from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the cube insights powered by ETR this week cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has invited a number of analysts and press to San Francisco for an event to talk about the future of Cisco and no doubt the role of the company in the next decade and I will be there so in this breaking analysis I thought that I'd focus on Cisco and its prospects in this era of next-generation cloud of course last week we attended AWS reinvent and you can catch all our coverage on the cube net but the key takeaways are that we're entering a new era of cloud that is heavily emphasized emphasizing getting more value out of data with machine intelligence and things like sage maker now AWS was heavily focused on this notion of transformation putting forth the strong case that enterprises have to transform not just incrementally it was a clear message that CEOs really have to lead and AWS are striking directly at the heart of what a device had Andy Jesse calls the old guard namely IBM Dell Oracle HPE and many others including of course Cisco saying that you can't just transform incremental e CEOs you have to transform whole house so today I want to look at six areas and I'm showing them here on this on this slide but the first thing I want to do is just review the overall spending climate and then what I want to do is discuss Cisco in the context of industry leadership playing on Jesse's themes and then you know we'll look at the spending momentum in the latest ETR survey for those leaders next thing I want to do is I'm going to talk about the cloud and it's impacting everyone and I want to take a look specifically at how it's impacting Cisco and how Cisco is faring in the face of competent from the public cloud which we've talked about a lot across a number of vendors we're then going to look at Cisco's business overall from a spending perspective and then I'll wrap with some some comments on what I see is opportunities for Cisco like edge I want to talk specifically about multi cloud and of course cloud in general so let's start drilling into the spending climate overall now remember the EGR data tells us that spending on balance is reverting to pre 2018 levels but it's not falling off the cliff buyers member are narrowing their experimentation on new technologies and they're placing more focused bets as part of the digital transformations we're also seeing more replacements of redundant systems that buyers were running in parallel as a hedge on their bets and that is affecting overall spending and it's somewhat compressing spending so with that as a backdrop let's look at some of the the latest data from ETR and focus on the leaders from the latest survey so what I'm showing here is data from ETRS October 2019 Syria one thousand three hundred and thirty six IT buyers who responded and I've selected market share as the metric across all sectors as you can see here in number eight now remember market share is a measure of pervasiveness and it's calculated by dividing the total vendor Mensch mentions divided by the sector total so now the remember the ETR methodology allows for multiple responses by a vendor so you can see in the y-axis there can be more than a hundred percent okay because of those multiple responders respondents now note that Microsoft Cisco Oracle AWS and IBM have the highest shared ends or mentions and you can see the pervasiveness of Microsoft and its prominence which is not surprising but Cisco Oracle and IBM generally have held from again pervasiveness standpoint pretty well as you can see the steady rise as well in AWS is market share so cisco really the bottom line there is cisco is a clear leader in this industry and it's maintaining its leadership position and you can of course on that chart you can see the others who really didn't make the top five but they're prominently you know mentioned with the shared ends that's VMware Salesforce Adobe's up there and of course Dell EMC is the you know 90 to 100 billion dollar company now let's take a look specifically at spending momentum you know what we're showing here in this chart is the exact same cut except we've changed the metric from market share to net score now remember net score is a measure of spending momentum that's calculated by essentially subtracting the percent of customers that are spending less in a given survey from those that are spending more and that's the net score and you can see the picture changes pretty dramatically AWS jumps up to the top spot with a 62% you know net score over taking Microsoft but then look at Cisco it's very strong with the 36 about 34 percent net score you know not nearly as high as AWS and Microsoft but very respectable and holding you know fairly strongly and notably ahead of IBM and Oracle which are both in the red you see that red area which signals caution now what I want to do is address the question of how is the cloud affecting Cisco's business you've seen me do this with a number of other vendors let's drill into what it means for Cisco so if you've been following these breaking analysis segments you know we've been reporting that the the pace at which the cloud is eating away at a traditional on-prem data data data center business continues now here's a quote from an IT Pro that summarizes the situation for networking in general and then we'll come back and specifically talk about Cisco he says or she says as we migrate the data centers to AWS networking costs will decline over three years this is a director of tech strategy for a large telco so the question I have is does the et et our data back this up let's take a look so what this chart shows is a cut of cloud spenders there are 818 in the latest ETR survey and the net score within those accounts specifically for Cisco so it's spenders on AWS asier and Google cloud and you can see the steady decline post 2010 for Cisco so just as I've reported for Dell EMC HPE Oracle and others you can see that the clouds steady march continues to challenge the on-prem suppliers so each of these companies has really got to figure out how to respond now in the case of Cisco it's moving from owning the network market to really participating in the public cloud and interconnecting clouds so we've seen Cisco make many acquisitions that can allow them to work with AWS for example app D which is application performance management VIP teller which is SD win clicker which is orchestration duo in cloud security and then you've seen bets on kubernetes which are going to help them span hybrid you know as well you've seen them make partnerships with the leading cloud some suppliers and I'll make some comments later on when I talk about multi cloud so let's look at how these diversification moves have impacted Cisco overall because they've not sat still you can see that in this chart what it shows is Cisco's market share across all of its businesses including analytics security telephony and of course core networking but also servers storage video conferencing and virtualization so the point is that by diversifying its business the company has expanded its Tam its total available market and as I showed you before has maintained a leadership position in the data center is measured by market share now here's a deeper sector analysis of Cisco's business by various sectors and what we're showing here is Cisco's business across a number of sectors comparing the October 18 survey with July 19 and the October 19 surveys so this is net score view and you can see across all customers that Cisco's second-half net score for these sectors which are in the green are showing strong momentum relative to a year ago so here you go Meraki which includes Cisco's wireless business its telephony business parts of its security business core Cisco Networking they're all showing strength now parts of its security portfolio like Open DNS and Sourcefire which is intrusion detection which Cisco bought about six years ago and some at Cisco's voice and video assets are showing slower momentum but Cisco's overall spending momentum is holding on pretty well all right let me talk a moment about some of Cisco's opportunities they're trying to transform into more of a software company with assets like duo app dynamics and they want to focus less on selling boxes and ports and more on licenses and subscriptions so it's also got its got to use software also to unify its many platforms so I want to talk about for a moment about multi cloud hot new area right everybody's talking about it cisco recently made some organizational moves to take its separate cloud group and better align it with Cisco's core operations in a new group that they call cloud strategy and compute now cisco competes in multi cloud with vmware IBM curves Red Hat Microsoft and Google even though they partner with Microsoft and Google so here's some ETR data that looks at key Cloud sectors including the three did I pulled out cloud computing container orchestration and container platforms so these are buyers spending on these three areas so there's 937 in the latest survey you can't see that and because I'm hiding it with the pulldown but trust me but you can see the big players with spending momentum and while cisco doesn't you know show the momentum of an azure or a red hat or even a Google it's in that multi cloud game and my my premise is that cisco is coming at this opportunity from its strengths and networking and it's got more than a fighting chance why because cisco is in my view in the position to connect multiple clouds to on-prem and convince buyers that cisco is the best partner to make networks higher performance more secure and more cost-effective than the competition now let me wrap with some critical comments and then i'll end up on an opportunity with with some comments on edge so the first thing I want to say is well Cisco is dominant in a space it's missed a number of opportunities VMware has beaten Cisco to the punch in the initial move of course to virtual machines and then the nice Sara acquisition NSX as I've shown before is clearly has strong momentum in the market and is really eating into Cisco's core business Cisco's ACI does okay but it's definitely a sore spot Francisco and this represents a crack in the companies Armour containers the move to cloud native architectures is mostly a move to public cloud so it's a replacement or a displacement more so than a head-to-head competition that hurts Cisco here is John Fourier says you have you have cloud native and if you take the T out of cloud native you have cloud naive so cisco along with others must not beat cloud naive rather it has to remain relevant in the cloud as we discussed earlier in the multi cloud discussion now Cisco they were the king of converged infrastructure if you remember with the first wave of Vblock along with the Flex pod from NetApp and it you know changed the server game and drove UCS adoption and then guys like IBM and pure jumped in Cisco really became the standard now well hyper-converged infrastructure didn't really displace Cisco Networking you know Dell VMware with it with VX rail and Nutanix as well as HPE who's in the third position are posing a challenge that's so cisco cisco they everything they really don't play in the lucrative high margin external storage business but there's some challenges there that from a tam standpoint but I don't worry so much about that because despite all the rumors over the years specifically in storage that Cisco is going to buy a storage company and I think there are better opportunities in soft where in the end the edge and as I've said before storage right now is kind of on the back burner it's not it's a very difficult market for a company like Cisco to to enter so I want to talk more about the edge because they think it's a way better opportunity for Cisco Cisco among all the legacy tech vendors and my view could really compete for the edge and the reason I say this is because Cisco is the only legacy player in my opinion that is a solid solid developer strategy and it's because of dev net dev net is the initiative to make all Cisco products programmable we talk a lot about the API economy and infrastructure of code as code and what Cisco is doing is they're taking Cisco certified engineers like CC IES and all these people that they've trained over the years huge number of IT pros and they're retraining them and teaching them how to code on Cisco products to create new use cases new workloads and new applications specifically at the edge and Cisco products are designed to be programmable so they have a developer play and I've always said the edge is going to be won by developers this is why frankly I was so excited last week at reinvent about AWS outpost and the move they're making at the edge because they're essentially bringing their stack to the edge and making it programmable IBM failed to do this with bluemix they couldn't attract developers they they had to go by Red Hat for thirty four billion dollars you know Dell MC they have VMware and they have an opportunity with pivotal but that's got to come together they currently have very little developer synergy in my view specifically with Dell Hardware at least that I can see and there seems to be little or no effort to retrain storage admins and VM admins in the same way that cisco is is doing this with CC IES HPE essentially I see them like Dallin away throwing server boxes over the fence to the edge you know versus really attracting developers to identify sort of new workload new use cases so I like Cisco strategy in this regard and it's something that we're gonna continue to watch very closely and probe this week with Chuck Robbins okay this is date Volante sounding out from this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching everybody and we'll see you next time

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by the M Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> I am Stew Minimum and my co host, Justin Warren. And you're watching The Cube live from VM World 2019 here in Moscow North. Actually, the 10th year that we've had the cubit this event joining me on the program, I have Brad Anderson and Keith Norby, both with Netapp. Brad is an executive vice president, and Keith is director of strategic alliances. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. So, Brad, I've had >> the pleasure of working with the, um where since 2002 it's one of the highlights of my career in Tech has been watching that growth of virtual ization a company that, you know. It was about 100 people when I first started watching them. And that wave, a virtualization that had ripples throughout the industry, was really impressive. But >> I didn't actually >> get to come to this show until 2010 Asai said. Our 10th year of the show, you were one of the few that were at the inaugural event that it's the 16th year of it. So >> just give us a >> little bit of ah ah, look back in. You know what you've seen changing Netapp, of course. You know, long longtime partner of ah of Via Mers. >> Absolutely. He was like 3 4000 for it was at a hotel in San Diego. And there's probably about 1000 people there, but I don't think they were planning 1000. So is the longest kind of room. And we had people that were just kind of a mile down. And finally, uh uh, the comment was, Hey, could we knock down a wall and kind of get people a little bit closer? So, no, that was a long time ago. And in fact, it was Diane Mendel. I had an opportunity of Aquino, and I think there was another key note from IBM. >> Yeah, well, you know, I'm sorry they didn't invite you back on stage this morning, but, you know, >> a little big, bigger show today. >> A little bigger. I think we're somewhere the ballpark. 20 thousands. What? This show's been for about the last five years. Conversations very different today. As I made commentary were in the post VM era. Today, V EMS are no longer the center of the conversation. And you know, multi cloud is something that they put out there, which is the story I've been hearing from net out for many years software company, living in all of these cloud environment. So talk to us a little bit about how that relationship with VM wear and what we're not upsets in the ecosystem is >> changing. I mean, you know, Veum, where has never happened, then where has been a great partner for a long, long time? And, uh, and net have strategies Clearly hybrid multi cloud. When you think about private clouds today, VM where has a huge footprint in that space, So they continue be super important. We probably have a more expansive definition of hybrid to us. Hybrid is private cloud and public cloud in all kinds of combinations. And but we also so strongly believe the multi cloud and so we are. You know, we're driving very hard for the hybrid multi cloud, letting customers basically start anywhere they want to with any cloud provider on Prem in the cloud, and have that you know that control of data irrespective of and move at their own pace. >> Yes, sir. Vienna, Where has long been one of those places where everybody can meet? So you mentioned knocking down walls. VM. Where is one of the few companies that actually succeeded in doing that and having people be able to work with partners in other eras? There was often a lot of fighting between different vendors, or it's here. It's whatever you as a customer wants to do, we will be there to do that with you. And that's another one of those companies. All right, if you have some data, we will help you manage it, no matter where it is. So what tell it tells about something that what are you doing right now in this Is New World, where a stew mentions it's a post of'em world. So in this post of'em world, how do you manage your data in that post VM world? >> Well, it's it's it's Ah, it's managing first of all, I mean, we really strongly believe place, and so we're gonna manage, you know, you know the data and start where the customer starts. I mean, we're not advocating that they have to start in cloud. They have to be on prim. There's an orderly path because depending on the customer, they're all going to take a very different path. And and so what we want to do is give him control. Their data, irrespective of the path, allow them to move on that path. But we're seeing at Netapp that it's it's the but the data is beyond the data that's increasingly about applications. And so, you know, you heard a little bit about Ah Kubernetes. That's That's something we've strongly feel as well on providing a set of tools to provide choice where, you know, you know, independent the cloud, you know, same kubernetes service, same different tools, same tool set. Same service is on prim or in the cloud. >> Yeah, Ned has a strong cloud. President's summer things like cloud volumes. Some of the other acquisitions that you've made that help you with the cloud journey, like some of them have sufferings, are really strong, >> know very much so. And and we think we can provide Ah ah, the superior customer experience. But then, if the customer wants to use, you know, a variety interesting set of tools we support that as well. We are supporting the customer on his journey with the tools as they ah determined. >> So, Keith, tell us about some of the strategic partnerships that helped net up. To be able to partner with these different customers and to bring different vendors together to help themselves. Customer problems? >> Yeah, well takes a lot of them. Thio, meet the customer needs, as you saw today in the landscape folks that are on the solutions exchange floor. It takes not just a partnership between net up and VM wear, but net up in Vienna, where plus v m net up in Vienna, where plus ah ton of other folks, Cisco has an example longtime partner of ours and flex pot. Then you know the fact that we're doing memory accelerator flex pod takes, you know, something that has had a long tradition of the, um where excellence with Cisco and is now the order of magnitude faster than anything you want for APS that need scale, performance, all the service capabilities of on tap for things like Metro Cluster and beyond. >> So you remember back years ago it was you know, you know who has the most integrations and with the M wear. And you know, if you know all the A I and Viv balls and all of those pieces and netapp always, you know, was right at the top of the list. You know, working in those environments may be brought if you want to enter this. But, you know, today, how do you give us some examples That kind of that joint engineering work that goes on between Netapp and VM, where obviously there's bundle solutions like flex pod, that's, you know, the sphere plus netapp in there. But you know that engineering level, you know, where does rubber with road? >> Yeah, it's funny because I've been at every vehicle except to, And so I've been with you. In the sense I've seen the landscape of these innovations where Steve Haired and some others would talk about the movie previews of things like the aye aye and bossy providers all coming. And that was the big thing you'd focus on. Now it's less about that, and I think it's more about what Brad is kind of brought to net happened in the focus on simplicity. Now the funny part about simplicity is that to deliver simplicity, much like the engineering detail to deliver Tesla or an iPhone is extraordinary, so the work isn't less. In fact, the work is Maur and you pre configuring or pre what you were wearing as much as possible. The work we started to do over a year ago between George Curry in our CEO and Sanjay Poon got together. We started planning on some multi cloud plans, and, uh, that's where you see a lot of our persistence and cloud volumes on VMC. You see us having a view more vow, didn't design Aneta Page C. I for your Private Cloud VD I solutions. And these air meant to draw NSX a kn and when his net I've ever had in NSX immigration all said, Now we have had a sex and integrations to make that easier to bring on board. We have the realized integration so you could build a self serve portal catalog just like it talked about today, and the list goes on and on, so it's funny how it's less. The features are important. But what's more important is trying to make this a simple it's possible for you to consume and then for the folks that need things like scale of maps and service is or they need the same cloud volumes in this data fabric on any one of the hyper scale er's. We have really the only end in story on that, and that's what makes the via More plus net up thing worked really well. >> So how do you balance the flexibility of being able to solve multiple customer problems? And they all have different needs. How do you balance the simplicity with that? With that complexity? And it was mentioned by Pat, make a note as well that you've got this kind of tension between. I need to be able to do everything flexibly, but that can sometimes lead the complexity. So how do you change that? To become simple for customers to use? >> I mean, I think the biggest thing it Z it's a design input. I mean, if if you start out with just trying to make the technology all it can be with a end of you know, one particular cloud or one particular partner, then it becomes very difficult. As he tried to expand it to multiple partners and because it's about choice. We're kind of think about that right up front. And so if it's a design input, it puts, it puts, as he said, to put some burden on the technical team. But it is a much more powerful solution if we if you can pull it off, and that's been a big part, and I think it kind of starts with this mentality that you know, it's about choice, and we gotta make simplicity. And now part of the value proposition, rather than after for thought as it has, may be historically has been. What if >> we could talk a little bit about customers? Because, you know the message I hear this morning is you know, you talk multi cloud, a cloud native. There's a lot of change in the industry, you know, I'm participating in couple of career advice events because remember back 10 years ago, it was Oh, my gosh, if I'm a server admin, I need to learn to be virtualization than it was cloud. You know, architects, but way know that change in the industry is constant. So, you know, what are some of the key drivers when you're talking to customers in general and specifically when you talk about in engaging in part with the M where, >> Yeah, I mean, I I think it starts with people just recognizing. Even if people haven't moved the cloud today, that tends to be their primary strategy. In a recent survey, I think we found 98% of the customers, said Cloud is her strategy. However, 53% said still on Prem is their primary compute centers. So you know they're not there yet. And so But because that's their strategy, then you know we have to respect that. And so So, uh, you know, increasingly you're seeing at Netapp Waleed with clout, even though we know customers aren't quite ready there. But we align to that long term vision. But then our strange made up helping the modernize What they have currently on prim helping build private clouds for the same service is they have him public cloud, and then let them have the complete absolute choice. What public cloud or multiple public clouds they want and designed with with, you know, that full spectrum in mind, knowing they could start anywhere on that on that scale. >> Yeah, the customers ultimately are gonna dictate to the market What Israel and I think over time, Pios sort of vet who is right on this stuff. And so history's a great lesson teacher of all those things, you know, for me, it seems less less about how many different things you can offer. And as you see whether we're at Veum World or at Red Hat Summit were made obvious. Reinvent or, um, coup con every every every vector, turn of the customers. Prism on this will say something different. But I think in general, categorically, if you look at it, you could start to just, you know, glean what you think are the real requirements. And by the way, the rule carpets are not all technical. You know, I think what what gets lost on folks is that there is a lot of operational political factors, probably political factors, a lot more than what a lot of people think. You know, they're just talking about what the what The speed is to re factor APs or to migrate APS. Frankly, there's just a lot of politics that goes with that. There's a lot of just stuff to work through, >> and that's where I think simplicity is so important because of those non technical reason. Simplicity resonates across the board. >> But I would say you have to have simplicity with capabilities. >> I mean, just one of the things you talk about, right? If I modernize some application, well, the people that were using that application, they were probably complaining about that old one. But at least they do have to relearn >> that. Have that that new one. So we're gonna have some exciting announcements tomorrow. So I'm kind of check out tomorrow's stuff that will announce with VM, where with Netapp tomorrow We're here at the show floor will be showcasing some of those things. We can't give away too much of that today. But, you know, we think the future is bright and together with with Veum Or, you know, this partnership, I think, has a lot of upside. Like you said, we've had We've had a 17 year history with, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers together and installed base that goes back to like you said to be very beginning. Um, I remember back to the very beginning of the ecosystem. Net up was one of the strongest players in that market on dhe Since then, it's evolved beyond just NFS. >> Well, hopefully bread. We can get you on a keynote for in another 10 years. Waken Knock that wall down Exactly. Exactly. >> All right, great. Want to give you both the final word? You know, so so many big themes going on, you know, takeaways that you want people to have from the emerald 2019 bread >> I think the biggest takeaway is that just like the show today you didn't hear a whole lot about virtualization. It's moving to contain her eyes and and we had netapp view that, you know, we support all virtualized environments on from across the cloud, moving to supporting all containerized application environments on premises and cloud. And it's about choices in combinations of both, but keeping data control. >> Yeah, I'd say for me, it's it's really the power of the of of the better together, you know, to me, it's nobody's great apart. It takes really an ecosystem of players to kind of work together for the customer benefit and the one that we've demonstrated of'em. Where with that plus Veum, where has been a powerful one for well, well over 17 years and the person that putting in terms of joint customers that have a ton of loyalty to both of us, and they want us just to work it out. So you know, whether you're whether your allegiance on one side of the Cooper natty criminals battle or another or you're on one side of anyone's stores. Choice or another. I think customers want Netapp on via mortar work. It's out and come up with solutions that we've done that. And now what? We wait for the second act of this to come out. We'll start that tomorrow. Teeth and >> Brad, thank you so much if you couldn't tell by the sirens on the street. We are live here at San Francisco at Mosconi, north of lots more coverage. Three days wall to wall coverage for Justin Warren. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the cue

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)