[Announcer] Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, we're in Las Vegas and you're watching theCube. My cohost is John Trayor, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome back to the program, Bob Madaio. >> Thanks Stu, I'm so glad to be here. >> Alright, so Bob, you're the Vice President of Infrastructure Solutions Marketing, and big difference, last year, you were with, was it, HDS? >> I was with Hitachi Data Systems. >> And now it's Hitachi Vantara and you had a little less facial hair when I talked to you last. >> You know it was around about November, I said, I might do theCube again next year, so I need to look different. >> Yeah, I had a, I had one Cube guy this year, he had got like almost a mountain man beard. And the week before he shaved it because he was coming back on theCube. And he was like, yeah I didn't but beards, no beards, diversity is what we like on theCube. >> Got to make the videos look different right? So next year I'll be beardless again, we'll do it again. It'll be fun. >> Alright, so I guess the follicle discussion's interesting but the Hitachi story is an interesting one you know Hitachi of course, huge company, lot of different technologies there, but bring us up to speed with what came together with Hitachi Vantara. >> Sure for a reminder of what we did, so we were Hitachi Data Systems, that's a part of the company I was with and again Hitachi Limited, out of Japan very large, you know, over 80 billion dollar organization of which Hitachi Data Systems used to be the IT arm that took those solutions to market around the world. What we did is, many might remember we had purchased Pentaho the open source analytics, you know, great a ETL blending capability. We brought them into the family with Hitachi Data Systems. We also had a sister company that was called Hitachi Insight Group. Hitachi Insight Group was really there to kick start our efforts around IoT. And if you've heard us talk about our Lumada Platform, if you look at what strings all this together, we've been having a lot, and I'm sure we'll talk about it here, of conversations about data. How do we help our customers with data? You know of course we've had a history in storage, but how do we bring it together, analyze it, bring new things, make that infrastructure more flexible? So that was what Vantara was. It was the bringing together of those three entities, and we continue to add. So, we're doing more and going to bring more companies into the fold. >> I love that Bob. I mean, we know the trend we've been watching for quite a number of years is, IT is going from that cost center over on the side that said, "No" to, to survive, you'd better be responding to the business, tie closely to the business or the business will go elsewhere. >> Yes indeed. >> For those solutions. And in the same way storage can't just be some growing expense that, you know, is I can't manage it I can't do this, to data is the life blood of business today. >> You know it's, I get to see some customers, not always as many as I'd like, but work closely with our field. And I was at this great customer of ours who's a regional bank and I was talking to, it was fundamentally a very storage-y audience. And I was, let's be honest, I was the corporate guy, I was a bit of the appetizer before the technical team, and I was having a data conversation. And we have this thing that, maybe we'll talk about, we call it the stairway of value and how customers should think of their value getting, you know, more important and how they can help, IT can help expose that value. And I was going through this model and I was worried, man, I might be losing this audience. But the lead person was writing, and I kind of stopped and said, is this relevant to you guys? And he said you know, I'm presenting on data to the organization next week, and I'm taking notes. And so what we're seeing is storage people, they also want to be able to have this conversation. How can what we do to make storage more accessible, move that data more quickly, valuable to the organization, to your point. >> Stairway to value, that's the power ballad for IT of the future, right? >> It does have a nearly built-in theme song, although we haven't gone there yet. For us actually, what it is is, we talk about the base layer sort of storing and protecting, and then it's enriching the data. So if you think of, often that's a meta data conversation. How do we bring more value, explain that data, make it easier to use? Then we get up into activate. That's blending maybe. You have the static systems. You want to build a repository for analytics. How do we help you activate that? And that really puts you on the path for monetization and that's the M. So we call it our SEAM model. >> So Bob, I love Hitachi Vantara and the idea of it. I got to say I understood Hitachi Data Systems better, because it's a storage, it was a you know, very, very smart, super smart storage company and you could compare it to other storage companies. But now, I'm just curious, in your, as you go and talk to customers, does that change who you talk with? And because, Hitachi Vantara as part of Hitachi too is about the industrialization of, of data and everything from oil fields and all the way down to, you know, a box in my office that might store my data. So, you know, but you've got the open source crowd and data scientists, you've got all the industrial and medical and health care stuff. As well as still these super smart storage scientists there. So how do you start that conversation and who do you end up talking with? >> You know it's very interesting. I mean, there are some companies that we approach at a Hitachi level and they're going to be major manufacturing projects or government projects, and we can bring the whole set. But oftentimes we are leveraging where a customer knows us and branching into new areas. So the storage base that we have is the most obvious to leverage. But what we're doing now is things like, we have some IT automation and analytics tools that help our customers know what's going on with the systems in their environment and how to take processes out. Well we can bring Pentaho in and tie in non-storage systems, non-IT systems like security, power and cooling, and really give a whole new dashboard. So that's a new entrance. And then the IT team can be an advocate to help you meet new business people. We also go in and speak to the business of course. We can do that through, we have IT governance go to markets, and data analytics go to market motion. And we're beginning to blend those better and better, but to be fair there are still some silos in how we talk to the customer depending on the audience. But what we see is if we can use data as a bridge, that's when the audiences sometimes meet each other, you know, for the first time it seems. >> Alright, so I love some of where this is going. Let's think down a level. You do the infrastructure solutions group, >> I do, yeah. >> So when you talk about, you know, CI and HCI and all those pieces. We're talking multi-cloud, a lot of this stuff, you know, what's the latest? What are the conversations you're having with customers about that? >> Yeah, very good. And really for us it's all been about agility. You know, data agility sure, but you can't make your data agile if you're infrastructure is very, you know, static. And so it doesn't take much to convince a customer we can build them trusted storage. That's like telling them the sky is blue, if they know Hitachi, they know this. What our conversations are now is about, what about the rest of your applications that surround this? On that trusted storage, how do we cloud enable it? What can we do there? On HCI and converge, obviously here at VMware, we partner deeply with VMware, so we are working with, for instance, how do we run some of our applications in the AWS VMware cloud, as well as be that HCI or that rack scale system on-site that manages it? So we're really having this agility conversation. How do we build the systems to be ready for this onslaught of data? Because it's great to have an IoT conversation, which remains of interest, but the reality is the systems folks need to be ready for that wave that's coming at them, and current process of just, I'm going to add controllers, I mean, that's not the way to think about it anymore. There's new types of systems that are making customer lives easier. >> Right, so from the VMware standpoint, I believe on-site is part of the partnership. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Anything in particular VMware specific. >> Yeah, across the portfolio. So of course on the storage we work with Vwalls and we do all the protection and integration with SRM and the like but, but really what's of course, hot, is hyper converge and we have our unified compute platform, HC line, that is based on Vsan. And that's doing very well. We actually had a session here with some great customers. So both Kanagra brands and MCL told their stories of picking Hitachi and they've seen some great results. So that business is doing very well. We've also introduced what we call unified compute platform RS for the rack-scale infrastructure. And we do a number of things with that. So we'll do bare metal systems for, you know, analytics workloads, but what's really got people excited is we sell a complete package with VMware cloud foundation. And that gets customers, not only ready to get up6 to hybrid cloud quickly on-site, but really have that hybrid ability. And so we're beginning to do things like certify core applications so they can test. We have a tech preview out on our Hitachi content platform, Object Store, it's actually in the app store for VMware's AWS cloud. Now, it's a tech preview from us because we know it works, but there's a scale thing. And you know Hitachi, right? It's going to work perfectly before we let our customers go crazy. So, we're really getting into those hybrid conversations and also enabling it as a service. I don't know if we talked about the as-a-service cloud that we have on offer too. >> But, no, please do, yeah. >> On top of all that technology, one of the hot offerings we have is called Hitachi Enterprise Cloud. And we have a VMware based offering, which has been doing very well and a much newer container-based platform. So on the VMware offering, really it's all of the VMware tools, but a customer never touches any of it. They don't touch our storage, the servers. It is an as-a-service model that we come in with services, help them bring in their applications, help build the service catalog for that customer and really, all they do is consume the service. So while the hardware might be on-site, it's really, they're largely indifferent to it. We do all the underlying capabilities, upgrades and such and they just provide out services to the business. So it's a really great option that people don't even know we offer. >> Yeah, well absolutely. You've had a number of conversations here at the show, it's, the customers have, the companies that have decades of appearance, you start with that base level of trust and therefore, you can help customers. You might not be the bleeding edge, but when you're there, customers know, oh wait, you're going to be around. I know that this thing's baked and ready when we get there. >> You know, the bleeding edge is fun, and there maybe some things we do, but I think it's fair enough that maybe that isn't always us. But I, but I think I have heard us called the adults in the room from time to time. And over at the booth we hear a lot of these. You know, we've been playing with this but it's going to get real. What do you guys do in this space? And while it is maybe some fun marketing being that bleeding edge, it is great to know that when it really matters, customers always trust us. And that's a huge vote of confidence. >> Alright, yep, Bob, really appreciate the update there. Absolutely, technologies like IoT, rapidly go from, this is super early but I need things we can trust. So absolutely, congrats on the progress. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to seeing, you know, how Hitachi and you know, the beard look next time we see you. >> Look forward to it. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage from VMworld 2018 soon. Thanks for watching theCube.