>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And welcome back here to Las Vegas, we're in the Venetian, the Cube is at Dell EMC World 2017. Good afternoon or good evening if you're watching out on the East Cost or perhaps overseas. Good to have you with us as we continue our coverage here on the Cube. I am John Walls along with Keith Townsend who's the principal at CTO advisors. And we're joined by Boaz Palgi who is the vice president and GM and one of the founders of ScaleIO. Boaz, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. Good to see you. >> Yeah my pleasure. >> John: First time I think, is that correct? >> No no no it's my fourth time. >> John: Oh fourth time, first time with me, my apologies. >> It's my first time with you, yes. >> My apologies, tell me about the history a little bit. I think it really says something about the growth, the explosion and what you've seen. 14 employees back in 2013, Dell makes the purchase. Today you have 220 plus working. So obviously you've had a lot of great growth, a lot of expansion, but a lot of success. >> Yes, yes we've experienced a lot of growth not just in the number of people, but also in customers. Not just in number of customers but also in the capacity in production with customers. So today we see we have well over 300 large enterprise customers like financial institutions, telecoms, all kinds of other enterprises. Also on top of that some mid-size and even smaller customers. And what we see is that the capacity sizes of our customers have been growing over those four years as well. So if four years ago we had maybe a part of the storage estate in some of our customers, today we have quite a few large enterprises that have completely standardized their entire block storage estate on their ScaleIO. Maybe one example of that was today in the keynote opening of this event, Dan Maslowski of CitiGroup presented how they have been using ScaleIO. They're running ScaleIO on tens of petabytes today and still growing very, very fast and with a lot more capacity to be added over the next few months and years. >> So what's going on there? Why are customers with CitiGroup want, who've already made the move, but are making the move over to SDS. What's generating that kind of activity and what kind of gains do you think they're realizing from that? >> I think there are two ways to look at this. One way to look at it is that actually storage arrays were invented 25 or 30 years ago in order to work around the problem of lack of resources for CPU, for processing, for memory in the application servers. So 25, 30 years ago an application server had barely enough resources to run a single application. So if people wanted to add another application to manage the storage, etc., they had to take another server, fill it with disks and that became the storage server which is the storage array of today. But nowadays application servers obviously have ample resources in terms of CPU memory, network, bandwidth. You can put any media whether it's flash or magnetic in your servers. So you still have enough resources. That's exactly where ScaleIO comes into play. We take those little part of those resources to actually provide enterprise class, storage capabilities in a software form factor alongside the applications or the hypervisors or the databases on those same servers. So this is maybe the technology enabling the shift in the paradigm that has been happening. On the other hand when you look at what is possible today products like ScaleIO make operations of the data centers significantly easier. So if in the past you needed to have dedicated storage products that were actually islands by themselves you couldn't really inter operate between various storage products or various vendors. You needed dedicated storage teams that were specialized on that storage every few years. Storage estate would come up for refresh or their competitors would start bidding. You would start getting very expensive and intrusive data migration projects from the old storage to the new storage. All of that is something of the past when you work with soft storage like ScaleIO. >> So Boaz, let's talk about that for a little bit. WikiBond did research and determined that they called this market originally service, some people may call it hyperconversion infrastructure. But overtake traditional storage arrays in sales in the next couple of years. You talked about ease of use, let's talk about the deployment. How is ScaleIO consumed? >> We see several form factors of ScaleIO today. The most obvious one is software. Some of our customers buy ScaleIO software. They have the servers of their choice which might be Dell servers or HP, or IBM or any other server vendor out there. They build their own estate just like they used to buy servers to run their databases for Oracle or to run their operating system, the hypervisors, etc. Now they also run the storage as another application really on their servers. That's one form factor. Actually people some of our customers today downloaded software from ScaleIO from the internet, started to use it, started to grow it and then came to Dell EMC to buy the license and to grow it and to put it into production for real. >> That's a kind of strange statement you said. This is a platform that holds petabytes of storage. You're telling me customers just download it and installed it? I missed the whole sales process before the download part. That's very unusual for an EMC. >> It's unusual for EMC and especially for all of NS really in the storage space. But this is, this is a new world. So ScaleIO software is freely downloadable for testing purposes. Customers find it, download it, and we have not a small number of customers that actually came to us that way. Hey, we already use ScaleIO, we tested it. We took some servers that were lying around, we built a cluster, it works. It gives tremendous performance, it's easy to operate. We want to roll it our in production. And we're saying we need to buy the license for that. This is one form factor. The second form factor that we see are appliances. ScaleIO obviously supports the 14G servers of Dell. We are agnostic really to the underlying hardware. But this is with one of the Dell server approaches that we are supporting is to provide appliances based on 14G servers running ScaleIO together with hybervisors or like ESX or hyper VOKVM and a management software around it that we call AMS that allows customers to manage their entire stack of the server and the ScaleIO software and the hypervisor software and the firmware, etc. with single-clicks configuration, single-click upgrades, and pretty soon also a single-click deployment of machines and storage together. This is the second form factor appliances with whole management package for the entire stack really wrapped around it. The third form factor that we see are the VX Ragflex approaches. Where VCE or CSPD these days are selling entire racks including networking, compute, and ScaleIO storage. Customers can buy these racks, plug them in, and start running their applications and their environment out of the box. >> It's all about simplicity, right? I mean talking about one-click, you're talking about the accommodation of force, the new structure. So it's all about making it a lot easier at the end of the day. >> Keith: It's solving a great problem. >> Huge problem. I would say it's simplicity of management but also simplicity of operations. In the past traditional storage estates forced people to deal with storage items. Forklift upgrades from old systems to newer systems. When you have an array that's full you now need to somehow migrate data to another array. There are a lot of operational challenges with the traditional approaches that completely disappear just like that when you deploy a software like ScaleIO which completely scales across all these clusters, across all these environments, across bare metal operating systems as well as across multiple types of hypervisors. You really get one big pool if you may, of storage that well big and big pool also provides among the best performance in the industry as well. And this is because our architecture that is completely paralyzed and it makes it possible to not only aggregate capacity, but also aggregate performance across a large number of devices and nodes. >> So curious geek question. When EMC originally bought ScaleIO, Chas Thacket did what I think he called a face melting demo of using ScaleIO in AWS. Crazy stuff I don't even know, it was like a million iops or something coming out of AWS. Shows the portability of the application. Future of ScaleIO, you see a use case for ScaleIO in the cloud? >> Well, ScaleIO in many cases enables the cloud. So we see one of our main use cases is infrastructure of the servers. This is really private clouds in the enterprise or managed hosting or public clouds in telcoms or managed service provider environments. This actually represents a very significant part of our deployments. Another part of our deployments are the traditional enterprise applications like Oracle and SQL and hypervisors of the world. Then we also see deployments of the newer type of applications like (foreign words), Cassandra, all kinds of open stick implementations, etc. Also on ScaleIO. >> I hate to jump ahead but it's always interesting to talk with people such as yourself who are always kind of thinking ahead. What's the next big headache, or what's the next big problem that you'd like to tackle or you'd like to challenge that you think with a more polished or more defined storage capability would solve whatever that dilemma might be that emerging for the enterprise? >> I think the first hurdle we need to pass is just the challenge for most industry veterans in particular to make this shift from they're built like a tank traditional storage arrays that you can touch and see to software that has a connotation, or a perception of it's just software I can't touch it, I can't see it, how can it be robust? How can it be performance? How can I operate it in an easy manner? As a matter of fact, all of those topics are better with a ScaleIO software than with traditional enterprise arrays. We've built some of them in the past. But in ScaleIO you get the most advanced benefits in terms of operational ease, elasticity, scalability, performance, flexibility of deployment, readiness for the future. Agnosticity to the underlying hardware, underlying media. So this really makes the data center a lot easier to be operated, and also a lot lower cost because you eliminate a lot of the complexity. You eliminate a lot of the smaller vendors that only deliver a small part of your hardware state because now you as a customer can really leverage everything on your X-86 hardware. This is commodity par excellence. You can go out there, you can get server vendors to bid for the hardware state that you want to run. And on that estate you can run your applications, your databases, your ScaleIO software, whatever you need. >> So you're telling them you can touch it, or you don't have to touch it, you don't have to feel it. Trust me, it's real right? >> Don't trust me, try it. >> Boaz, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here on the Cube and great seeing you. Again four time around you're about to join the five-time alumni club so congratulations on that. >> Can I by the way tell you a little bit about the version, the new version? Maybe very quickly end of this year we're releasing a version, a new version of ScaleIO, ScaleIO Next. The main items there are we are delivering space efficiency, but we provide it in a dynamic manner. So one of the big downsides of putting space efficiency in storage systems is that it usually hits performance quite significantly especially if the data is not too compressible. In ScaleIO we will dynamically compress data based on the compressibility of the data. So if data is not compressible we won't waste resources trying to compress it. If data is very compressible we will use more resources but we will also compress it and we will be able to do that with a very little, very small degradation of performance compared to the non-compressed environment. That's one, two we introduce volume migration in a non-disruptive manner enabling customers to move volumes from flesh-only to magnetic-only to hybrid environments on the fly without any disruption to the ongoing applications. We introduced a spot for vevos in order to be able to run all the ScaleIO capabilities, ScaleIO volume capabilities on a virtual machine granularity level in ESX. And we are also introducing the next level of the AMS management software which is the wrapper around the server with ScaleIO software appliance bundles that enables you to manage the entire stack. >> And timing again? >> End of this year, end of '17. >> Good deal, you've got a full plate, don't you? >> We do, we do. >> Very good well done, thank you again and sorry about that. I knew you had news you wanted to get in, I'm glad you did. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You bet, all right back with more on the Cube here from Dell EMC World 2017 right after this.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, and my co-host here is Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor on Twitter. Our next guest is David Goulden, the president of Dell EMC infrastructure business. Great to see you. Our eighth consecutive year covering EMC World, now Dell EMC World, the first Dell EMC World, kind of a seminal moment watershed event here. You've been to all of them, you've seen the movie with EMC now. Now eight months after the close, it's Dell EMC World, but it still feels like EMC World. What's your reaction, I mean, all the same? >> No, John, it's very different, it may maybe because it's in Vegas and it's in May. So those two things are common, but the content, the breadth of the message, you mentioned it, it's eight, nine months after the closing transaction, but of course bear in mind, we had a year before that of planning after we announced, so it's really quite some time into the concept of this transaction and to a larger extent, this week for us is the coming out party. It gives us a chance to demonstrate to the world what we've spent the last nine months and the year before that planning and doing, and actually investing in, and you saw just from my remarks this morning the breadth of technology we're bringing to our customers, and the amount of innovation, and the better together story coming real, I think it's exciting. >> You know, David, I'm always complimenting you and talking behind your back when you're not around as well, but the compliment is, you're a great operational person but you're also a strategic chess player as well in terms of the industry. The Dell EMC strategy's pretty clear on the existing traditional infrastructure, data center, whatever you want to call it. It's a mature market, it's consolidating, win that business, be the number one supplier in that market, we see that playing out. However, you got to have the growth strategy. That's the future revenues that are going to come down the pipe. Describe for a minute the strategy, 'cause pretty obvious the mature market on the data center is moving to hybrid cloud, and there's a pathway there, so you lock it and load it on that being number one fast 14 generation servers, we see that, cool. Growth strategy, what's the growth strategy for Dell EMC? >> Well, don't rule out growth in on-prem data centers, right, so, let's not put that into pure mature, no growth. >> I mean it's not hockey stick. >> Right, but the market is still a massive marketplace in on-prem data centers. It's true that all the infrastructure growth, so if you look at the infrastructure marketplace, $110 billion dollars that's served by service storing networking data protection. You look at that marketplace in total and you say where's all the growth? The growth is in off-prem, we'll come back to that in a second. But the on-prem, the data center is still over sixty percent of that marketplace. And in total that market isn't growing but the consolidation opportunity you talked about is huge. And segments of it like moving to a private cloud like hyper-converged infrastructure, there are rocket ships occurring inside of that big target adjustable market. That's $60 billion dollars our data center IT spend. So there is growth for us in that. And there is growth in being the largest most capable player to consolidate, pick up share, be stronger in the newer segments than we even were in the more mature segments. So I wouldn't rule off growth there. From an infrastructure point of view, of course there's a lot of growth off-prem. Now off-prem is a very fragmented marketplace. As soon as people think off-premises, they go immediately to the web scale public cloud providers. And they're certainly a part of it, but there's the SAS companies, there is the outsource integrators, the ITS and service companies. There's a huge opportunity there. >> I mean everyone is a cloud service provider. Everyone will be, I mean, Riot Games which does League of Legends, they're a cloud company, right? I mean, everyone's kind of a cloud company or a SAS company these days, or they're trying to get there. >> That's because the whole IT industry's moving to cloud. Because cloud is an operating model, not a place. And cloud is about delivering IT at all levels, application, infrastructure, networking, whatever you think about it. It's delivering IT as a service that can be monitored and metered and charged based upon use. That's a very simple definition of a cloud and everybody wants to do that. Whether you are an on-prem data center, whether you are a third party service provider, everybody wants to offer cloud. So we shouldn't get too confused about the cloud opportunity, it is the redefinition of the IT industry. >> So David as we talked through the opportunity within the data center, one of the obvious things when you look at Dell EMC is the breadth of products, the depth of capability compared to your competitors... Traditional knowledge would tell us that, you know what, you guys have the potential to really dominate this thing, but when you're coming to customers, what's the clear message that you're bringing when it comes to specific products and the core of that growth? >> So the message to customers is we are investing for the longterm and we're investing heavily. Our strategy is not to just be good enough, it's to be the number one, so we don't want to just be the number one market share player, but also have the best technology. So our message to customers is hey, Mr. Customer, Ms. Customer, you've got a lot of things to worry about in your IT world. Ultimately, you want to be providing IT services to your customers. You need an infrastructure partner, you want a company who can be that essential infrastructure company who can provide the vast vast majority of all the things you need to be able to equip your IT shop to provide services to your customers. That's the message, and it's very powerful. Because it spans the client, through the data center, and into the cloud. And it encompasses security and all other elements of the infrastructure plate. So it's a very very powerful message. And the final thought I would tell you is relative to that, is I haven't had a customer in the last two years who told me they want more IT suppliers. They want fewer and they want them to be strategic and more capable. And that's our plate. >> Great, I want to double down on that comment. They don't want more suppliers, I buy that, and I think end-to-end you're seeing architectures, we saw Intel on stage, you're seeing 5G being end-to-end with IOT. They like the end-to-end, they like the supplier consolidation. But the other thing we're hearing in the hallways here at the event is, and this is the question for you because you manage the product portfolio, is I don't want more products, I want less products or skews if you will, whatever you want to call it. So there's a product overlap certainly with the Dell EMC combination, there's been some overlap. People have been talking about that. So how are you managing that? I know we talked about it a little bit last year just getting the roadmap cleaned up, but what specifically are you doing to manage the product overlap with respect to some of the products that kind of are overlapping between the two companies? >> Well first of all, your earlier comment was right. Customers want outcomes, and we'll come back to that. But specifically, relative to your question on overlap. The beauty of this combination is we come with one of everything and two of almost nothing, which is most unusual in a large scale tech merger. The only area we had any overlap was in the mid-tier of our storage family. Where there was the Dell SC Compellents and there was the EMC Unity family. Now, if they'd both been mature at the end of their product cycle, it could have been a longer issue. But the point is they'd just gone through a full investment to create new versions of each one. So what do you do? You roll them out, you support your customers, and you look for convergence opportunities down the road. So we didn't have to make any short term keep one, kill one, type choices because it was a very fortuitous stage. Both had been through that cycle. But that's the only part of the entire portfolio where there's any overlap. The rest is all about... >> And you're saying it's opportunistic for you because there's no real conflicting overlap. >> There's no conflict. We have two mid-range storage products, one from each family. Big deal. Most customers don't want to be confused so if they were a Unity customer we sell them Unity. If they're a Compellent customer, we sell them Compellent and we say don't worry, we're going to bring you a converged solution in the future. It's really quite simple. Everywhere else, Dell came with their technology, EMC came with ours, and we can focus upon how you create the power of more. >> Okay, so back to the end-to-end conversation because you mentioned they want less suppliers is the trend, I agree. >> And more partners. >> Multi-cloud? For technical reasons, latency and things, I think it's not ready for prime time. But certainly the direction, hybrid clouds front and center, I see that. Talking with the CEO of Oracle last week, and his briefing with me, they want to be the supplier. Everybody wants to be the end-to-end supplier. So multi-cloud implies multiple vendors, so there is still a multi-vendor. Can you just share with us your vision on that? Because it's not a one vendor take all world. Certainly an end-to-end life cycle is good, but how are you guys dealing with this multi-vendor, multi-cloud scenario and how should customers look at that in dealing with Dell EMC? >> Well first of all, we didn't say we want to be anybody's exclusive IT provider, we want to be their most strategic. Everybody has a number of IT vendors, and this is one of the challenges that most IT operations have, they have tens of vendors. In some cases they have tens of vendors for just one piece of the stack, like their management tools. So they're looking for fewer, more capable partners. And what we want to do is to position ourselves to be the most strategic amongst their handful of key partners. As it comes to multi-cloud, that all ties back to applications. So this whole conversation about cloud is often mixed up with a question around applications. I was with a customer, a large financial services customer, after lunch we were having a conversation about cloud. I asked them how many applications they had. 6,900. And that by the way, that's after they've done two years of application rationalization. So what they now want to do is figure out a strategy for those applications. Well they're not all going to sit on one cloud, they're going to sit on multiple places. Some will sit upon an internal cloud. They may have a couple different flavors of internal cloud. They're going to have some SAS vendors, they're going to have some public cloud. So multi-cloud is a reality for anybody with more than, let's say, 50 to 100 applications. It's just a way of life, particularly when you take my definition of cloud or our definition of cloud as being an offering bowl and our place. >> In the final minutes we have I know Keith's got another question that he wants to ask, but I got to ask you, 'cause you've been on the EMC side, you've been running that business with the team there, the federation over the years. You had a good trajectory, you looked at the roadmap, you've seen the growth rates. Now with the combination, I'd like you to spend a minute talking about what's different now and be specific, because now you have so much more opportunity on the revenue side with the combination. So talk about, and Michael made a comment to me just now this morning, they're winning more business. So you're winning business, you're seeing some successes, NSX with VMWare is doing great, the convergence stuff is going great, got some good product announcements. What specific wins are you having that illustrate this new growth opportunity that wasn't there before the combination? >> We're having a number of wins. We're having a number of situations where, in the data center for example, a strong dell server customer may not have much EMC storage, and we're winning the storage footprint. Conversely, we're having a lot of wins where we've got a strong storage footprint in the data center with EMC's strength and we're winning significant server deals on the back of that. So we're seeing this cross synergy occurring just on the back of having a number one position on both sides. We're also seeing our ability to bring brand new products to the market like VxRail that includes a PowerEdge, that includes VMware, that includes EMC software. So we're winning because we have the broader portfolio, and we're winning because we're creating new products to leverage the best of both. And of course, a big piece of what I talked about this morning was 14G service. That is going to be the next generation bedrock of the data center. We'll incorporate that across our entire portfolio. >> Why is that important? Quickly, what's the value proposition? >> What's the value proposition for 14G? >> Yeah. >> It's been designed for the digital transformation of the future. It's been designed not only to host existing applications but to host those scale-out high performance applications of the future. And we can uniquely provide the scalability, the performance, the security those applications need. So it's built for the next generation. It's built thinking about things like machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence. It's the platform for those applications, and that's really powerful to have that inside the portfolio. >> So David, digital transformation, a lot of time to value, a lot of buzzwords I've heard today that I've generally heard from my management consultant days. Dell EMC is now the leader in the infrastructure space. You guys are now having conversations with much different people. CMO, COO, CEO, CIO... What lends Dell technologies, Dell EMC, the credibility to come to these new contacts within enterprise? >> Keith, I'd say a couple things. So first of all, we have the world's most advanced platform as a service tool with Pivotal. There are more cloud native applications being built on the Pivotal framework than any other single framework out there. >> Keith: I'm a big fan of Pivotal. >> So am I. And it lets customers become software businesses and everybody talks about becoming a software business. And it creates not just a platform but a toolkit, and also through Pivotal labs, the ability to train people. So Pivotal gives us the credibility to have that software conversation. And then on the back of Pivotal, and just on the back of what we're doing in the infrastructure business, we recognize that there's IT transformation and there's digital transformation. And we're building infrastructure that is aligned to support both of those. So we're building applications for big data Hadoop. We're building infrastructure for IOT. We're building applications for next generation digital transformations. So the infrastructure side of the business is able to address IT transformation and digital transformation at an infrastructure layer and then we've got the best tool out there for the digital transformation applications. So I think that gives us a lot of credibility, and so we're having that conversation. >> David final question, take your president of Dell EMC hat off for a second and put your personal David Goulden hat on. And I'd like to have you just reflect in your own words what surprises you about this combination? It's been historic, you've got the entrepreneurial led CEO Michael Dell, your private. It feels good, we haven't heard really any horror stories about the integrations. There's been some bumps but no major horror stories, so congratulations. But in your own words, what's the biggest surprise that you've seen given the history you have with EMC and as the senior executive at Dell EMC, what's the biggest surprise that folks might not know about in this massive combination? >> I think you've hit upon a couple of them, John. So one, we planned for contingencies that didn't happen. You put a big merger together you expect some things to go wrong in the night. They didn't, touch wood. So that perhaps is an attribute to the planning and the integration that went on. And then on the other side, it's just how quickly we've been able to bring things together. I thought it was going to take us another six to nine months before we could really have customers turn around to us and say we are now viewing you as our most strategic partner. And that's happening to me today, and I really didn't think we'd be there within the first Dell EMC World. I thought it would be the Dell EMC World a year later when we could have those conversations. I think when you just look at the amount of innovation and the progress we've made in a short period of time, because I think what's happened here is we've hit a little bit on an inflection point. We are touching upon a real requirement those customers have, and maybe even more than we ever realized. They really want a technology innovator who is broadly based, who is not constrained by some of the conventional models out there who can push the envelope with them. >> You must have those moments where you kind of pinch yourself and say wow, look where we are, kind of how the industry's changed over the years, how you guys have a nice pole position. Interesting times. >> We're excited about it and we think, also more importantly, we're playing a long term game. We view that in three to five years time the industry becomes even more consolidated. And we think that we have this unique position as this essential infrastructure broad based platform company that can just continue to grow from here. >> Michael Dell says the same thing, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, ten years of innovation is what it pretty much takes to kind of make things happen. Congratulations on your success David, great to see you inside the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for your candid commentary. We really don't talk behind your back, I mentioned that earlier. We have to say good things about you. David Goulden, president of Dell EMC infrastructure here inside the Cube. I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend live from Las Vegas, we'll be back with more coverage, stay with us.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Kevin Roche. He is the president of Dell EMC consulting services. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. Thank you. >> It's great, you're a veteran, so we're happy to have you. Talk a little bit about what's new with the services consulting business, particularly since the merger. >> If you don't mind, I'll put some context around this. As we brought Dell and EMC together, the services piece became a really critical part for our customers' journey as you think about the transformation they're going through, the consumption of our technology. We have right now, today, Dell EMC services is about 30 thousand people globally today. We're augmented with another 30 thousand partners across the globe. We're able to deliver services directly in about 160 countries and our ability to look at the entire portfolio from consulting to design, to deployment of technology, and then the ongoing support of that and then the managed services piece of that. We feel we're in an interesting position to be able to help our customers through any parts of the transformation they're going through and those conversations have been really relevant to them. I think they've really appreciated that. A coming together of Dell, EMC and the role services plays has really been fascinating. We're excited about that role. You heard it earlier today with Michael and David Goulden at the keynotes, they really emphasized the importance of services and bringing this technology and helping our customers through their transformations. We're excited about playing that role and helping them through that process. >> What's on your customers' mind as they begin to realize this digital transformation? What are you hearing from them? >> It's interesting. I've been fortunate this morning to have had three customer meetings today. Last night we had a great customer appreciation event. The one thing that I'm finding, if we go out and say, "Here's the story," I don't think we are doing the right service. I think what you really have to get to is that you have to first listen to customers because they're at various stages of that journey. Where they are in their digital transformation. Some more mature companies are further along, others are just starting this journey. If we come out and say, "Here's the cloud story," you could offend people who are further along in their journey or you could just be talking over people who haven't started. I think the most important thing that we're finding is making sure that we're listening to our customers. It's the most important thing we can do within the services team. A big part of that is listening to where they are and what we're finding is, we just did a study, and we found that of the companies who identified themselves, less than 5% are identifying themselves as mature in that digital transformation. Which means that there's still a long way through a process that they have to get through on their digital transformation. We're pretty excited about the role that we can play in helping them with that. We feel right now what we're hearing from customers is, the opportunity is there to help them. They are looking for answers. They are looking for best practices. They are looking for, What are others in our industry doing so that I can help apply that to my executive team to convince them to take the journey, to make the investment of the transformation we have to go through. It's really kind of fun to listen to them. It's exciting that they want this right now. You know that they have to do something. It's exciting that we can play a role in that. >> Kevin, let's talk a little bit about the transformation inside of Dell EMC. EMC was a very respected, but very big, professional services even before the merger, with a lot of products, the cover and the storage, hybrid cloud, just a lot of services. Combine that with Dell. The workforce has to be overwhelmed by the sheer depth of services offered by the new Dell EMC. How has that transformation occurred and how's it going inside? >> I appreciate you asking, because I think that's one of the things we've been able to share with our customers. Is the transformation we just went through. From the combination of Dell and EMC coming together. You're right, there's a little bit of history from both companies. One of the things that we've wanted to do is preserve the value that we've created to those customers in the different segments, where Dell has been great on the server and client side of things. You can't lose that intimacy and the relationship that they had with those customers. It's really an important piece. You certainly couldn't change the model that EMC has traditionally had, of the large enterprise customers. We wanted to make sure that intimacy and that relationship with those customers are really important. So we've been blending the best-of as we brought the teams together. If you look at the leadership team and the people we've put in leadership roles, and as we looked at bringing the portfolio together, it's been a bit of best-of-breed, if you will as we've landed now the Dell EMC team. Our team members across the globe, there has been a little bit of now assuring of, What does this mean? and the complexity of this large transformation. We've asked them to do one thing for us. Focus on delivering services to our customers. The rest will fall into place. Just stay focused on our customers and all of the indications seem like we're moving in the right direction and our team members across the globe have certainly done that. I think that was a big guiding principle to ask our team members, "Stay focused. Don't let the noise distract you from the execution and the service we have to have with our customers." >> A lot of weapons, a lot of tools in the toolbelt before pulse merger. What are the folks in the field, the consultants, what are they most excited about when they are talking about visible transformation? >> There's a couple of things that we're really excited about part of this. The first starts with the market. We talked a little bit earlier, customers in the market are asking for help in their transformation. It's no longer, "Hey we think you should transform." Now it's customers in the market asking for help of some sort. We're excited about that. The first thing is, when the market drags you into things, you get excited about that, as opposed to trying to push something. The second, most of our consulting team are pretty excited with now having the identity of being the place to go to help in the transformation. We think that that's a very important role that we're going to play. We're aligned very well with our core sales teams. We're going in now with one campaign that's consistent across the whole company. IT transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation. That not only talks about it from a product portfolio, but all the way through in the consulting side. We know that there's a role that we can play to help our customers. They were actually pretty excited about the alignment piece, and the demand that's coming from the marketplace in this. >> Can you talk a little bit about the learning that you're discovering and you mentioned best practices. What has emerged and is there a template for, This is how it happens in healthcare. This is how it goes in financial services. >> It's interesting that you bring that up, actually. Some of the customers earlier today, one in healthcare, a couple in financial institutions. They were asking that question a little bit. Without sharing obviously the confidentiality of our customers, we are able to aggregate what's happening in those industries. Those two industries in particular, especially the more proven companies, their ability to move quickly through that transformation is probably going to take a little bit longer. They have to deal with confidentiality and financial and legal requirements in their industry that they have to make sure they preserve that value, that trust that they have with their customers. For them to move too quickly through that transformation could jeopardize their value proposition in the marketplace. I think you're seeing those industries and some of the traditional customers taking an appropriate pace. That pace and sharing of best practices could start with modernization of the infrastructure. It could start with, I want to change my operating model within how I operate IT. It could be my endpoint. I want to make them more trusted, more valuable, et cetera. It could start the transformation from a workforce standpoint. We're pretty excited about where that's going and the ability to share that with our customers. I think what we're seeing is not one template is perfect, but when you think about the transformation in three areas: IT infrastructure, the operating model of IT and then what you want to do with your applications, I think those things become really critical. You think about the projects that are probably pretty consistent across every single industry today. >> You mentioned that most companies really get this. That they are on board. But there have to be some that are resisting. What's your advice for those, even on a workforce level, that are being curmudgeonly or resisting because it's new? >> It's a great question. We would be saying, "A successful project looks like this." First you have to have executive-level sponsorship. You need somebody at the executive level in the company, whether that's the CFO, CIO, somebody who takes sponsorship for this transformation. That basically can shepherd through bouncy times through that. One of the things that we would say for a company who might be a little bit reluctant, Who is that sponsor? Who is that person who is going to help shepherd the transformational message at the executive level with the company? The second piece: allow participation of the business. It's not an IT project anymore. This is a project that's a shared project. It's the business and IT coming together and being able to share that experience and trade-offs of priorities of what's important and not. Build the project governance in place to allow you to be successful in these projects. We think those things, helping some of those customers that might be a little bit reluctant, those are the things you need to put in place. Then what we've been suggesting for some companies who might be a little bit reluctant, take a piece of this. Find a pilot. >> Experiment. >> Find a proof point. Give yourself a chance to validate some of your assumptions, some of your guiding principles, to be able to demonstrate to your executive sponsor, If we make these changes, this is the value that you can get. Those, I call them assessments or pilots or small-sample areas, have seemed to resonate really well with some of those customers that might be a little bit reluctant to begin that journey. >> Can we talk about the inverse? The customers that might be a little bit too excited. DevOps the world and what's that conversation? That education conversation. What has that been like? >> That's actually probably the harder one, right? Where they probably want to go at a pace that might be a little bit challenging and risky for them. How do we make sure that that risk has been balanced appropriate? What we want to do is again, share some of those best practices in those environments and say, Here's three other companies in your industry. Here's how fast they went. Here's what they have tackled. We never want to slow down a customer. If they want to take the risk, our job is to make sure we expose the risk so that they can make the best decisions. This has to be a customer decision. Our job, I think, is advise and present the risk and the opportunity associated with the speed or the pace that they want to go. I think that's the most important thing that we can do. >> Kevin, thanks so much. This has been great. >> It's been fun. Thank you very much for the time. We really appreciate it. We're pretty excited about the role we can play within Dell EMC services to help our customers through this transformation. Enjoy the rest of the week. >> Thanks, you too. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for my host Keith Townsend. We'll be back with more at Dell EMC World after this. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC world 2017 Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell E, Dell EMC world, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Fernando Thompson. He is the CIO of University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico. Thanks so much for joining us, Fernando. >> Thanks Rebecca, to you. >> So I want you to just set the scene a little bit for our viewers and talk a little bit about some of the biggest technology problems you were facing on your campus. >> Well, Universidad de las Américas Puebla is in the state of Puebla. We have around, less than 10,000 students. We have 1,000 employees. And we are full dedicated to research and development. And also bachelor's degrees. I used to work for the federal government and also for the private sector in television and entertainment. But I have never been in such a huge challenge, like, in a university because, you know, it is, it is so difficult to implement the governance but at the same time the freedom and, if you think, well for instance, when, when is a period of time where, where more appears in the world, it's on vacations where the students of the universities have enough time to build that kind of thing. Not very creative people, so in, in the sense that, well we live in an environment where you have to deal, to deliver technology, to protect to millennials that doesn't want to be protected and also, you know, they always ask for more services, no? And now is coming the generation C, so, it's going to be real tough for the next years. >> So, so, so set the scene and talk to us about the kinds of things that you are trying to deliver. Better products, better speed, better services to both students, perspective students, faculty and staff. Talk about what some of the needs were. >> Well, we have to think that, actually, technology is very important in the university because we have to prepare our students to give them the tools to face the future. The world is changing. And, in Mexico right now, we have a huge challenge because we're competing against China, Brazil, and India. We used to have an advantage with, with the price, and people that is very well prepared and with their salaries, but not any longer. So, we have to give this advantage to our students. So, nine years ago, when I arrived to university, for instance, we have the subscription system, and it was awful, no? Because it was very slow with the performance and not very reliable, so the people was really complaining, no? Because we're a private, private university. You always suspect, you know, good performance for a private university. And especially in subscription where your main customer, that is a student. So, we start to work to fix the main system and it take us years, years, no? So, we passed through availability and relability but bad performance. Now, performance, but since we implement XtremIO and we changed our data center with Dell products, this very year, in, in, in the spring, in the spring semester, we make a huge change cause the subscription system now became, you know, one of the biggest transformation tools in the service for the students. What happened was that, during the subscription, we announced on a special day, and a special hour, 8:30, and if you are okay with your administrative stuff and qualifications, you can get into the system and subscribe. Four years ago, that takes, like, one hour or 45 minutes. But with the change that we made, now it is a matter of two minutes. So-- >> Wow. It was a change of 100 degrees, no? What happened was that, yes, we changed the application, but also, you know, with this Flash technology, we use it because at the end, what we want to make was, you know, to impact to the student, in order that they can receive the schedule. He can take faster decisions. They move very fast with their computers and with their devices, so they needed the applications, so, we build it, we test it, and it worked fantastic. And let me tell you something, no? How I measure, I don't have a business analytic tool or a business intelligence tool. What I have was, you know, access to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And, man, they gave us such a compliment, no? Like, hey TI finally did something well for us also and it was thousands of comments, no? >> Members was waiting. >> A lot of thumbs up. >> Yeah, yeah. Members was waiting, you know, to attack us, like, you shall not pass, and stuff like that. Like past years. But not this year. So, it was, it was, it was a successful story and now we are thinking to implement all these changes that we made in an ordered space itself, of the university. >> So let's talk about that a little bit. So that's, I think, is a great example of digital transformation. I don't need to ask you if you believe in digital transformation. That was a digital transformation to your business. Specifically, I'm interested in research. What type of research does the university do and how does your group play a role in enabling that? >> Yeah, basically, for instance, we have four programs of PSD with specialization in technology and also in environment, no? One of the top challenge that we are facing in Latin America. So we have to supply the technology that our researchers need. And it has to be at the same level of the United States. We belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. So, it's not United States soil, but we belong to that association. >> Reporter: So you have the same SLEs? >> Yeah, basically, basically, you know? And we have to supply, you know, all the bandwidth and performance because they're discussing, at the same time, with people in Texas or Wisconsin or Alaska or Brazil and they need, you know, for instance, high-performance computing, storage, cloud tools, and for them, have to be, you know, pretty clear and transparent. What I mean is that they don't care, and they don't have to care about where it's working, of it is expensive or not, no? Do you have, do you have to supply what they need? Let me give you an example. For instance, a fractal. If you send the information of a fractal, we don't have a super-computer in our university, but we have a deal with another university and they have this super-computer. So, what we do is to supply the connection of the computer to send information and to receive information immediately, in order than the graphic can have information in real time. And people are taking decision in different parts of the, of the country with that information that we're sending. Sometimes, could be, you know, if we're facing a hurricane or we're going to have a problem with water or if we want to avoid, you know, you know, something that can happen with an earthquake or something like that. And with that kind of information, now, our researchers certainly can know what is happening. So, we give the info, we give the technology for them. We make a mixture between cloud-computing services and also our data center. Then that a wonderful tool because with XtremIO and with our new servers, if you can go to our new data center, you will realize that it's only Dell and EMC right there, no? And something funny is that we have a wonderful data center, but to be honest with you, we only use, right now, only three racks. So, the space that we are using right now with this new disk is, the space that we are saving is amazing, no? Because if you can, if you can see our racks, you will see that we have, for instance, Clarion, and DMX and another technology. Right now, we shut down all those racks. And right now, we are using just like, 40 inches of disk. And, man, you know, I have more performance, I have savings on air, savings on electricity. The people think then, right, we are having, you know, more space with more racks and more this. But not any longer. So, I think what is going to happen with Dell and EMC in the future, I think that they are going to deliver, for instance, 100 terabytes in just in a USB or something like that, it's the future. So, there's not going to be need over that, that's good, no? >> Hit it on the head of a, on the head of a pin. >> Yeah. >> Fernando, thank you so much for joining us. >> No, thank you to you. Thank you Rebecca, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsen. We will have more from Dell EMC world after this. (progressive music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2017. We're live here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Day one of the three day show. Had Michael Dell out on the keynote stage earlier today. Also had David Blaine, world famous magician. Pretty interesting performance to say the least. >> Yeah I went down to get an ice pick. (man laughing) During our break. >> We'll get into that later but it was interesting. Keith Townsend, John Walls also joined by Itzik Reich who is the CTO of XtremeIO at Dell EMC. Itzik, thanks for being with us. It's good to see you sir. >> Thank you very much. >> All the way from Tel Aviv and great to have you. Alright, so your sweet spot of the company is giving birth to a new baby today. >> There you go. >> XtremeIO X2, tell us about that. What spawned that, and then what that responses be, what you developed. >> Right, I think in order to understand Xtreme, you need to start with the beginning, the X1. So, November 2015 I was having my class reunion, meeting my ex-girlfriend, and we've launched X1. And X1 became, within two quarters, the largest sole Dell flash array in the world. From nowhere to the largest sole flash array, at least in terms of units sold to the market. Right, both Garthner and I. And it was huge. A huge building and a success for us. A success because nobody would become the number one leader. And we built them because we didn't have the life cycle to normally mature a product. Right, so you mentioned being a father. I'm a father to two daughters, lovely daughters. One of them is six years old, one of them is five. And the young one is starting to show some signs of being a really clever person. And I'm afraid that somebody will tell me, oh she can skip the first class. Because skipping class serves some association with it. Social aspects of it. So we've been really busy trying to understand XtremeIO X1. Making super stable. Today we're already about 5/9 in the market. But it also would stand to refresh the product and come with something new. So our life cycle wasn't a traditional year or year and a half of refreshing the product. It took us longer for us to X2 and this is what we announced today. So what's new with X2. The first thing is the ability to come with really Dell's XO Drive and Dell's configuration. In X1 each DAE, you could put up to 25 drives inside of the DAE. And X2 can put out up to 72 drives per DAE right. And you can scale just like before. Up to 8X bricks. It's a huge capacity which you need for the vast majority of the use cases out there they don't know. Just VDR or just a single database is right. Today XtremeIO can fill pretty much every transaction while closing including virtualization wall close. You just need a lot of capacity for thousands of VM's. So that's one of the things. The other thing we improved performance of the X2 array. And the magic story around there was that because of the thousands and thousands of customers that we're involved with really got the good insight of the workload that they are running. And what we found out is something very interesting. The majority of those customers are running workload that they're very small block size. So you storage every item that arrives in the system as a different blocks characteristic and we found that the majority of them are using very, very small block size. And we want them to improve the performance of those block sizes. The IOPS and the latency. And we also wanted to make sure that it's actually more economical cheaper than the very expensive drives that the new NVMe drives that are out there. So different design goals. Making it faster and also making it cheaper in different dimensions. So we come with a new feature called Drive Boost. In a nut shell, in a nut shell Drive Boost will give you 80% better latency for pretty much every walkthrough that is out there. >> So... With that small block sizes versus big block sizes. Why is that important? We're at a conference and we're talking a lot about digital transformation. CEO, we teased John earlier. You know he's a sports guy, he doesn't do LAG goals. >> (laughing) Sorry. >> That's alright. >> Help us understand the value of that data type. >> Sure, so you know we like to think about digital transformation but at the end of the day. You're the customer, you have a database. You'll use it on query or queries against the database. If it's a very large database, there are thousands maybe even millions of queries everyday. Those queries take time for the end user to get a response for. So let's assume that you want a monthly report. And this report normally takes nine hours to generate. If I can shrink the report crunching time to two hours instead of nine, that means that I have provided better value for the business success. Right. One of the stories is that we have a financial customer in the Middle East. They need to generate the report every month between midnight because this is where they locate their reports. Up until eight o'clock in the morning. Why eight o'clock because this is when the employees start to come to work. And every hour that they exceed after the eight hour generation they get fined by the government. So if I'm saving this customer four hours then they are not getting fined by the government for generating the report. That's a true value for the customer return. Cause those things are important. People tend to think about just performance numbers in terms of IOPS but the real magic number is latency. How quick can you make the query? Whether it's a database application or a VDI VM or just a generic web server running on a Voltron machine. Those are the important things today. >> So transactional apps. Big deal. Are these transactional apps, we learned a lot about virtualization and cloud computing to date. Are these transactional apps running in a virtualized environment or are we still relying on big heavy metal workloads going to treat IO2. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At least from my experience some would argue that anywhere between 70 to 80% of the customer that allowed it went full virtualized. So their running their entire application running either under V6 or a Microsoft type of V. So they are fully virtualized. Some of the customers are still running their workload on a traditional physical servers right. Even in the S6 at the end of the day it runs on a physical server to all day the kill in itself. But yeah, the majority of them are already there in terms of virtualization. >> So what are customers really excited about when it comes to features sets for an XIO2 versus XtremeIO version wise. >> Right, amazing question. So performance, we've already discussed performance. 80% better latency, that's not something that you get because of the usage of better CPU's. Intel moves slow, it's basically dead right. They don't give you 200% performance between generation so we wanted to do something else and solve the same problem. The other thing is quality of service. We are not cheaping NGA but it's coming soon. The ability to give a specific VM, a specific IO copying and the latency copying. And also could give you the ability to burst to more IOP's techniques needed for a couple of minutes. So quality of service I the noisy neighbor right. Somebody generate too much noise you want him to be quiet. That's what quality of service is. The other things that we've announced native replication. We found out finally of our own replication that can replicate between one XtremeO2 and another. But it's not a traditional replication. The unique thing about XtremeIO was always the cusp. The content of dressable architecture. People typically think about it as a D Duplication feature but in fact we don't have a feature called D Duplication. We analyze the data as it goes through the system itself. And we give a unique shot signature to each one of those blocks. And if the shot signature already exists in the system we dupe the block. But it's not the feature per se. That why the D Duplication's so fast on XtremeIO. So up until now the customers architecture was only applicable to writing the data into the array itself. Now it's also applicable for replicating the data. So for example if you have a data reduction of five to one which is very common in virtualize use case. Many VM, many the same template and so on. You know need to replicate four times less the data at the source to the destination target. Right. So that's a very, very big thing because you need to replicate more and more data. But the 24 hour window isn't changed. God didn't upgrade it where the server respects the time. Right. >> (laughing) Right. >> It's still 24 hours per day. So this is super important for us and we're very excited about it. And the other thing is that, again larger denser configuration of the array itself so the customer can have up until two-thirds cheaper. The drive, the cost drive of the XtremeIO in itself so it's cheaper for them to put their walkthrough on ExtemeIO. Whether to really pick up the just the database that needs all the performance in the world. So we can really become a true enterprise array with those features. >> It seems like it's got to be for you a constant chase though right. You're looking for higher performance, you're looking for lower costs. You've said you just gained 80% increase in your performance capabilities. >> Yup. >> And now people are going to be looking at you over the next Xtreme and so what next? You know, where are the gains to be had in the next generation of technology and just in terms of philosophically approaching that so what do you do. >> Yeah, yeah again another good question. I actually gave a briefing about it just earlier. So, the first thing we need to do is an industry not just the daily insists to lower the costs of the drive itself to be even cheaper than and economical drive. That's not Dell today right, the hybrid mechanical drive. You can get a more economical drive if you apply data reduction on it right. So if you're five times cheaper because of the data that's gets integrated into the array and get a different compress and different provisioning. Then you can be on par with the mechanical drives. So first we want to be on par if not cheaper. We want everybody to move to S's. And we were the first twirl for charade the portfolio of Dell EMC. That's the first thing. The second thing is to really get a better insight into your wall application, wall close. Today people analyze things like IOP's and latency but what does your application really think? Where are the cues in the application stock itself right. How can you find them out in the storage sub-system itself right. So we are on a journey to over there with our importing mechanisms. So a year and a half ago, we started a new project to completely change the reporting mechanism of the WebUI. The interface of XtremeIO right. And today you can really get to drill down into pretty much every aspect. Up until now you had to purchase a third party software that will analyze your walkthrough for you. So things like Instagram, IO's, block size, read and write like I can see pair of blocks. So you can really understand your workload. We also give you something like abnormalities. We can tell you every week this application is being fine but on that Friday for some reason the response time wasn't that good. You should go in and check it out. Maybe it's in the application there is a bottleneck. Maybe it was a bottleneck in the storage load. So you can actually find it out. But I would argue that the long term goal. That's a vision right? That I'm not announcing anything yet. Is really the ability to marriage or combine between the softer defined wall right. The input converge mechanism, to the traditional arrays right. Although SSD's not that traditional. Maybe you can have a denser configuration with very small to DAE but the performance aspect of it will not be drive from the DEA where it actually store the data but from Voltron machines. That you can spin up and down in a cloud like fishing. That will bring you all the performance that you need. That's a thing to me the only gray. The really merging between the walls. Cause there isn't one perfect answer right. The softer refined guys will tell you everything should go to softer defined storage. We will tell you everything should go to flash arrays. But really the truth is like always right in between. And this is really one of the direction that we are approaching. >> I tell you what, for now I want you to enjoy X2 for now. How about that. >> That sound good. >> It's a good day for you. And don't let that five year old skip either. I think that's a good idea too. >> Very good. Very good. Thank you very much. >> And so thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. (exciting techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here to Las Vegas, live at the Venetian, theCUBE continuing our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017, where we're extracting a signal from the noise here on theCUBE. Of course, the flagship broadcast outlet for SiliconANGLE TV. I'm John Walls. Good to have you with us here along with Keith Townsend who's the principal of CTO Advisors, and joining us now is Arindam Paul who's the senior consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC. Arindam, thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you, John. >> It's kind of like the XtremIO X2 hour right now on theCUBE. (Everyone chuckling) We just said it's great talking about the launch today. You're heavily involved with X2. Just had the first break-out session and you said you packed the house. >> Yes. >> Standing room only. So I assume it was a big hit. What were the customers, if you will, most interested in and what was your sense of where they were coming from? >> That's right, thank you. Yes, we just had our first break-out session and there was a lot of customer interest. It was primarily the customers wanted to know, obviously, what was great about X2, how would it differentiated versus X1, in terms of speed... Not only what speeds and feats, but also all the features, the software enhancements, everything that we're going to be announcing this week. >> John: So a hungry market? >> Definitely, definitely. We were, actually, to be quite honest, it was on top of the lunch hour, so we were not expecting a very full audience because obviously, we are keeping people from their lunches, but the interest belied our expectation. We were very happy and surprised. >> John: So literally a hungry market then? >> Definitely. >> Over lunch time. >> You're right (laughing). >> So, I'm going to ask a lazy question. What was the biggest question coming out of the session as people stood around and asked? >> Yeah, people loved all the hardware enhancements that we're bringing to markets. There was a lot of impromptu unsolicited clapping and cheering when we announced that our latest GUI, graphical user interface, is going to be without Java. Apparently, that was anticipated for a very long time. >> Keith: I almost clapped just now. (John laughing) >> That right, HTML5 was and we have a lot of enhancements that use graphical interface in terms of, like intuitive, very context-sensitive hints as you'd expect on your iPhone, as you're configuring and walking though the menus. We also have a lot of nice reporting, very beautiful search capabilities that's going to be there for the first time and people, apparently, just loved it. Especially from an administrative perspective. >> Any new, exciting data services that weren't available in XIO1 that's available in XIO2? >> In terms of data services, yes, obviously. Like, now we're going to be scaled up as well scaled out, so we're going to be multidimensionality scaling and then we obviously have done a lot of work in terms of tuning performance, tuning data compression, so you're going to get a lot more compression out of our platform, data reduction out of our platform. Overall, it's a lot of interest. >> When's the last time you got spontaneous applause at a presentation? (Arindam laughing) >> I'll tell you, for as skeptical and as discerning customer base as ours, it's hard to get. >> I imagine. >> You have to earn it. >> You had to feel like, "Hey, we've hit the jackpot here." >> We did, exactly. >> So to speak in Vegas. >> So, customer base, I've been hearing a lot about cheaper, deeper storage in XIO2. What is the target customer for XIO2? Is this only for larger enterprises or is there a play for the SMB mid-size company as well? >> We wanted to make X2 the platform of choice for our customers who are primarily interested in, say for example, copy data management. We've been an amazing copy data management machine, like if you look at our installer base today, we have about 1.5 million snapshots of XtremIO virtual copies that have been used. The vast majority of them, well 50% of them, are actually writable snapshots, so they're being used very differently than primarily dumb backup copies, or secondary copies. They are active citizens, first-class citizens, they're at par with volumes. So copy data management is obviously a big use case for us. Virtual desktops, VDIs, right? >> Before we get off into VDI, copy data management, that's a term I've heard, but some people might not have heard that term. What's copy data management and what's the impact of copy data management to an IT budget, for example? >> Oh, there's tremendous benefits, right? Copy data management, when done right, like we do on our platform, really lets your IT break the chains and it frees IT, and provides for them a lot of business agility so that they're able to make instant copies of the production database virtually at will, without any cost, even in terms of time because they're instant copies, or in terms of occupying spaces. So you could literally create clones of your data, and these clones are perfectly functional clones so you can write to them, you can read to them as if your production data, and that's an amazing capability of itself. By the way, when you're creating these copies, there's zero to no impact to your production performance. Your production performance keeps on being as it is. Now, when you layer on top of that, because of our metadata architecture, metadata delivery architecture, you can make the copies resemble production or make the production resemble the copies. So you can basically restore-refresh at will. Again, without any impact to production, without any downtime, without literally any cost whatsoever. So when you're able to do this kind of stuff right now, think about the use case in your typical tester and their production environment. Where you have one copy of production and then multiple copies for your test engineers. You'd allot your engineers all the analytics copies and all those copies can be, literally, run very close to production because it doesn't cost you hours to basically create those copies or it doesn't take terabytes of space. So it really, truly lets you add agility to your IT and basically run your business much much efficiently and fast. >> Flash storage in general always helped with VDI, seems like there's a connection between copy data, flash storage, and VDI. Am I making an assumption here? >> Well, VDI, when you think about it, is copies of desktops. It would be perfect copies if you're not trying to basically customize them. So we use a slightly different technology, in namely our inline deduplication and compression and how we integrate our inline dedupe and our in-memory metadata with VDI-specific commands such as VAAI xcopy, how you basically clone virtual desktops. So we don't use snapshots to clone the virtual desktops, instead we use something called VAAI xcopy optimized with inline metadata, but the effect is the same. You can literally create roll-out virtual desktops, thousands and thousands of copies of virtual desktops in a really short order and you can manage them and everything compresses and dedupes very efficiently in a very small optimal footprint. >> You've heard from your customers today, at least in a brief amount of time. What do you think is going to be the biggest benefit an X1 user is going to find with X2? At the end of the day, what do you think is going to be the "Aha!" moment for them that's really going to open their eyes as to how you've impacted their businesses. >> Certainly, certainly. So we have a lot of eager customers and I think of the features that were long-sought after by our customer base, I think they're very happy about the economics of the platform. So we have significantly reduced the dollar-per-gigabyte cost to the customer on an effective basis and it's going to be like 1/3rd of what it was in X1. I think people were literally jumping on the seats when they heard that because not only don't you have better performance, better data reduction, new data services, but hey, we just slashed the price >> Save me money. >> 66% >> Right. >> So, outside of cost savings, new data services, one of the things that I heard is data replication natively. >> Right. >> That's a big deal. Walk us through the data replication capability. >> Yes, yes. Again, if you step back, one of the things that our architecture let's us do because of, again, our metadata, our foundation architecture that's based on metadata, is that we're very, very efficient in doing copies. Whether it's VDI copies or database copies, we are a copy machine. When you think of it and step back, replication is a copy problem because you're creating yet another copy, the only difference is that now the copy is happening outside of your box, from one XtremIO to another XtremIO. So what we did was that we leveraged the same foundational architecture, our same architecture, to basically not only replicate changes but actually dedupe changes. Now if you think about a global enterprise that has maybe a multisite replication going on, like four, five, six, seven, eight, up to 16, 32 sites that are replicating to one place, now you can see the power of our architecture. So there are many advantages. One is that you're only replicating deduplicated changes. What I mean by that is if there is a block of data that's already at the target site, you won't need to replicate that again, all you need to do is copy metadata and point it across, and that gives you like 99% savings. That's one. You also change the data transfer problem into a data reduction problem because now the only data you have to put on the wire to replicate is everything after dedupe and compression, and we get about four to one. So you slash your data transfer by 75%. In a global dedupe system, when you're multiple sites replicating to one target site because of the fact that all sites are deduplicating among themselves, we expect savings to be up to 38% on average. So savings at the target site, savings on the WAN bandwidth, and much faster replication. That's our solution. >> That's why they were standing on their seats clapping for you today (Everyone laughing) >> That's true. >> Arindam, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Congratulations on a very successful launch and one I'm sure will be many more spontaneous rounds of applause. >> We're just getting started, thank you. >> You bet. >> Thank you, John. We continue here on theCUBE live from Dell EMC World 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Back with more in just a bit. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you buy Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here live in Las Vegas on The Cube at Dell EMC 2017. We are live from The Venetian continuing our Day One coverage here on the show along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. Did you have a good lunch? >> I'm ready to go, John. >> Excellent, excellent. It's all about data protection right now and with us to talk about that is Beth Phalen, who is the President of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Jim Clancy, the SVP of Sales in Data Protection as well. Jim, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Alright, so big news for you today. Led off with a couple of key announcements. Beth, take us through those, what was the news that you were making from the stage? >> Absolutely, two big announcements today. First, is the Integrated Data Protection Appliance which is an end-to-end appliance that gives you box to backup in less than three hours. While the customers are looking for simplicity but they still need the fantastic dedup, up to 55:1, the performance, the scales they get with our Data Protection Suite, our data protection portfolio, so now we're bringing it to them as an integrated appliance. Couldn't be happier about it. >> Great, so big news there, and announcement number two. >> We had a second one, too, which was cloud data protection. With a special focus on cloud Disaster Recovery, our customers want to leverage the cloud to have the DR site in a cloud, a public cloud, or perhaps a separate private cloud. They also want to be able to run Data Domain in the cloud environment. So as of today, you can run Data Domain Virtual Edition on AWS Or Azure and soon you'll be able to run it in Virtustream. >> So Jim, put that into practice for me now. If I'm one of your partners and I know that I've got some extra layers or extra opportunities, now what does that mean to me? >> Well firstly, we start with our partners. I think we've had such an incredible journey together supporting our customers' requirements. Well those continue to change and they struggle with things like the amount of information that they need to recover from, they need to back up, they need to store. For us, we're giving them that next conversation with their customers. So the new challenges are being met by data protection from Dell Technologies and our partners are going to benefit from that because they have the trusted advisors in their accounts. They want to be able to go and work with their customers and the new challenges and deliver. So Beth and her team have delivered from a technology to allow us to go and capture that mind share with our customers working together with our partners. >> So Jim, backup appliance, very high market. A lot of investments and a lot of startups in that market. What differentiates this solution over those competitors? >> Well first off, we're in the number one position in this market for a reason. It really comes down to our technology. So our customers have been pushing us saying, We need it to be simple, make it simple, make it simple. Because then they're running out of time every day on what they can do. I think we're taking our industry-leading technology and bundling it together as a simple, high-performance solution is the first thing. The second thing is the total experience that Dell brings to the marketplace. Our customers always are counting on us that if there ever is a challenge, who's going to be there to help us, right? If I ever need that next application comes on the line and how am I going to protect it? Who can come in a design that? That's what we deliver. So the things that we deliver are the experience vs. a point product. And by the way, from a point product, with our new announcement we're going to be able to take on any competitor in this marketplace. But it's the full experience that separates us from anybody in this marketplace today which is why we're number one and we're going to continue that leadership. >> So Beth mentioned the second announcement, cloud, which is a huge part of our new hybrid portfolios. What cloud services are we compatible with out the gate with your new solution? >> The cloud services that we're developing at the end of the gate, is that what you said? So first of all, if we take a step back the cloud is really multi-steps for customers to take advantage of it. Some customers are extending to the cloud. So they may have a full on-prem Data center that they want to leverage the cloud for perhaps long-term retention. That's one thing you can do. The second is a lift and shift. When they may choose to move some of their applications to the cloud. Now for that, they can run DD VE with NetWorker and CloudBoost and still have that same operations for the data protection that they did from on-prem. So the first is extent of the cloud. The second is lift and shift to the cloud. The third is something that you'll hear us talk more about. It's beginning to refactor their applications to be more cloud-native. Which is another area that we're very engaged and working on. >> So for a lift and shift scenario one of the things that we're concerned about on the customer side, is cost. When we're backing up to the cloud, it doesn't cost must to get it there but getting it back. Do you guys help with that scenario? >> We do, because first of all, all of the data is going to be deduped before it gets sent out to the cloud so it's a small amount of data that needs to come back. And second, with this most recent announcement if you're using the cloud DR capabilities you can bring that application back up in the cloud itself without having to bring the data back. So the data is stored and it's sort of format on the cloud is certainly the best value. Then you could actually bring that application up in AWS, as an example. >> So let's talk too from a staff retention, or staff training rather, what do my staff have to learn new of these solutions, if anything? >> It's a great question. Because of the things we pride ourselves on is making them seamless extensions of the products that we already sell. So that you don't have to introduce a brand new product to your environment. You can manage from NetWorker from Data Protection Suite to initiate the launch and retention or the Cloud DR. >> So the look and feel is what they're using today. What we've done is we've just extended the use cases that our customers are coming to us on, saying, I need to move data to the cloud, I want to make sure that I can leverage my existing technology and get that done. That's a big advantage to us because our customers are comfortable, understand the tools that they leverage today, and if they can just extend it instead of bringing something new in and learning something new, because every one of our customers does not have time to learn new tools, new products-- >> Well they really don't want that. >> Yeah, they don't want that. >> That's the last thing they want, right. >> Yeah, and I wanted to add on to what Beth said. We've been selling in the cloud for well over a year now. So this is just another few use cases that we're adding to our customers' requirements. So we have hundreds of petabytes that are being protected in the cloud today, whether it's some of the ones that Beth mentioned or Virtustream, so we're already in the cloud. This is just a more thought leadership. This is more of a technology leadership that we're announcing today. So we're extending our leadership as we extend our customers to the cloud. >> So what are the big picture stuff? We're talking about people moving more work. You've got tons of data, right? We have so much more. How is all this coming together in terms of where your section of the business is going, how you're responding to those kinds of trends, and what do you see coming down the road? >> It's a great question. So one of the things we talk about is people moving away from data centers to centers of data. When you look at with IOT, with all the distribution of where data is stored or coming from right now, it becomes more and more of a challenge to make sure A) You know where all your data is and B) That you're confident that it's protected. So given the capabilities and more and more distributive services giving people the ability to see where all of the data resides and the protection state, is one thing. I think the term data fog is beginning to start coming into the conversation. People have been mentioning it. It makes a point, right? It's not in one place anymore, it's not a lake. It's all over the place. Think about the challenge for CIOs to have the confidence that it's still protected and that they could get it back. >> So with all this distributed data one of the challenges that we have is the metadata around that data. Knowing what's where, analytics around that. Do you guys help solve that challenge? >> We do, in a few different ways. >> One thing in particular is, as of last year, we have a SaaS offering which is ECDA, Enterprise Copy Dating Analytics. That lets you have a global view of where your data is and it's really moving into more machine learning. So it's not just reporting. It's allowing the customer to get smarter and smarter about where his or her data is maybe not as protected as it could be and where they might want to take some actions to increase their levels of protection. >> We're pretty exited about it because we've gotten an overwhelming response from our partners and our customers that this is where we need to go. So everything we're talking about has been things that we've been going through with our customers for years saying, Okay we need to get here, we need to get here. and how do you help us get to that path vs. doing these individual things? There's a strategy behind all of this but it really comes back from our customers and our partners saying, This is what we need, we know you're going to get us here but let's try to get there sooner than later. I think Beth and team have delivered on that again. >> So this is a transformation. Again, big theme of this show. Help us with the big picture. How does this copy data, secondary data market that you guys are helping us with solve that support that digital transformation? >> We heard Michael talk about it on stage today, right? The ability of what we can do having a greater amount of leverage around the data that we all have right now is mind blowing in terms of accelerating medical diagnosis, driving more capability around awareness, around risks and sometimes of security. There's a level of knowledge that we've become more adept at mining the data that we have and then leveraging, machine learning, to analyze it. It's going to give us leaps and bounds of acceleration in whatever business objective we're looking out to achieve. >> If you had to pick a use case you're most proud of when it comes to your new solution set, give us the best one. >> I'll let you go first. >> I love the new things that we've done with the cloud data protection. Giving people the ability to be able to extend seamlessly is something that they've been asking for and to have it now and be able to offer it is really fantastic. >> I'd have to agree. Our customers want data protection everywhere. They don't care where that data sits. They don't want to be handcuffed on where they can actually protect their data or recover from that data. So they're working really strongly and tightly with us because we are the leader in this market and we just proved it again that we're going to keep up that leadership. Data protection everywhere is important and I think the cloud extension and leadership is what puts us in that position. We're really excited about that. >> It's an asset no matter where it is, right? So you have to protect it. >> That's right. >> Data fog, though, I think I live my life in data fog. (laughter) >> I like that, that's cool. >> Beth and Jim, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time on The Cube and best of luck. >> Thank you. >> Nice talking to you. >> We'll continue live here from Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017 and you're watching The Cube.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for a wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World Now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell Technologies, all those brands. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-hosts this week, Paul Gillin and Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Guys, great week, I thought I'd be wrecked at this point. But, I mean, a lot of energy here but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary, we heard the EMC people trotting in, about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. (laughing) All the messaging, pretty tight. >> Yes. >> All singing the same songs. My take away real quickly on messaging, they want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine. No icebergs ahead. We are going to help customers try to move from speeds to feeds, a bigger message. Not getting there yet. Still speeds and feeds. 14 (mumbles), 14G, that's kind of the high level, thoughts? >> This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, but that's okay, but they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like big data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they are choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too. It means they are focused. >> John: Keith, your thoughts. >> So, again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think if the present analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasized 310 analysts, from analysts and press, from all over the world. They get out the message. They get these guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what? When big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They are usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning. We haven't see that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor, so I think they did a great job of getting that out there, and portraying the stress of the brand, and throughout the show. It was a great show for them. >> They have a good story. Their story better together, obviously that's the whole theme. My impression is, in weaving through all the messaging, is generally, authentically the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this, we're a storage company, you know, and I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy, but VM World events were always different than the EMC World, so those culture clashes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, and you had VMware developers, right, so I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger, and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right, so I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now will it work? I still think your post is still open. They merged for the right reasons, but look it, they're not done. They got a boat-load of work to do. >> I think they're aware, to Keith's point, they are aware that history is against them, that mega mergers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work, and the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on this show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega mergers in history with Compaq Digital and HP Compaq, knows where a lot of those landmines are, so they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said John, the language was consistent from the start. >> Alright, I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point cause it kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops, because, to your point, history's against them, okay? We sat down with Michael Dell, founder, lead entrepreneur, still at the helm. He's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does his thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts guys? >> So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain >> Paul: Home run. >> Incredible. >> Paul: Home run. >> Home run. >> Paul: DSSD. >> DSSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. >> They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. >> Yeah, they did, what doesn't work they get it out quick, so great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech, so the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. >> That's a great point. And they know when to leave stuff alone too. >> John: Yeah, engineering lead but they're also, because we heard Jeff Boudreau on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do, we took the lumps trying to, late to the game on Flash, we're not going to be late to the game in these other areas, and he is very hyper focused. But the other thing that we didn't talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably, credible sales organization. They know how to sell, they know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talked to, startup to growing IPO is we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling because they have great tech and horrid sales people. They are hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. >> Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet was EMC. I mean, these are the guys who would get on a plane at midnight, would charter a plane at midnight, to get to the customer's site to fix a problem, and no other company does it like that, and Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they are going to have huge opportunity with their server division. >> I want to take a minute just to thank our sponsors for their awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Dato, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VM World, 20 plus videos a day, for 3 straight days. All that's on youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, siliconangle.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research, and also a shoutout to Keith at @CTOAdvisor. Check him out on Twitter, always part of the conversation, super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks. My take away? Hyper converge, big time focus on these guys. VMware is the glue, Hybrid Cloud, and they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon, so thoughts on that point? I see you rolling your eyes. >> I just got out with James Watters, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know Michael has stressed on theCUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long term success. One of Dell's challenges, Dell EMC's, and this is not just Dell EMC, it's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape, is getting out of that conversation with their VP of infrastructure, getting into the offices of the CIOs, COs, CMO, and having these business conversations, and it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically their service organization, is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on a flight, solving the problem. Whatever the original statement at work was, they are willing to tear that up, and get down, get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that >> The question for you then is this, without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers? >> Keith: None. >> Amazon would mop that up and they'd have no positions, so I would say it is certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is how big is that market for them. Can they get there, can they hold the line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going, thoughts? >> This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get in front of the right people and tell that story, that CrossCloud story of being able to develop using CF and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms and have the right conversations, >> Yeah. >> Keith: That's a tough thing to do. >> I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they have pulled off here in such a short time, and to think about the developers are probably not their first priority right now. >> Alright, so we are going to do the metadata segment of our wrap up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, in the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read and just nuance points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal sharing, in between the conversations kind of weaved in, yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes, he didn't say it specifically, but he's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? And they had to because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right, but you can almost see that now as, I'd like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point, that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public, roll it into VMware. >> Yeah, I think that is going to be a interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to once again come back together with solutions. This NSX, CrossCloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dell EMC being relevant long term. They understand the value short term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross selling between the Dell and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn down one knob and turn the other one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell, and the team have the chops to get it done. >> Cisco has to endure the public markets while they are doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. >> Data point that you can extract that you take away from this? >> Synergy, synergy. I mean when two companies this big come together, you're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this, though, thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid market, with the small companies, a company that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is this merger makes sense from that perspective, and the big question is software, what are they going to do with those software assets, and to your point, the future is going to be, software defined everything, and that's not a story they're telling yet. >> Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Anything notable to you? Something obscure that made you go, wow I didn't know that, oh that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. >> You know what, just the scale of, you look at the merger, 57 billion dollars, and on paper you are like, okay that's interesting, but a lot of the numbers coming out, you know, we talked to the senior VP of marketing and he says, you know, my guys are making bank, actually that's to paraphrase him. You said that John, that they are making bank, and one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell sales culture, very web based, very, you know I had a Dell rep and there was not an awful lot of value add, EMC >> Paul: Value add. >> The value add, and those guys earned their money, and bringing those two together and making sure that customers don't miss a beat and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure, I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they are executing really well on that, and I thought from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you know, you want to see some value. >> Great point, that was one of highlights of my take aways, Marius Haas' interview around sales and comp and structure. They are used to a lot of bank, those sales guys, and now it's like, hey we're going to give you a haircut, what? I was about to make a million dollars on commissions this year. >> This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. >> Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies a point, that's memorable is Michael Dell's interview hits home the point of entrepreneur founder, lead guy, and there's only three left in the industry, Ellison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they are actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment. I think he does sell Pivotal a little too much, which gives me a little red flag, like hmm, why is he pushing Pivotal so much, what is he hiding, but that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life. 2016 was the hardest year of his life. >> Keith: That was a mean story. >> Personal and business. Almost got fired. Remember last year? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelsinger, you're fired. So, he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, evaluation's on the rise. That jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell had the Intel, wintel, Microsoft relationships from day one, that history, Intel was on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs. I think you are going to see a massive power base, to your scale point, around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way its high octane power, Intel. >> Keith: It is a big bet. >> It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you, final thoughts, interviews? >> Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic, 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. >> Yeah, great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you, anything else? >> The scale of this show compared to, I've been at Dell World, I've been to EMC World. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure, from the EMC Worlds and the Dell Worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide eyed. I've been to plenty of VM World's. It doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM World, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow I didn't know >> John: The relevance has increased. >> Just little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on, that they're keying on that there's value there. >> The 800 pound gorilla, the very relevant impact, people are taking notice. >> If you are a one product Dell customer or a one product EMC customer and you are coming to the show for the first time, I think you're a little bit wowed. >> Alright, guys, great job. Keith, great to have you host theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. >> Always great being here. >> Paul, great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to siliconangle.com, wikibon.com, and go to youtube.com/siliconeangle and check out all the videos and the playlists, more coverage, great. Thanks for watching our special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE's eighth year of coverage of what was once EMC World, now it's Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier at SiliconANGLE, and also my cohost from SiliconANGLE, Paul Gillin. Our next guest is Vikram Bhambri, who is the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. Formally with Microsoft Azure, knows cloud, knows VIPRE, knows the management, knows storage up and down, the Emerging Technologies Group, formerly of EMC. Good to see you on theCUBE again. >> Good to see you guys again. >> Okay, so Elastic Compute, this is going to be the game changer. We're so excited about one of our favorite interviews was your colleague we had on earlier. Unstructured data, object store, is becoming super valuable. And it was once the throwaway, "Yeah, store, later late ". Now with absent data driven enterprises having access to data is the value proposition that they're all driving towards. >> Absolutely. >> Where are you guys with making that happen and bringing that data to life? >> So, when I think about object storage in general, people talk about it's the S3 protocol, or it's the object protocol versus the file protocol. I think the conversation is not about that. The conversation is about data of the universe is increasing and it's increasing tremendously. We're talking about 44 zettabytes of data by 2020. You need an easier way to consume, store, that data in a meaningful way, and not only just that but being able to derive meaningful insights out of that either when the data is coming in or when the data is stored on a periodic basis being able to drive value. So having access to the data at any point of time, anywhere, is the most important aspect of it. And with ECS we've been able to actually attack the market from both sides. Whether it's talking about moving data from higher cost storage arrays or higher performance tiers down to a more accessible, more cheap storage that is available geographically, that's one market. And then also you have tons of data that's available on the tape drive but that data is so difficult to access, so not available. And if you want to go put that tape back on a actual active system the turnaround time is so long. So being able to turn all of that storage into an active storage system that's accessible all the time is the real value proposition that we have to talk about. >> Well now help me understand this because we have all these different ways to make sense of unstructured data now. We have NoSQL databases, we have JSON, we have HDFS, and we've got object storage. Where does it fit into the hierarchy of making sense of unstructured data? >> The simplest way to think about it is we talk about a data ocean, with the amount of data that's growing. Having the capability to store data that is in a global content repository. That is accessible-- >> Meaning one massive repository. >> One massive repository. And not necessarily in one data center, right? It's spread across multiple data centers, it's accessible, available with a single, global namespace, regardless of whether you're trying to access data from location A or location B. But having that data be available through a single global namespace is the key value proposition that object storage brings to bear. The other part is the economics that we're able to provide consistently better than what the public clouds are able to offer. You're talking about anywhere between 30 to 48% cheaper TCO than what public clouds are able to offer, in your own data center with all the constraints that you want to like upload to it, whether it's regular environments. Whether you're talking about country specific clouds and such, that's where it fits well together. But, exposing that same data out whether through HDFS or a file is where ECS differentiated itself from other cloud platforms. Yes, you can go to a Hadoop cluster and do a separate data processing but then you're creating more copies of the same data that you have in your primary storage. So things like that essentially help position object as the global content repository where you can just dump and forget about, about the storage needs. >> Vikram I want to ask you about the elastic cloud storage, as you mentioned, ECS, it's been around for a couple of years. You just announced a ECS lesser cloud storage, dedicated cloud. Can you tell me what that is and more about that because some people think of elastic they think Amazon, "I'll just throw it in object storage in the cloud." What are you guys doing specifically 'cause you have this hybrid offering. >> Absolutely. >> What is this about, can you explain that? >> Yeah, so if you look at, there are two extremes, or two paradigms that people are attracted by. On one side you have public clouds which give you the ease of use, you just swipe your credit card and you're in business. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure, you don't have to worry about, like, "Where my data is going to be stored?" It's just there. And then on the other side you have regular environments or you just have environments where you cannot move to public clouds so customers end up put in ECS, or other object storage for that matter, though ECS is the best. >> John: Biased, but that's okay. >> Yeah, now we are starting to see customers they're saying, "Can I have the best of both worlds? "Can I have a situation where I like the ease of use "of the public cloud but I don't want to "be in a shared bathtub environment. "I don't want to be in a public cloud environment. "I like the privacy that you are able to provide me "with this ECS in my own data center "but I don't want to take on the infrastructure management." So for those customers we have launched ECS dedicated cloud service. And this is specifically targeted for scenarios where customers have maybe one data center, two data centers, but they want to use the full strength and the capabilities of ECS. So what we're telling them we will actually put their bought ECS in our data centers, ECS team will operate and manage that environment for the customer but they're the only dedicated customer on that cloud. So that means they have their own environment-- >> It's completely secure for their data. >> Vikram: Exactly. >> No multi tenant issues at all. >> No, and you can have either partial capabilities in our data center, or you can fully host in our data center. So you can do various permutation and combinations thus giving customers a lot of flexibility of starting with one point and moving to the other. Let's them start with a private cloud, they want to move to a hybrid version they can move that, or if they start from the hybrid and they want to go back to their own data centers they can do that as well. >> Let's change gears and talk about IoT. You guys had launched Project Nautilus, we also heard that from your boss earlier, two days ago. What is that about? Explain, specifically, what is Project Nautilus? >> So as I was mentioning earlier there is a whole universe of data that is now being generated by these IoT devices. Whether you're talking about connected cars, you're talking about wind sensors, you're talking about anything that collects a piece of data that needs to be not only stored but people want to do realtime analysis on that dataset. And today people end up using a combination of 10 different things. They're using Kafka, Speak, HDFS, Cassandra, DASH storage to build together a makeshift solution, that sort of works but doesn't really. Or you end up, like, if you're in the public cloud you'll end up using some implementation of Lambda Architecture. But the challenge there is you're storing same amount of data in a few different places, and not only that there is no consistent way of managing data, processing data that effectively. So what Project Nautilus is our attempt to essentially streamline all of that. Allow stream of data that's coming from these IoT devices to be processed realtime, or for batch, in the same solution. And then once you've done that processing you essentially push that data down to a tier, whether it's Isilon or ECS, depending on the use case that you are trying to do. So it simplifies the whole story on realtime analytics and you don't want to do it in a closed source way. What we've done is we've created this new paradigm, or new primitive called streaming storage, and we are open sourcing it, we are Project Pravega, which is in the Apache Foundation. We want the whole community, just like there is a common sense of awareness for object file we want to that same thing for streaming storage-- >> So you guys are active in open source. Explain quickly, many might not know that. Talk about that. >> So, yeah, as I mentioned Project Prevega is something we announced at Flink Forward Conference. It's a streaming storage layer which is completely open source in the Apache Foundation and we just open sourced it today. And giving customers the capability to contribute code to it, take their version, or they can do whatever they want to do, like build additional innovation on top. And the goal is to make streaming storage just like a common paradigm like everything else. And in addition we're partnering with another open source component. There is a company called data Artisans based out of Berlin, Germany, and they have a project called Flink, and we're working with them pretty closely to bring Nautilus to fruition. >> theCUBE was there by the way, we covered Flink Forward again, one of the-- >> Paul: True streaming engine. >> Very good, very big open source project. >> Yeah, we we're talking with Jeff Woodrow earlier about software defined storage, self driving storage as he calls it. >> Where does ECS fit in the self driving storage? Is this an important part of what you're doing right now or is it a different use? >> Yeah, our vision right from the beginning itself was when we built this next generation of object storage system it has to be software first. Not only software first where a customer can choose their commodity hardware to bring to bear or we an supply the commodity hardware but over time build intelligence in that layer of software so that you can pull data off smartly to other, from SSDs to more SATA based drives. Or you can bring in smarts around metadata search capabilities that we've introduced recently. Because you have now billions of billions of records that are being stored on ECS. You want ease of search of what specifically you're looking for, so we introduced metadata search capability. So making the storage system and all of the data services that were usually outside of the platform, making them be part of the code platform itself. >> Are you working with Elasticsearch? >> Yes, we are using Elasticsearch more to enable customers who want to get insights about ECS itself. And Nautilus, of course, is also going to integrate with Elasticsearch as well. >> Vikram let's wrap this up. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Bottom line, what's the bottom line message, quickly, summarize the value proposition, why customers should be using ECS, what's the big aha moment, what's the proposition? >> I would say the value proposition is very simple. Sometimes it can be like, people talk about lots of complex terms, it's very simple. Sustainably, low cost storage, for storing a wide variety of content in a global content repository is the key value proposition. >> And used for application developers to tap into? The whole dev ops, data as code, infrastructure as code movement. >> Yeah, you start, what we have seen in the majority of the used cases customers start with one used case of archiving. And then they very quickly realize that there's, it's like a Swiss Army knife. You start with archiving then you move on to application development, more modern applications, or in the cloud native applications development. And now with IoT and Nautilus being able to leverage data from these IoT devices onto these-- >> As I said two days ago, I think this is a huge, important area for agile developers. Having access to data in less than a hundred milliseconds, from any place in the world, is going to be table steaks. >> ECS has to be, or in general, object storage, has to be part of every important conversation that is happening about digital IT transformation. >> It sounds like eventually most of the data's going to end up there. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so I'll put ya on the spot. When are we going to be seeing data in less than a hundred milliseconds from any database anywhere in the fabric of a company for a developer to call a data ocean and give me data back from any database, from any transaction in less than a hundred milliseconds? Can we do that today? >> We can do that today, it's available today. The challenge is how quickly enterprises are adopting the technology. >> John: So they got to architect it? >> Yeah. >> They have to architect it. >> Paul: If it's all of Isilon. >> They can pull it, they can cloud pull it down from Isilon to ECS. >> True. >> Yeah. >> Speed, low latency, is the key to success. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> And I love this new object store, love this tier two value proposition. It's so much more compelling for developers, certainly in cloud native. >> Vikram: Absolutely. >> Vikram, here on theCUBE, bringing you more action from Las Vegas. We'll be right back as day three coverage continues here at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillan, we'll be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone We are wrapping up three days of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Keith Townsend. We are joined by Gil Shneorson. He is the Senior Vice President at VxRail Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Gil. >> Thank you for having me. >> Keith: Good seeing you again Gil. >> Yeah, good to see you again. >> A CUBE veteran. We are always happy to have repeat guys on the show. >> Yeah >> So, talk to me about VxRail. It's a massive success story. What is the secret? What is the secret of your success? >> Well, it's a combination of a few things. First of all, it's an HCI appliance, hyper-converged appliance And, as you may know, and I'm sure it's been discussed before we are seeing a massive transition from traditional architectures to HCI and that's basically driven because the economics of HCI are so enticing, that people really can't resist at least looking at them. And we know that 60% of them either have it or will have it soon. And within that HCI transition and within those economical benefits we focus on VMware, which is a larger portion of the market. And, we have a product that's solely focused on VMware, it automates the deployment and lifecycle management of, essentially, a VCR cluster. So, it's a very simple message. If you are a VMware customer, instead of going and changing every three years to your traditional three tier architecture, what if we could give you the economical benefits of hyper-convergence, which is start small, grow in very small increments, and never migrate data, but without ever leaving your VMware ecosystem. And so, if I ask you as a VMware user, you'd always say yes. Because it's so focused on that user and so optimized to them, we're seeing a great success with the product these days. >> Before the cameras were rolling, you made a comment, you said hyper-convergence is not really about the tech. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, that's an insight (laughing) >> That's actually very true. We can do things today that could not be done in a three tier architecture. But there are many hyper-converged products and all of them are doing very well. In fact, even in our portfolio, we at VxRail, we also have the Dell XC, which is a Nutanix-based technology. So, why they are all doing well is because when I buy hyper-converged, I can start small. Which means that essentially, I do not need to plan. And planning is dangerous because with traditional storage, you either buy too much or you buy too little. And even if you plan properly, you use only part of it until you migrate that data in and then, you use all of it, and then when you have the new one, you also use part of it until you finish. >> Rebecca: Right, right. >> And so, you are never really using what you're buying. And so, now you have this technology where you buy small. You don't have to plan at all. You can automatically increment and you don't have to migrate. And you know that migrate is a very traumatic experience (laughing) In large environments. And so those benefits are what's driving all of this. It's now enabled by technology, but it's not about that. But what I also think that is happening, is that we've combined the skillset, or the technology for storage and server, and we deploy it within a customer's network so we've made it much simpler, but it's not ultimate simplicity. People have to remember that they still bought a data-centered solution and so now, troubleshooting your hyper-converged solution means that you have to know storage principles and network principles and hypervergence principles. >> So, let's explode that out a little bit. Because this is really an exciting topic for me. When you take that load off of your customers, The planning, the pre-engineering, the test, the integration work, that frees up a lot of opex hours for customers to redirect their energies to do something else. Let's talk about those something else. What has been the transformation within customers once they're freed up from that responsibility? >> I don't know. Look, if you look at hyper-converge, while it's growing dramatically it hasn't taken a massive share of the industry yet. We have to be humble at the same time. We see growth. So I don't know that people free up a lot of time, but what they can do is they can focus on the higher level outcomes, Which is ultimately what they want. People want a cloud experience. Either it's completely private or it's a hybrid cloud. They want the ability to deliver by self-service to their own internal users. They want a cloud outcome and regardless of HCI, you still need to do that work. And so now they can forget about the infrastructure, because it's mostly automated, and focus at the next level of outcome. And, as you know, within CPSD, we also do that. So if a customer wanted the full experience, we would actually put the infrastructure aside, we would talk about that hybrid cloud experience end-to-end, we would consult or deliver, but if they want to do it on their own, which many of them want, we would then provide them the infrastructure, but I think that's where they are going. They are looking at the next level of outcomes beyond what the infrastructure brings. >> But you also said, which is also an astute comment, about how it is actually a traumatic experience for these customers to do the migration. Do you face a lot of resistance? I mean, how do you get the organizational buy-in to initiate this change? >> Yeah, when I said traumatic, I mean that in a three tier architecture that migration happens every three years. So I think people are pretty much willing to do it one last time. (laughing) Because they know it's not going to happen again. And so, migration into hyper-convergence is certainly not resistance. Where we see resistance, is not even customers objecting, but some customers are unable. For example, if my storage buying cycle and my network buying cycle and my server buying cycle are not aligned, I will always have some access capacity somewhere, so even though I could have a much better solution going forward, I can't afford it because I have capacity somewhere. For that reason, by the way, we introduced Cloud Flex, because if you could buy VxRail or Dell XC with zero down payment and pay month by month by month, and have no commitment which means you can return all of it in 12 months, we are trying to break that cycle and allow people to get into it because they want to do this. Sometimes they simply can't. >> So day three of Dell EMC World, you've talked to what something like 30 customers? Give us a snapshot of the range of conversations. Is there a dominating theme or are customers just on, are all 30 customers on 30 different phases of this journey? >> So I talked to a lot of customers, but I also talked to a lot of partners. Partners are still figuring out how much they need to go into hyper-converged. Most of those conversations, both with customers and partners were about, not the technology so much, but rather is it time to consolidate practice?. Is it really still the time to keep a storage practice separate? And that's both for the seller, us and the partners, and for the end-users, right? Is it really true that you need to all budget for storage, budget for network, budget, and do you have the right people that know all of those disciplines that could, you know, then you might need fewer of them, because others will be focusing on other things. But, those that support this and understand this must have a broader skillset than they did before. So, most of the conversation were around, you know, around that. People were interested whether hyper-converged is ready for primetime. They don't know if it's ready for mission-critical, and I tell them that VxRail today is used for radiology, and unified communication phone and email, and SMS traffic between carriers, and trading applications, believe it or not, already. >> Keith: Wow! >> And so, I think as I said, because it's not so much about technology, because we assume that technology from any large vendor will work, and if it doesn't any large vendor will make it work, and stand by the customer. But those economical benefits are driving everybody to go there very, very fast. So, most of the conversations about can it be done, is it ready for it, should we do it right now, should we wait. I think those are the themes right now. >> And that's what we will be talking about at next year's Dell EMC. >> I think by next year we will talk less about hyper-converged because it's almost going to be. >> It will be the reality. >> Keith: Yeah, table steaks. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's going to be table steaks at that point. I actually don't know what we are going to be talking about. (laughing) >> Well, we will just have to wait and see. >> Yes. >> Gil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> It's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> That wraps it up for theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm Rebecca Knight along with Keith Townsend. Thanks for joining us and we will see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE's eighth year of covering, since the inception of theCUBE. EMC World, which is now called Dell EMC, with the first year of the combination coming together. Exciting, a lot of storylines here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, and my co-host with SiliconANGLE, Paul Gillin. Our next guest, Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell EMC Storage Division. It sounds weird to say that because EMC used to be a storage company. Now, they're a part of Dell Technologies with a zillion brands. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So first, explain quickly what the storage division is, because Chad Sakac does converge infrastructure, but, you own all the storage. >> Jeff: Correct. >> So just quickly, just. >> Yeah, real quick, keeping it simple, if you think about the components and the building blocks, you have Ashley running compute, you have Tom Burns running network, you have myself running storage, and you have Beth Phalen running data protection, and then Chad's the converge platform, so when we integrate the solution, Chad has that piece. So yes, all storage, and that would be Legacy or Heritage Dell storage, but also Heritage and Legacy EMC storage. All that came together so, just massive revenue, massive amounts of customers, and then obviously tons of engineers around the world. >> You got a lot of work to do. Obviously storage is not going away. It's changing radically and in different ways. Certainly cloud is accelerating it. The data center world is changing. They call it data center. They don't call it server center. They call it the data center 'cause there's more data coming. So I got to ask you, one of my favorite quotes in your keynote this morning was, "We have self-driving cars. "Why don't we have self-driving storage "or autonomous storage?" Which is provocative, but also very relevant. Can you explain what you meant by that, and let's dig deeper into that. >> Yeah. I mean, actually, it's one of my favorite topics, actually. So I have these notions of the pillars of innovation, right? And I want to start looking at, to your point, things are changing in the markets and in the way customers are using our products, and I want to embrace that change and innovate around that change. The notion of the day in the life of the storage admin, or the day in the life of the data center admin, and the day in the life of just about anybody using the product. We got to make it simpler, right? It goes back to consumer simplicity, a lot of this stuff. What we're trying to do there is actually make the storage be smart enough to actually just take care of itself. It's kind of the set it and forget it notion. So, as part of autonomous storage, we look at four attributes simplistically, in regards to how you would have a self-driving system. The first one is about being application-centric, 'cause, at the end of the day, it's all about the app and the workload. We all know that, right, and that's what the users care about. So the way I kind of looked at that this morning is, the example is, that's like telling your car where you want to go, or is it a turn-by-turn decision, right, that you would give it? The second thing is about being policy driven. I'm not going to say, hey listen, do I want to take the fastest route or do I want to take the scenic route? >> John: Yep. >> Right, simplistically. And then, I'm going to be honest, that stuff's relatively easy and we do a bunch of that stuff today. Really when it starts to get the next level is when this stuff becomes self-aware, right? Understanding its resources, and then understanding if you're in or out of those boundaries. So, am I, you know, swerving out of my lane? Do I have enough gas? Dot, dot, dot, right, as an example. And then where it gets really powerful is the fourth component for me, is self-optimization. That's being able to understanding what, you're self-aware and then making a better outcome for your customer. At the end of the day, that could be, hey, there's not enough charging stations to get to your destination, or you don't have enough charge, or better yet, the storage will actually or the system would tell you, hey take this path. There's enough charging stations. I'll get you there on time and safely, right? >> So you'd be very happy if you had the brand bumper sticker of the Tesla of storage. >> Absolutely. >> To your point about the stations, you know, people love Teslas. It's very sexy and it's relevant. I got to ask you about machine learning. It's obviously AIs hyped-up. We call it, not artificial intelligence, more augmented intelligence. That's a better definition because artificial intelligence is this weak, weak word. (laughing) It doesn't really exist, it's kind of out there. But, augmentation of value is about machine learning and deep learning. These are the learning systems you mentioned. Self-optimization, that's basically learning machines. >> That's right. >> What are you guys doing around big data, I meant big data machine learning and some of these things? >> So we're doing a handful of things. So along the keynote, I mentioned builtin analytics. That's two things, you know. Dell EMC, we store, protect and secure more data than anybody else in the world, par or not. So, you know and I used to joke, EMC used to be known for where information lives. Dell Technologies and Dell EMC has to be known for where information comes alive, right? And actually providing value or generating value for our customers. So, what we're going to do is, we're going to have builtin capabilities into the array, but also we're going to plug into the broader ecosystem, you know, with analytics and service providers to really help drive that value and that creation. So, you'll see a lot more around the storage itself around that self-learning and understanding. That kind of, the core components of an array. What makes it run healthy or unhealthy enables the customer to better utilize and add more value to their stack. Then also, going into that broader ecosystem, making sure that they can really drop that value to their customers and to their business. >> What pieces will you be delivering first? >> On the storage side itself, specifically, we'll be, we already have a lot of products that have probably two or three of the capabilities. So between app-centric, policy driven, and self-awareness, those are the ones we're on right now, big time. And I have a team focused on the machine learning, so we can really start self-optimizing. We actually just, we mentioned, I don't know if the guys that were on, where all the folks we've had on the show talked about a thing called cloud IQ? >> Paul: Yes, they did. >> That was something that we built a SAS model in the cloud, which is all about machine learning. >> So, that's part of this whole rollout, is moving to the cloud eventually. >> Oh, absolutely. It's critical. >> So another quote that I have off from your keynote, because it had some great soundbites, Isilon, one of the products in your portfolio, "Isilon is known to be the gold standard "for storage in the genome sequencing." Obviously, with the massive amounts of computers available, certainly cloud computing has now made it possible to do amazing things with the data, and make that literally come alive, and hopefully people could live longer. But, genome sequencing is actually doable, and price points at. >> It's crazy, probably the last two years alone, it's dramatically and drastically just reduced. >> But why is Isilon the gold standard for sequence? What specifically is it that's great about it? >> Well, it basically, in regards to the data structure and how we can process that big data, and make sense of it quickly as we analyze it, there's nothing faster in the market. And it'd be interesting, and now that we've brought out the Isilon All-Flash array with the new infinity platform, we've taken something that, two years ago took weeks, down to days, down to hours, and with the All-Flash array we've taken it down to minutes, 22 minutes to be exact. >> So I got to to ask you, I'll let you think about the portfolio question and I'm going to ask in about a minute how you're going to rectify all that, where the overlap is or isn't, so you can work on that, but the next question is, the industry, you're not seeing a lot of start-ups trying to do what Isilon did. You heard Isilon guys leaving, starting companies, and everyone's kind of pivoting, but you are seeing startups in the white spaces, data protection, so question, how hard is it to do a startup right now and get venture funding, because it seems to be scale is the issue, and it's hard to be a, quote, pure storage company, pun intended. Pure Storage was the last company to challenge you guys. (laughing) >> You know, I've also thrown that app in there as well, it's standing on their own, regardless of that. But, let's be clear, this market is consolidating. That's good for us, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. So, with our size and scale, Dell and EMC, and Dell Technologies together, our size, our scale, our buying power, unmatched by anybody. It's going to be hard, for you know, there's a lot of companies. >> Hard nut to crack, for a start up to come in and it could be the table stakes are too high. >> So in regards, the innovation, spending R&D, value chain that we get, efficiency, buying power, intel, I mean think about all the stuff around the whole ecosystem, it's just really hard to do, so this market is consolidating. We're good with that. What I want to do is consolidate this market faster, and I want to drive more share of this market in regards to that, and I think it's really tough. So, you've seen small guys be bought recently. Some guys that aren't doing well. Some people, >> Acquihires. >> Maybe some of these orange people are really in the red, going back to your pun. So, they're struggling, right, some of these guys are struggling, so I really think this is an opportunity, as we force this market as it consolidates, for us, I think it's a real big thing. >> Alright, so the question on the consolidation, sorry Paul to interrupt, but okay. I get the consolidation. Now the growth, we're going to put the pedal to the medal. It's going to come from where? You got a mature market, you're consolidating. You lock that in, so that's big dollars by the way. It's not like small numbers, and the table stakes are high so, storage going to crack that nut. Then you got to have the growth strategy where there's a hockey stick opportunity. >> Yeah, so, from a storage perspective, let's be clear, they're going to have the growth. It's going to come through things like HTI. It's going to come through things like software-defined, in regards to how we do that, right? That's obviously part of, software-defined is part of my portfolio as well, so, it will be a journey in regards to where we grow. The traditional space is huge, let's be very clear. It's massive, right. We have to do that and do that extremely well, and protect that, and make sure our customers are taken care of, but as they go on their journey, if it's software-defined, or cloud, or what have you, we want to make sure we're relevant can help with that. So, one will be taking share in that space, there'll be opportunities as the consumption models, the technology, and the deployment models change, we'll be front and center in all of those. >> Speaking of software-defined, essentially that can deposition some of the storage elements below it. Cisco is wrestling with that right now. Where they sort of held off for a couple of years on software-defined network, and they're finally embracing it. What are you doing to balance the need for your, the elements of your portfolio to shine, with also the need to get customers to software definition? >> Absolutely, so, right now, I mean, it's a journey. Let's be clear, right, so, I have a, actually, a large customer that was on stage with me. I'll leave their name out, if anyone wants to watch who I talked to on day one, they'll know who I'm talking about. They're on a journey. Right now, today, they're probably one of the, I would say, leaders in software-defined storage and driving software-defined storage is part of their IT transformation and their data centers. They're 20% software-defined, 80% still traditional physical infrastructure. They have a big stake in the ground. In three or four short years, 2020, they're going to be 50/50. Right, and these the guys that are leading and driving. So just give the folks a little bit of balance in regards to yes, that's where their growth will come from, this is where the appeal is, but it will be a journey in how we get through that, but also for me, going back to scale and Dell Technologies, I have products like Scale IO. I have virtual Isilon, I have virtual Unity. In regards to what we do with ECS, that's an object store, so file blocker object, we have it. And then I have wonderful 14G servers from my friend Ashley in the compute team. Go well together. >> So, Pat Gelsinger's talking about a developer-ready infrastructure. You've mentioned on your keynote, I thought was clever, the cloud-ready storage. Talk about that dynamic because, love this soundbite, "Storage has to be cloud ready, cloud connected, "build out on off prim, and live in a multi-cloud world." Don't comment on the multi-cloud. We think that's going to happen. Not ready for primetime right now. I'm pretty certainly it is happening. Their is some latency issues on multi-cloud. >> Sure >> We don't want to digress. But hybrid is definitely happening, but multi-cloud is the gateway, hybrid cloud is the gateway to multi-cloud. Dealing with legacy to cloud native, that gap with hybrid. How do you look at that, cause that's truly going to be a great opportunity for you, and being cloud storage ready, I'm sorry, cloud ready. >> Cloud ready. >> Ready storage, how do you make that happen? >> Yeah, so, cloud connections is one of the big ones for me. So, the ability to connect to the cloud and allow people to move, seamlessly move data in and out of the cloud. So depending if it's a traditional on prim or off prim, so we have great technologies for file, we have CTA, which is a cloud tiering appliance, all file based, gets rave reviews from our customers and we're able to help them not only on our products but actually on some competitor file products to move it off to the cloud if need be, which has actually been a pretty big win for us. In addition to that, Isilon has a notion of cloud pools that people haven't seen, but again it's a transparent seamless data mobility from Isilon, from core to the cloud, if you will. Then, lastly we have a cloud array, which is a block device that allows us to move block data from a traditional asset into the cloud as well, so, we have a handful of products or features that are natively in certain products today. We'll be evolving that over time. >> You got everything! >> Well we'll be evolving that over time too, so we want to have a more coherent simple storage for our customers, right? It doesn't matter what the data type is, we want to be able to present it to the cloud. >> But you, by that I mean EMC, were late to the Flash market, but have caught up, are now the leaders in the Flash market. Phenomenal growth year over year. What did you do to pull that off? That's kind of counter-intuitive. >> Focus and energy, and a lot of great engineers. I'll be honest with you, alright. And then a great sales team behind it as well. So, we were late to the game. We made some decisions to lead with certain products and drive certain products where if we, you know if you took a step back, I think we'd said, "Hey, listen, we all agreed Flash was critical. Flash will be everywhere, compute, storage, network." And then you could debate on the consumption model, if it would be all Flash systems versus hybrid systems, or what have you. At the end of the day, Flash was pretty critical, and I think we're all on the same page there, in regards to how you want to attack the problem, if it's a hybrid or all Flash, that's maybe where we got a little stuck in our own way. But then focus from all the teams, if it was Bemax or Midrange or Xtreme IO, Isilon now. Teams have done an amazing job catching up, and then working with Billy and Marius, and the go-to-market teams, they've been phenomenal. It's been a huge shape with our. >> Well that's a good point to my portfolio question, is you guys really worked that problem hard. I think it was a two year window, we saw all kinds of architecture, but that was good timing on that, because you were early on the trend architecturally was happening in a real sense, although late to the game. Things kind of played out and you kind of shaped your portfolio up during that time. Kind of a forcing function. One, is that what happened, and two, what is the current view of the portfolio right now? Do you feel comfortable about the overlap, gaps, things that you think about? >> Yeah absolutely, so let me take the media one first, and go back to Flash specifically. We learned a lot, and yes that did help us shape our portfolios and go forward and actually try to focus specific architectures to specific-use cases to make our customers successful. We also learned is we didn't ever want to be late again. That's why, with NVME specifically, that we actually were major contributors and actually a codeveloper on NVME. Which others can talk about NVME in their marketing material. They weren't actually at the table codeveloping. >> You get the scar tissue, saying if we don't get out in this, we're going to. (laughing) >> That's right, so we've learned and I don't want it to happen again. I want to be a learning organization. I don't want it to happen again, so we're going to be driving that, and we'll be a leader in NVME, and as more media transitions happen in Flash, there'll be more, trust me, a few years down the road beyond that, we're already looking at, we'll continue to make sure that we're a leader in that space. Now on the portfolio, I talk to customers all the time. They love the portfolio in the sense of, that they understand, they believe in the fact that there's no, one size does not fit all. They have said, though, "Hey you got a lot of products "and you have to simplify." In full transparency that's something we've been working through and we'll continue to work through that. We will have overlap, and we want overlap, it's good. >> John: Better to have overlaps than gaps. >> And Joe Tucci was a huge person and I couldn't support more but we want it to be planned overlap versus unplanned overlap, because we want to be making sure we want to make our customers successful, and we say hey, and that we can articulate clearly to our customers why they'd use a product and the value its going to drive for their use-case, for their application. Same thing our sales guys, same thing for our service guys, same thing for our own engineers. We want to keep people aligned and focused on what we're trying to do. So that way, we can provide a better outcome on the other side. >> Are you looking at, when you're looking out at the future, do you see anything disruptive on the horizon? Is there anything that could change this industry fundamentally? >> Obviously, I always keep cloud in the back of mind. It's still something, you know. Depending on how people want to portray it or look at it. People call it a destination, some people call it a media, what have you. I call it a virtual infrastructure. Depending on how you want to define it, there's different ways. >> A mainframe in the sky. >> You know, I say that one always keeps me up at night, depending on how things go, but there's a lot of cool things going on in storage actually where I think, first, let's be clear, storage in general maybe hesitant. It's lost some of the sex appeal, if you will, the attractiveness of it. I think that's starting to come back with some of the things like NVME and cloud-ready and multi-dimensional scaling. There's a whole bunch of things going around there that actually is going to kind of drive that back. Now in addition to that, though, we all know internet of things, machine learning, you know, video, it's exploding. So let's be very clear there'll be a lot, >> Storage is not going away, but the machine learning certainly is going to be a nice jolt in the arm for optimization and automation. >> There's a huge opportunity there, in regards to that. Cloud is one of the big ones, but I think there's a lot of things, I guess the had-wins stay at wins, there's a lot of things in favor to really kind of push us forward. >> Jeff Boudreau, thank you for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate the insight, and candid commentary and analysis and insight into your business. Appreciate it. You got the storage, it's not going away. It's called the data center and the cloud for a reason. It's all about the data and the value of business will be data driven. This is theCUBE bringing data to you here live from Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin. Back with more, stay with us after the short break. (lively music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017, our eighth year coverage with the Cube. Formerly EMC World, now Dell EMC World. This is the Cube's coverage. I'm John Furrier, my cohost, Paul Gillin. Our next two guests are Craig Bernero, who is the senior vice president general manager of the midrange and entry storage solutions at Dell EMC. And Pierluca Chiodelli, VP appliance management at Dell. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> Give us the update. We're hearing a ton of stories, 'cause the top stories, obviously the combination, merger, acquisition, whatever side you want to call acquired who. But all good, good stories. I mean, some speed bumps, little bumps along the way, but nothing horrific. Great stories. Synergies was the word we've been hearing. So you got to have some great growth with the Dell scale. Entry-level touchpoint growth, high end, get more entry level, give us the update. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, first and foremost, I wanted to call out to all our customers and partners that are critical for the success that we've seen. No doubt, and actually, we've committed better together one fourth, which is why you saw two of our launches, both on the Unilining and the Assine line, which historically were part of EMC and Dell respectively prior. And main point is, a lot of the feedback we got from customers was they really respected and appreciate our customer choice first philosophy. But also understanding that there's clear demarkation where each of those technologies play in their sweet spot-- >> Well, how are you demarcating them right now? >> Absolutely, so traditionally, pre the EMC acquisition, what we actually ended up determining is, when you define the midrange market segment we were looking at, it was more in the upper range, upper level of it, where they're driving value from a technology aspect and with their Unity product set. We are focusing heavily into the all-Flash market segment, too, which is one of the major refreshes we did here. And then in the Dell storage, which is very server affinity, a direct attached construct at the entry through the lower end of the midrange band, it was actually some very clear swim lanes of where each of the respective products played to their strengths as well. And so as a result of that, we've really taken that to heart with our hybrid offering on the C side to get your economics. Again, effectively, our 10 cents per gig as they've rolled it outlined on Monday as far as the most affordable hybrid solution there on the market. And then you go to the upper, premium level of value capability, with all Flash to deal with your performance workloads and other characteristics, too. >> Here Luca, talk about the overlap, because we address that, we hit him head on with that. Turns out, not a lot of overlap. But as you guys come together with, we just had Toshiba on earlier. Flash is obviously big part of the success. Getting those price points down to the entry, midrange, enabling that kind of performance and cost is key, but as you look at the product portfolio, where are the areas you guys are doubling down on, and where is kind of some of the overlapping taking care of, if any? >> Yeah, so let me tell you, the first thing that is very important and we have in the show is the reaffirmation of the investment in the two product. So we have a panel entry yesterday also a panel with 120 customer. Divide 50% between the legacy, the heritage Dell and the EMC customer, and the amazing things there was the Flash adoption is very strong, but also they want to have it economical, so Four I is very strong. So this is really feet to our two product. Because if you remember, Compellan has been created as the best storage for data progression. And we double down on Unity now that we are now that we are now so completely full line of Unity product today. So in the other face, on the FC line, we reaffirmed the completion of the family with the new 5020. That provide more performance, more capacity, much more lenience. And we'll drive our 4020 customer to a very new product. So yes, some people before they think, "Oh these guys, they have a lot of overlap." But actually, we have two amazing product that they play together in this market. >> And talk about the customer dynamic, 'cause that's interesting about that. Almost the 50/50 split as you mentioned. They got to be, I mean, not, their indifference is probably, they're probably like, "Bring on the better product." I'm not hearing any revolts. Right, that no one's really revolting. Can you just share the perspective of some of the insight that they're telling you about, what they're expecting from you guys? >> So I think it's very fun to be in this position where we are right now, where we have such a good portfolio of product where a customer, company, people inside of our company start to learn how this product works. Because you sell what you know, right? Or you use what you know. People, right, try to do the same things every day. So we are forced now to look outside of our part and say, "You know, we have two product. "What is the benefit?" And now, we sparkle this discussion with the customer. And in any customer, we have before tremendous amount of common customer, right? The customer, they have a preference, but now they say, "Oh let me," an EMC customer say, "Maybe I have a huge case for "an all-Flash upgrade with Unity." And the SC customer say, "Oh, maybe now I can run "this application on Unity or SC "or Open App to a different things." What we say is, this is the line I use. We are the top one now because we can solve any use case. Right, if you look at our competitors, they try to cover everything with one product, right? >> John: You can mix and match. >> Yes, you can mix and match and we have a very differential part between the two. And we said, "SC economy, drive economy with the fact "that we can have a de-looped compression on speedy media." Unity optimized for Flash. >> Is there any incompatibility between the two? Do the two platforms work pretty seamlessly together? >> Pierluca: Yes. >> Yeah, so I'm going to expand a little further on that. So one of the things we did highlight as part of the all-Flash offering for Unity, 350 through the 650, the four new entry models, customers were surprised, you know. And there were some questions on the level of innovation we're driving. A year later, getting a full platform refresh was a very big surprise for customers. I typically, two years, 18 months of other vendors in the field, and they're like, "You just launched "the product last year, and you already have a refresh." And we did that 'cause we listened to customer requirements and the all-Flash, the performances as absolutely critical, so the controller upgrade. We went from a Haswell to Broadwell design. We actually added additional core capabilities in memory, and all with the architecture built to do an online date and place upgrade that will be driving later in the year, too. So, and the SC 5020 that we announced too as a separate product line to complementing, as Pierluca stated, but the third area that hasn't been necessarily amplified but customers have raved about seeing in the showroom area is our Cloud IQ technology, which is actually built off of Cloud Foundry. That's a value, the portfolio of the company and a strategic aligned business. And actually, it does preemptive and proactive not only monitoring, but we're taking that from Jeff Boudreau's keynote today. That whole definition of autonomous and self-aware storage well, in midrange 'cause of all the use cases and requirements, we're driving that into it. And there's actually, we have compatibility between Unity and SC in Cloud IQ. As that one pane of glass, it's not helmet manager, but more to take that value to a whole new level. And we're going to continue to drive that level innovation beyond, not just through software, but clearly leveraging better together talent to really solve some key business needs for customers. >> As David Guilden always says in the Cube, it's better to have overlap than holes in a product line. So that's cool that you guys got that addressed, and certainly mixing and match, that's the standard operating procedure these days in a lot of guys in IT. They know how to do that. The key is, does it thread together? So, congratulations. The hard question that I want to ask you guys and what everyone wants to know about, where the customer wins? Okay, because at the end of the day, you'd be number one at whatever old category scoreboard. >> Craig: Sure. >> Scoreboard of customers is what we're looking at. Are you getting more customers? Are they adopting, are they implementing a variety of versions? Give us the updates on the wins and what the combination is of Dell EMC coming together. What has that done for sales and wins? >> Yeah, so there's a public blog I posted for Dell EMC World, and it's about the one two punch with midrange storage. >> John: What was the title of that blog post? >> It was basically a one two punch, our midrange storage. And I'll provide you the link in followup. >> John: I'll look at it later. >> The reason we preemptively provided that was the biggest question I would get from customers was, which product are you going to choose? And our point was, both, right? Both products, the power of the portfolio. We don't need to choose one. Our install base on both those technologies is significant. But in that post, I also did quote some of the publicly available IEDC data, which showed us in our last quarter, in Q4, where you compare Q3 to Q4, we actually had double digit quarter growth for both Uni and SC, our primary leading lines in both the portfolio, which actually allowed us to get effectively back into a midrange market share segment. Now that's for purpose build. >> That reflects a very positive trend for Dell EMC midrange storage portfolio. I'm quoting directly from your blog post. One two punch drives midrange storage momentum. >> Craig: Correct. >> And it's not only the storage, right? I've been with a very big customer of ours. I was telling to an analyst this morning it's amazing to see the motion of the business that we can do now that we are Dell EMC. So being a private company in one sense allows us to do creative things that we didn't do before. So we can actually position not only one product or two product, but the entire portfolio. And as you see, with the server business, the affinity that some of the storage they have with the server, we can drive more and more adoptions for our work class. >> Just quickly, how is your channel reacting to all this? Are they fully on board, do they understand? Are they out there selling both solutions? >> 100%, we put a lot of investment into our channel enablements across the midrange storage products in portfolio as well, 'cause that's the primary motion that we drive as well. And that it allowed us to actually enable them for success, both in education enablement, and clearly, proper incentives in play. They're very well received. The feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. And we've been complementing that more and more with constant refresher of not only our technology and sharing roadmap delivery so that it can plan ahead as that storage is used. >> I asked Mike Amerius Hoss and David Guilden the question, they both had the same answers. It's good to see them on the same page. But I said, you know, what's, where are the wins? And they both commented that where there's EMC Storage, they bring more Dell in. Where there's Dell, they bring more EMC Storage in. >> Yes, that's why they judged this with this customer. The new business motion that we can now propose like we have a very loyal customer from Arita GMC for example, but now we can offer also server, a software define on top of all that and the storage, right? And you can enter from the other one, from the server and position now a full portfolio of storage. >> Alright, I'm going to ask you a personal question. I'd like to get your reactions. Take your EMC hat off for a second. Put your industry participant, individual hat on. What's the biggest surprise from the combination, from your area of expertise and your jobs that you've personally observed with the combination? Customer adoption, technology that wasn't there, chaos, mayhem, what? >> Yeah, so I'll comment first. I think the, I mean, recognizing the real power of global scale, and what I mean by that is the combined set. So from an organization and R and D investment, being able to have global scale, where you have engineering working literally 24 by five, right, based on effectively, a follow the sun model, that's how you're seeing that innovation engine just cranking into high gear. And that was further extended with the power of the supply chain and innovation bringing together has been in my opinion, super powerful, right? 'Cause couple customers had shared with me, it's like, my concern if I go with a startup that may not be in business and relative to the supply chain leverage and the level of innovation, breadth, and depth of products that we have. >> Craig, that's a great point. Before we go to Pierluca, I just want to comment on that. We're seeing the same thing in the marketplace. A lot of the startups can't get into the pure storage play because scale requirements is now the new barrier entry, not necessarily the technology. >> Exactly. >> Not necessarily the technology, so that kind of reaffirms, that's why the startups kind of are doing that a lot of data protection, white space stuff. And their valuations, by the way, are skyrocketing. Go ahead, your comment, observation that surprised you or didn't surprise you, took you by storm, what? >> I need to say that I'm living a dream in this moment because I think it's a few times in life that you can experience a trust formation. And you can have the ability, actually, in my role that I have right now to accelerate this trust formation. And that it's not the common things to do in the company that is already established. So this shape, this come together give you more and more opportunity. So I'm so very exciting to do what I'm doing, and I love it. >> Injection of the scale, and more capabilities, it's like, go to the gym and you're like pumped up, you're in shape. >> Actually, I started to go to the gym after 20 years. (laughing) >> It's like getting a good meal. You're Italian, you appreciate a good buffet of resource, right? >> That's right. >> Dell's got the gourmet-- >> You know, every day, I find something new, some product that I didn't know, something that we did, innovation that we have in the company that we can actually use together. It's very very exciting. >> And the management teams are pretty solid. They didn't really just come in and decimate EMC. They essentially, it was truly a combination. Some say that EMC acquired Dell, some say Dell acquired EMC. But the fact that is even discussed shows a nice balance in terms of a lot of EMC at the helm. Its great sales force, great commercial business with Dell, very well play, I think. You guys feel the same way? >> I appreciate that, and couldn't agree more. And I think it shows as you look at business results and even from an employee satisfaction level. We continue to see that being record high, 'cause there's always that uncertainty, but the interesting piece is people have really been jazzed based on opportunity ahead. >> Alright, we're done complimenting. Let's get to the critical analysis. What's on the roadmap? >> Craig: A lot. >> Tell us what's coming down the pike. I know you privately do your earnings call, but you guys have been transparent, some of the things. What can you say about what's coming out for customers? What can they expect from you guys in the storage? >> I'll let Pierluca run the product management team. He drives that every day. >> So I do not say much, things that I'm getting. >> Share all, come on. You're telling, just spill it out. Come on. You and your dream, come on, sell it. >> We have only 20 minutes, so, really, as I said, we announced the 5020, right, we add the 7020 in August. We are planning to finish the lineup of the new family of SC for sure. We announced the ability to tiering to the Cloud, we're going to expand that. Also, we announced a full new set a family of Flash Unity. So we're going down that trajectory to offer more and more. And we are going to be very bold to offer also upgrades from old jan to the new jan and non-destructive upgrade and also a line upgrade. So it's a very very beefy roadmap that we show with our customer in the A and DH section. I need to say the feedback is tremendous, and to your point at the beginning, what is the ecosystem? How do you integrate the thing? You're going to see more and more, for example, the UI, the experience for the customer being the same. So the experience from the UI perspective-- >> Paul: Simplicity. >> Yes, simplicity. >> Paul: Simplicity is the new norm. >> Cloud IQ key, but also going between the products who have the same kind of philosophy. >> Hey, I always say, this great business model, make thins super fast, really easy to use, and really intuitive. Can't go wrong with that triple threat right there. So that's like what you guys are doing. >> Yes. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing insight and update. Congratulations on the one two punch and the momentum and the success. That's the scoreboard we look at on the Cube. Are customers adopting it? Sharing all the data here inside the Cube live in Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Along with cohost Keith Townsend. We are joined by Todd Pavone, he's the COO of Dell AMC. Thanks so much for joining. >> Well all my kids call me dad, whatever. >> Rebecca: We can call you anything you want. >> Dad's good, yeah. >> Daddio alright. >> So Todd, the theme of this conference is about providing companies with the tools that they need to realize their digital futures. Lay it all out for me. What do you see as sort of the biggest problems that you're trying to solve. >> Sure, that's a good question. If you're a CIO today, I think there's lots of them in this show these past few days. They have lots of challenges, right. If you're CIO today, your budgets are flat or decreasing. Your users are asking to do more faster. The evolution of change is at a crazy pace. You look at your operating budget, the mast majority is spent on maintenance. So as a CIO you have to do something different. You have to transform. If you think about that, IT has changed so much in the last 10 years. IT is actually the differentiator if the business will succeed or fail. Years ago, I've been doing this a long time, years ago it was just a support function. It is now the differentiation if you'll succeed or fail. So if you think about that scenario of a CIO, they have to change. They have to transform. They have to modernize their data center. So everything we've been doing for the last several years is helping the CIOs and data centers transform. Transform so they can simplify the complex. So they can deliver faster. They can have better service levels with the users. So their staff can actually work on strategic initiatives, not on the things that just are keeping the lights on. So they can help their business transform and differentiate. And that's what's it's all about. Is helping them transform. >> So what are you seeing out there right now that is making you confident about the landscape. >> So for us, in CPSD, the BU we've been in, we started this about seven or eight years ago. What we see is results. It's all about delivering results. We're seeing customers improve their time to delivery by 4x. Customers cutting their total cost of ownership by 50%. Customers able to provision new services to the end users at a 5x rate. Measurable, tangible results. The metric I care most about in our business is repeat customers. About 70% of our customers are repeat. Meaning they're deploying the technology and solution and they're seeing the benefits. They're saying this is how we want to run data center of the future. What's really cool is, we're helping them change their businesses and be more successful long-term. That's the best part of what we're doing. >> So let's talk about overall market. Where is Dell in this market? How big is the market? And where's Dell in this market? >> Dell technology, you're talking about hundreds of billions dollars market. It's an enormous market. From a Dell technology perspective, it's all about how do we help transform the data center. How do we provide the essential infrastructure for the data center. If you start to peel that back and you look at the market that our business unit is in, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, we're focused on the hybrid cloud solutions engineering systems all the way down to our Blueprints solutions. You're talking about a 20, 30 billion dollar market, depending on how you look at it. It's big and growing. Fortunately, our space is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry. Customers are deploying converge and hyper-converge at a rapid pace. And thankfully we're the ones helping drive that that change. >> So what are the big value props coming from a technology perspective. You talked about hybrid cloud. You talked about the actual systems, what are the value props for Dell's converge systems versus competitors. >> So if you think about the top x we talk about this build to buy continuum. So what we want to be able to do is have a continuum of offerings, depending on where the customer's maturity is, they can leverage wherever we are in their transformation. At the tip of the pyramid is our hybrid cloud solution. So this where companies may want to deploy a turn key hybrid cloud. From application all the way to infrastructure and within a very short period of time have a fully enabled running cloud that they could offer to their end user customers. Value for that is time to market. We have customers deploying a full hybrid cloud in days. If they had to build themselves, it would take months and many months. So speed is a huge part of that value proposition. Obviously leveraging of VMware technology in that solution is key to what we're doing. Leveraging Pivotal for our native hybrid cloud solutions is very differentiated. Those are two technologies that are in the Dell technology portfolios, VMware and Pivotal that we can take advantage of. In the engineered systems landscape, I hit on this before, but it's all about speed to deliver. We know if customers were to build things out themselves, it would take them 140 to 150 days. We know we can do it in 45 days. So think about that, it's a three to four times x improvement in delivery. We know it requires less people to manage. We know we can save 50%-60% total cost of ownership by deploying these engineer systems versus managing themselves. Those are big numbers. Those are numbers where you can actually take those dollars and reinvest in other things. It comes back to what I said upfront, it's all about solving those pain-points for the customers. Simplifying the complex, allowing them to go work on that are really strategic to their business. I used an example yesterday of Blockbuster. My three boys and I would go down to Blockbuster every Friday night, we'll rent movies. Blockbuster is not here anymore. >> Rebecca: Nope. >> What happened? I can tell you, their IT organization was supporting their point of sale systems in their stores. They weren't thinking of new ways to distribute content. Why? Because they had no time. We want companies to be able to have the time to work on strategic things that are important to them. We want to enable them to do that. >> So that's a great example of being short sightedness. And the dangers of being short sightedness at time of profound transformational change. What is your call to arms to customers, what's your advice? >> Customers have to, it's hard to change. It's easy- >> Rebecca: And you resist it. It is. >> You have people that have been doing things for a long time, it's hard to change. It's not just about technology change, it is about changing process, changing the way people work. You have to have the intestinal fortitude to go do it. People when they see change, they kind of want to run from it. You have to embrace it, adopt it. Because if you don't, you may not be positioned in the long-term. First thing, for us, we need change agents. We need customers to have change agents that are willing to put push back, willing to try to do something different. Willing to innovate, I'm willing to break some glass. And when they do that, at the end of the day, we know they're going to be better off for it. But again, it's hard to do. That's probably the first thing we ask them, be willing to accept some major changes in what they do and how they do it. >> So this seems like this would be something that's contagious. Once a customer embraces that change, talk us through that next level of conversation and the future conversation. >> Typically there needs to be an event. Something to trigger them to go change. Could be data center consolidation, it could be a new application rollout. It could be a strategic initiative by the executive team. So most of our customers will start with maybe one or two applications. And they'll say, let's go see how this works. Let's go test how this works. Especially if they're big. If they're a large enterprise, they're not going to do a global change for everything. They're going to say, let's start with a subset. Once they see the subset work, then they start rolling more and more applications into this new way of running their data center. When we talk about with our customers, I like to use autonomous driving as an example. To me, we see a data center someday where basically, things will happen autonomically. You'll set a business policy, workload will dynamically base upon that policy. We're requiring humans not to get involved. It's kind of the same thing, back to my analogy of Tesla. You get into Tesla, the car actually starts to drive itself. How is it doing that? It's doing real-time data analytics, it's understanding all its environmentals, it's making decisions. Why can't the data center get to the same place? Because if you can do that, think all the savings you can now reinvest in the things that are real important to the business. So we try to set a strategy and vision that customers understand and appreciate. And then we try to give them the building blocks of how they're going to get there. >> Just as we'll remember the days when we used to drive to the supermarket, we'll remember the days when we had to run the data center. >> Exactly. That's the hope. That's the hope and dreams of what we're trying to do. >> Next year's conference. >> Next year's conference. >> I'm all in. I'm all in. >> We got more. We got more. Thanks so much Todd. >> Todd: Thank you guys. >> I appreciate it. >> This is great. >> Great to have you on the show. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Keith Townsend. We will be back with more after this. (Lively techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are here with theCUBE live coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Jon Siegel. He is the Vice President of product marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, pleasure to be here, as always. >> You're a CUBE veteran. We're always happy to have repeat customers, yes. >> It's one of the highlights of the week every time. >> Yes, excellent. So, I want to start out by talking about who your customer is and what his or her problems are. IT professionals are juggling a lot of different responsibilities and pressures. How do you approach your customer? >> I think what it starts down to is, I'm with the converged platforms and solutions division. It's a lot of a war helping customers with throughout the end of the day, is how they spend a lot less time integrating and maintaining their infrastructure, and more time supporting their end-user's right. And what we hear more often than anything else, the one word I keep hearing all week has been agility. How do I have more agility? How can I be more responsive to the business? In terms of, for example, developing applications more quickly, and faster to market. Whether it's bringing new initiatives to market, new products to market, et cetera. So, it's all about speed and agility from an IT perspective. And what they can't do is, they can't keep up the agility when they're spending so much time integrating. Right? So, our user really tends to be the ones that are more forward looking, bold, and are really looking to make a mark on their company, and on the business. >> So it's agility, it's speed, as well as cost pressures, too. So, what are you coming out with? Tell us about some of the big announcements you've made. >> We're with the converged platforms and solutions division. Really, the fastest growing part of the IT industry today, really, is around hyper-converged and converged. It's all about helping companies spending much more time innovating and much less time integrating. And with that in mind, we have solutions and products that are turnkey in that way. So customers no longer have to spend their time trying to figure out, how do I build this logical infrastructure to actually support my applications and users? And then how do I maintain it? Whereas, we actually provide a turnkey solution, which allows our customers to spend a lot less time fiddling, if you will, with their integration and infrastructure. >> So, let's talk about the history of HCI. It's called converged infrastructure, or hyper-converged infrastructure. From the beginning to where we're at today and the announcements around it, you guys have made around VX Rack. We started out with that basic three-note model. We were solving basic problems in a data center around BDI, the speed of specific applications, enterprises. We got a taste of that, we want a little bit more of it. And now, it sounds like VX Rack is that little bit more. >> That's a great point, yeah. So, as you said, HCI, or hyper-converged really is taking off in the industry. And I think that is the answer to agility. I think it's really that response to agility. And how it's softer to find, if you will, in that approach. So, what we found now is that hyper-converged has now been adopted by 50 or 60% of enterprises in some form or fashion. Because they like the idea of software defined. They like the idea of it's cloud. It's really a good foundation for the cloud, by the end of the day, that's what it is. But what we're finding is now some customers are saying, you know what, I need a little more software defined, I actually want to go all in on software defined. This is where we find the bolder, if you will, CIOs of the world, that actually want to go all in on software defined. And that's where they want to start to adopt, in order to adopt hyper-converged and software defined at scale, you need to consider the network. The network needs to be a part of that equation. You need to consider not just the compute and the storage part elements of it, but the network as well, is part of that. So, what VX Rack addresses, it's actually to treat the network as part of the system design. This is really funny how this is happening. This headset is nothing. Just don't tell Keith about this. >> So, let's talk about the network. And hopefully I can help frame the network while your headset is getting fixed. Traditionally, that three-model HCI solution has challenged the network teams and the server teams and the storage teams. We enjoy the simplicity of HCI because we can consume it easily. But when we went to scale, we found that we ran into storage performance issues. Which then affected the virtual machines. Then, of course, that impacted the application. So HCI up to a certain point was all about storage and compute, and nothing about networking. So VX Rack addresses that network bottleneck. >> That's exactly right. And I think what we've found is that a lot of customers have underestimated, if you will, the importance of the network when it comes to an HCI solution, you're right. So, what the appliance has done, we have HCI appliances today, and customers bring their own network, if you will. And that works fine for smaller deployments. But you're right. Once you get up to eight, ten appliances or more, eight nodes, that's when the network becomes really critical. Because you have much more east-west traffic, and north-south traffic going across the nodes, and between systems and between cabinets. Suddenly, that network, as you know, that's what affects the availability, the performance of the applications at the end of the day, which is what it's all about. >> So, what are you seeing from your most successful customers? In terms of solutions, in terms of the ones who aren't underestimating the importance of the network. What are you seeing from them and what would you like to see replicated across industries? >> I think our customers today that are adopting HCI at scale, or software defined at rack scale, oftentimes, we have everything from service providers, as you might imagine. Those that actually want to provide a HCI foundation for their cloud, IAS, it's a really good foundation for that. Because if they want to support a wide range of applications what VX Rack does is, it allows customers to support a wide range. Whether it's enterprise workloads, traditional workloads or cloud-native workloads. Or customers that want to not just support, for example, VMware Hypervisor, but also, maybe hypervisors such as Hyper-V from Microsoft. They may even want to go BareMetal, and support containerized applications and containers. What we find, it's the customers that actually have a broad set of applications in particular, that want to go all in on hyper-converged. They want to modernize their infrastructure. They want to save money. They want to simplify operations. Those are the customers that we're seeing really succeed here. >> So, we hear this term as customers, cloud customers, whether it's enterprises, proper community clouds, puppet clouds. What's the market for VX Rack, VX Reel compared to the traditional three box solution. Are we limited to just enterprises deploying private clouds? Or are you guys actually in the public cloud market with your vCloud network. Are they adopting VX Rack? >> So, VX Rack, and hyper-converge in general is actually being adopted everywhere. It's being adopted by, not just medium sized companies, but large enterprises as well, like you said. And it is really a starting point for customers that want to start to build that foundation for the cloud. They may want a hybrid cloud. What hyper-converge really does is, it provides a really agile onprem solution with a nice opportunity to leverage the public cloud as well. So it is being leveraged heavily in what we call hybrid cloud solutions and areas by both medium and larger companies. We also have a number of service providers now, that are leveraging, if you will, VX Rack as a solution. Because, what they're able to do is basically spin up new applications, new users very easily, that they wouldn't be able to do with traditional infrastructure. >> Rebecca: Jon Siegel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you. >> You're welcome, it was a pleasure to be here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, from my co-host Keith Townsend, we will have more from Dell EMC World coming up after this.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas here at Dell EMC World, The Cube's live coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Don Norbeck. He is the senior director, customer experience engineering, architecture and product management here at Dell EMC. It's a mouthful, but we got it in. >> Figured I'd try and get the largest title ever. >> So, well done, good job. So, talk to, explain to our viewers a little bit about what you do as a customer experience engineer. >> Well it's really broken down into three things. The first thing we do is really look at our customers through data analytics and the try to understand what makes them successful. That's looking at their initial C set, that's looking at their interactions with our services teams and our support teams, looking at the configurations that they have. Looking for patterns of causality and correlation. Second thing we do is a lot of our customers have a lot of ideas on how to expand the platforms and portfolios that we put out there on our CPSD. How to expand the V Blocks, the Vx Racks, the Vx rails. We take those ideas as field innovation. We look for the ones that are repeatable, and we bring them back into the general roadmap. The third thing that we do is, this is a new program, is what we're calling a not-so-secret shopper. So, we go out, and we act as a customer. We buy it, we experience the sales cycle. We ask the questions to go and consolidate down to the need. We go and install it, and we live with it for a while. And we give that feedback, from an end-to-end customer experience perspective. >> And so talk about that not-so-secret shopper program. I love it. What are you finding? What's the feedback? >> We're finding that you can only prepare for every question that you know, so we find a lot of times customer experiences have been great, but there's those little things, that we don't think are nits, but do come up when you switch your perspective and put it into their shoes. Literally and physically sometimes. That you're not going to understand what a customer feels, unless you're acting like that customer. >> Rachel: You've walked a mile in the customer's shoes. >> Exactly. That goes a long way. Because when you're an engineer, you tend to think of things within your own data center or within your own product development experience. You don't always have that perspective. And I had a unique thing 'cuz I came from a customer. Seven years ago I bought one of the first V blocks. It took me about eight weeks to bring up, we had revenue flowing through it. We set it up as a cloud for a service provider, and I continue to drive that experience, what I felt, back into what we do everyday. >> So, how has the customer conversation changed from seven, eight years ago, to now? Same conversation? Different conversation? >> It's actually both. So this is my tenth EMC World, Dell EMC World. I've been as a customer and as a presenter, and we tell the transformation story. We tell the transformation story that you have to stop doing certain things, like playing around with cables, to be able to do certain other greater things for your organization for the line of business. We still tell that story, and it surprises me every EMC World that there is a percentage of customers that have not heard that, that can benefit from that experience. Sometimes you get a little jaded saying the same things over and over again. But it is impactful, it does. For those customers that have gone through that transformation, it's talking about what's next for the platforms. >> Yeah, so what are the opportunities that you're seeing out there? What is next? >> I think this show itself is highlighting some of the opportunities. You go back two or three EMC Worlds ago, and it was all about the product line itself. There's a VMAX World, there's a VnX World. Now those things are still highlighted, but they're highlighted in how you can use them to achieve an outcome. They're embedded in a system, they're embedded in a solution, they're embedded in a practice, or an approach to an outcome for a customer in innovation. So, I think a lot of customers are hearing that story, and you're seeing a switch from asking how many spinny drives does this have, to how can this change my business, change the way that we approach a business problem. >> So, I'm interested in this second phase, this story behind innovation as I've gotten, whether it's a Vx Block, a Vx Rail, whatever the platform that I've gotten in, there's integration points, and I need help figuring it out. What are some of the innovations that your team has helped when you're or, actually what are some of the most interesting use cases that's come to your team and customers asked you to help expand the capability of the platform? >> Excellent question. We've heard our customers. Coming into our last year, we have five V Block families. Vx Block, and then have Vx Block version, so 10 different model lines. Customers wanted to combine some of the model lines, and we found and heard, that you couldn't get from say a 300, which was a VnX based, add a VMAX to it, it wouldn't work. But if you started with a VMAX base, and added a VnX base to it, it would work. The reason was the size of the MDS switches in between. So that doesn't make sense. You should be able to enable that to have a customer to have two storage arrays based on the need that they have. So the two innovations that came out of a customer, one was a process innovation, which was listen to the customer and tell us what they were going to become, rather than just what they needed today. So asking that question helped us gear them to an infrastructure that can support both use cases. Second one was changing the architectural approach. And moving from three or five model lines, that you have to take the new, hottest component, and try to jam it into each of them, and do five different engineering approaches, well maybe if we just did one engineering approach, we may be able to apply it to all the model lines that are appropriate. So, instead of having a system out approach, it was infrastructure up and customer need in. >> So what I keep hearing is, really understanding the customer's needs, and it sounds like you need, this requires a lot of empathy. So how does this work just from the developer's side, in terms of working so closely with the customer, and knowing the great questions to ask. I mean, is there any kinds of advice that you give to your team, in terms of how to really get at the problems? Because sometimes, the customer doesn't even understand what the problem is, they just know there's an issue. >> First thing is to get out of speeds and feats. If you get out of just the technical bits, we usually have the argument, green cables are better than blue cables. That part doesn't matter. The part that matters is what you're going to use it for. So getting past that into why, and the outcome is the first approach. And then, after you get out of, get answers based on that, you go into what I call PACCS, performance, availability, cost, compliance, security. Those are the hows that you achieve the why. Then it can get down to blue cables and green cables. But engineers always want to start with the green cable. I had bad experience with blue cable, so I need the green cable this time. Why did you have a bad experience? You can ask a bunch of questions to elevate the discussion. >> So put your customer hat back on. First V Block that you bought was eight years ago. You're almost coming up on your second refresh. What excites you about the new portfolio products, where the portfolio has moved, what excites you? >> What excites me is if you think about all the configurations that are possible, it's ten by a really large number, but not all of them are good. You can do anything but you can't do everything. What excites me is that we're spending more and more time narrowing down the prescription on what's appropriate for purpose. And that's interesting for me as a customer, because if I can buy something and I know it is appropriate for purpose, I can worry about that purpose, not just the infrastructure that I put it on. So that really excites me. Other things that really excite me are we're going to that broader architectural approach but still maintaining the prescription that allows us to give the support experience. And how we're doing that is, we're going to see some things later in the year around the refresh of the V Block that allows a lot more interconnectivity from those purposes. And that architectural infrastructure allows us to package things for purpose, rather than creating a system for purpose. That's really interesting. But what really gets me, is the future. The next step after that is how we bring the benefits of software definition, that is really, lit the HCI world on fire, to the convergence world. How do we bring that back down? So we have an amazing portfolio from servers to storage to networking. Wouldn't it be nice for us to go out and scan what a customer has, and tell them what their infrastructure could become? What purposes it could be used for, what configurations are no good, what configurations are known bad, that you should go in and remediate? And I think we're really at the point where the software investments that we're making are going to lead us to that type of experience. >> I'm sensing the theme of next year's Dell EMC World. Don, thanks so much for joining us. It was great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Keith Townsend. We'll have more from Dell EMC world after this. (upbeat techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. theCUBE's 8th year of coverage of what was once EMC World, now it's Dell EMC World. The first official show of the combination of two companies. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost this week for three days of wall-to-wall coverage, Paul Gillin. And our next guest is Max, Matt Waxman, Vice President of Product Management, Dell EMC Data Protection and A.J. Wineski, who's with UNIX and Microsoft Technologies Managers at Shazam ITS. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So data protection on stage, it's hot. I mean, it is the hottest category, both on the startup side but also customers, as they go to the cloud, are rethinking the four-wall strategy of data management, data protection. Why is, is it the cloud? What's the, why is it so hot? >> Yeah, I think you nailed it. It is very hot. It's, backup is not boring. I think customers like A.J. are talking about simplifying, automating, getting to the cloud, and so we oughtta modernize data protection. Our announcements this week were all about how we're doing that. We had a great announcement around a new appliance that's a turnkey solution, out of the box, time to value less than three hours. That's the agility that customers are really looking for. And of course our cloud data protection's evolved a lot. Great new use cases, disaster recovery now for the cloud, great use case. >> Matt, A.J., I want to get your thoughts in a second, but Matt, first talk about the dynamics that the customers are facing right now, because really there's two worlds that exist now, pure cloud native, born in the cloud. Completely different paradigm for backup and recovery, data protection, all on this scheme that has to be architected. And then companies that are moving quickly that had a data domain, had a pre-existing apps that have been doing great, but now have to be architected for that cloud, hypercloud. Those are the two hot areas. Can you just break that down real quick? >> Yeah, yeah, you know, I think you have a good framework there. Right, there are customers who will go through a re-platforming, and think about how they can move their application and its existing eco system into the cloud. That's where we've seen a lot of traction. We would call that "lift and shift." You know, move the application as is. And then this cloud native space is really different. It's developer-centric. It's thinking about "How do you cater to "the application developer who wants to build "off of a modern tool-set?" And there it's all about micro services, it's API-driven. You know, it's a-- - [John] Programmable infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> John: Programmable backup. >> Exactly, right? That's what makes a text-- >> Alright, A.J., the proof is in the pudding, when you sit there and you look at that scenario, programmable, being agile, automations all coming down the pike, what's it look like for you? >> Well, for us, prior to having the ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage Suite, we were running everything to backup tape. And we were having to do two sets of tapes. It was taking us two weeks sometimes to do our tape retentions. We had a set retention policies at 11 year across the board because our past backup software didn't allow us to set retention periods very well. Once we got to Elastic Cloud Storage Suite, it was couple clicks, you set retention periods, it takes care of itself. Automatically replicates to our DR site and we don't have to worry about it. It's done. I used to have three and a half FTEs who took care of backup suites all the time. I'm down to a half-guy now. So I gained back-- >> So you re-deployed those resources on other things. >> On other products; what I hired them for in the beginning, and now since that's happened, I'm able to use a lot more of those resources for the projects we should be using them for. We don't have to worry about backups like we used to. I don't have to worry at night, "Did it back up? "Did it not? Did my essential databases "get backed up to tape?" I don't have to worry about that anymore, it's done automatically. >> What was that transition like for you? Going from tape to cloud? >> Painful. It was because we were having to move everything that was on tape on to ECS. Takes a while to redo that. Finally we decided at one point that after this period, no longer are we going to be writing to tape, we're going to write everything to ECS. Just became too painful. So once that transition was done, once we made a decision that we were no longer going to tape, it was easy. >> How about the cost? I mean, you now have an operational cost instead of a capital cost in your backup equipment. Over the long-term, is this a better, a lower cost happen for you? >> Oh, much better. We're saving $350,000 a year just in backups. And over the five-year TCO of that product, it's $2.7 million that we are saving over five years for that product alone. We're a small non-profit organization that we can then, in turn, turn around and give our customers some of that money back because we're not having to charge them so much for some of the backups that we have to do. >> Matt, talk about the dynamic, you mentioned developers. This comes back down to the developer angle because, just a scenario, data is becoming the life-blood for developers, and providing that data available in that kind of infrastructure's code way, or data as code, as we say, the DataOps world, if there is one yet. But I'm a developer, okay, I want the data from the application, from an hour ago, not two weeks ago, or those backup windows used to be a hindrance to that agility. >> Yeah, yeah. >> How is that progressing, and where is that going in terms of making that totally developer-centric infrastructure? >> Yeah, I mean, I'd answer that on two fronts. I think there's the cloud-native view of that where, you know, what those developers are looking for is inherent protection. They don't want to have to worry about it. Regardless of their app framework, regardless of the size of their app. But at the same time you also have database sizes that are growing so dramatically. I mean, when I was here even two years ago, I remember talking to customers who had databases that were over a hundred terabytes was like, 1 out of 10. Now I talk to 6 out of 10, hundred, two hundred terabyte infrastructures. At a certain point you can't back up anymore. And you have to go to the more transformative-- >> And the time alone, the time is killer too. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And so customers are replicating, and how do you put the same sort of controls around replication to get the levels of data protection that you expect? >> Well we're in a world where people are, customers are collecting everything now, they're saving everything. And they don't have to save everything necessarily. They don't find out until they start to use it. Is data protection becoming more of a service, a filtering service also, of how you, of what data you really need to back up? >> Yeah, I think that gets into the whole notion of data management. And that whole space is, "How can you "leverage the information out of the data, "as opposed to just managing the infrastructure?" And through automation, we're going to enable our customers to get there. Automate the infrastructure to the point where it's completely turnkey. Set a policy, set an SLA, and go. And at that point, you're managing the metadata. Analytics become really important. We've got a really cool new offering called Enterprise Copy Data Analytics. It's a SAS-based solution. Literally log on to our website and you enter your serial number, you're off and running. Analytics, predictive recommendations, based off of machine learning. That, to me, is the transition-- >> Is that managing your copies, you mean? >> That will give you visibility into your copies, that will give you visibility into your protection levels, and it'll actually score you so you have a very simple way to understand where you're weak, where you're not. >> So this is A.J.'s point about staff efficiency. You have that machine learning, like an automated way, what used to be crawling through log data, looking at stuff, pushing buttons, and provisioning (laughs). I mean, do you see that impact on your end? >> Oh, it's huge on our end. Because in the past, our database administrators would have to write something, and if a developer needed a backup copy of that database, it took potentially days, if not weeks, depending upon the size of that, to get it from tape. Or to go back to the old tape set to do that. Now, with ECS and DD Boost, it's instantaneous. They can restore that instantaneously to where the developers need it. It's a tremendous, tremendous savings for us. >> Some recent research I've seen says that there's still a sizable minority of customers who are concerned about the private security and the integrity of their data in the cloud. Does that, is that an issue for you? >> It is. We're heavily regulated through different regulations 'cause we're in the financial services industry, so we have PCI compliance, we have FFIEC compliance, SOC compliance. That's huge. And making sure that that data is protected at all times, is encrypted from end to end, is encrypted in transmission. Those are all things that the Dell EMC Suites give us. >> Talk about your data environment, because the data industry's growing, and I remember calling up Dave Velante years ago in 2010, 2011. The companies that were selling data stuff weren't really data companies, they were selling software. And a lot of the innovation came from, we call "data full" companies. They actually had a ton of data to deal with. They had the data lakes piling up. And they had to figure it out along the way. You guys have a lot of data. >> A.J.: We do. >> Can you insight into how big the data size coming in, because Tier 2 data is very valuable. You have data lakes going to be more intelligent, and that comes another factor into the architectural question. >> Yeah, we, the amount of data we collect is enormous, and we're just starting to get into the analytics of that and how can we use that data to better serve our customers, and how can we better advertise and pull our customers in to us to provide those services for us. The data, I mean, we're doing over 90 million transactions a month is what we're coming through our system. And-- >> John: So you're data full. You're full of data. >> Oh yeah, we're full of data. (laughs) And so there's just a tremendous amount of stuff that comes through us, and that data used for analytics is very powerful for us to be able to turn around and provide services to our customers. >> Matt, talk about the dynamic of, as you get into more analytics, this brings up where the data world's going, and this where kind of the data protection question is. Okay, all this data's coming in, you got some automation in there, you got some wrangling, you got some automation stuff now, analytics surfaces the citizen analysts now decided to start poking and touching the data. Okay, so now policy's the-- how do you back that up? So you have now multiple touch points on the data. Does that impact the data protection scheme and architecture? >> Yeah, I think it does. You know, fundamentally there's going to be a shift from the traditional backup admin role. And not just managing the policy, but also managing the data itself. To a role that's more centric around managing the policy. And compliance against it. As you go to decentralized environments and centers of data as opposed to data centers, you need to rethink the whole model and-- >> John: Data center. Data. Center. >> Exactly. >> John: Not server center. >> Right. >> It's the data center. (laughs) >> Paul: As you look-- >> And data's gone mass, right, so it doesn't move very easily. >> As you move to a more distributed model in an "Internet of things" type of environment, how will that affect data protection? You have to re-architect your service? >> We have been on a journey to transform data protection. We last year talked about some new offerings in that space with our Copy Data Management and Analytics solution. And that's really oriented towards that decentralized model. It's a different approach. It's not your traditional combine-your-data-path- and-your-control-path, it's truly a decentralized distributed model. >> Paul and I were talking on the intro today with Peter Burris, our head of research at Wikibon, and we know about the business value of data, and not to spare you the abstract conversation we had, we were talking about the valuation of companies were based on the data that they have and data under-management might be a term that we're fleshing out, but the question specifically comes back down to the protection and security of the data. I mean, you look at the marketing capital of Yahoo on that hack that they had, I think you mentioned Yahoo hack, really killed the value of the company. So the data will become instrumental in the valuation, so if that's the case, if you believe that, then you got to believe that the protection is going to be super important, and that there's going to be real emphasis on ground management policies and also the value of that data. You guys talk about that in your world? You guys think that holistically and can you share some insight into that conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that comes back to your very first point about "data protection is hot." It's hot because there are a lot more threats out there, and of course there's that blurry line a little bit between security and data protection sometimes, but absolutely, if you look at regulations, if you look at things like GDPR in the EU, this is going to drive an increased focus on data protection. And that's where we're focusing. - [John] And IoT doesn't make this thing any easier. >> Absolutely not. >> John: (laughs) He shook his head like, "Yeah, I know." ATMs will be devices, wearables will be using analytics to share security data and movement data of people. >> Yeah. And so, us, security is one of the top priorities, it has to be. You look at what's happened with Target and Sony and Yahoo and all the other breaches. That keeps me up at night. And being sure that, >> John: I can imagine. >> being sure that we have a stable backup is integral to our system, especially with some of the recent ransomware threats and things like that. >> Paul: Yeah, going to ask you about that. >> That's scary stuff. And one way to be sure that you are protected from that is being sure that you have, number one, a good security system, but number two, you have a good backup. >> Over half of companies now have been hit by ransomware. Is there a service, a type of service that you have specifically for companies that are worried about that? >> Yeah, we have, I think A.J. said it very well, it's a layered approach. You have to have security, you have to have backups. We have a solution called Isolated Recovery, which is all about helping our customers create a vaulted, air-gap solution as the next level of protection. And some of the largest firms out there are leveraging it today to do exactly that. It's your data. You got to get it off prem, you got to get it into a vaulted area, you got to get it off the network. >> Matt, A.J., thanks so much for sharing the insight on the data protection, great customer reference, great testimonial there in the products. Congratulations. Final question. Your take on the show, it's the first year, big story is Dell EMC World, as a customer are you kind of like, "Mmm, good, it's looking good off the tee, "middle of the fairway, you know?" >> No, I'm impressed. I was really kind of skeptic coming in last year when it was announced and "What is this going to mean?" and things like that, and just seeing this year the integration of all the technologies with Vmware and the Dell desktops, laptops, the server line, the VxRail, VxRack, and all the other suites that EMC Dell products offer, it's refreshing to me as a customer knowing that now I have that one call for just about anything in the IT world. >> As they say in the IT, "one throat to choke, "single pane of glass." We're kind of going back down, congratulations on the solution. >> Matt: Thanks very much. >> Data protection, data center, they call it for a reason, the data center, you got to protect it. It's theCUBE, bringing you all the data here from Dell EMC World 2017, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin with SiliconANGLE Media. We'll be right back with more, stay with us. (upbeat tech music)