>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. And we're talking about next generation VxRail product came out almost two years ago. Colin, I want to poke at it a little bit and challenge you somewhat. A lot of people would say great, you know, you've got a great portfolio, awesome company, you're number one, but you're really trying to lock me into VMware at your sister company. You know, Michael Dell owns both companies, what do you say to that? >> Well, I mean, VxRail is jointly developed with VMware. That's a fact. It is the, as such, is the best hyper-converged appliance for VMware environments. And it does require you to run vSphere. But, that isn't necessarily a lock-in. When I talk to customers about this, I always phrase it as, it's a matter of ecosystem choice. And whatever product you purchase today, be it a laptop, be it a phone, you're not just choosing that product, you're choosing the ecosystem behind it. And, the VMware ecosystem is incredible. It's huge, the number of developers, the number of third-party applications, all the support for it is incredible. So, it's not about vendor lock-in, it's about are you choosing an ecosystem that is large enough to support you? Are you choosing an ecosystem that has all of the other third-party vendors? You know, to go to the phone analogy, right, I mean there are phones that die. You know, we can talk about Blackberry or some of the Microsoft phones, that die because there was no app ecosystem for them, right. And again, you want to buy into the ecosystem that gives you the best choice. And VMware certainly is that, and that's why it's the market leader in hypervisors. >> Okay, great, okay let's talk about networking. So, one of the concepts that we talk about a lot at Wikibon is this notion of a single-managed entity, fluid pools of infrastructure, whether it's compute or storage or networking. Now when I think about VxRail, am I correct that you're basically, the networking is not fully-integrated using top-of-rack switch choice, but it's not this sort of hyper-converged infrastructure as I just described it with this single manage entity. Can you address that? >> Absolutely, the network is not included by design. What we find when talking to customers is that not all of them are ready to transform the network. So for customers who want to get started with hyperconverge, who want to consolidate their compute and storage, we have our appliance line, including VxRail. That allows customers a tremendous amount of transformation and tremendous amount of benefit. When customers are ready to transform their network as well, or if they're ready today, we have a sister product, VxRack that allows them to do that. So it's not, unlike other competitors, where they have one solution and they're pushing that one solution, we have a range of products on our portfolio that tailor where customers are along their HCI journey. >> Okay, great, another sort of knock off, if you will, is file support. It's not been something that you've offered before. Where is file? >> It has been a ding on us today. There are customers that want to do file on top of hyper-converge. And some of our competitors have beat us to market on that. However, we're announcing, along with this announcement, the ability to run IsilonSD Edge on top of VxRail. Isilon is the leading file solution on the market. Their SD Edge capability runs on top of VxRail, seamlessly integrates with the VMware environment there. Key use cases for this are edge deployments, where customers want to run compute and file together. And SD Edge has a unique advantage that no one else on the market has, is if you want to do file to core replication, you want to have a bunch of file sites in various remote locations and then you want to consolidate all back to a core location, you can do that running SD Edge on VxRail at the edge and Isilon at your core data center. >> Well, that's awesome, okay, great. I'll give you the last word. What should we know, take aways, why Dell EMC? Wherever you'd like to go. >> We didn't get to be number one in this market by accident. We started out two years ago not number two, not number three, woefully behind. And in the course of two years, through our rapid pace of innovation, really focusing on key customer requirements, not getting distracted by some of the noise in the market, and leveraging the power of our portfolio, we've delivered solutions that customers are adopting, and that are driving us to be number one on the market. >> Excellent, well Colin, thanks for your honest assessment and addressing some of these critical questions. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.

>> Voiceover: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. (upbeat techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat techno music) >> The research analysts at Wikibon tell us that the market for what they call true private cloud, that is on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics public cloud infrastructure, the market for true private cloud is growing at 30% compound annual growth rate. Twice the rate of infrastructure as a service in public cloud. Why is that? It's because HCI is really a foundation for IT transformation and private cloud, true private cloud as we call it at Wikibon. Hi, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Colin, good to see you again. >> Thanks, good to be here again, Dave. >> So, we're going to get into it, and we're going to talk a lot about VxRail, which was announced well over a year ago. Give us the update on VxRail. >> So, yeah. It's actually almost been two years. It'll be two years this coming February. And it's been a tremendous ride. We have seen tremendous customer adoption, primary for some of the reasons you just mentioned. Customers looking to build private cloud on an agile, kind of modern transformative infrastructure. And to date we've sold over 17,000 nodes. That's over a whopping 165,000 cores, and over 190 petabytes of storage. So, tremendous amount of success. All of this great customer interest has helped propel Dell EMC to be number one in hyperconverged. And we haven't just been selling the same product for the last two years. We've been continually innovating over the course of these last two years driving a tremendous pace of innovation. We've introduced new software capabilities. We had hybrid-only configurations to start and rapidly introduced all flash. After Dell acquired EMC, we moved to a Dell-based hardware infrastructure, obviously. >> Quickly. >> Very quickly, very quickly. >> Almost as fast as the logos changed. >> Yes, almost. (laughter) Within two months. And what we're announcing today is that we're building the next generation and selling the next generation of VxRail appliances based on the 14th generation PowerEdge servers. >> Okay, so you mentioned a lot of that was driven by, of course, the acquisition. But tell us more about 14G sort of and VxRail. What's the synergy? People say, "Eh, it's just another server." Is that the case? >> Absolutely not, Dave. By leveraging the 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we are able to deliver a tremendously powerful, a tremendously purposeful, and tremendously polished appliance experience. What do I mean by powerful? With VxRail we can deliver two times the IOPS than we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads. But what do we mean by purposeful? We can deliver over a million combinations of configurations for customers. And yes, it's over a million. Me and my team counted, and they hate me for it. (laughs) Yes. >> Really? Did you use a supercomputer to do all that counting? >> No, just Excel spreadsheets and a lot of elbow grease. But by tailoring this, by delivering allows customers to buy exactly what they need to master specific configurations. And by polished we can deliver a highly predictable system. We can deliver over nine times more predictable system than we could in previous generations. And we can maintain sub-millisecond latency for a wide variety of workloads. >> So, I'm interested in this specific contribution of PowerEdge. You're basically saying that it's essentially built for this type of environment. It's not just a generic sort of server that you're popping in. >> Absolutely. You know, the fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverge, which is built on top of software-defined storage, is that hardware doesn't matter. And while yes, a tremendous amount of the power comes from the software, hardware does make a difference. You know, you get a very different experience when you have purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a white box server. Think about the hard thing we used to do for storage array. Someone still needs to do that work. You know, software isn't going to cover all of that. And these PowerEdge 14th generation servers have over 150 custom requirements from us, the software-defining ACI teams. Things like how you boot. That needs to be done differently in hyperconverge appliances. The drive choices that we select, they need to be very different than you would find in just a standard server. Even things like power and cooling are slightly different based on the needs of hyperconverge. So, what you've got with a 14th gen server is purpose-built hardware for hyperconverge. You know, the net-net is hardware matters. >> So, you mentioned a lot of permutations. What are some of the configuration options that people should know about here? >> So, I believe we have one of the widest if not the widest selection of CPU choices. Again, why does that matter? Customers want to buy the CPUs that match their specific needs. Nothing more, nothing less, right? If you buy more, you're overspending. If you buy less, you have to buy two or three nodes to get the same level of performance. By offering this tremendous breadth of CPU capability, we allow customers to fine tune their needs to exactly what they want. We also offer an additional set of drive types now. We're doubling our drive choices by offering SATA SSDs as an addition to SAS. SATA allows us to offer lower price points yet still deliver an all flash experience. And because in hyperconverge networking matters, we are significantly increasing our network connectivity options, allowing customers to get more granular control and/or more ports as needed. Oh, and we're introducing 25 gig networking as well. >> Okay, great. I want to maybe come back and talk about some of those points. But before we do that, I talked about at the top of the segment about how this all fits into cloud, and our true private cloud definition, and so forth. What makes this offering cloud? Can you give us some detail or an example or two? >> Yeah, I think when you go and buy a cloud service, you are specifying a certain configuration that's based on, hey, I want this number of IOPS, this capacity. You're not specifying drive types. You're not specifying network connectivity, ports options. You know, that's something you can only ... And when you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle. By going to hyperconverge where you've consolidated storage and compute together, you can build a very simple experience on top of it, layer your service catalog on top of it, and not have to worry about managing the underlying components separately. >> You know, I want to talk about the guys who aren't doing hyperconverge. I mean when you see it ... We were early on looking at the market, and understanding the benefits. But still, there's still a lot of folks who want to roll their own. You know, maybe it's a channel affinity. Or maybe it's some server affinity Or maybe they just like doing heavy lifting. I don't know. But what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of why people aren't moving to hyperconverge? And what would you tell those people? >> Well, I think I'll disagree with you on that, Dave. You know, depending on which analyst you listen to, somewhere between two-thirds to three-quarters of customers are actively looking at deploying hyperconverge in the near future, within one to two years. So, people are interested. But you're right. That's one-third or a quarter of the market who's not. And for both of them, when I talk to them I say that the key benefits are that you cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product. If you're still buying the same, old components piece by piece and assembling themselves, you're going to be spending all of your time doing that assembly and the maintenance of that yourself. You need an infrastructure product that frees up those resources to deliver better business value. What we do with hyperconverge appliances like VxRail is that we take on that burden of integration. We take on that burden of testing. Yeah, you know longer need to maintain a full test lab because we've done the full certification ourselves. And we deliver that lower TCO, fully-automated experience that you can't get by doing it yourself. Some of our competitors focus on doing the same thing, but they focus a lot on the day zero value. You know, how fast it is to install. You know, how fast it is to get the first VM. What we found in hyperconverge is the real benefit is the lifecycle and automation that comes from day one, day two, and beyond. By building that automation lifecycle management qualification, testing, allows us to deliver a truly transformative experience. Buying VxRail can lower your TCO by 30%. That's a three-year TCO. This isn't marketing magic, marketing numbers. This is a full three-year TCO lowers by 30%, and can lower your support costs by 42% You know, that's something you can't get by buying servers and building your own. >> Well, I would totally agree with that because our data suggests that there's over $100 billion over the next 10 years. 150 billion, actually, that's coming out of sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting of deployment of infrastructure. But again, people still ... You know, it's like you said, a third of the market. I don't know. Is it because old habits die hard? What do you think it is? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm giving a secret away. I'm writing a blog post on this, but I've been late on it. So, I'll use it here now, >> Great. >> and then maybe it'll force me to actually publish the post by the time this comes out. (laughter) You know, I get those questions when I talk to customers. There's always one in four customers says, "Well, I can do that. I know how to do it. I've got the processes down." And my response to them is always. What does it say on your resume? On your resume does it say rack and stack servers? Does it say deploy vCenter and vSphere? Does it say cable networking? I doubt it. Your job description today on your resume probably says, "I develop applications as support, and x revenue business." You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Digital transformation. >> Colin: Digital transformation. Exactly right. >> Enabler. >> So, if you're not doing that, and you're saying your value is racking and stacking, cabling, installing software, right? You're lying on your resume. (Dave laughs) What I'm giving you on VxRail is the ability not to lie on your resume. (laughter) It'll allow you to actually focus on the digital transformation. >> Well, I think every customer we talk to is going through some kind of, not only transformation, IT transformation, but a big digital transformation. They're trying to move resources up the stack. There's this sort of bromide. But it's true. To whatever, AI, data, analytics, or application development that's going to drive revenue. >> Yeah, and hyperconverge is perfect for all that. You know I used to say either hyperconverge was ready for all virtualized workloads. That you could buy a VxRail and run any virtualized workload on it. With the power that we get, the predictability, and the configurations that we get from 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we're not just ready for virtualized workload, we're ready for any workloads, mission-critical workloads, anything customers want to deploy on it. >> Yeah, this is really important. Look, IT is a very labor-intensive business that's too labor intensive. And that has actually stifled some innovation. And now we're finally seeing some light at the end of that tunnel. And hyperconverge infrastructure is an enabler there. Okay, when can I buy this stuff? >> We are actively taking orders right now. It's available to order now. And it will be shipping within 30 days. >> Dave: Okay, great. Let's see, a little commercial for a CrowdChat that's coming up, #nextgenhci which is on December 1st. Where else can I get info? >> You can go to dellemc.com/hci. That's a full page where you can find out about all of our HCI solutions, including VxRail. >> All right. >> And we've got some great there. We're going to have some cool videos, including this. And hopefully, some other ones. But yep. >> Well, Colin, congratulations on this success. A massive number, 17,000 nodes, 165,000 cores, 190 petabytes, and presumably more to come. So, well done. >> Looking forward. >> All right, thanks for coming on. >> Colin: Thanks, Dave. >> All right. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE Conversation with Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage at .conf2017. Splunks get together here in the nation's capital, Washington D.C. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us here for two days of coverage. We're joined now by Team Dell EMC I guess you could say. Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of VxRail Product Marketing. Colin, good to see you, sir. >> Likewise. >> And Cory Minton, many time Cuber. Colin, you're a Cuber, as well. Principle Engineer, Data Analytical Leader at Dell EMC, and BigDataBeard.com, right? >> Yes, sir. >> Alright, and just in case, you have a special session going on. They're going to be handing these out a little bit later. So, I'm going to let you know that I'm prepared >> Cory: I love that, that's perfect. >> With you and your many legions of fans, allow me to join the club. >> That's awesome. Well welcome, we're so glad to have you. You've got a big data beard. You don't have to have a beard to talk big data at Dell EMC, but it certainly is not frowned upon if you do. >> John: Alright, well this would be the only way I'd ever grow one. >> There you go. >> I can promise you that. >> Looks good on you. >> I like the color, though, too. Anyway, they'll be handing these out at the special session. That'll be a lot of fun. Fellows, big announcement last week where you've got a marriage of sorts with Splunk technology and what Dell EMC is offering on VxRail. Tell us a little bit about that. Ready Systems is how you're branding this new offer. >> So we announced our Ready Systems for Splunk. These are turnkey offerings of Dell EMC technology pre-certified and pre-validated with Splunk and pre-sized. So we give you the option to buy from us both your Splunk solution and the underlying infrastructure that's been certified and validated in a wide variety of flavors based on top of VxRail, based on top of VxRack, based on top of some of our other storage products, as well, that gives you a full turnkey implementation for Splunk. So as Splunk is moving from the land of the hoodies and the experimenters to more mainstream running the business, these are the solutions that IT professionals can trust from both brands that IT professionals (mumbles). >> So you're both a Splunk reseller and a seller of infrastructure, is that right? >> Indeed. So we actually, we joined Splunk in a partnership as a strategic alliance partner a little over a year ago. And that gave us the opportunity to act as a reseller for Splunk. And we've recently gone through a rationalization of their catalog, so we actually have now an expanded offering. So, customers have more choice with us in terms of the offers that we provide from Splunk. And then part of our alliance relationship is that not only are we a reseller, but because of our relationship they now commit engineering and resources to us to help validate our solutions. So we actually work hand in hand with their partner engineering team to make sure that the solutions that we're designing from an infrastructure perspective at least meet or exceed the hardware requirements that Splunk wants to see their platform run on top of. >> Dave: Okay, cool. So you're a data guy. >> Indeed. >> You've been watching the evolution of things like Hadoop. When I look at the way in which customers deal with Hadoop, you know, ingest, you know, clean or transform, analyze, etc., etc., operationalize, there seem to be a lot of parallels between what goes on in that big data world and then the Splunk world, although Splunk is a package, it seems to be an integrated system. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And, what are the requirements for infrastructure? >> I think that the ecosystems, like you said, it's open source versus a commercial platform with a specific objective. And if you look at Splunk's deployment and their development over the years they've really started going from what was really a Google search for log, as Doug talked about today in the kickoff, to really being a robust analytics platform. So I think there's a lot of parallels in terms of technology. We're still ... It's designed to do many of the same things, which is I need to ingest data into somewhere, I need to make sense of it. So, we index it or do some sort of curation process to where then I can ask questions of it. And whether you choose to go the open source route, which is a very popular route, or you choose to go a commercial platform like Splunk, it really depends on your underlying call it ethos, right? It's that fundamental buy versus build, right? For somebody to achieve some of the business outcomes of like deploying a security event and information management tool like Splunk can do, to do that in open source may require some development, some integration of disparate open source platforms. I think Splunk is really good about focusing specifically on the business outcome that they're trying to drive and speeding their customers' time to value with that specific outcome in mind, whereas I think the open source community, like the Hadoop community, I think it offers maybe some ability to do some things that Splunk maybe wouldn't be interested in, things like rich media analytics, things that aren't good for Splunk indexing. >> Are there unique attributes of a data rich workload that you've accommodated that's maybe different from a traditional enterprise workload, and what are those? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day any application is going to have specific bottlenecks, right? One of the basis of performance engineering is move the bottleneck, right? In enterprise applications we had this evolution of originally they were kind of deployed in a server, and then we saw virtualization and shared storage really come in vogue for a number of years. And that's true in these applications, these data rich applications, as well. I think what we're starting to see is that regardless of what the workload is, whether it's a traditional business application like Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft or it's a data application like Splunk, anytime it becomes critical to the operation of a business organizations have to start to do things that we've done to every enterprise IT app in the past, which is we align it to our strategy. Is it highly available? Is it redundant? Is it built on hardware that we can be confident in that's going to be up and running when we need it? So I think from a performance and an engineering perspective, we treat each workload special, right? So we look at what Splunk requirements are and we understand that their requirements may be slightly different than running SAP or Oracle, and that's why we build the bespoke systems like our Ready System for Splunk specifically, right? It's not a catch all that hey it works for everything. It is a specifically designed platform to run Splunk exceptionally well. >> So Colin, a lot of the data practitioners that I talk to at this show and other data oriented shows like, "Ah, infrastructure. "I don't care about infrastructure." Why should they care about infrastructure? Why does infrastructure matter, and what are the things that they should know? >> Infrastructure does matter. I mean infrastructure, if youre infrastructure isn't there, if your infrastructure isn't highly available, as Cory said, if it lets you down in the middle of something, your business is going to shut down, right? Any user can say, "Talk about what happened "the last time you had a data center event, "and how long were you offline, "and what did that really mean for your business? "What's the cost of downtime for you?" And everything we build at an application level and a software level really rests on an infrastructure foundation, right? Infrastructure is the foundation of your data center and the foundation of your IT, and so infrastructure does matter in the sense that, as Cory said, as you build mission critical platforms on it the infrastructure needs to be highly reliable, highly available, and trusted, and that's what we really focus on bringing. And as applications like Splunk evolve more into that mainstream world, they need to be built on that mission critical, reliable, managed infrastructure, right? It's one thing for infrastructure development, and this kind of happens in the history of IT, as well. It happened in client server back in the day. You know, new applications ... Even the web environment I remember a company was running, one of my clients was running a web server under their secretary's desk, and she was administering in half time. You would never have a large company doing that. >> They'd be back up (mumbles). Before you leave. >> As it becomes more important it becomes more central, but also it becomes more important to centrally manage those, right? I'm a 15 year storage veteran, for good or for worse, and what we really sell in storage is selling centralized management of that storage. That's the value that we bring from centralized infrastructure versus a bunch of servers that are sitting distributed around the environment under someone's desk is that centralized management, the ability to share the resources across them, the ability to take one down while the others keep running, shift that workload over and shift it back. And that's what we can do with our Ready Systems. We can bring that level of shared management, shared performance management, to the Splunk world. >> I'll tell you, one of the things that we talked about, we talked about in a number of sessions this week, is application owners, specifically the folks that are here at this conference, need to understand that when they decide to make changes at the application level, whether they like infrastructure or they think it's valuable or not, what they need to understand is that there are impacts, and that if you look at the exciting things that were announced today around Enterprise Security updates, right? Enterprise Security is an interesting app from Splunk, but if a customer goes from just having Splunk Enterprise to running Enterprise Security as a premium application, there's significant downstream impacts on infrastructure that if the application team doesn't account for they can basically put themselves in a corner from a performance and a capacity perspective that can cause serious problems and slow down the business outcome that they're trying to achieve because they didn't think about the infrastructure impacts. >> Well, and what they want really is they want infrastructure that they can code, right? And we talked about this at VMworld we were talking about off camera that cloud model, bringing that cloud model to your data as oppose to trying to force your business into the cloud. So what about Ready Systems mimics that cloud model? Is it a cloud like infrastructure? Wondering if you could talk-- >> Yeah, I think it's that cloud like experience. Because we know we're in a multi cloud world, right? Cloud is not a place, cloud is an operating model, right? And so I think that the Ready Systems specifically provides a couple of things that are that cloud like experience, which is simple ordering and configuration and consumption that is aligned to the application, right? So we actually align the sizing of the system to the license size and the expected experience that this one customer would have so they get that very curated bespoke system that's designed specifically for them, but in a very easy to consume fashion that's also validated by the software vendor, in this case Splunk, that they say, "These are known good configurations "that you will be successful with." So we give customers that comfort that, "Hey, this is a proven way "to deploy this application successfully, "and you don't have to go through "a significant architecture design concept "to get to that cloud like experience." Then you layer in the fact that what makes up the Ready System, which is it is a platform powered by, in the VxRail case powered by VMware, right, ESX and vSAN, which obviously if you look at any of the cloud providers everything is virtualized at the end of the day for the most part, or at least most of the environments are. And so we give, and VMware has been focused on that for years and years of giving that cloud like experience to their customers. >> You talk about, you mentioned selling, sort of reseller, you've got this partnership growing, you're a customer. So, you have all these hats, right, and connections with Splunk. What does that do for you you think just in general? What kind of value do you put on that having these multiple perspectives to how they operate whether it's in your environment or what you're doing for your customers using their insights? >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day we're here to make it simpler for customers. So if we do the work, and we invest the time and energy and resources in this partnership, and we go do the validation, we do the joint engineering, we do the joint certification, that's work that customers don't have to do, and that's value that we can deliver to them that whatever reason they buy Splunk for whatever workload or business outcome they're trying to achieve, we accelerate it. That's one of the biggest values, right? And then you look at who do they interact with in the field? Well, it's engineers from our awesome presales team from around the world that we've actually trained in Splunk. So we have now north of 25 folks that have Splunk SE certifications that are actually Dell EMC employees that are out working with Splunk customers to build platforms and achieve that value very, very quickly. And then them understanding that, "Oh, by the way, Dell EMC is also a user of Splunk, "a great customer of Splunk "and a number of interesting use cases "that we're actually replatforming now "and drinking our own Kool Aid so to say," that I think it just lends credibility to it. And that's a lot of the reason why we've made the investments in being part of this awesome show, but also in doing things like providing the applications. So we actually have four apps in Splunkbase that are available to monitor Dell EMC platforms using Splunk. So I think customers just get a wholistic experience that they've got a technology partner that wants to see them be successful deploying Splunk. >> I wonder if we could talk about stacks, because I've heard Chad Sack-edge talk about stack wars, tongue and cheek, but his point is that customers have to make bets. You've heard him talk about this. You've got the cloud stacks, whether it's Azure or AWS or Google. Obviously VMware has a prominent stack, maybe the most prominent stack. And there's still the open source, whether it's Hadoop or OpenStack. Should we be thinking about the Splunk stack? Is that emerging as a stack, or is it a combination of Splunk and these other? >> You know, we actually had that conversation today with some of the partner engineering team, and I don't know that I would today. I think Splunk continues to be, it's its own application in many cases. And I actually think that a lot of what Splunk is about is actually making sure that those stacks all work. So there was even announcements made today about a new app. So they have a new app for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, right? So if you think about stacks for application development, if you're going to hit push on a new application you're going to need to monitor it. Splunk is one of those things that persistent. The data is persistent. You want to keep large amounts of data for long periods of time so that you can build your models, understand what's really going on in the background, but then you need that real time reporting of, "Hey, if I hit push on a Cloud Foundry app "and all of a sudden I have an impact "to the service that's underlying it "because there's some microservice that gets broken, "if I don't have that monitoring platform "that can tell me that and correlate that event "and give me the guidance to not only alert against it "but actually go investigate it and act against it, "I'm in trouble." The stacks, I think many of them have their own monitoring capabilities, but I think Splunk has proven it that they are invested in being the monitoring and the data fabric that I think is wanting to help all the stacks be successful. So I don't necessarily put it in the stack. And I kind of don't put Hadoop in its own stack, either, because I think at the end of the day Hadoop needs a stack for deployment models. So you may see it go from a physical construct of being, a bit trying to be its own software that controls the underlying hardware, but I think you're seeing abstraction layers happen everywhere. They're containerizing Hadoop now. Virtualization of Hadoop is legit. Most of the big cloud providers talk about the decoupling of compute from storage in Hadoop for persistent and transient clusters. So I think the stacks will be interesting for application development, and applications like Splunk will be one of two things. They'll either consume one of those stacks for deployment or they'll be a standalone monitoring tool that makes us successful. >> So you don't see in the near term anyway Splunk becoming an application development platform the way that a lot of the-- >> Cory: They may have visions of it. That's not, yeah. >> They haven't laid that out there. It's something that we've been bounding around here. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting. Again, I think it goes back to .. Because the flexibility in what you can do with Splunk. I mean we've developed some of our own applications to help monitor Dell EMC storage platforms, and that's, it's interesting. But in terms of building what we'd I guess we'd consider like traditional seven factor app development, I don't know that it provides it. >> Yeah, well it's interesting because, I'm noodling here, Doug Merritt said, "Hey, we think we're going to be the next five billion, "10 billion, 20 billion dollar ecosystem slash company," and so you start to wonder, "Okay, how does that TAM grow to that point? That's one avenue that we considered. I want to talk about the anatomy of a transaction and how that's evolved. Colin, you mentioned Client Server, and you think about data rich applications going from sort of systems of record and the transactions associated with that. And while there were many going to Client Server and HTTP, and then now mobile apps really escalated that. And now with containers, with microservices, the amount of data and the complexity of transactions is greater and greater and greater. As a technologist, I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. >> Yeah, I think as we kind of go down a path of application stacks are interesting, but at the end of the day we're still delivering a service, right? At the end of the day it's always about how do I deliver service, whether it's a business service, it's a mobile application, which is a service where I could get closer to my customer, I could transact business with them on a different model, I think all of it ... Because everything has gone digital, everything we do is digital, you're seeing more and more machines get created, there's more and more IP addressed devices out there on the planet that are creating data, and this machine generated data deluge that we're under right now it ain't slowing down, right? And so as we create these additional devices, somebody has got to make sense of this stuff. And if you listen to a lot of the analysts they talk about machine data is the most target rich in terms of business value, and it's their fastest growing. And it's now at a scale because we've now created so many devices that are creating their own logs, creating their own transactional data, right, there's just not that many tools that out of the box make it simple to collect the data, search the data, and derive value from it in the way that Splunk does. You can get to a lot of the things that Splunk can deliver from an outcome other ways with other platforms, but the simplicity and the ability to do it with a platform that out of the box does it and has a vibrant community of folks that will help you get there, it's a pretty big deal. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting. I don't know, like under the covers microservices are certainly interesting. They're still services. They're just smaller and packaged slightly differently and shared in a different way. >> And a lot more of them. >> Yeah, and scaled differently, right? And I totally get that, but at the end of the day we're still from a Splunk perspective and from a data perspective, we've still got to make sense of all of it. >> Right, well, I think the difference is just the amount of data. You talked about kind of new computing models, serverless sort of, stateless, IoT coming into play. It's just the data curve is reshaping. >> Well, it's not just the amount of data, it's the number of sources. The data is exploding, but also, as Cory mentioned, it's exploding because it's coming from so many places. Your refrigerator can generate data for you now, right? Every single ... Everything that generates Internet, anything doing anything now really has a microprocessor in it. I don't know if you guys saw my escape room at VMworld. There were 12 microprocessors running this escape room. So one of the things we played about doing was bring it here and trying to Splunk the escape room to actually see real time what the data was doing. And we weren't able to ship it back from Barcelona in time, but it would've been interesting to see, because you can see just the centers that are in that room real time and being able to correlate all that. And that's the value of Splunk is being able to pull that from those disparate sources altogether and give you those analytics. >> Yeah, it's funny you talk about an IoT use case. So we've got these... Our partner, who's a joint partner of both Dell EMC and Splunk, we actually have these Misfit devices that are activity trackers. And we're actually-- >> Misfit device? >> Misfit. Yeah, it's a brand. >> John: Love it. >> It's fitting, I think. But we have these devices that we gave away to a number of the attendees here, and we actually asked them if they're willing to participate. They can actually use the app on your phone to grab the data. And by simply going to a website they can allow us to pull the data from their device about their activity, about their sleep. And so we actually have in our booth and in Arrow's booth we're Splunking Conf and it's called How Happy is Conf? And so you can actually see Splunk running, and by the way, it's running in Arrow's lab. It's running on top of Dell EMC infrastructure designed for Splunk. You can actually see us Splunking how happy conf attendees are. And we're measuring happiness by their sleep. How much sleep-- >> John: Sleep quality and-- >> The exercise, the number of steps, right? So we have a little battle going between-- >> Is more sleep or less sleep happy? >> Are consumption behaviors also tracked on that? I just want to know. I'm curious. >> It's voluntary. You'd have to provide that. >> Alright, because that's another measure of happiness. >> It certainly is. But it's just a great use case where we talk about IoT and the number of sources of data that Splunk as a platform ... It's very, very simple to deploy that platform, have a web service that's able to pull that data from an API from a platform that's not ours, right, but bring that data into our environment, use Splunk to ingest and index that data, then actually create some interesting dashboards. It's a real world use case, right? Now, how much people really want to (mumbles) Splunk health devices we'll determine, but in the IoT context it's an absolute analog for what a lot of organizations are trying to do. >> Interesting, good stuff. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Cory, it's probably not the real deal, but as close as I'm going to go. Good luck with your session. We appreciate the time to both of you, and you and your Misfit. Back with more here on theCUBE coming up in just a bit here in Washington D.C. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is VMworld 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host, Peter Burr. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me back. >> So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked. What's happening at the show, a bunch of parties last night. How's the vibe? >> Colin: Huh, were there? >> Responses from customers to your announcements, give us the update. >> Nah, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Had to keep my voice. Shame. >> Dave: I went, I just didn't talk. >> Smart man. No, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show, and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, you know, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converge, because that's what I do for a living. You know, and I brought Josh along to talk about his experiences with hyper-converged. But I've been having a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about, and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. >> So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about, what's your role? >> Sure. Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa, if anybody's familiar with that. We're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. >> And your role? >> I'm a VP of information systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. >> Okay. So maybe paint a picture, well, let me start here. What do you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business, and how they ripple through to IT? What are those drivers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world, with the FinTechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisories, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation, where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. >> Yeah, so things like Blockchain and Crypto, and you guys launching your own currency any time soon? >> Josh: Nope. We are monitoring it, but nothing like that. >> So how do those, I mean somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, you know, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like wow, that's a pretty radical statement. And everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there. >> Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side, and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got an increase government's regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. >> So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. >> Sure. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stack, server, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, hyper-converged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. >> So can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the before and the after. What did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity, and how many of these and those, or whatever detail you're comfortable with. >> Josh: Sure. >> And what happened afterwards? >> Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-located our data center facilities, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continued to grow within that type of simplified, or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we've been able to reduce rack space. I think at my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four, and we're running the exact same work load at a higher performance. >> How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? >> It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services, and not always be the in the weeds, or the break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. >> So you went to somebody, CFO, business, whoever, to ask for money, because you had a new project. But you would have had to do that anyway, correct? >> Josh: Yes, yes. >> Okay, so... >> Was it easier? >> Was it easier with the business case or were you nervous about that, because you were sticking your neck out? >> No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it, so what I brought forward was well-vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC, and they just really were there the entire step of the way. >> And what was the business impact? Or the IT impact, from your standpoint? >> Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition of data domain, and the data protection software. >> Peter: Is that important in banking? >> (laughs) You want to make sure that people check your data, right? >> If it's my bank, yeah. >> So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. >> So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyper-converged or converged, is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hills Bank and Trust? >> You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. I've got a systems group, a networking group, and a security group, so transforming or doing things differently within that IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp-up time to get VxRail up and running was very minimal. >> You still have a systems group, a network group and a security group? >> At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that, and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point we're still operating within that. >> Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor? Whether it's FTE's, or how they spent their time? >> We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure, and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this, is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider, and not just an operational group that fixes servers and storage. >> So you're saying a little less? >> A little less. >> It wasn't a dramatic change? >> We're still transforming though, so we still have this traditional IT structure within our group, so I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I had to start with that hardware layer first. >> What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of freeing up resource, and what do you want to do with that resource? >> Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. >> And any desire to get more of your weekends back, or spend more time with your family, or maybe golf a little bit more? >> Exactly. Golf is always good. You know, we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend managing these platforms, or at least the hardware standpoint, firmware upgrades, and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware, and then we've got to appropriately match the storage side or the networking side of it. >> And the backup comment. Easier to back up, more integrated? >> It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software, and it's just really simplified it, so backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. >> Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and attentions to some other problems that might serve the business? >> Exactly. You know, one of the themes I've picked up here at VMworld has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking, but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. >> We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? >> You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger, and it was a solid relationship. They'd been there the entire way during the merger, every question was answered. It wasn't anything that was, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. >> So trust, really. >> Josh: Absolutely. >> And then if you had to do it over again, anything you'd do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? >> You know, I don't think so. Again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. >> Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful, then? What did you do up front that led to that success? >> You know, it was just a lot of relationship-building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships, and Dell EMC does that exact same thing. >> All right, gents. Thanks very much for coming back to The Cube. >> Josh: Thanks, guys. Good to be here. >> Thanks, Josh, take care. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from Vmworld 2017. Be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.