from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante full stack observability is the new buzz phrase as businesses go digital customer experience becomes ever more important why because fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse every vendor wants a piece of the action in this market including companies that have provided traditional monitoring log analytics application performance management etc and they're joined by a slew of new entrants claiming end invisibility across the so-called modern tech stack recent survey research from etr however confirms our thesis that no one company has it all new entrants they've got a vision and and they're not encumbered with legacy technical debt however their offerings are immature on the other hand established players with deep feature sets in one segment are pivoting through m a and some organic development to fill gaps meanwhile the cloud players are well positioned and participating through a combination of their own native tooling combined with strong ecosystems in their respective marketplaces to address this opportunity hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we dive into a recent etr drill down study on full stack observability and to do so we once again welcome in our colleague eric bradley chief engagement strategist and director of research at etr eric good to see you my friend thanks for coming on uh always good to be here dave thank you so much for having us we appreciate it all right before we get into the survey eric i i want to talk a little bit about full stack observability define what it is and so let me start and then you can chime in so when people talk about full stack observability they're referring to the need to understand the behavior of all the technology components that support an application i.e the stack right throughout the entire system meaning the full piece of the equation right the entire system so the compute we're talking about the storage the network and of course that's all software defined today the containers that are running the software the database other middleware components the pipeline of data and then of course the client-side code everything the html the css everything down to the mobile device and the idea is to give people who can fix problems full visibility into the system with a dashboard of metrics that can be visualized at a high level and then drilled into to see logs or traces or events all the metrics that could help remediate an issue so a simple way to think about this eric is i like to think of it as the ability to see everything in the tech stack that could impact the customer experience right how do you see it if only we're that simple right it's it's a huge thing that we're trying to encompass there with full stack observability and uh even though the vendors might tell you on the first sales call that they can do it it's really not that simple based on everything you just said um in this particular survey we tried our best to look at it and we'll go into it later but you know we had to survey on the application side infrastructure side database side blog management security network it's a very difficult thing to encompass um the holy grail would be able to do it with one vendor and do it with one dashboard i don't think we're there anytime soon all right so let's get into this drill down survey results and talk about what you've learned first what is explain what a drill down study is how often does etr conduct these types of things you know who responds what can you tell us yeah sure so the drill downs are actually basically think of it as a custom type of survey work and that could be customized from two different ways either our clients will come to us with a particular topic and we will hold their hands and make sure that they get the the responses that they need uh and more often than not it's actually us as a research department uh wanting to dig into trends that our larger data encompasses and then we'll say hey we really need to look into that and we've done it with everything from rpa to identity access to you know hearing observability and also vendor specific and and macro trends as you know david this particular one the genesis was really a large amount of interest not only from our community the end users but clients i i can't tell you how much interest there is in observability right now we're constantly getting questions and demands for more research and deeper research in this space yeah so our audience will be familiar with the concept of net score that's the periodic survey every quarter like clockwork etr does that then in addition as eric was saying hot topics like in this case full stack observability so we're talking about respondents in the etr community in this case who have a deep understanding of observability and related topics and and they had varying degrees of knowledge about each vendor's offering so you asked the respondents to concentrate on the ones that they knew well correct yes that is correct so this was a smaller survey that we did the end was a little under 188 i believe um and essentially what we did was we took people that responded in the bigger study on these observability vendors and then sent this drill down out so they were specifically people that have purview over their spend with observability now some of it might be more database infrastructure application or security but everyone here is already qualified as an expert to answer these questions that's correct dave yeah so the first data point is the one we're showing you right here the respondents were asked who uses observability tools and eric i've highlighted app ops in in the site reliability engineers because given the emphasis on customer centricity that we hear all the time from the vendor community you would think these roles would be more highly represented but it's the folks in the boiler room that are using these tools highly technical and specialized roles what are your thoughts on this data you know i was a little surprised as well i i kind of thought the sres would be a little bit higher on this but it really just comes down to you know it's the infrastructure um devops and secops that seem to be using it the most i thought maybe the application operations teams would be a little bit more involved as well so i agree with you i was a little bit surprised on this but you know they're the experts so we have to take the data at their word for it but i think what's really happening here is you're recognizing that the work is being done across the entire enterprise as you mentioned before about full stack this isn't just one aspect it's touching every aspect of the enterprise and that's including the internal i.t teams well and i think too eric that this what i took away from this drill down and we'll get more into it is that the vendor marketing is not aligned with what's actually happening in the field and so there's these early days we'll talk about that some more okay next question i thought this was very interesting etr asked on the scale of one to three three being most preferred which pricing model host-based user-based or amount of data ingested based pricing that the responders preferred and eric so what are your what are your thoughts on this because just doing a quick scan scan pricing is all over the map yeah it really is all over the map from a vendor perspective right and also from an end user perspective and all the interviews and panels that i host pricing's a real concern but it is always but in this particular field it's a real concern and i actually just did a panel yesterday of four of these 88 survey takers to get a little bit deeper so i'm going to kind of remark on what they taught me a little bit yesterday one of them said ingestion pricing might be preferable but because it's so unpredictable that's why we're seeing the results skew away from it another one went so far that said uh ingestion based pricing is a nightmare that keeps him up at night because he's just so afraid he's gonna wake up the next day and see what the bill is so um really what they're looking for here and the reason the pricing is skewing that way in this survey is because they need predictability it's about their budget and it's about their planning even though they would prefer an ingestion-based model the fact that they have to plan for their budgets and they have to concern themselves with spending it's moving more to host based yeah so i mean it is complicated and because so for example i just took a quick snapshot of some of the pricing models like dynatrace appd datadog aws and others they tout their host-based pricing new relic they have a splash page up around its user-based pricing and the tiers datadog talks about its ingestion-based pricing for security monitoring aws prices by ingestion for cloud watch logs splunk prices on index data and calculates a per gigabyte per day metric so metrics dashboards alarms alerts events it's they could all be priced differently yeah that's true a few that got called out on us and i'm sure we're going to get into them later so i don't want to you know kill all of our fodder right now but when we were talking about this slide one person particularly decided to call out new relic and specif specifically for their flexibility around pricing he said that they have the ability to rapidly scale up but also contract as needed and he actually even though he's a user of splunk he's a user of dyna trees user of elastic um he also just really wanted to call out the flexibility of new relic in this area so to your point there's a lot of different ways to price this it's a complex problem but i think the key takeaway for vendors is flexibility is the key you really need to give people the ability to be flexible in what they want all right let's drill into the functionality and explore the usage and adoption of the different features by the respondents so this next chart shows module adoption for application performance monitoring apm database and digital experience down to the user and eric i underlined apm which is the blue bar because it seems it stands out especially for aws and you can see dynast dyna trace but also azure new relic and splunk and then digital experience which is the gray bar because despite all the chatter in the market and the marketing around digital transformation and customer experience other than a slightly higher response percentage for aws not a lot of adoption on that front so the vendor marketing again doesn't match the user behavior does it eric no it doesn't there's a couple of things to point out here but let's stick with that digital experience i i was surprised that it was so low on this slide and overall in our survey i did expect it to be more and not just from the vendor marketing perspective but you and i both know at the end of the day the whole point of this is to actually get into that 360 view of what your customer's doing so i i was a little bit surprised to see it that low when we spoke to the panel yesterday a couple of people said no listen it's not that we aren't doing that it's just that it's not the vendors that you put on this survey and they called out two particular names one is called catchpoint and the other one is thousand dies and i think you're aware a thousand dice i'm going to transition that off to you there yeah so a thousand eyes is now part of cisco and we're gonna talk about that a little bit later but but essentially like as i was saying up front they've got gaps in their in their product line so they've got to do m a and then package that up so you know we'll we'll get into that a little bit down the road but i want to bring up the next graphic because that looks at incident management infrastructure monitoring and log management and and what i did here is i called out infrastructure monitoring which is the gray bar and log management that light blue because aws and azure they stand out in these categories and splunk of course eric for for log management what what do you take away from this data yeah the previous slide and this slide you really have to call out aws cloudwatch and microsoft is your monitor um they are very pervasive in this survey and we could probably do an entire show on just that on the cloud versus independent but a couple of things i do want to point out even though these numbers are so high for these cloud tools the the panelists and the people i spoke to in more detail all said listen i'm going to look at my cloud tools first i'm on their infrastructure they're handing it to me i'm going to look at it and i'll use it for what it's good for however we're in a multi-cloud world and they're not good at things that aren't in their ecosystem so these are not even though these numbers are high i do not believe that you know aws or azure is going to go and take over all the independents in a multi-cloud world they want an independent vendor whether it's a data dog new relic we could talk about all of those later but um you know really i was surprised that the aws particularly was so high and so pervasive in here across the way a splunk what can you say i mean they are the most pervasive vendor you know they they're everywhere uh we had people in the panel call them a swiss army knife and you know that's a good and a bad that they have a lot of breadth of coverage which is great but because there's a breadth of coverage not all of it is great log management without a doubt is what they are great at they're specialized at it but the panelists were saying listen if you go away from their core and you try to use some of the other things they claim that they can do it requires a lot of heavy lifting and then we can get into a little bit later about their cloud cloud sas integration we had some issues with that in the survey as well and great points about the multi-cloud you're probably not going to trust that to your your cloud your public cloud vendor and so a lot of white space available for the traditional on-prem guys okay next the etr survey drilled into network monitoring and security monitoring and then other security functions and eric there are a couple of things that stood out to me in this chart i highlighted security monitoring which is the blue bar because you can again see the adoption from aws and azure and of course splunk and also we called out solar winds because of the large adoption in network monitoring so let me ask you what are you seeing in the data since the solarwinds breach and is there anything else in this chart that you want to call out i could go on for a while about solarwinds but you know the data since i guess it broke around 12 months ago even though the breach was even prior to that uh the headlines were big i think you remember you and i last year did a quick drill down survey just on solarwinds uh and the impact that we thought we would have it uh there's a very real impact happening uh with that said they're not easy to move away from um we asked about is there any one vendor that could take this entire space and the answer was solar winds was best positioned to do that but it's too late now and then i drilled down a little bit and i asked the panel well what can they do to reinvent themselves what can they do to change the reputational damage from this breach and the panelists all said nothing the reputational damage is done the best way for them to reinvent themselves would be to do an m a consolidate with somebody else change their name they truly believe that right now the only reason that people are still using solarwinds is it's not that easy to lift and shift away from but there will be no new net workloads going to these people at least according to the the ones who took our survey um that's on solar winds and we could get you know in more if you want but i think that's kind of you know giving the the the crux of the matter on splunk again what can you say on the security side on the sim side people don't want to use multiple vendors on the other side we were talking about with full stack some might be better at apm some might be better at infrastructure monitoring when you're talking about security you truly do want one vendor to rule them all and splunk does seem to be the one that's most well entrenched on the security side and as long as the policy is consistent across security you really can't say much about them so what they do well their core their the data shows that you know people still trust them great thank you for that okay now the last set of data we want to show we kind of consolidated some things you want the the detail and the drill down you had several drill down questions and what we try to do is consolidate them into a single chart which we had to stare at for a while so for each of the 11 companies etr asked respondents if the features across the top that you see here were strengths weaknesses or neutral and what we've done is we tried to consolidate the chart showing the strengths in the green which we just subjectively said okay that means more than 40 percent of the respondents identified the feature as a strength the weaknesses in yellow meant that more than 20 percent of the respondents cited the feature as a weakness and the neutrals in the gray where neither of those conditions were met but the gray was you know the neutral was high and what we did is we added four stars for standout features where 60 or more of the respondents cited the feature as a strength and we threw in two stars if they were close to 60 you know high 50s even mid 50s but but not single digit weakness for that feature that was got two stars so it was able to sort of visualize a lot of data so eric just a quick scan of this chart chart shows that the two big cloud players aws in particular but also azure they have a relatively strong showing and i say relatively because as you know eric there wasn't a single category of feature for any vendor where more than 70 percent of the respondents cited the strength for that single feature not one and there was a lot of gray and you can see pricing is a sore point for many customers including those evaluating solarwinds new relic elastic datadog dynatrace appd and splunk only aws and grafana were hit not hit hard on pricing and i guess the other thing that stands out to me here is that new relic eric showed some relative strength so the last thing i'll mention before you dive in look at what cisco is doing we talked about this before a little bit the drill down focused on appd but as i mentioned earlier companies that have mature stacks are filling the gaps so if you look at what cisco's doing this space they've put an interface layer over appd inner site and thousand eyes even though they're separate products they're historically priced separately i think they're still trying to figure out the pricing but they are definitely going to market with a strategy that bolts together these three separate products and that's not necessarily a bad strategy because combined they can claim even more depth and breadth eric what do you make of this data yeah just like this chart there is a lot there right so uh on a macro level let's just the obvious situation here is this is a crowded crowded marketplace and consolidation is needed i had one panelist say to me yesterday i can't wait for this to consolidate like this is just crazy that there needs to be consolidation uh now to your point about cisco cisco's taking the same playbook they did with security right they're going out and they're buying great tools and then now we have to make sure that they figure out a way to integrate these better uh the security side took them a little while to do that but they're getting there hopefully they can do this a little bit quicker here what we did here is that um appd is actually very strong on the application monitoring side for the core apm uh maybe not so much on these others and then that's why they go out and do what you're doing what you're saying about now so hopefully they will get there um kind of talking across the board pricing was a problem for all of them right so it just seems to me that you know the end users the buyers just feel like hey i shouldn't be paying this much for this we've got a lot of choices maybe there's some collusion on the pricing side but we have to figure it out because they do not want to pay this much for it it was the number one concern across almost every single vendor another aspect that i really want to call out on this and is something that our research team found really interesting and it's really about the digital transformation as digital transformation continues the workloads are moving towards the cloud and we're clearly seeing in this data that that's benefiting the newer players the data dogs and the new relics versus some of the others like a dynatrace and a splunk and when you go and actually look at the cloud sas integration answer option specifically it becomes very very obvious um you know splunk had a 38 on that number whereas datadog had 61 new relic at 58. so it's just very clear as a digital transformation increases workloads on observability it is lifting all boats but it's lifting some faster than others great points um all right as we said at the top you've got a set of incumbents they're jockeying for position you've got companies like datadog it's got as eric just mentioned strong cloud model elastic's got got the open source mojo and they're going after splunk's install base as is datadog and then you see startups like chaos search they're out now talking about how to do log analytics they do more than that but that's their sort of starter use case and they're going after the elastic and the elk stack which got dinged a bit in the survey on simplicity uh you know ease of standing it up and and so forth not a weakness if you're comfortable with full open source model but maybe not well understood as some of the other solution oriented plays and then you got other new entrants which are not covered in the drill down they're not as pervasive in the marketplace but guys like honeycomb and observe eric you mentioned some others that came out in the panel vmware even is getting into the act they're positioning tanzu around observability with really a strong kubernetes emphasis and there's dozens of other players in the space which we haven't talked about so eric this is jump ball and i'll give you the final word give us your last thoughts yeah there's a again a lot there it's such an interesting space like even ibm right they go out and buy turbonomics right everyone seems to be playing and not only that the ones that are already playing are expanding data dog comes out and says hey we do security now so i don't really know where this is going to end but there's too much happening there needs to be some sort of you know order out of the chaos uh to your point about some of the emerging names we just launched our emerging technology survey this week david those are the ones where we're going to see data on those names so stay tuned for that we don't track them in the core tsis which are more mature public vendors but we will be getting some data on those uh but to your point i really do believe that this space is rapidly expanding and i just kind of want to leave everyone with this there's a lot of growth still left in the panel yesterday i basically said to people how much of your infrastructure are you monitoring today versus how much you want to and the answer was around 65 to 70 percent being monitored now and without a doubt they all want to get to 100 so there is still a lot of room to grow in this space but i just don't know if there's enough room for all of these people that are basically going after the same percentage points so what we're seeing from a vendor strategy now is bundling they're trying to bundle because that's the way they're gonna actually gain that market share right and uh just one last point to you for elastic a lot of people still view elastic as a search functionality so even though they have use cases and observability i still think there's a lot of people that the elastic got into the elk stack in general got into their enterprise for search so that is still kind of where they are and maybe they're not moving as fast as a data dog or a new relic in pure full stack observability eric so great to have you on you guys cover so much space so we're gonna leave it there for now we really appreciate our friends at etr for the the work that they do and thank you eric for joining us today and sharing your insights great stuff welcome dave i always enjoy talking to you you know that and uh everyone else we'll be back in a couple of months with our predictions as well so yeah that's right yeah look for those all right remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you gotta do is search breaking analysis podcast check out etr's website etr dot plus they've got a whole new packaging and and pricing models so check that out we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can get in touch with me david.velante at siliconangle.com or at divalante on twitter i'm on linkedin all the time this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week everybody stay safe be well and we'll see you next time you

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live and we are in Las Vegas. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, we're now joined by Vince Affatati, whose the the global VP of sale and pre-sales at Dell EMC. It's good to see you sir. >> Thanks for having me. >> John: And Dan Serpico who's the CEO of FusionStorm. Dan, good to see you as well. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here we appreciate it, especially late in the day. >> Dan: Yeah absolutely, glad to be here >> First off Dan, tell us a little about FusionStorm and we'll get into the channel partnership a little bit later, but first off a little bit more about what you do. >> Great, well FusionStorm is a global solution provider, we're rapidly approaching a billion dollars in sales, probably hit a billion dollars in sales this year, and Dell Technologies is our principal partner. >> Alright and then the partnership program, if you would get, a little bit of great success, you know, it's just an absolute home run, but, again, how does working with Dan's company kind of personify what you do in the broader scheme? >> Yeah I mean, FusionStorm's a great partner, you know, part of what we want to talk about today is Ready Stack and how, kind of, this partnership and this program evolved based on, kind of cross-engineering and marketing that we do together and how, you know, Dan's team is so much closer, they're very close to the business of our customers and they have a great understanding of what's needed in the marketplace, so they're able to design and engineer and support the service solutions that are really unique, they hit an industry vertical and they really leverage, kind of, the best of our technologies, so, it's a great partnership. >> Dan: Yes it is. >> Yeah, Dan maybe you could expand a little, you said that, you know, Dell's your primary partner, why is that, you know, what kind of things do they do to enable you from a channel partner to meet what your customers need and, you know, make the money you need to run your business? >> Boy-oh-boy, we probably don't have enough time in this interview to talk about why Dell's our best partner. Look, all kidding aside, they are our largest partner, they have the broadest portfolio of technology solutions bar-none compared to any of our other partners, they're number one in most of the technology stacks, which is really important, our customers want leading edge technology. Our customers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Square, Pandora, they want leading edge technology as part of their play and Dell has really a incredible portfolio, then frankly, from the business side, the tremendous partnership with the great channel program, which gives us a terrific opportunity to partner from a marketing perspective, back-end rebates and incentives are a critical part of our value add and profitability model, so they touch all of the important points that make us a viable business. >> Vince, we talked to Marius Haas a little bit this morning about how the Dell and the EMC pieces came together and of course, you know, long history of channel with both sides, but bring us inside some of those, you know, incentives and rebates and things that Dan was talking to, you know, how does Dell set up those programs and, you know, bring us inside a little bit. >> Yeah, so, there's front-end rebates and there's back-end rebates, we're actually in our second year of rebate design, so we've done some things to kind of change it, but ultimately, there's rebates paid on dollar one across our full, a full stack, so, and then as the metal, as you go in the metal tiers, the rebates kind of increase, right, so our top tier partners get a higher rebate amount and then today, we announced a richer rebate for taking our competitive gear, so that's on the back-end and those are the traditional design. Now on the front-end we have storage rebates, we announced about five months ago or so, which incent you to basically sell our modern infrastructure or the storage side, include DPS into those designs and then take out competitive gear. We also have some incentives for proposal writing and demand generation as well, so a pretty rich program. >> Alright, so Dan here's the question I have for ya. Dell, they've got a lot of offerings out there and change is something that, you know, at the keynote this morning they said, you know, today compared to the past, you know, is the busiest we've ever been, but tomorrow there's even going to be more change. So, do they make it simple, I mean, you know, that's something, you know, we're all looking for, you got to run your business, you got to listen to your customers, you know, how is it easier when, you know, working with Dell? >> Well, I think it's easier because they are leading the pack, really, if you think about the world of technology and how it evolves constantly, everybody is leap-frogging everybody else every six months, so what you want is, you want a partner who's going to be leading the technology play for the future, honestly. Our business 15 years ago sold, 99% of what we sold 15 years ago, we do not sell a nickel today, not a nickel because that partner couldn't keep up with the evolution that takes place in technology today. So really, while I appreciate the question, it's really not about what's easy, it's what is most advanced so that you can stay competitive. >> You know, Vince was talking about incentives, he was talking about rebates, right. And so, from your side of that fence, if you will, how critical is it that you have those kinds of opportunities or you have that kind of incentive, I would think in a competitive environment, it's fairly crucial, right, I mean, you've got to be able to offer to each other and then down the line, that kind of value, right? >> It's tremendously important, we pride ourselves on our ability to help influence customers in their buy-decisions around technology, okay. And so, look we're not going to sell, regardless of what the incentives are, we aren't going to sell bad products and bad technologies 'cause that's a good way to lose customers, but certainly the financial rewards for our sellers, for our SEs, and for us as a company so we can continue to stay viable is critically important and we absolutely take advantage of the programs that are in place with Dell and others too, by the way, but certainly with Dell and direct our customers to those things that make the most sense for them. >> Yeah, right, I mean really, simple, predictable and profitable, we talk about it a lot, but that's ultimately where we're trying to go. We're not perfect, we've learned a lot, but, you know, strong partnerships like this make it clear that that's the right way to go about it and it is more than just incentives, it's staffing, it's dedicating people to help, help make the business easier, doing boot camps and joint seminars and, you know, selling together. And that works. >> Vince, the other thing, can you put into context for us, you know, Ready Stack, we've got everything from, you know, Full Stack, everything bake to, you know, some of the software platforms, you know. What's in here and, you know, how does this fit in the overall? >> So, Ready Stack is a way to address a market that we haven't gone after directly, which is the build systems, when you look at converge infrastructure, it's about a six billion dollar market. We own about 49% of that and with the VxBlock 1000, is a good example of those, kind of, integrated systems, right? But what we haven't really done a lot of and we're really going into feet-first, head-first is the idea that we want to help with customers who aren't ready to buy the Full Stack, but they want to do something that's engineered special right? So, providing, Ready Stack is a way to, it's so we're close with our, it's a partner exclusive program we work with the partners to make it easier for them to sell our tech, right, into converged environments to help solve problems. I mean, it's something that you guys do everyday, already, but it's a program to help with the engineering and provide incentives, to make that easier to do. >> Well, I think that's right, the converged infrastructure which is, you know, what we call this, is probably, outside of maybe cloud computing and that world, the single fastest growing part of the tech space today, right? It's what our customers need, it's what our customers want. I think that what's unique about the Ready Stack play here, the architecture, is that it's flexible, okay? It's flexible and leads with Dell and leads with certified architecture, as opposed to others who are just taking piece parts from different vendors, cobbling it together and calling it a certified converged play, this is a truly converged play that has flexibility. Flexibility could mean that someone's, a customer's storage needs grow faster than compute needs or vice versa, alright? So you're not locked in a solution, but you still, you're locked in on a framework that allows you to expand based on your unique needs, then when you take their architecture and their engineering capabilities in combination with ours, the blueprints, you get, you have a really robust solution that we can align ourselves with and be consistent in terms of our delivery to the customers. >> So, you tell us about flexibility, I mean that, that's kind of a buzzword, right? I mean, you want to give people the ability to customize, right? Do people, I mean, are your customers now, you know, Dan, do they really, I mean, do people know what they want or because they have new capabilities, they have new, there are new avenues they can go down, new choices. I mean, how do you get 'em there? >> Well, our customers are very smart, again, if you heard the partial list of customers that we have, they are very smart and they're looking at this. >> Stu: You mentioned a couple of big names there. >> We've recognized a few of those. >> But they are very smart and access to Dell, lot of them are here at Dell Technologies World, they read information on the internet, these are very smart people, of course, but let's not undermine our role, or underestimate our role in helping them, whether it's through our labs, to do bake-offs, we can take, we can run some of their workloads on our architecture or the Dell architecture versus others and they can see how this technology works or how their workloads work, what performs better for them for their unique specs. There is constantly discussion around white boarding, okay? The technology is moving all the time and I don't think that can be underestimated either, right? If you look at a data center, if you picked up a thousand customers and looked at their data center, probably no three of them would be exactly alike because of the nature of technology, so what you need, is you need an OEM, like Dell Technologies get a robust portfolio of products and a good partner, like FusionStorm who can offer that robust portfolio and help it be fully integrable with all these other technologies, right? Look, the truth of the matter is that we would love to rip out somebody else, but that has a depreciation life and CIOs have to live with something they bought last year, for three years. So, how is that compatibility going to exist? That's very important; so all those things are part of the education of our customers. >> Vince, I know there's a huge push at this show, working with the channel partners, bringing them all together; but give us a little view past Dell Technologies World, you know, for this program, some of the roadmaps; what should we, that are watching the industry, look for throughout the rest of the year and in the channel partners? >> So, you mean what's coming forward or what? >> Stu: Just walking away from here. >> John: The road ahead! >> Stu: Your program, the road ahead, yeah. >> The road ahead, absolutely, so I'll tell you, particularly, let me focus for a minute on, on Ready Stack and where we're going there. So, as I said, we're, the idea here is maximum flexibility, but we also want to provide guidance and compatibility and sizing. So, what you'll see from us over the next year, is a lot, a lot of engineering around this program and working on building different scenarios, common scenarios and scenarios that we're learning about, you know, working with FusionStorm and our other partners, around the world. So, you'll see a lot of engineering going on around creating these design guides to deployment guides and help with sizing and we think that's really important. You'll also notice that, this is going to be hypervisor agnostic and so they'll be support for other hypervisors in this, we realize that other people do use other hypervisors besides VMware, which is kind of odd, but we know it exists, right, so a KVM we're work, they'll be, you'll see solutions that support KVM, we'll have solutions for Docker, we'll see, you'll see Hyper-V in here as well. Again, it's a realization that there's more to this do-it-yourself kind of options and we want to be there to support that, but we do think great integration, great support, sizing, is what you'll see more of as we kind of go through the year. >> Which brings us right back to flexibility, right? Give the people what they want, when they need it, right? >> Now we also say, our engineer systems, right? VxRail, our hyper conversion converge systems, we're not saying we're de emphasizing that, we're not at all, but we're realizing that, you know, more and more working with our partners there's, we're addressing a very large and growing part of the market space. >> Dan, Vince, thanks for being with us. >> Yeah. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, enjoy the rest of the show, but I'm sure it's going well for ya. >> It's wonderful. >> And we hope to see you down the road. >> Terrific. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for joining us. Back with more here on the Cube; we're live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic music)