically doing updates, like four times a day, blowing up the entire environment and recreating it and no-one has touched a damn thing, step one. The next thing that's face-melting is that their ability to update the infrastructure, can be done at tens of thousands of sites via API calls. So I'll give you another fascinating example. Kubernetes is generally thought-of as mostly a data-center thing, we've had fascinating interest from retail and other use cases, where they're like, look I get it, I want a Kubernetes, that I could deploy in a store. >> Keith: Yeah. >> And then you go and say, well, do you have a great DevOps practice in the store, in Topeka, Kansas? The answer is, no. But if I say I can basically drive all of the platform updates, including the infrastructure, at thousands of stores around the globe, that's pretty face-melting, no-one else can do that. >> Exactly, and look we see, you know, lots of pockets of Cloud Native popping up in accounts, and a lot of times IT doesn't even know where they're at. You know, these are things that are going to go from a line of business, and all of a sudden become production, have to become production, and IT needs a way to manage that. Rail gives them a way to go in and manage that infrastructure, at a scalable way, and move it from a line of business, into production. >> I'll give you another face-melting, do you mind? >> I'm not calling the shots. >> Bring it on. >> Is your face OK? >> My face is getting there. >> I want to see it like, melted Keith, just melted. People have asked me is that a good thing? And, yeah, it's a great thing. (laughing) So, we were talking about a particular customer, I dunno whether we can name them, can we name them? >> I don't know if we could, I haven't asked. >> OK so-- >> What industry? >> Financial Services. >> And, basically, they use the PCF stack on VxRail, and they're currently using it, for pre-prod. >> Exactly, so they're building all the testing applications to test their classic applications, that are running on VxBlock. >> So they've got a production environment that's like, big, classic, VxBlock, also my former baby, so and I love all my children equally, right. What they are finding is that the simplicity of the PCF on the VxRail Model, is so wonderful and fast and great. But when they want to try and do a capacity add on a VxBlock, or to do an update, like an RCM, it's a lot harder here than it is over here, right. I guarantee at that customer, what they're eventually going to discover is this has been awesome, we're going to keep using VxBlock for something else, but we're not going to deploy PCF, PaaS and PKS, on a VxBlock. >> Exactly, and this is going to trigger refactoring of all those workloads, that say, can I refactor these to be Cloud Native, right. If I can iterate my testing that quickly, can I iterate my production applications that quickly. >> And the ROI on that refactoring is? Fill in the blank. >> No, no it is like a thousand to one. So, again, this is a very hard thing to imagine. >> Talk about business impact. Not financial, but-- >> I'll give you one example that I'm so happy that they actually posted this to YouTube, because the customer's voice in this is incredible. If you YouTube, From zero to 12 million, T-mobile. OK, so this is not me saying it, you can go and you can see it themselves. T-mobile basically, and to all of you T-mobile, you know, subscribers out there, anyone of you guys use T-mobile? I use T-mobile, so, in any case, they have a single, giant, Java app that has a thousand functions in it, right. So, just imagine one app, sitting on a app server, like web-sphere or whatever, and inside that app, there's a thousand API calls, functions, and purposes, right. And because it's so big and monolithic, but this is critical, this is like the thing that runs their ordering systems and like, subscriber functions. It's the heart of the business that any time they needed to update it, to do like a patch, would take seven months. If they wanted to scale it, so like the iPhone launch is coming up, we need to get like three times as much capacity to handle all these iPhone orders in September, it would take them seven months of planning, work et cetera et cetera. >> Sure. >> Sakac: Everyone goes, I could visualize that. Right? >> Right. >> They took one function, just one, and pulled it out, and they said, we're going to do a project, we're going to take this function called, Get Usage, which, as you can imagine, basically pulls up the subscriber's usage data, and we're going to make it into a small micro-service, and we're going to run it on a PaaS, OK. Within five months, that function was getting used 12 million times a day, and they were able to do three CVE updates, so in other words, a Critical Vulnerability Patch, comes out, they were able to do it in real-time. They have eight platform operators, just eight, that are supporting 5,000 developers, sorry 500 developers. Eight, 500. Now, if you look at that and go, what does it mean for them? Well, they reduced the number of outages by almost 90%, the time for an outage went down by 63%, the developers and the dev-ops team are now happy, because this thing auto-scales itself. >> Dave: Ching ching. >> Ching ching, ching, right? >> Right, dudes, we got to go. Chad squared, thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Guys. >> You OK? >> I'm good. >> Your face is melted. >> Your face melted? >> I have water. >> Splash it on your face to bring it back. >> Really, always great seeing you guys, thank you so much. >> Thanks, Dave, it's always good to be on here. >> Thanks very much. Keep right there, everybody, we'll be right back to wrap, right after this short break. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by The Cloud Foundry Foundation, >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube's coverage of the Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back one of our earliest and favorite guests of the Cube Chad Sakac Who's at Pivotal now and he handles PKS and Dell technologies. Chad, great to see you, thanks for joining us, welcome to the Boston area, you come through this area a lot but it's great to see you. >> It's good to see you too. This is, by the way, my first CF summit. So it's interesting, you and I have talked together at Dell Technologies World, Dell EMC World, and EMC World for years. >> Stu: VMWorld. >> And VMWorld. This is a different scene. >> Alright Chad, this is my third time doing this show. I was at the first one back in 2014, last year we did the Cube there; every year it's like 'oh wait, there's this cool new technology; containers, maybe, how's Pivotal going to deal with that? This year, wait, Kubernetes, cloud natives everywhere. Maybe give us your point of view, as to how this fits in. >> So I feel like I'm a kid in a candy store. My job inside Pivotal is to drive PKS. Pivotal Container Service, that's built on top of Kubernetes. And there's a lot of Kubernetes action occurring here. If I had to net it out, I'd say a couple things. Number one, we've moved past the early hype cycle, and actually went through several hype cycles that blew up, so Docker is going to take over the world, not correct. What turned out to be correct is Docker would become the container standard, right? >> It's Mobi now, right? >> Right. Then, we went in to the battles of different cluster container managers. It's Swarm, it's Mesos Marathon, it's Kubernetes and there were lots of others, and then you get through that early hype period and things settle down to the point where they're actually productive, and everyone now kind of agrees, that Kubernetes is the standard container cluster manager for broad sets of workloads, great. Now the debate is Cloud Foundry, the structured PaaS-World, right? The structured platform opinionated, versus the little more wild west and open eco system of Kubernetes, and then early stage Kubernetes projects, like Istio and others, right? I think this has two chapters now, in front of us. Number one, and this is my focus I think for the next few years, is how do we make Kubernetes simple enough, easy enough, and frankly, enterprise ready. Not that it's not ready today, but a lot of Kubernetes projects that our customers are all over the map, difficult to sustain. We want to bring a lot of the lessons learned over the years of Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. And I'm happy to say, that just a couple days ago, we released PKS 1.O.2 and 1.1, which we haven't announced the date but we've always said that we're going to be in constant compatibility with GKE, and the core Kubernetes. Since GKE shortly will have Kubernetes 1.10 support you can expect a 1.1 of PKS. So mission number one is make Kubernetes a great platform, and I am determined and stubborn, and will make PKS the best enterprise platform for customers that are putting workloads on Kubernetes. That said, Kubernetes isn't steady still and neither is the ecosystem. And you can see that there's a lot of discussion over what is the intersection between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes? I think that over time it's inevitable that these things come together more. But again, I think that's going to occur over years. Not in a heartbeat. >> And even, I've been at the Kubernetes show and have been at this show a few times, it's not a monolithic stack, we're building distributed, lots of different pieces. You go to the Cloud Foundry, I'm sorry, the show that's Kub-Con, there's so many different projects there, I mean Istio was all the buzz, talk about the service national, there's all these little pieces there. And at this show, we're talking about Zip Car came and talked about they love everything in this eco system. They don't use some of the core components, but they use all these other pieces. As you and I've talked many times, Chad, people go read, Chad writes a little bit about some of these things to give you all the details there, but this stuff's pretty complicated. There's some in the Kubernetes community that's like it's never going to get simple. Remember when we thought Cloud computing was simple? And if you've been to any Amazon show and you go through, it is more complicated to configure a compute instance at Amazon, than it is to buy a Dell server these days. Because there's more options out there. Look, customers need options, many of them want things to be packaged and serviced and buy it as a service, but some love to put those pieces together and it's a spectrum and I loved at this show, Google and Microsoft up on stage, talking, 'hey, open communities, collaborating together'. Maybe not merging everything, but working together, understanding where things fit and it's not one or the other, it's many customers will choose both. >> You and I are both nerds at heart, I hope you don't take offense to that. >> I've already been doing Star Wars quotes this week. >> I wear it with pride. I'm always fascinated by the technology itself, but one thing that's been really cool about my experience alongside, and now inside Pivotal, and you can see it here at the CF Summit, is that the Pivotal obsession, is about the customer and the outcome. We build a platform that is an essential part of that, but teaching the world how to build better software is a noble mission. And the thing that's the most exciting for me is actually when the customers talk. So if you went to any of the customer discussions, did you see any of them, did you see the T-Mobile one? >> I saw T-Mobile up on the key note, I actually did an interview with T-Mobile. Had an interview with US Air Force. >> The Air Force One is amazing. >> Awesome. >> It's fascinating, from a technological standpoint, to say how do you use these tools? But it's the story of what you do with it, that actually matters so much more. I'll leave the, no, I won't leave the customer name out of it. So in talking with the T-Mobile crew, they love the Pivotal application service. So they are using it, it's an essential part of how T-Mobile works. They talked about it on stage, that's why I don't mind talking about it. And if you ask them, it's not an or. They also have massive projects, massive application workloads, that don't fit in PaaS, but are Docker images, they're currently doing some strange stuff with Swarm, and blah blah. And they're like 'Man, if you guys can basically deliver a great platform that we can consume instead of trying to construct and maintain, we trust you, you iterate with us, you work with us, we'll be able to focus more on the outcome. The thing that I'm actually going to be the most curious to hear feedback from customers over the next couple of years, is how do they navigate what workloads are best put into Kubernetes, how does Kubernetes sets of ecosystems start to not calcify, but firm up, right? It's going to be loose. But it will start to align more over time. >> Yeah our research team actually calls it, we need to get to a place where it's plastic. It should be not just scalable up and down but side to side a little bit more too. Once you have it, you can be able to go. >> Figuring out over time, and helping, with customers, figure out 'Hey, this is a Kafka or Crunchy data.' Post grass instance, or it's an ISV stack, or it's an application they've home grown, but they don't want it fully compartmentalized and put on paths, and they decide that they want to put it on Kubernetes, awesome. What is the value and the return of doing further work on that app to really make it Cloud Native, pull out all config, turn it into sets of small micro services, and then it's better fit for the PaaS part of PCF. Figuring out that formula over the next few years is going to be really cool. >> You mentioned culture. And that's been something you and I, Chad, lived through. It was the server vs the storage vs the network and the virtualization admin, and then the cloud admin. I talked to the US Air Force guy, and he was like, 'We actually have the people take off their uniforms, because rank would have a certain meaning inside there.' But you've got the Devs, you've got OPS, you've got still the infrastructure pieces on tub, what are you seeing from the customers you're talking to; what are some of the big challenges that are slowing people back from reaching this Utopia of fast, fast, fast, agile, inter-operable, wonderful times? >> How do I answer that one? That's a loaded question, brother. The biggest impediment is human nature. It's these damn humans, if we could just get all the humans out. >> Well everybody's mine, mine, mine. >> We'll go to low code, no code, eliminate all the humans, it'll be dreamy. >> I did one of those interviews today, too. Absolutely, you don't need all programmers, the business people can do it. >> The human tendency for control, and the need for control, I think it's probably deep seated in our, we're living in a world where we know intellectually that we don't have control over everything, but we hate that. Because we want to create control in our lives, that basically is the thing that sets up boundaries between people, and they get really hung up on their function. That's not new, the word's changed, like you said. Used to be server people vs storage people. Then it was virtualization teams vs the silo teams. And now it's the intersection of the DEV team and the DevOps team, the operations team. How do they intersect? The places where they're the most successful, is that they don't get hung up on that and the people blend the roles. Now the trick is, how do you do that in a big company? I wrote a blog, I'm not trying to advertise, virtualgeek.io I wrote a blog on this which was a synthesis of all the customer dialogues I've been having over the last few years. And the pattern I've seen that is most successful, is actually to recognize that there are stacks, and the stacks, I don't mean this particular technology choice, but the way that the whole stack driven by the business and the application and then the abstraction it sits on, and then you have to build your actual operations team underneath that. That creates a whole operational model which in itself is a stack, and just so it doesn't sound like I'm describing something that's nonsensical, a stack can be in big enterprises, there's a main frame based app, that's running on a main frame, that's being supported by a main frame operations team, and then right beside it there's another stack, which is all X86 workloads that are static. So they don't need an IAS they just need to run on a kernel mode VM abstraction. And then under that you've got the team that supports. Then you've got the workload that can be containerized, and don't need a full blown PaaS. And then you've got another one, which is a full blown application service model. Each one of those stacks ends up with different people, processes and tools, because they're mapped to the cultural operational model of that stack. And the thing that I'm trying to guide customers when I'm talking to them is, don't reject that; that's actually reality. Yes you should move as much as you can to the highest order abstraction you can. That's goodness and it pays dividends all the way down the stack. But don't go and say, that this workload, by definition has to go there. Or because you operate this way in this stack and this group operates this way, that by definition you're stupid and they're smart. The other rule is that- >> Chad, the answer to everything is server-less. >> By the way, I should have said that's another abstraction even to the right of the application service model. So the thing I've found, is a key kind of pattern of good, is that between the stacks, people and process are not allowed to transverse them, because the process is linked to how you operate. The only thing that goes between them, because in the end, for any customer, the stuff that touches all of those, is to become religious about one thing, which is that API's and data, and how those transit, those different stacks, that you have to be very clear on. Do you know what I mean? On the blog I drew a picture, but it was terrible. It was a terrible drawing. >> I've done whiteboards with you, Chad, I understand. Great, so. Sound's like you've got your hands full. Lots of us read the S1, so Pivotal's marching towards an IPO. You've only been there a very short time, you've know Pivotal since the beginning and all the pieces since Greenplum's part of the MC, Cloud Foundry part of VMware. Anything that you've learned since you've been inside Pivotal now that there's misconceptions? One of the things I always find is, we always learn about something the first time and then don't think it changes. >> It's funny actually, that's an insightful question. Having joined the team, it's weird because to many of them, I'm new, I'm a new Pivot. But to many of them they know that I've always been there. And I was reminding some of the originals, the crazy tortured path that we've taken to get to today. The original effort was hey, people are doing new things data's at the core of it. And that was the trigger for the Greenplum acquisition. And several of the people who are the senior leaders of Pivotal now came in through that. And then Paul Maritz was the CEO of VMware at the time, hey, I'm seeing people build new apps in new ways, by the way there's this crazy team inside VMware working on this thing called Cloud Foundry. And they were like a red headed stepchild. That's not PC, but like a black sheep? Or I don't know what metaphor you want to use, but basically they were working on something that had nothing to do with kernel mode virtualization at its core. >> Yeah it was a Cloud native peg in a VM square. >> And at the time, VMware isn't what they are now too. And then people forget this but I wrote a blog about it, so it's on the internet permanently. There was a Greenplum project, which was a great idea, that says people want to collaborate with data sets, and data scientists want to work together and it's really hard. Let's build a thing, which is like a social media portal, for Greenplum which was called Chorus. And the Chorus project was completely sideways. And they were like we don't know how we're going to get this thing on track on time, and they asked around the Valley, and people said hey, you should go talk to these guys, Pivotal Labs, up in San Francisco. What they do is they help people when they're stuck. They went, and I remember when Bill Cook and Scott Yara came back to Hoppington and said 'This was awesome, they've changed the way we think about how we build software, we think we should buy them.' And that got added, I remember when Paul Maritz said 'Spring is available.' it's like the most widely used modern JAVA framework, and that was also stuff in Spring Rif. All of these weird bits, in essence became the essence of Pivotal. You know what I've learned through that? Is these journeys are not in a straight line. Everyone's. >> Like our careers, Chad. >> Like our careers man. That's the first part, the second thing is, and this is going to be a challenge for Pivotal, honest, if we're very transparent as always, is Pivotal's brand is now so linked with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. And that's a good thing, like those customers raving about the business outcomes that they are getting. But inside Pivotal, the strategic change, the strategic pivot ha ha ha, to do a full embrace of Kubernetes versus the traditional opinionated versus plastic debates, I wouldn't say that we have 100% of the company fully embracing it yet, because companies are themselves, organic. But across the vast majority of the company it is something understood that it is an imperative for us. If we want to help the customers and the world build better software, we've got to do it for stuff that fits into PaaS, and stuff that doesn't. And so I've learned over the last few weeks about how many people share that passion that I have, and I think we can make something awesome with PKS. >> Alright, well with that Chad, we'll have to leave it there for now, looking forward to seeing you at more events. Congrats on the new role, I'm sure if people haven't already, Chad does have a new site for his blog, virtualgeek.io instead of the previous one. Chad, always a pleasure. Got the Cube here at Cloud Foundry Summit, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the Cube. (upbeat tempo)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone center it's theCUBE covering AWS Summits San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. Here at the Moscone Center West. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have a distinguished panel of guests on the program. Starting down of the fair side, Steven Jones whose the Director of Solution Architecture with AWS, helping us talk about how AWS gets to market is Chris Wegmann, Manager and Director of Accenture, and then super excited to have a customer on the program Chad Anderson is the IT Director of Operations at Del Monte Foods. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright Chad, we're going to start with you, talk to us a little bit about your role inside Del Monte and really the journey of the cloud, something we've been talking about for years, but Del Monte has an interesting story. I want to kind of understand your role in that. Start us off. >> Ya so I oversaw the project for us to migrate everything to AWS. We started off with just needing to really understand if were missing something here. Like, shouldn't we be moving to the cloud and that ended up in a study where we just kind of went threw the numbers, we looked at what the benefits were going to be and it kind of just turned into a obvious choice for us to do it. >> Back us up for a second, give us you know your organization Del Monte Foods and your technology group is this global and scope kind of how many end user do you have? How many sites? Can you give us a little bit of the speeds and feeds of what what was being considered, was it everything or some pieces, what was the impetus for the journey of the cloud? >> Ya, so we have about a thousand users, globally we are mostly in Manila, for our global share services our business back office work is done there and then most of it is U.S. footprint of plants and distribution centers and headquarters, et cetera operations. >> Alright so Chris, the SI partner for this cloud journey. So bring us a little bit of insight, bring us back to you know, kind of what was the business challenge and what was your teams role in helping along those journeys? >> The business challenge was getting Del Monte, getting the heart of their organization SAP to AWS quickly. Alright, there was a short time frame, I learned a lot about fruit packing during the project, but it was about how quickly could we get there? So, when we actually started, we started looking at taking seven months to do the migration of their environment. We really got into it and really got focused on what needed to be done. We looked at a lot of automation, put a lot of automation on the process, a very diligent approach, and we were able to do it, we thought we could do it in four months, and we did in three and a half months so very rapid, and I think as Chad will tell you we really kind of focused on building the right architecture, putting a lot of automation, and then also getting it in there with the right performance and then being able to tune things down, because you can you can move so quickly between engine sizes and memory and it was a really really exciting process to go through. >> Ya, so you said it originally we thought it was seven months, and it was good and done in half that time. That's not my experience with Enterprise Software roll outs. So, what was the delta there? How was the team able to move so fast? >> A lot of it was obviously AWS, being able to spin up the infrastructure, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that had to be done. Alright we did it threw three different environment sets. So we started diligent, moved to test, then went to production, and in each step we automated more and more of the process so we were able to condense the speed of the technical work that had to take place in a really short amount of time. >> We had to treat it also, like a mission critical thing across it wasn't just a infrastructure move it really the application guys were focused on this, we stopped all development of other activities going on. We really just kind of turned everybody and say "Let's get this done as soon as possible "and not be competing with each other." >> When you say stop everything, but of course the business didn't stop, but was transition pretty seamless. >> I mean other projects. >> Ya, ya, ya I understand, but I mean from the cut over and from your users stand point, did it go pretty smoothly? >> Oh definitely, these guys did an amazing job of putting together a plan that was really ready to be executed against. It took some, it took a lot of, I mean on my part it was really just to negotiate the extended maintenance window, but as far as the best compliment I ever got was people were like what did you do? Like I didn't even know that you guys did anything. From day one they took it and ran with it and we were stable. I mean it was pretty awesome. >> A black box, magic happens here and all of a sudden everything is running faster, scaling easier, cost is better, some of those types of thing? >> Ya, cocktails and beach time. >> Steve cocktails? I didn't realize that when I moved my enterprise application to cloud cocktails were involved. >> A few cocktails are involved. >> I mean look, I remember a few years ago where it was like well it's your development will do in the cloud, but I mean SAP has really raised cloud full boar and you know very strong partner, but bring us up to how does AWS help customers make sure that, this is critical things running the business, that it runs so smoothly. What have you learned along the way? What is different in 2018, then say it was even a year or two ago? >> A lot of great questions in there Stu, I would say this is become the new normal. Right? It use to be full disclosure, dev test, training type work loads in the early days but over the course of years we have taking a lot of learning with partners like Accenture and customers like Del Monte and we've taking those learnings and put them back into the platforms, so what you see today is a platform that a partner like Accenture could come in build a lot of automation tooling around, to reduce time frame from seven months down to three and a half. I think it was around two hundred servers, 50 of those were SAP related, and 25 terabytes of data that were moved in a short amount of time. So it's a combination of years worth of effort to build a platform that is scalable, resilient, and flexible. As well as the work that we have done directly with SAP that has gone right back into the platform. >> Chad bring us inside kind of operations on your team. What is the before and after? What's it look like? Was there change in personal or roles or skills? >> We transition services with our migration. So the Accenture team has taking over the long term operational activities as well as helping us through the migration efforts. We had a lot of preparation that was going on besides the server migration that was happening and I think what is really unique about them is because they can deliver these capabilities of the migration they have got a lot of the tooling and the automation is built into the operational mana services model as well. So it's been a much easier kind of hand over from those teams because we are working with the same vendor. >> Most of the time its not just that I've migrated from my environment to the cloud, but how does that enable the new services either Accenture from AWS from the marketplace. What has changed as to how you look at your SAP environment and kind of capability wise? >> It's just incredibly flexible now. It's just one of those situations where we can start small and we can scale so rapidly and it's like I feel like its kind of like walking into a fast food restaurant and just like oh, I'll take one of these, one of these, and one of these. You wait there and the food comes out, it just happens automatically. So, it's a great thing. >> Chris, I remember I interviewed a CEO a few years ago, and he said use to give me a million dollars in 18 months and I'll build you the Taj Mahal from my applications. Today I need to move faster and it's not a one time migration, but there's ongoing I've heard it a time and again there, so where does Accenture, it's not just the planning, where's Accenture involved? What is kind of the ongoing engagement? >> We go end to end. Right? So, we start out with strategy, we start out with a migration. The migration takes planning and execution, but really we focus on the run area as well using our Accenture platform and tooling that we have built. We really focus on how do you continue to optimize? How do you continue to improve performance? How do you govern? How do you do things like quota and security management and that type of stuff. I do think that a lot of our customers start with cloud think I can spin this stuff up, I can run it just like I ran my on premise data center and it's not the same. You go from a capacity planning person to a cost management person. You need to have a cloud architect understanding how you build your applications to be Cloud ready and AWS ready. There are a lot of great services, but if your not taking advantages of those services you can't auto scale, you can't do that stuff. So, we really help our clients go threw that entire process and make sure their getting the most value out of AWS all the way through the run for many years after they have done the migration. >> Chad, do you have any discussion of how are you reporting back to the business as to what were the hero numbers or success factors that said hey this was actually the right thing to do? >> Ya I mean we're a canned food company, so people are very interested in making sure that we are keeping our cost low. Most people from a business prospect want to talk to me about the efficiencies that their seeing and how's that going to show up a reduction in SG and A. We have seen it, I mean when you move to a group of people that can manage a larger set of infrastructure with a smaller group of people and the underline services can be turned on and off, so you only utilize what you really absolutely have. Those numbers show up on our bottom line. >> Steve, any other similar, what do you hear from customers when it comes to SAP, and what is the main driver, and what are the big hero things? >> So in the early days, it was all about cost right, driving cost out of the system. Now it's the flexibility, the ability to move quicker. Chad was relating earlier how you would spend a lot of time sizing environment and now there actually able to right size their environments using purpose built equipment the AWS has built for SAP. It's enabled them to actually reduce cost and move quicker. That's what we are hearing is common theme now these days. It's okay to move faster, to maybe not worry about sizing as much as we use to. >> Ya for future initiatives, I mean it's, there's all these windows of time that are just gone for us to stand up new services whether it's traditional application that needs servers and computer, whether it's SAP services, we are kind of all on that platform now where we can just click and plug in items much easier. >> Chad, what do things like digital transformation and innervation mean to a canned food company? >> We are desperately trying to get in touch of our consumer. So, whether were figuring out how to get improve kind of how we are managing our digital assets, how were managing, our pages on Amazon, or our pages on Walmart.com. We need to be much more in touch and much more consumer focused and a lot of these newer technologies, et cetera there built to run on AWS and we ready to kind of integrate that into our existing enterprise environment. >> Innervation has been a big part of our customers reason for moving to cloud. I'd say 18 months ago, we saw a big transition in our enterprise customers a lot of them were starting off with cost savings, for operational savings, just overall improvement of their operations, and then we seen about 18 months ago we saw a big shift of people very much focused on innervation and using AWS platform as that catalyst renovation. So, the businesses asking for Alexa apps, they're asking for the integration. Well, the SAP data has to be there to support that stuff. Right, and your enterprise tech has to be there, so by doing that it's enabled a lot of innervation in our processors. >> Chad, last question when you talk about innovation, are there certain areas that your team's investing in is it AI, is it IOT, you know what are some of the areas that you think will be the most promising and how do Accenture and AWS fit into those from your planning? >> Ya, I mean IOT is definitely an interesting area for us, and getting to a point where we can measure our effectiveness and our manufacturing processes, those are all really initiatives now that we're starting to focus on, now that we kind of gotten some of the infrastructure related stuff and were ready to kind of build out those platforms. We're talking about scaling out our OE software and our infrastructure its just such an easier conversation to kind of plan for those activities. We turned a three month sizing exercise as to how much IOT did and we think were going to have to process through these engines into a hey let's go with this and if it doesn't work then we'll take it out and increase the size. It really helps us deliver capabilities new capabilities and new types of ways of measuring or helping our business run in a much more effective and efficient way. >> Anything that you've learned along the way that you've turned to peers and say "Here's something I did, maybe do it faster or do it a little bit different way?" >> I think Accenture has been an amazing partner. I think a lot of people are skeptical about running their entire enterprise across the network and once you kind of bring them in and you really let them look under the cover of what you have. One of the reasons we went with them was just the trust and confidence that they had that we could do this. Once I kind of saw that it was like well I mean let's trust the process here. I mean these guys are the experts and so so that's been a big thing is just reach out learn about what people are doing. There's no reason why you can't do this. >> Well Chad, Chris, and Steve thank you both so much for highlighting the story of a customer's journey to the cloud. We will be back with lots more coverage here at AWS Summit in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas: It's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. 45,000 people here at Amazon Web Services reInvent. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guests are Barry Russell, general manager and business development of Amazon Web Services marketplace, growing like a weed, and Chad Whalen, who is the global Vice President of Public Cloud for F5, guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Barry, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, just, you can kinda see it now. Clear as day, no more, I mean, Andy says, "We're okay to be misunderstood." That quote, okay, no one's gonna misunderstand the Marketplace. >> Barry: I think it's pretty clear. >> You get in there, and you make money. It's pretty straightforward. >> Barry: Reducing a bunch of friction for customers. >> What's the current pitch, I mean, because this sounds like an easy sell at this point, what's the real benefits? Because, more of services are coming in. You got composability. What's the current state of the Marketplace? >> Yeah, you know, I think it's a couple of things. Uh, it's about selection and customer choice, so we've really grown the catalog, in terms of number of listings that are available and now more than 4200 listings in the catalog, and we announced three key features that we launched on Tuesday: AWS private link which enables SAS products to be run in a VPC. We announced Private Image Build that allows enterprise customers to run their own hardened OS underneath an image, and then we announced Enterprise Contract to reduce friction in the procurement process between large enterprise customers and software vendors. >> Okay, so I gotta ask, the AWS question: What was the working backwards document on this? Was it a main request from the customers? What was the main driver for some of these features because it sounds like they want to be cloud native, but, yet, they still gotta get that migration over, or was it something else, what was the driver? >> The driver was customer feedback. We went out, and we interviewed hundreds of customers over the last 12 months before we started building some of these features, and, without a doubt, they told us they wanted broader selection, broader deployment options, and to reduce friction around the contracting process, and then we just started building, and, over the course of the last nine to 10 months, that's what we've delivered. >> Awesome, all right, F5, you guys are in the Marketplace. You're partnered with AWS. What's your relationship with AWS, how's that going? >> Oh, I would say our relationship with AWS is fantastic. I mean, they're obviously the innovator in the Cloud space. Public Cloud is a strategic imperative for F5. They're at the vanguard of really the innovation of what's taking place in Public Cloud, and Marketplace is that fantastic medium to reach market, and, so, we really have the premise around meeting our customers how and when they want to be met. Marketplace is an excellent vehicle for us to do that, and we've enjoyed a lot of success with launch. >> How has your customers' consumption changed with the Cloud 'cause I can only imagine that, as they look at the mix of how they're gonna consume technology, they want some Cloud. How did you guys hone in on AWS? What was the real factor there? Was is acquisition of the technology? Was it the performance, what was some of the key things? >> You know, I think it's all about really reducing the friction in the process, right? Our customers are moving to the Cloud to have real-time agility and velocity in their business. What we get out of Marketplace is a fantastic set of options from a commercial construct. This solved the customer requirements. If it's going to be at development, we do it on a utility by the hour. When you start to go into production, we can do it in a subscription or a BYOL, so it's really about what application is there permanence and what's the best outcome for the customer, and we have all of that in front of us in multi-year agreements or otherwise leverage in this vehicle. >> So they're tailoring the products, basically. >> Absolutely. >> It sounds like customers are looking at this tailored model, whatever their needs are. They don't wanna be forced into a. >> Correct. >> Certain use case, they can just kind of mix and match. >> Yup, absolutely. >> Yeah, Barry, you know, think networking security have been spaces that I've seen really exploding in this ecosystem over the last couple a years. It, building off of what John was say, I mean, how much of it is custom stuff? You know, things that they're coming, working with Amazon versus just, you know, oh, it's the everything store where I can go get pieces? >> Well, we work with each vendor that lists in the catalog. We have a SA team, Solution Architect team, to work with them on the optimal architecture, be that an omni-based, API-based, and SAS-based, and then we give that vendor and their product development teams the ability to price those products in utility consumption model metered, for example, on the amount of data or band-width consumed, multi-year contracts that are publicly priced or negotiated behind the scenes. So, both in the innovation and the engineering and how the customer actually deploys the product, we innovate on pricing and consumption models to match those deployment options, and we give vendors, all vendors, that enter the catalog, whether they're open-source or commercial products, like F5, the option to use all of those features. >> Yeah, Chad, I think back to, you know, there was the wave of like software, you know, happening kind of networking and secured and everything, but, you know, you've always been in kind of the application delivery portion of this. How is Cloud accelerating your customers' journey and impacting how fast you need to change inside at F5? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think that because Public Cloud is such a fantastic vehicle for our customers it was really customers-focused, right? So, when you work back from what the customer wants both in terms of how you orchestrate, how you automate, and then with the commercial construct is then they can use it in a best-fit application, and that's really the grounding point for us, and, when we get friction, any time you have a new medium there's going to be friction points and learning points. We've worked in concert with AWS, Marketplace in particular, about solving these ways, whether it's in private offers or custom negotiated offers specifically for customers to meet their needs from an economic and a delivery standpoint. >> I gotta ask the question 'cause it always pops into my head, especially at this reInvent, the pace of services being released, Lambda, Serverless, you can just see it coming. It's going to put more pressure under the hood for automation, that heavy lifting that's Dev Ops, as we know, right, so no new news there. The question is what does it mean for the Marketplace 'cause now you're gonna be under a lot of pressure to integrate a lot of these plumbing and or, abstracted away dev ops-like tools that developers don't wanna provision, so you have the automate so that seems like a challenge. How are you guys dealing with that? How do you make Lambda sing? How do you guys make this thing go smoother? >> Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, one of the challenges that you get in, when you get into what I would say Cloud Sprawl, within an organization, is how do you maintain the governance and compliance of those workloads? And so we're really lookin' at it from that basis. We want to give as much flexibility into the model while still maintaining what was designed from the beginning, and so our customers wanna use the rules. They wanna have that portability into Public Cloud so they have the assurance. The underlying technologies are just the delivery vehicles, whether it's containers or Lambda or whatever in a server-less architecture, we're focused really on making sure that we have that ubiquity of posture across the asset wherever that asset is. >> Jeff: Makes your sources work together properly. >> Absolutely. >> Barry, what's the trends that you're seeing in the Marketplace? I mean, obviously, there's a lot of growth. Lot of data, and one of the things that I love about this reInvent is they're servicing this new playbook of, hey, use the data, your own data. We saw a new relic had a great report, Sumo Logic kind of report, that basically anonymizes the data, but they're using real data and Verner will talk about this at the keynote. What data can you share about the Marketplace that shows some trends that indicates or allows us to read the tea leaves of what's gonna happen next? >> Well, I think the customer growth stat that we shared, in terms of active monthly customers, we've gone from a hundred active monthly customers we announced last reInvent last year when we were here to now 160,000 active customers using the Marketplace, so we see steady growth. We see growth and adoption from the enterprise, and customers like Shell and Thomson Reuters, that we announced were part of Enterprise contracts on Tuesday, really beginning to think about using the Marketplace to go from traditional procurement moving to digital procurement model allows their IT organizations' dev ops teams to move much fast when pairing with services like a Kinesis, like an S3, like a Red Shift, when they're matching third party software with an AWS-native service. >> Jeff: Are you happy with things right now? Pretty much looking pretty good! >> I'm happy. >> Jeff: Middle of the fairway. >> I think it's been a fantastic show! (laughing) >> I'm happy, F5 has been a great partner of ours in the Marketplace, I'm a happy camper. >> Jeff: What's next? >> What's next? I think what's next for us next year is continuing to grow the Enterprise contract that we deployed, so we started with a small set of customers and vendors that participated to help us arrive at that contract that they both could use, and, I think that over the course of the next 12 months, we really need to think about the types of customers and vendors that enter that program. >> All right, Barry Russell and Chad Whalen with F5. Barry will be back on our next segment with another partner. A lot of partner goodness here. Amazon's ecosystem's exploding, and there's a lot of value to be had by all. That's theCUBE bringing you some content value on our third day live coverage. 45,000 people here this year at Amazon Webster's reInvent. More after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. (techno music)

(exciting upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> Okay, we're back in Las Vegas. This is VMworld 2017, and this is theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris, and this is the second segment with Chad Sakac who's the president of Dell EMC. We're going to dig into what the cloud looks like in the next decade, you know, 2022 time frame. Chad, again, welcome back. Thanks for spending some time. >> It's great to be back. No one's got a crystal ball a decade out, but I think we've got a pretty good idea of what we think the next five years look like. >> Well, you know, we do like at Wikibon to look further out, and say okay, what are your assumptions about how the business is going to evolve, knowing that any kind of ten year forecast is going to be wrong. But it does shape your thinking and your assumptions. >> Yep. >> So what's your vision? What's Dell EMC's vision for how the cloud is going to evolve and shape, and look like in the next five years? >> I think the following things are a near certainty and they're driving our strategy. Basically customers will consume platforms. They will pick the best platform on a temporal basis and on a space basis. So time and space (chuckles) right? So I'll give you an example. Today if you said, "What is the best place and time "to do AI and machine learning "for work that is against data that is not in-house?" The answer would be Google cloud platform in a heartbeat. Their core capabilities as a platform around AI and machine learning are head and shoulders above everything else. Right? >> Yep. >> That's a platform that people consume. Likewise, if you said, "Okay, what's the platform that I use for my "applications that basically need a little more "traditional care and feeding around them?" That's going to be an evolution of the VMware stack that the customers are using today. It powers 80% of what they do today. It's the platform that runs the core of their business today, and that platform, as you can see this week, is expanding and expanding and expanding. Now what'll happen over the next decade is that platform will be independent of place. So if you imagine what we're going to do with that capability now, it's not an announcement, it's a platform that customers can buy around VMware cloud on AWS, you can see that we just broke the "Is something on or off?" is now not the question. The question is what's the right platform and services to use for a given set of workloads? >> I want to build on that for a second Chad, if I can. So the vision that I think you articulated the core experience is Look that what you love about the cloud is you love the get in small, grow fast, or grow according to the workload needs, >> Chad: Yep, elasticity. >> Yeah, don't lock in a whole bunch of financial assets. Lower assets, specificity, be able to apply it to a lot of different things. You love that. But the problem is, the physical, legal, and IP realities of your business dictate that you're not going to put it all in there. So the common experience is, get that dependent upon the workload, and have it all run simply in a straightforward manner that serves the business. Right? >> Bingo. So the word platform is independent of space. >> Right? >> Right. The other thing that I think we'll see over the next decade is that any technologies that bind multiple platforms together are incredibly compelling. And you can actually see this driving both the R and D strategy and the M and A strategy of the leaders, right? So let me give you an example of things that bind together platforms, and themselves are platforms. Cloud Foundry is one of the best binders and spanners that exists. Because people use Cloud Foundry on Azure, on AWS, on their own private cloud all day long. In fact, it won the award for basically, at Microsoft Ignite, for the most popular used thing on Azure outside Microsoft's own core services. So it's a binder. It gives customers mobility and flexibility across these different platforms. Another example, we're going all in on Kubernetes. We think that Kubernetes as the container abstraction that spans these different clouds is in essence, game over of chaos, and game beginning of standardization and movement forward. I'll give you another example. I think that ten years from now the debates that we're having around SDN today will be so over, and everyone will go, "Of course you're going to have a software-defined "network that abstracts," because networking is something that needs to span platforms. So, core idea number one, people will make platform choices and there will be multiple platforms. Those platforms will be independent of on off prem, independent of Capex, Opex choices. Those platforms will exist in all of those modes. >> But be tied to the characteristics, the benefits that they provide to workloads. >> Bingo. The library of connectors, of things that span and bind these platforms, will grow in value and importance to the customers. I'll give you another example of a binding thing that links together multiple platforms. And you can see its success even today. ServiceNow is the thing that binds and connects at the ITSM layer, all of these different topologies. So it's not just things that are all just in our family (chuckles) right? But you can see these ideas continuing to march forward. The thing that I think you'll also see is the explosion of the edge is going to create this whole world that is the opposite pendulum swing of centralization that you can kind of already see happening. The number of edge devices that will exist, the amount of data that they're going to need to process locally, and the amount of data that they're going to need to process that's centralized in one of these platforms is going to be immense. >> So the edge, does the edge create a new cloud? >> Yes. You know, people are already talking about that like it's the fog or whatever. Again, buzz words can sometimes make people underestimate very important things that are actually happening in an industry right now. The last thing I'll say is, and this is a dream and an aspiration, and a vision, but a dream and an aspiration. There are amazing problems to crack in the domain of security. And that itself needs to become a core platform element that transits all of these other platforms. >> Peter: That's a key binder. >> It's a binding element that has to transit all these different platforms that people consume. And I think you can see the edges of the industry, us tackling these problems in new ways, and I'm very hopeful about that actually. >> So the infrastructure requirements of that new cloud, customers have to make bets. We were talking about that earlier. There's new stack choices that are emerging. What's your point of view there and how does it all relate to bring it back to how you get from point A to point B? >> There's a great risk in saying stuff on camera Dave. (men chuckle) But you know-- >> Peter: But take the risk Chad. >> But to hell with it (laughs). See it here on theCUBE first. >> So look, I think that we're entering into an era of stack wars. And that sounds too militaristic. That's not what I mean. >> Peter: Let's call it stack competition. >> I think that what is happening is that the need for customers to choose platforms and make platform level bets in exchange for simplification and speed is basically forcing them, and it's forcing the market and everyone in it, including us, to think, what is our opinionated stack? That doesn't mean closed, right? However, even though there's open connections all over the place, increasingly you're seeing people take the Lego components and go (makes building sounds) This works with this, which works with this, which works with this, and they're built all together. And the thing that I'm finding, and I don't know whether you guys see this in your customer conversation. It's weird, people are schizophrenic. They're really worried about what that means for them on premises. Because they're used to hand-assembling everything under the sun, and then are frustrated it doesn't all work together easily, right? And yet, they have no issue at all about saying "I'm putting everything in, you know, "in Office 365." I was talking with a customer, with the procurement person, and you can imagine the procurement person's reaction when I say, "I think that the world is moving "towards vertically integrated stacks." And there is decidedly an open ecosystem, but also an opinionated, pivotal, VMware, Dell, EMC stack. A Dell technology stack. The procurement guy lost his mind. He did not like to hear that from me. >> Of course. >> He started to get angry. >> Well, would you rather have what occurred with the Dupe? >> Yeah, and-- (Dave laughs) >> Well, what he wants is he is being told, "You got to take "five points off of every transaction." >> Yeah, of course. >> And he wants to see all these transactions be distinct, and what you're saying, Chad, is that we're moving where the transactions start to accrete value, accrete strategic importance, >> Yep. >> and accrete risk. And the procurement guy's looking at that saying (makes terrified sound) But it requires hard core, realistic vendor management that's well-defined and treated by the business as an asset. >> I think that we're entering into an era of consolidation. Customers are going to have to make platform bets that are business bets. >> For themselves. >> That's right. >> So bring it back to a topic that is more 2017, hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Chad: Yep. >> Is that the model for the future cloud? Or does it need to go beyond that? Beyond the virtual machine parlance that we tend to talk about? >> So, we have years of experience working with customers, trying to build clouds out of traditional infrastructure stacks. >> Dave: Right. >> And we're there as their partner to make it work. It is freaking hard! Frankly, nearly impossible. And again, they talk to vendor after vendor who's like, "Buy our new cloud management platform "and we'll be able to automate all of your crapola." >> Buy our hammer, and we'll fix all your cloud nails. >> And the reality of it is that every layer that you build one of these stacks on, the more variation that you have at this layer, it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And then the more variation you have at this layer, the more it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And that's what I mean about the stackification where the stacks are starting to bowl together. Driven not by vendor, but driven by customer need for simplification and speed. >> Peter: And workload. >> They're just not consciously making the connection yet that says it's time for me to make strategic choices. Right? So hyperconverge infrastructure has proven an ability. It's no longer in weirdo VDI only use cases (laughs). It is now proving itself to be a material simplification at the bottom layer of the stack. And it's not rocket science. It is basically the same lesson that hyperscalers and SASS startups realized, which is that you need to have something which is much more industry standard, much more software defined, much more rigid in a sense about how it's constructed so you actually life cycle it and make the next stack up simpler. >> All right, so we got to wrap. Let me summarize what I heard, and maybe you guys can fill in any gaps. So platforms essentially be products is what I heard. Those are my words not yours. >> Totally, yeah. >> And platforms will be place-independent, and a key value creator will be this binding platforms together. >> Chad: Yes. >> Which is going to become very very compelling. You gave the example of Cloud Foundry, Kubo, Kubernetes. >> I'll give you one more, Boomi. >> Boomi, and even SDN which is basically a fait de complis >> Yeah. >> is essentially what you're saying. An explosion at the edge will create a new cloud. The infrastructure requirements are going to evolve to support that cloud. And security is going to be a core platform element, a key binder as you said. Anything I missed? >> And that literally, customers have to be as simple as they can. And what they need to accept, and make choices, I'm not forcing them down the path with us or whomever. They need to accept that simplicity and speed means choosing platforms and platform partners. >> So here's what I'd add. 'Cause I think you're right Chad. I would add just a couple of refinements, that the quality of the platform is going to be a function of how well it binds. >> Chad: Yep. >> And that that security becomes a crucial binder. And the other thing that I'd say is that the edge, it's not so much a new cloud. I hate the term fog. >> Yeah. >> Because if there's anywhere where business is going to need clarity, it's going to be at the edge. >> I totally agree. >> That's a vendor way of looking at things. The customer way is, "I need clarity here you guys. "Don't talk to me about cloud." In fact, we like to say that when Andreessen said, "Software's going to eat the world," the right way of saying it, "Software's going to eat the edge." >> Right. >> That the edge is going to make a lot more of these choices clear. >> And just, again, I know we got to go but, It always sounds like hyperbole. The amount of stuff that we're doing around trying to make the edge clear, like basically the EdgeX Foundry, which is basically trying to standardize this mess of proprietary protocols and devices. That stuff is happening like now. The Pulse IoT stuff that we talked about, that's happening now. But those are just in early, early days. If you look out over a few years, that stuff will be a new platform. >> That's absolutely right. >> Yeah. And Dell hasn't fully played it's edge card, I suspect. >> We will see more there. >> Yeah. >> All right, Chad, first of all, awesome content. Peter, thank you very much. Virtual Geek is Chad's blog. If you're into this stuff, go subscribe to that. It's a fantastic resource. >> Thanks man. >> So thanks again. Really appreciate it. >> My pleasure guys. >> All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Chad: Thank you. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. This is Day 2. Chad Sakac is here. He's the president of Dell EMC, long-time CUBE guest, CUBE alumn. Chad, we were talking about eight years >> Yeah, it's crazy, man, it's been great. >> Dave: And you were one of the first. >> It's been great. I was thinking about it. What I love is it's always a great events where there's great things happening. And you guys ask killer, right to the point questions, and I always try to give killer, right to the point answers. >> Dave: All right, well let's get into it. Your ascendancy, personally, kind of coincided with VMware's explosion. You are down and dirty with the customers. So, first of all, congratulations on-- >> Thanks, dude. >> Dave: that role and being the president at Dell EMC. Awesome. >> I have a passion for it, Dave. Passion is the key, right? >> Okay, so we're all talking about cloud, right? Cloud first is something that you hear from customers all the time. I want to be cloud first. What does that mean to you, to Dell EMC, VMware? >> I think the first thing is is that to all of us, cloud is much more about an operating model than a place. And people have started to internalize that it's about changing the way that they operate their business, both for some of their traditional apps, as well as how they build cloud-native apps. That's the first thing. Operating model, not place. The second thing is, I think I'm seeing the customers in the market get a little more, I don't how to say this without sounding pejorative, but a little more mature in their view that the answer is going to have to be a hybrid model based on data and data gravity, based on elasticity of workloads, based on governance factors, that lead to hybrid being the answer. And if you think about what we've seen just in the last two days, VMware on AWS, Google partnering with VMware and Pivotal around Pivotal Container Services. Those are all about hybridizing both traditional IT and how people build new cloud applications. So operating model, not place. Hybrid is the answer. And the third thing is that it's multi. I still occasionally encounter somebody that says, "It's all going to be one cloud." And I'm like, "Okay, just out of curiosity, "does your definition of cloud include SalesForce.com?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include Office 365?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include AWS?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include your own private cloud?" "Well, yeah." "So, what are you talking about?" >> Peter: Where's the one? (laughs) >> Where's the one, right? And I think that there's a... Things start to matter once they move out of hyperbole and into pragmatism. >> Well, and when you paid attention, let's say four or five years ago, when you listened to Andy Jassy speak, the notion of hybrid cloud, or hybrid IT, or private cloud was not in his lexicon. And then yesterday, we saw him up on stage with Pat Gelsinger. They were talking about hybrid and private cloud. >> Chad: Well, by the way, I don't want to throw the dart at Andy. I think if you talked to Vmware or Dell EMC four or five years ago, public cloud wasn't in our-- >> Dave: Absolutely. >> (laughs) in our vernacular either. >> Dave: Absolutely, so those worlds have come together with the customer reality that says, "Well there isn't just one cloud. "And I can't just bring my business, "reform my business for the cloud." So what do you make of the fact that we've evolved as an industry and as a vendor community? >> I think it's time to get on to the brass tacks of solving the problems for the customers, ma'am. And I see actually that happening in the industry more and more. People are solving problems that they can't solve in their private clouds using public clouds. They're figuring out that the best place to put a dollar is to rebuild their applications using cloud-native principles. But they're also realizing that sometimes that it's not even a legitimate choice or option. And they're trying to figure out also, at the same time, "How do I support some of those "more traditional application stacks "and make them more automated and cloud-like, "even if they're not going to be cloud-native maybe ever." >> Peter: Let me jump in here for a minute. >> Dave: So this gets to the promise that you've got to make. And please jump in. >> Yeah, because in many respects, what we're really saying, let me test this with you, Pat, is that, ultimately, it may be one cloud, but that one cloud is going to be defined by the business and not by a particular vendor. >> Chad: It's a higher-order function. >> Peter: That's right. So what we like to say is we like to say, "You're not going to take your business to the cloud. "You're going to bring the cloud to your business." And your business attributes and your business characteristics, where you operate, how you operate, how you use data, who your customers are, how are you going to reach them, all those different things, the physical realities, the legal realities, the IP realities, all that's going to shape the architectural choices that you make regarding cloud. And you have to have a strategy for that becoming consistent and coherent for your business. So a lot of piece parts, but it becomes your cloud. Does that make sense to you? >> It makes sense to me. It means that it's an answer that involves a little more sophistication and nuance for the customer, because they've got to think about what it means for them. And the answer is not the same for every single customer. However, there are common base elements in that formula. Number one, digital transformation always starts with applications that are written using cloud-native principles, often using data fabrics that are modern distributed data fabrics. That's one piece. There's a consistent piece that says, "I'm going to leverage public and private cloud models." And the definition of which workload goes to one or another, like you said, is very much driven by data gravity. Compute tends to co-locate with the data against which it's computing. Governance rules, which is not security. Public and private clouds are equivalent. In some cases, one or the other is more secure than the other. But those are common elements. There's one other common element that I've learned over the last four years of being on the journey myself with many of our customers, which is that the only way that the on-premises part of cloud stacks work is through radical simplification and deploying their on-premises infrastructure using design and automation principles that look a lot more like the public cloud than they look like their most traditional IT. >> No, you're absolutely right. And I think that's a crucial point, that ultimately the physics of all this. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> And I agree, cloud is not a We like to say the cloud is not a place, it's a time. >> Chad: Yeah. >> Because at the end of the day, all this is defined by the realities of your data. >> Chad: Yep. >> And if your data can't If you don't have time to move the data or it's too expensive to move the data, that's going to dictate where the process actually runs. And I like the way you've redefined, I'll say redefined data gravity. Most people think data gravity, "Oh, once you put data in place, "it's going to accrete more gravity." And you're saying, "No, that's not the way to think about it. "It's going to accrete more function." >> Chad: Right. >> 100% agreement. And I don't think a lot of people are talking about things that way. >> By the way, the linkage to physics, I don't know how many of the viewers basically were physics majors, but it's actually related to quantum physics and mechanics. Information inherently can't simultaneously be in two places at once. That's a law of physics, right? >> Data, okay, keep going, keep going. >> If any bit, any information, basically, is connected between two points at the speed of light, that's not a function of vendor technology until someone-- >> Well, let me we get into quantum entanglement, nano >> Yeah. >> But I think where you are, where you're absolutely correct is that ultimately, that there is a cost to moving data. >> Chad: Bingo. Bingo >> And we have to start When we think about digital transformation, our approach is the difference between a digital business and a business is a digital business treats data as an asset and builds strategic capabilities to treat data as an asset and apply data as an asset. And one of the beauties of what you were saying earlier with simplification, is for example, the idea that if I build around data, >> Chad: Yup. >> then I can use hyper-converged, I can use converged, I can use Flash, I can use VC, and I can use all these different things to treat my data differently. >> And do it as simple as possible. The thing that I think I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with a customer that's in the finance and insurance vertical, right? And they're pretty advanced down there, use of both public and private clouds. They've got a software-defined data center. And they're trying to basically redefine how they're using mobile apps and customer intelligence. They provide a ton of services. They're a great, great customer and a partner. But again, to highlight that cloud is a place, or a time, to use your vernacular, as they build their mobile app, sets of assets are running in a public cloud, the data was born in the public cloud, the compute is running in the public cloud, it's built around a cloud-native app principle using PCF and Kubernetes. Great! When that person is using that application, there's a moment when they go in and do a transaction where literally it's hitting a mainframe running DB2 in their core data center. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that pattern is universal, right? And so it highlights basically that you've got to be a little practical about how you do this stuff. >> Okay, so in the limited time we have remaining, give us the the quick why Dell EMC, Dell EMC, VMware, why you guys Maybe talk a little bit about the portfolio. >> So if you look at this week, the one thing that jumps out, at least to me, I'm probably a little close to it, Dave, but I hope it jumps out to the viewers, right, is while we maintain an open ecosystem, Dell EMC has its open ecosystem, VMware has its ecosystem, Pivotal has its ecosystem, we're becoming much more opinionated, right? And that matters because customers want clarity. So I'll give you clarity. Clarity that jumped out on stage and it came out of the mouth of Pat, not me, was the easiest way to deploy VSAN is on VxRail. The easiest way to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation is on VxRack SDDC. Period, full stop. Now, why are we saying that so emphatically? It's because if you don't have a good foundation for an SDS and SDC, or SDC, SDS, and SDN, so software-defined network and compute and storage, in the case of VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRack SDDC, then your whole underpinning is just way too complex, right? So there's a very clear opinionated point of view that says hyper-converged infrastructure that's being built by the combined team is the way forward for customers who have standardized on vSphere. >> Well, and you nailed it earlier. If you're going to bring the cloud model to on-prem, to the data, it's got to be simple. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> Peter: That's the cloud model. >> That is the cloud model, right? And and without it, you can't fulfill that promise. With it, you can. >> I'll give you a second example. For the last four years, we've been supporting our customers with the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. We've learned more about what does it take to lifecycle, manage, and deploy vRealize Suite on top of HCI, where we own the lifecycle, right? At the same time, VMware has been learning about, "What does it take to take vRealize and run it "in the VMware cloud on AWS, not as software, "but as a service?" And that's all about simplification and lifecycle management. What we're doing between VMware and Dell EMC is taking that knowledge and saying, "HCI is the foundation, and on top of that, "here's how you build your IaaS "for your traditional applications, "and the foundation for what's coming next." And then the last part that we saw today loud and clear is a strongly opinionated point of view that says PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is the best structured PaaS in the market, and a full embrace of Kubernetes, Pivotal Kubernetes Services, Pivotal Container Services using Kubernetes, is going to be the best way to build container as a service. How do you deploy it best? On vRealize. How do you deploy it best? On top of VxRack SDDC. It's pretty clear. >> Covered all the bases, we could go all day with you, but we're out of time. >> Yeah. >> Chad, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE yet again. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure, guys, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)