>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell World Technologies here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We have two guests on this segment. Both CUBE veterans, so. (laughs) We have Varun Chhabra. He is the VP, Product Marketing, Cloud Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, VP Solutions Product Marketing at VMware. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we just had the keynote address. We heard from Michael Dell, Sachin Adela, Pat Gelsinger. It's a real who's who of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What did we hear? What is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective, Varun? >> So, Rebecca, what we hear from customers again and again is it's a multicloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments. We saw Pat mention five on average, cloud architectures in customer environments. And what we keep hearing from them is there are operational silos that develop as part of the tool set, the SLAs that are different, the machine formats. All of these things just lead to a lot of operational silos and complexity. And what customers are overwhelmingly asking Dell EMC as well as VMware, is that how do we reduce this complexity? How do we be able to move work loads together? How do we manage all of this in a common framwork and reduce some of that complexity, so that really they can take advantage of the promise of multicloud. >> So Muneyb, theCUBE goes to, you know, all the big industry shows. >> Right. >> I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like Intel and NVIDIA up on stage with the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, Pat and Sanjay were, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage. We have the Google cloud event a couple of weeks ago. There was Sanjay up on stage. You come here, there's Sachin Adela up on stage. So, let's talk about that public cloud piece. You know, we know the relationship with AWS, VMware cloud on AWS sent ripples through the industry. And, you know, the Google cloud piece. So tell us what's new, anything different about the Microsoft piece when it comes to public cloud. And how does that fit in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify what Varun said, right. We think about customer's choice first. And really customer choice as you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers makes this choice of, I need to make this, you know, a multi-cloud world. Why are they going towards the multi-cloud world is because applications are going there. And really VMware's strategy has been to say how do we empower customers with that choice? Our, you know, AWS partnership is as strong as ever. We continue to innovate there. And that was our first kind of choice of platform. And Pat alluded to this on the stage. We have 4,000 cloud provider partners, right. And the 4,000 cloud provider partners we've built over the years, and that include, you know, not small names. They include IBM. Like you know they've got Rackspace, some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy has always been how do we take our stack and land it in as many public clouds as possible? So we took the first step of IBM, then about 4,000 other cloud providers, be it Rackspace, Fujitsu, Hitachi. Then came Amazon, Amazon being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today, we kind of further extend that with Microsoft, and you know a few weeks ago with Google. So this is really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi-cloud piece, it's app-driven. Right, you got two worlds. You got an existing application and you're looking to get some scale out of that existing application. And you're building a lot of native cloud, native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drill down one level deep. So if I'm going to ask your customer today, my understanding is the VMware's DDC Stack, what does that mean, what do I use, how is that look and feel compared, do I use the Microsoft system center, am I using vCenter, you know. >> Sure, this is really, again, an app-driven conversation, right. There were multiple announcements in here, just to unpack them. It was like, hey, we have the Dell Technologies cloud platform. The Dell Technologies cloud platform is powered by DELL EMC infrastructure and VMware Cloud Foundation on top, virtualizing your full compute network storage with vShere, vSAN, NSX, and management, right. And the second part was really we've got VMware Cloud on a Dell EMC. This is to bring cloud to the work loads, which did in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation of work loads back on the data center or the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers who have built native IP in the public cloud, be it Amazon, be it Azure, who want to now bring some of those work loads closer to the data center or the edge. Now this comes to, how do I take my Azure work loads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why is that a need? You know we have large customers, large customers, multi-national, they have 500,000 employees 90 locations worldwide who've built IP, or when I say IP applications natively in cloud. Suddenly for 500,000 employees in 90 locations, they're going ingress egress traffic to the cloud, public cloud, it's huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers, right? And this is where taking Azure work loads, bringing them on prem, closer, solves that big problem for them. Now, how do I take that work loads and bring them closer, is that's where we landed in the VMware on Dell EMC infrastructure because this brings you closer to the data center, gives me either low latency, data governance, and control, as well as flexibility to bring these work loads back on prem, right? So the two tangents that you're driving, both your cloud growth and back to the edge, the second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native work loads. You're able to bring them closer to your data center is purely the value proposition, right. >> Well, we heard so much about that on main stage this morning, about just how differently the modern workforce works, in terms of the number of devices they use, the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. Can you talk a little bit about the specifics in terms of customers you're working with, you don't need to name names, but just how you are enabling those people to be more productive, be more collaborative, and to get their jobs done. >> You know, we get feedback from customers in all industries, so Muneyb can share a few as well. We have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their work loads on VMware today, as have many more organizations and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or move it back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change their machine formats and just make it a little bit easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches in the cloud. But then they don't necessarily want to adopt a new machine format or a new standardized platform. That's really what the Azure announcement helps them do. Just like with Data Blue S can now move work loads seamlessly to Azure, use vCenter, use your other tools that you're familiar with today already to be able to provision your work loads. >> All right, Varun, wonder if we can drill into the stack a little bit here. I went to the Microsoft show last year and it was like, oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack, even if you look at the box, then it's very much the same. Underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of VxRail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you, I believe there was two pieces to this, there's the VCF on VxRail and then, you know, help explain some of the differences. >> Yeah, so for the Dell Technologies cloud platform announcement, which is, as you said, VxRail HCI infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundations tightly integrated. So that that the storage, compute, and networking capabilities off of VMware Cloud Foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage of within the HCI infrastructure. This is all about making things easier to consume, reducing the complexity for customers. When they get VxRail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use VMware Cloud Foundations to be able to manage and automate those work loads. So we're packaging the sup out of the box. So when customers get it, they have the cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated tightly. The engineering teams have actually worked together and then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those work loads to public cloud using the same tools, the same VMware Cloud Foundation tools. >> And you know, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while. I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has been, when, yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations in this hybrid cloud world. And what we really mean is that VMware Cloud Foundations stack. Right, so when we talk about VMC on AWS, is that Cloud Foundation stack running inside of Amazon. When we talk about, you know, our partnership with Azure is that VMware Cloud Foundation stack running on Azure. When we talk about these 4,000 partners, cloud certified, IBM, it is the Cloud Foundation stack. And the key components being the full stack, vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and there's a critical bar in Cloud Foundation call life cycle management. It's missed quite easily, right. The benefit of running a public cloud, they key three attributes you get is you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure as software, and the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the inter-operability between your compute, network, storage. And that is a huge deal for costumers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this inter-op. And VMware Cloud Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. That is key. >> Thank you for bringing that up, because, right, one of the big differences you talk about public cloud, go talk to your customer and say, hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running? And they'll laugh at you and say, like, well, Microsoft takes care of that for me. Well, when I differentiate and I say, Oh, okay, I want to run the same stack in my environment, how do I keep that up-to-date. We know that VMware customer, it's like, there's lot of incentives to get them there but oftentimes they're N minus one, two, or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it is more cloud-like and up-to-date? >> Yeah, absolutely, so there's two ways to do that. One of them is, because the VMware and Dell EMC teams are working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest version supported right out of the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's going to work on your hardware, or vice versa. So that's one level. And then with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, we're also providing the ability to basically have hands-off management and have that infrastructure run in your data center or your edge locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to Dell Technologies and to VMware, to be able to manage that solution for you. So really, as Muneyb said, bringing that public cloud experience to your on-premise locations as well. >> And I think that's one of the big differentiators that's going to come, right? People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but at the same time I want to rely on Dell and VMware to come and help us build it together, right. And the second part of the announcement was really, hey, VMware, Dell, on a Dell EMC, is that manage service offer. The demo you saw from June Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you can kind of click of a button roll it back into a data center as well as an edge. 'Cause you have really literally very little IT skill sets where in the edge environment, and as edge compute needs become more prolific with 5G, IoT devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model there as well. And that really the beauty of coming to VMware and Dell DMC, Dell Technologies' power, is to maintain that everywhere, right? >> I want to ask you about innovation. One of the things that was really striking during the keynote was the Bank of America executive saying I rely on Dell Technologies to be thinking about four steps ahead of me, even though I obviously have my own customers' needs that I need to be thinking of. I need Dell to be four steps ahead. So how are you, how are you getting in the heads of these obvious problems. >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers, right. As Dell Technologies, as VMware, we have the advantage of working with so many customers, like hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. We get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting-edge things that customers are looking for. And then we can now take that back to customers like Bank of America, who may have thought about certain scenarios that we would learn from, but they might not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their industry. So that drives a lot of our innovation. We are very proud about the fact that we are customer-focused. Our innovation is really driven by listening to customers and having smart people just work on those problems. >> And, you know, customer voice is a big deal. Customer choice, that's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key to, if you just look at VMware's innovation, we're already talking about this multi-cloud world, where it's like, hey, you've got work loads natively, so how do you manage those? We're already ahead in thinking about Kubernetes with acquisition of Heptio. And you think about it, we've done this innovation in the cloud space, established this hybrid credibility, and we've launched it with Dell Technology now. We're already ahead in this multi-cloud operational model, we're already ahead in this Kubernetes evolution. We'll bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice because at the end of the day, we're here to solve customer problems, right? >> I think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly be customer container based. >> Yeah, I'm just wondering if you can expand on a little bit. You know, one of the things I said, VMware is great, it really simplified the environment. I go back 15 years ago. One of the things it did is, let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth to begin with, my hardware's out of date, my operating system out of date, stick it in a VM and leave it for another five years. And the users of that are like, oh my gosh, I need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think that application is probably the crux of the business, right, we're-- >> It's a long pole in the tent for making change, but uh. >> And applications have evolved. This is actually the evolution journey of IT itself, is where there used to be support systems, now they become actually translate to business dollars, 'cause you know the first thing that your customer, often customer touches, is an application. And you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about these old applications and new applications, and they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications, where do they need to land, and then make the choice of what infrastructure is the best platform for it. So really you're going to flip the thing on, don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect apps to it, think app first and then make a choice on infrastructure based on your application need. And really, like you said, VMware kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and made sure that your VMs could from everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say, doesn't matter if it's a VM-based, it's a cloud native, we'll give you the same consistent infrastructure and operations. >> Okay, Varun, last thing, could you just tell us of the announcements that are made. What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely, so the Dell Technologies cloud platform that's based on VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation is available now as an integrated solution. The VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, the fully managed offer, is available in the second half of this year. It's in beta right now and, as you saw, we have really good feedback from our customers. And then I think the Azure VMware Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and Muneyb, congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here at Dell Technologies World 2019, wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, three days, tenth year of theCUBE at EMC and Dell World. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)