>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Howdy, y'all Welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Day one of pure accelerate 19 from Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host is Day Volonte. We got a couple of gentlemen here chatting with us. Next, we've got one of our alumni. Mike Bundy's back head of Cisco Worldwide alliances for appear. Mike. Welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Sporting the very dapper >> It's not ours today, but it's enough. >> I like it. Very subtle on we've got Andrew Tenant joining us for the first time Senior manager Worldwide sales at Cisco Andrew, Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we know we've had lots of conversations with Cisco and Cure Isis. Go live. Just a few months ago, Mike was on with this bright orange blazer. You guys have been partners for about four years now, Mike, let's start with you and talk about the evolution of that partnership from Bogota Market. A field A sales perspective, right? Overall partnership. How are things going? >> Well, things were great from a mo mentum perspective. We're we're on track to eclipse You know, I'm not supposed talk about a lot of numbers, but in the next year we will eclipse together a billion dollar run rate >> with partnership, which is tremendous milestone >> in a 4 to 5 year regulations. So things were, well, you know, it started from the field and what customers were requiring. And now, in the last, um, year, we've we've added about six new CDs were up to 22 we have three in the queue between now and the calendar year. So in terms of the growth, the product development and momentum, it's it's tremendous. And what we'll talk about today will be kind of one of the next generations and errors that that will hit on regarding this. >> And you guys were also we had a conversation a little bit ago with with Nathan Hall. Really, this partnership with Cisco and Pure is now getting started in the field, as you were talking about, but it's all the way down into the engineering level in terms of being very pervasive throughout. You guys have really achieve that. Yes, >> Yeah, top to bottom, right From From that field, engagement began. It was watching our customers embrace purest innovation. Right? And everywhere you turned pure was showing up, and it was it was really the field. Say, Hey, we got to get on board with this. And Tim Shanahan, who's part of our correctional organization on the descent aside, said, Hey, this is a big deal. We need to get in front of this thing. So that's really you. Mention where it started. And now we're doing everything from integrating products, right, integrating management tools to try to bring that together for our customers. And it's It's an awesome partnership. >> Absolutely. So where's the product focus. Where do we start? >> Yes, so you joked, right? Fibre channel. I think I remember Fibre Channel from many years ago. It Cisco, and then you look back and suddenly it's not dead, right? The truth is, five channels the best protocol for mission critical storage traffic that's ever been built. It's probably best critical out there for that. It's not sexy, though, right, so we can't took our eye off the ball at Cisco. But as we now develop these next generation storage technologies, there's never been a more important time to bring that switching fabric into play right It's absolutely critical that we have the right tools to accomplish what our customers trying to deliver from applications standpoint. So the agility, the visibility, just the overall performance is more important today. That was back in sort of that the heyday of fibre channel, if you will. Right? So the partnership that we're working on right now is making sure that we're we're maximizing the outcome of these investments. Custer's making with all of yours storage offerings, leveraging a sand infrastructure that's compatible with it and really gonna make it sing. >> And you're right and you go back 10 plus years and it was a vice scuzzy was coming in, but had some f f C bigots is that I will never hang on to win the NFC. Oh, we now you got N v m e over fabric. We'll talk about that. But so from pure perspective, you have always had to pay attention to that segment of the market. Guys went hard after the high end. Of'em sees business, which was heavy fiber channel, absolutely early days. >> Yeah, I mean four out of five of our razor attached fibre channel to a customer's environment. It is core to what we do. And we're excited about the resell opportunity that we just started with pure because, you know, Andrew and I joke last week, but we put pen to paper in terms of we believe our our introduction of this is a re silk and help them grow their sand business by 35 40%. And that's the kind of disruption that we're seeing with our A raise in the market. And we think because of how we're evolving customers to modernize those networks, that we can drag the Sisko Fibre Channel business right along with it. >> This is a sorry Mike. This is a re sell pure reselling wth the MDS product line. How is you the pure Channel? Responding to this news? >> They love it because it's it's a new buying center, you know that they're getting to talk to Ah, and it helps us, you know, establish Maur, you know, understanding the customers, whole business, not just from a storage perspective. So >> So how was envy? Emmy changing landscape? What do you guys seeing there? I mean, you guys, I think the first another first Charlie didn't mention it today on stage, So money first. It's hard to keep track of. But how is that affecting? You know what's going on in the field? >> Yeah. So I mean, again, it's the timing of this generational shift to next. Gen. Sarge, envy me being probably the most critical of that. If we look at what happened with all flash A raise, for example, all of those ended up on critical mission critical workloads and all ended up on fibre Channel 80. 85% of those end up on that legacy technology because it was so capable of getting the job done. Envy me is gonna take us another leap forward so customers will be challenged toe have something that lives both in the what they have today and bridges them to that future proof state. Right? So it's absolutely critical that you have tools that are gonna let you adopt envy me as it makes sense on carry it operationally alongside the same modality that you had for those workloads in the past, right? That's the key. Is that the folks we're gonna own this stuff going forward to the ones who own it now, right? Just with maybe older technology >> and the business impact is what you could do more with less performance, lower costs, more >> last performance, visibility right so you can help. Troubleshoot way had a situation not that long ago where a customer had Honore, not it was a competitive ray, right? It was getting hammered and it was locking up. And when they looked at the the forensics coming off, the rate said they had 4000 I ops off of that array. A very nominal amount. It should have been the problem. It shifted the focus elsewhere. Well, using some of the telemetry built into the MPs platform, it was obvious that there were 25,000 I ops hitting that array because VM, where was doing a lot of command control traffic to the array. So having that visibility at the's scales and speeds, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't see what's going on. You could be flying blind and struggling and everybody loses there. So >> you know we're excited about this because we don't want to bring our rays into an environment that's not suited for high end performance and reliability, cause that's what we've kind of made our brand on when it comes to customer networks, especially with the X 60 and nineties that we launched the year ago. They're all envy me ready. So we want to make sure that, as we did, ploy that that the entire infrastructure's ready and Cisco, in my opinion, has the best. Every product is 64 gig capable. It's envy me today. And so we're ready, you know, envy me, you know, in the end, if you will. So when when the host are ready to take advantage of this full network and full storage system, we're ready. Um, an Andrew also mentioned analytics. So, you know, >> we we >> extract ourselves on the analytics capabilities of our system as it works today with after one and so that allows us to, you know, very quickly using machine learning solve most of our customers problems. In fact, we open about 85% of our own customers tak cases for them because we predict when things were going to get rough and bumpy. So as we extend and bridge that together with what Cisco has and their Sandwich Analytics capability, it's gonna make the experience way different than it would be on a competitive sand fabric and a competitive storage array, whether it's flash or not. So that's that's what we're doing together, which makes fiber Channel better and more unique than it has been in the past. >> In terms of adoption. You mentioned when the host guys already, What's the blocker? There's just silicon. Is it just, >> you know, you could You could take Cisco's example. You know, they're they're looking at the new memory technology. And how do they apply that to the interface adapter? And how do you handle that situation? So, you know, as they evolve their next platform, it will be pervasive in that. And I'm sure that the other you know, host providers are gonna be doing >> standards standards. Low hanging fruit was envy me over converge Ethernet, right, because that was kind of the first place to start. But reality is weaken were the only vendor who can provide both of those in the Cisco side. Right. So we have the same tooling on the same, actually administrative tooling on on either. Right. So that's ah, terrific. >> And it's not just the infrastructure from the hostess, the operating system as well. So you know Lennox can take advantage of it in a different way. So, you know, we're seeing most of our deployments today, our fibre channel over Ethernet, because the the customer base that air deploying that are purely a Linux based environment. So they're able to do that. So, as you know, not all of our enterprising and commercial customers run that environment. So it's It's a little bit of the technology. It's a little bit of the Intel cycle. It's a little bit of the operating system, but the point is, we're ready. And there's a long, long road map. You know, for customers if we go this route, >> when should customers start thinking about this terms >> immediately? Right? Ultimately, it's not a question of if it's a question of when, but if they're, if they're getting things ready now, if you're making investment today, you can make an investment today that accommodates what you're doing today. Like back in the day. If we were selling a storage platform, the sandwich is sort of this necessary thing behind the scenes. That wasn't necessarily you could actually let it sit there for a couple of generations of the storage it was supporting. That's no longer going to be the case right, because, quite simply, the evolution on the storage front. And it's so much faster that you need to make sure the thing you're plugging it into. That's a simple question for any customer there. What'd you plugging this into right? Because at the end of the day, if it's just that that old san you have sitting around it may or may not be capable. Regardless of Endor, right, it's it's gonna actually diminished value you get in the time value of that investment you've made in this incredible platform. >> So where are you having these customer conversations that we talk about the joint go to market in the field? You know, it's It's not just about fibre channel and speed and storage, these air business critical work loads that are being protected and run and access to be able to extract all these insights. When you're talking with customers, where are you? You're not at the storage. I've been level. I imagine this is a much more business intensive conversation. It's a >> great question. Go ahead. >> So I think you know people that are driving the cloud platform strategy for the infrastructure. They obviously need to understand how. How does this work in a hybrid cloud or multi cloud environment? Then you've got, you know, the people that are developing the mission Mission critical business APS. Whether that's you know, Oracle s a p et cetera, et cetera. But it's also the non traditional business APS that are coming to play things that leverage stores that are file or object oriented, or kubernetes or things like that. It's so you're having discussions with the teams that are deploying the apse for the business and that will drive and dictate the requirements. Is that you know, we're trying to help the infrastructure on the cloud infrastructure teams adapt to >> multi cloud piece gets interesting here, right? Because us now talk about building massively scalable distributed systems, and you're not gonna be able to You don't want to necessarily ship all your data around, but you want to ship the metadata and be smart enough to know where the data is so you can go ship to compute right to the data, right? And I >> think that that's another interesting thing. And a positive aspect of leveraging some things we've already done with Cisco is you know they have the concept of a C I anywhere. No, you know, just like we're doing with Cloud Block store of extending that storage capability into the cloud. Cisco has done the same with a C I. So it's not just it's not sure, making sure the workload in the data payload our mobile, but also the application. And that's, you know, yes, that that may not be the case today for Fibre Channel, but the technology is there if the customer demands it. So that's 60% of Cisco's revenue in the data center comes from his networking core. That's what we're more excited about. The next generation's partnership is we feel like we've done a good job and built momentum with the computer part of their business, and I think as we evolve into this part of the business, it's gonna It's gonna be better for customers. In the end, >> it's either today, customers gonna spend more time operating this than anything, right, and really, that's all about visibility. Meantime, the resolution just how quickly they can make sure that those this thing's running and and as proactively get in front of congestion and issues at a time if they can. So it's Ah, it's a complimentary hardware software problem solved. You have to be able to do things at extremely high rates of speed with visibility I've never seen before. So analytics built into a six incredibly important stuff to get that streaming right out of the chip so you could tell what's going on at any level of the stack. Where is Like I said today, we've seen many cases now where their challenges in the network and in the sand and on the array and everyone's blind to it because our >> engineers love it because the monitoring and the scoping capability that were required, a lot of sand fabrics to deploy would require extra tools. Extra tap kits Cisco has at built in the A six so literally. It's just enable that with software. And you can do all the diagnostics you ever wanted to do at the at the wire and the fiber level, >> as opposed to a discreet probe. Exactly a disruptive drives the >> costs way out. The complexity reduces risk troubleshooting floor space, you know, the whole you know >> that's big time >> based. So today there's an issue. Last night Hey, Mike, what happened last night? I know. Let me know. That happens again. That's pretty much the ticket Close, right? We could actually go back in time now kind of a DVR and actually see now for the first time in a sand fabric what's actually happening and go back and reconstruct it to figure out how we proactively prevent it going on from the next time. So >> so, Mike, Last question. We're out of time. But last question for you. Everybody says future proof. Pardon? Everybody says future proved how are is pure delivering that with Cisco. What is it gonna mean to that business leader that I have an infrastructure in place that will truly be the food? Your proof? >> Good question. So you know, it's evergreen is the term that pure uses for you know what we do. So you never buy the same storage twice, right? And if you look at the platform that Cisco has for MDS, it is clearly capable to 400 gig capability. And today most networks are purchased for 30 to get capable with 16 gig optics, so they have 32 64. There's a long way to go here so the platform and their innovation will continue this to be, you know, a future proof network that marries up with our evergreen story. So we were excited We wouldn't get in this relationship if we felt that it was not gonna provide the same level of benefits and standard that we have for our own customers. So >> correct. Mike Andrew. Thank you for joining David me on the Q. But way. Look forward to hearing what happens in your five of the pure Cisco relationship. I know. We'll probably stay tuned. I know we'll see you again. Thank you for your time. Thanks for David. Dante. I Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from pure accelerate 19.

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)

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