>> Commentator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live covering VMWorld 2017, day two of coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with my co host Stu Miniman, we've had a great morning, main stage, Michael Dell, Patt Gelsinger, Google, et cetera. We're excited to be joined by Doctor Sadir, Sadir is kind of awesome, the CTO of Dell EMC, Stewart, welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you here, so you were an EMC guy, we talked about that. When people think of Dell, they think of, well maybe used to, PCs, when they think of EMC they think of storage arrays, talk to us about, you know, one year post combination almost, how has your customers' perception changed, what have you heard in the last year? >> Sure yeah, it's been a pretty dramatic change, I would say in the sense of about a year ago when the deal was, or actually two years ago when the deal was first announced that it would be happening there was a lot of skepticism in the customer base obviously around A, what does this mean, how's it going to come together? I think a year into it people started to see some initial signs of better together. And now a year later we're seeing dramatic, dramatic positive energy and feedback from customer base on how, when they're actually seeing the products and solutions coming together in a combined solution I think that's, I mean we used to joke in the old days where our products, you know, EMC's got our portfolio, and our products would only come together on the PO, that was the common joke inside. And I think that perception is changing quite a lot now. >> So bring us into the storage group, because it was one that you know, if you look there were a lot of places where there were no overlaps. Storage, there was a long partnership between Dell and EMC then Dell had acquired a couple of companies, EMC, as you said already had a very large portfolio so bring us inside a little bit, especially kind of with your, you know, your CTO, your technologist. What are those lenses you look through and where are we into, you know, things coming together soon? >> Sure, I think it's a great question, I know and thank you because one of the things that people miss is that the portfolio strategy is a conscious strategy, right? It is really hard to cover the entire spectrum of work loads, use cases with a single widget, if you will. And a lot of our competitors will try to convince customers of that and they're finding that out themselves that it's really hard to cover that gamut so I think fundamentally, first and foremost the portfolio strategy is very important now that said, it is acknowledged and I'll admit that it is perhaps more in the portfolio right now than perhaps is needed. And so that in fact is one of our first, one of our big priorities for this year is to simplify the portfolio because it's confusing for our customers and so we're definitely working towards that. You'll see that roll out starting next year. And then over the next few years. >> So on that front, and sort of maybe waiting things out to simplify, from an innovation perspective Michael Dell also talked on main stage this morning about the importance of customer innervation but I'd love to understand how if you can take us kind of more through that, how is Dell EMC innovating internally so that you can be leaders in innovation-- >> Yeah, that's a great question, it's a great question because you know when you have a multi billion dollar business everybody assumes it's really really hard to innovate and it is, there's no question because you've got a big business to sustain. Now but the, I completely agree with Michael, what he said on stage and what he said to us privately which is in fact Dick Egan used to say the same thing. Founder of EMC he was, if there's one thing that you should be comfortable with, it's change and because this industry is changing like crazy, and I've been in the industry now for what, coming up on 20 years. Seen a lot, you know from FDDI to wherever you're at today. And I'm still constantly amazed by how much change is going on even now. So we do believe in change, we believe in actually innovating constantly, and Jeff Budrow, one of my manager he's a big believer in change as well, we're working on a lump number of innovations internally, organic innovations, big innovations. I can't tell you much about that today but we'll hopefully as we get closer to the next year we'll be able to talk more about it. That said, we're innovating on our existing products as well, we've refreshed our entire portfolio at Dell EMC World earlier this year. At VMWorld just now we announced our availability of our X2 platform which is the next generation of the XGMIL platform, so we're constantly innovating and as a result it's more of a rolling thunder as opposed to like a big bang. >> So I kind of look at it, there's kind of two ways that things are changing along storage. Number one there's kind of the underneath pieces, so you talked about going from FDDI, you know when we saw from disk to flash for EMC was you know, early on that that kind of reemergence of flash after a couple of decades of it being you know, not used for awhile. We've got things like NVME, NVME over fabric coming out so we're going to start there, maybe by one o'clock after there's kind of the operating model on how we change things because we've converged and cloud and all those but on some of those underlying pieces which I know keep the storage people kind of really engaged, you know where are we today with some of those transitions, what are some of the things that you're looking at over the next kind of 12, 24, 36 months? >> Terrific, I mean I see actually three vectors of change impacting the storage business and impacting us. One is the media like you said, there's NVME and we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's actually a whole bunch of stuff beyond NVME right, storage class memory, persistent memory coming out. Second set of things is consumption models, what we call consumption model round, whether it's a cloud consumption model, where if you think of cloud actually more as a consumption model as opposed to a destination. And software defined is a big thing, I think that's going to dramatically change the game, especially when you combine it with things like persistent memory. And then the third thing I think is the new wave of applications as well, that's generating a whole new class of data and adds a whole new set of requirements. For example, real time streaming analytics, right, that changes the, you can't deal with block and file and object in those worlds, you're dealing with new semantics. So those are some of the vectors that we're looking at in terms of. >> So let's start with kind of the low level, the media, you know some of those things right, what is data, what is memory, you know all those things blurring. Where you know, I hear, there seems to be so many people NVME, NVME over fabrics seems to be-- >> Hey look, so let me hit that off right in front. Right so it was 10 years ago that Dell and EMC independently before obviously we were one company actually co founded the contortion that invented NVME so we saw the meat of this technology, the limitations of SAS and SATA 10 years ago, we saw this coming. We helped drive the standards including NVME over fabric standard, and that's like, well before some of these companies that are claiming NVME today weren't actually even born. So NVME to me is a journey, right there's the there's the bus, changing from the SAS bus to the NVME bus. That's one part, then there's the media that stands behind them all, the NVME transport. Things like 3D cross point that are starting to come out, and then even beyond that you get to really persistent memory type of applications. So we see this as a journey, we're going to be rolling our NVME in all our products across the entire portfolio starting this year, later this year. For first, today scale IO already supports NVME devices in 14G, so we're going to, you're going to see that. >> Yeah, I guess my follow up, just to dig in a little deeper because when we got the CTO you've got to dig down. There were some, when flash came out, they were like oh yeah, whatever, I'm going to throw a couple of percentage in, well we saw flash greatly change architectures, it changed some of those application considerations-- >> Absolutely. >> Especially you know, Wikibon's David Floyer has been beating on let's really look at databases, let's do this. NVME, is it an extension and kind of evolution or will this be a similar revolution to what we saw with flash? >> I think it's a similar revolution. It's a similar but perhaps less of a quantum leap, I would say. And the reason is because you're going from like 10s of milliseconds or milliseconds of latency with spinning media to sub millisecond with flash. Now you're going from sub millisecond to sub sub millisecond but you know, it's getting diminishing. I think where you're going to see a lot of dramatic is as it's more on the latency as you get as the applications get closer and closer to the servers. Right so I think you're going to see a lot of pretty dramatic change in that space. >> Speaking of change and revolution, the three vectors that you talked about, media, consumption models, this new wave of applications, how, ST to you are you seeing the buyers' journey change as a result of these vectors? >> So that's actually part two of the question that Stu was just asking is while I agree that it's going to be a revolution, what I've also seen in 20 years is that these things don't happen instantly, yes flash was a big change. But even today, over 40, 40, 50% of our revenue still comes from hybrid systems. Mixed flash and, so these things take time, right? So customers are taking leaps I would say I'm seeing a spread of the early adopters and, we're probably in the big medium, in the big, the bell curve right now and then there's some laggards as well that are still buying you know, pure HDD only systems. >> Do you see a difference there, sorry, with respect to industries, maybe healthcare or financial services that are early adopters? >> Definitely, I think, there's industries and there's also size of customer, right, the bigger the customer the more, eager we see they are in doing this digital transformation so we're seeing a lot of them going all in on software defined, right, so we're definitely seeing that shift from buying purpose build arrays to software defined. Now it's not going to be instantaneous, again it's going to be over many years, similarly in the mid range and below we're seeing a shift from, modular systems to hyper converged systems as well. So we're seeing that as well, we're seeing a lot of shift from purely on prem to a hybrid solution of on prem plus cloud, so all of our products are now attaching to the cloud as well. So we're definitely seeing all of these transitions. >> When it comes to the cloud native piece, there are some that have said well, it's kind of could be a kind of completely different way of doing things, really focused on the developers and won't that just live in the public cloud, or you know will SAS applications you know, be where a lot of those live, so you know what do you say to the, you've improved media, you've improved consumption models but, maybe they're just, it's easier for me not to own some of these pieces, one of the company, small companies, I don't want to deal with infrastructure at all, let me, you know, let me yeah-- >> Yeah that's another great, great question. What we are seeing I would say is definitely some of that. Especially as you said in the smaller companies it's easy for them to get started, right, with minimal initial expenses they can get started in the public cloud so we definitely see that. But as you get larger, what we're seeing is the economics of running everything in the cloud on a sustained basis, just don't work out, it's much more cost effective to run things on ground, so I think for cost reasons when you're running over a sustained operations as well as for security reasons, we're still seeing a lot of hesitation and especially as you get to the higher end of the market, people are concerned especially with all the breaches and things like that, that they're concerned about where their assets are. So we actually at Dell Technologies I would say, and Dell EMC in particular, we're seeing a pretty significant opportunity popping up where customers want to run on prem data centers just like the cloud. And that's where things like software defined storage become really important because hey, the public clouds are running all the software defined, that's their, one of the secrets to their agility and speed. Why can't we have that prem and we actually absolutely see that in fact today's announcement of PKS is right on the money for that. >> So we're here at VMWorld, with respect to that, seeing more customers want to bring things on prem maybe kind of the true private cloud that Wikibon's been talking about. What are you guys doing now with VM or to align that, we've heard a number of things about, yesterday with AWS you mentioned Pivotal today, Google, what's going on today with Dell EMC and WM Ware to help customers really build a solid on prem solution? >> Yeah so I think Pivotal is certainly a key piece of that, Pivotal, VM Ware, so the whole VM Ware cloud foundation, cloud suite is a key piece of that. The integration with PCF is actually going to be very key because what customers need, especially the traditional customers, if you will, who don't quite have the expertise yet to build cloud native applications, they need a platform, not just an infrastructure. So I think that's why Pivotal is very important. And we're working very closely with, as Dell EMC we're working closely with both of those partners in delivering those solutions, VX Rail is a good example of that. VX Rail, VX Rack are good examples of the two technologies coming together. And so those are the kinds of things, I think that's where software defined storage, you'll see a lot more integration between Dell EMC's software defined portfolio, with the VM Ware and Pivotal ecosystems. >> So the storage group you've talked about you have a lot of options, we've been talking about software defined storage, how that you know is driving a lot of the change there, gives a lot of flexibility there. How does the storage team look at things like VMAX and Extreme IO compared to the software defined storage these days? >> Yeah so I think we, I presume everybody's seen the famous chart where there's the traditional infrastructure and then there's the cloud native, the new world. And that's a transition that's going to happen and we think it's going to be a really long transition, right. Mainframes are not dead, right, so they're still alive. And there's a reason, because people are running their absolute mission critical application on those infrastructures so we think there's definitely going to be a place for both, and it isn't all or nothing. And that's, I think, going back to innovation, your question about it, where is Dell EMC innovating, we're the only company that's actually embracing these changes, this transition to software defined, right? Where with products like ECS and Scale IO and so on and so forth, so we see that the transitions will happen slowly but there's going to be a lot of opportunity for highly reliable, you know, six, seven, nines reliable infrastructure based on purpose built infrastructure. >> Yeah, it definitely matches a lot of as you said the true private cloud report that we have on Wikibon. >> Well thank you so much, Sadir, for joining us on The Cube, we now bring you into The Cube alumni, the illustrious Cube alumni category. >> Glad to be here. >> Lisa: And thank you for sharing your insights as CTO on what you're doing with customers and innovation. >> Sadir: Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching, I'm Lisa Martin. From my cohost Stu Miniman we are live covering day two of VM World 2017 from Las Vegas, stick around, we will be right back. (upbeat music)