>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We're at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Mike Arterbury is here, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at DELLEMC, Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks. Peter, great to see you guys again. >> The Ecosystem is absolutely exploding. VMware is on fire, the data center is on fire, you know, the technology business is just, as Pat and Michael were saying this morning, this is going to be the most boring time ever, relative to the future. >> Right. >> What's happening in the Ecosystem, bring us up to date. >> Well I think as Michael and Pat have talked about this week, pretty proficiently, is the fact that technology transitions are all out in front of us right? It's a new world, the opportunity for both On-prem and Off-prem infrastructure is all out in front of the companies, the family of companies, and we're putting together some of the best offers, the best combinations of technology. The DELLEMC infrastructure, VMware, Infrastructure Management, and a host of ISVs that, whose workloads we combined with all of our infrastructure and platform technology, to drive customer outcomes. >> It, it-- >> Well actually, let me jump in on this real quick if I may. So one of the things about Ecosystems, is that there's a danger in the metaphor of the Ecosystem, because an Ecosystem evolves in response to a number of things. But Ecosystems in the Tech industry require care and feeding. They have to be set up, they have to, contracts have to be written, programs have to be put in place. This is really, really hard work, and it's undervalued by customers too much. So tell us, talk to us a little bit about the work that goes into forming an Ecosystem, sustaining an Ecosystem, and then creating new degrees of freedom, in some of these partnerships, as these new problems emerge, and these new types of complexities, and these interesting problems, get to be solved. >> Well, so I'll start at the start, which is, we've got the vestige of two great partnering companies, Dell classically, and EMC classically. EMC classically partnered much more deeply at a technology level, and Dell partnered at a go-to-market level right? They could monetize in a high-velocity way, these partnerships. When you put the two companies together, you get both the monetization and the technology, the deep technical alignment between the partner, and Dell, but you can start at the very simplest instantiation of a solution. A vSAN Ready Node, or a VxRail, a hyper-converged appliance. Basically we take VMware, goodness, in their storage, software-defined storage offer, and we combine that with a very tightly configured set of offers from our PowerEdge Server lineup, and our VxRail lineup, and we test the configurations, and we test them and tighten them, and test them and tighten them, so that we can give customers a very prescriptive understanding of what their outcome's going to be, when they deploy a hyper-converged offer, running on DELLEMC infrastructure. >> So for what that means, if I can, sorry Dave, what that means is that in your... So the partnership then becomes measured, not just in terms of whether the logos are together, but whether or not it's been engineered together. Whether it's been tested together-- >> Tested together, validated, you bet. >> Whether it's court regimes are put in place, and that's different from how we used to think about partnerships. >> Well, and that's a critical point, and Andy Jassy on stage this week, basically said, "Hey, this is not a Barney deal," Barney being I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. It's got substantive engineering going on, and so that's really what differentiates a core partnership that has teeth, versus one that's just what we call a Barney deal. But I wanted to ask you to go back to the sort of different cultural nuances that you mentioned, Dell, high-volume, high-velocity, EMC, very high-touch, bring those two worlds together. Are there inherent conflicts there, or were you able to, are you in the process of sort of re-engineering how you form those partnerships? >> You know, interestingly enough, in the 2000s, I managed the partnership between Dell and EMC from the Dell side, and we created a lot of good customer outcomes, by combining their storage platforms, our go-to-market prowess but, but it was all learnings that we could transform the business with, when we actually did a hard-core marriage between the two companies. So I would tell you then, it was two companies trying to play nice together. Now, it's one company, and we're playing really effectively together so-- >> Well, I tell ya something there, I talked to Chad about this at a show recently, and asked Michael Dell about it as well. If you look back, that was an epic partnership that you entered, and the outcomes were tremendous, and I argued that in fact, if Michael had had a mulligan, that he would've just bought EMC sooner, and drive the, drove that integration sooner, he essentially said, "Yeah I wish I could've "Bought EMC sooner." But I think that to your point, you had, you know a partnership, and now that you're one company, you can really drive some outcomes that you couldn't through you know, smaller tuck-in acquisitions are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, so what we have today, because of the combination, because of the marriage, is one portfolio. Compute, storage, networking, combined with the goodness from our family of offers, whether it's VMware or Pivotal, you heard a great announcement about Pivotal today, and what they're doing with Kubernetes. So we're going to be able to combine all of those things, the breadth of our portfolio, in a way that we never could before when it was a partnership based on siloed offerings. Now we can really build solutions, and we've got a whole family of products, which we call Ready Solutions, that combine cross business unit portfolios, and our family of products as well. >> So can you talk about the scope of some of the technology partnerships, maybe get specific on, on some of the ones that you're exited about, I mean, I know you're excited about them all but-- >> Sure, sure-- >> In the time we have maybe you could address it-- >> So principally, I would start with VMware. While VMware is a family member of ours, we still manage the relationship much like we would a partnership, where you have to play team ball, and drive your technologies together, and test them, and ruggedize them. But once you get past the infrastructural software of virtualization, customers don't stop at virtualization, they run workloads on that virtual infrastructure, so you look at SAP, and what we're doing with Hanna, and IoT, and Leonardo. You look at what we're doing frankly, with Microsoft, what we're doing with some of the public Cloud providers, in connecting both our infrastructure on premises, with the capabilities of the Public Cloud, in a way that leverages the most appropriate Cloud to run a particular piece of software, and a particular workload in. Those workloads are going to gravitate towards the best usage model for a customer, but we want to have a full compliment of offering so that we can offer the right Cloud for the right customer at the right time, and the right price. >> So I got two quick questions for you, and one draws off of what you just said, and that is the, I really like that notion of technology partnership, and go-to-market partnership, and the expertise at EMC, and the expertise at Dell. Customers want invention, which is the engineering element, the technology partnership. But they also want the innovation side, which is, it's been applied to my business, and I'm adopting it, and it's creating business value for me, and I'm finding, are you finding, that as Dell broadens it's, or DELLEMC broadens this notion that even the technology partnerships are becoming informed by the innovation, or the go-to-market partnerships, so that it's making the technology side that much more successful? >> Absolutely, so we want, every day in the hardware business you have to fight commoditization, you fight that by simply adding value right? It could be business model value, it could be technology value. We add innovation everywhere we can. So those combinations both of our technology, and our partners technology, but in a way that doesn't just combine it, it doesn't make it any easier to buy, it makes it easier to operate. It makes it easier to understand, it makes it easier for a seller to sell it, and a customer to buy it and consume it. So you'll hear Chad talk about an easy button a lot. That is our mission in solutions, is to combine those things in a way that makes it easy for everyone. >> So here's the second question I have. And it's going to be a challenge out to you, because increasingly as companies become more digital businesses, and recognize the role that these technologies play in driving their business models and their go forward, they are struggling with this question of partnership. They are still driving with procurement, driving with taking cost out, et cetera, when in fact, they have to find ways to drive with partnership and strategy, and whatnot. What can DELLEMC do to train this industry about how to do partnership better? >> Well, I think you demonstrate the value that you create for a customer, for a partner, for a seller in these combinations. If you can show that you create real value through your innovation, through your great partnering, then that's value that any one of those constituents can align to. You create value, you let them harvest that value, and they will come back to you again, and again, and again. >> So we have to go Mike, but last question is, how do you see, or do you see your Ecosystem of technology partners sort of reforming, not only to the new DELLEMC, but also to this new Cloud reality, that I'm not going to put everything in the Cloud, I'm going to bring the Cloud model to my data? >> Right, I think VMware's going to play a pivotal role in that right, because they are the-- >> Unintended right? >> They are unintended. They are the kings of workload management today, and what customers really want, from the Public Cloud, or the Private Cloud, is a way to move those virtual machines around in a very seamless way. So at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where you operate that workload, you're going to operate it in the location that it best serves your mission as a customer. And so I think they're going to play a very instrumental role in how we do that going forward. >> Mike Arterbury, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. But really Peter, to your point, this is hard work, and customers generally undervalue it, but they expect it, and it adds a lot of value, so thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. >> Thank you guys. >> Your welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, we're going wall to wall, this is day two, two sets here at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and WikiBond. We'll be back, right after this short break. (alternative music)