>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE two stages, three days of coverage, our tenth year here at the VMworld show. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for this segment is Bobby Allan. And welcome back, two of our CUBE alumni. >> How are you? >> As I said back in 2010 we didn't even know what a CUBE alumni was. People were trying to figure out what we're doing but now we have thousands of them and both of these gentlemen have been on the program, a few times. >> Thanks for having us back. >> You're welcome. So, first, over we have Ajay Patel, who I believe was doing another filming evening with our crew-- >> Absolutely >> Earlier today. >> The Accenture Innovation Center. >> Ah, excellent. Beautiful building Accenture has here in San Francisco. >> Ajay: Beautiful (mumbles) >> One of the other benefits of being back in San Francisco is we brought in people and it's really easy to get in and out and do other things in the Valley. But Ajay is the senior vice president and general manager of the cloud provider software business unit inside VMware. And one of his partners is Rackspace. We have Peter FitzGibbon who is the vice president of Product Alliances, with for mentioned Rackspace. >> Yeah, super to be back in San Francisco. It's a great change from Vegas. >> Yeah, you know, there is some debate in the community of course it's a little more expensive here in San Francisco and there are other logistic challenges. We're excited to be back here and yeah, really excited to be talking with both of you. Peter, let's start, you know Rackspace has had a long, long partnership with VMware. When I remember back to like VMware Environments Hosted it's like, Rackspace was the one with the lion's share in that market. And, you know, Rackspace has gone through a lot of changes in the last 10 years that we've been doing this coverage. When I think about multi cloud, all of these environments you've got a nice perspective on this and lots of customers you've worked with. So, give us the update on what you're hearing from customers and your relationship with VMware. >> Yeah, so, 20-year history with VMware that we're very proud of. I would say it's almost being re-birthed in the last two years though. Two years ago, we were one of the first VMware Cloud Verified partners. We launched our VMware Cloud VMware Cloud Foundation Private Cloud. We added that about six months later in customer data centers. We're now one of the major partners of VMware Cloud AWS >> Ajay: VMware Cloud AWS yep. >> And that's one of the areas that we're continuing to expand upon. We announced some new services this week, specifically around VMware Cloud AWS or support of HDX, both for migrations for ongoing support as well as a number of, what we call Rackspace service blocks. Which are additional manage services that we are applying, specifically for VMware Cloud and AWS. So, exciting times at Rackspace and VMware continues to be a look, a major part of our portfolio. >> Ajay: And thank you for all the support, Peter. >> Yeah, so Ajay, bring us up to speed of what's happening in your space you know, a lot of attention gets paid, you know Every time, you know, I saw Sanjay Poon, up on stage at the Goolge clould event, and of course the AWS partnership has been one of the biggest stories in all of tech, for the last couple of years. And that's been extending to, you know first it was like, wait, you know Rackspace has data centers and many of your other partners have data centers, but how did these all, play together and how does the VMware software pull them all together. >> So Stu, I think, you and I have been talking about this world of hybrid multi and we've been arguing, whether it's just a transitionary stage, or here to stay. Hopefully that debate's over, right? Hybrid's a new reality, multi cloud's a new reality and we talk about these hyper scales but you know, Rackspace and many of my VCP partners they've been longstanding in this journey with us. I don't know if you caught Pat's keynote? We demonstrated, that we have over 10 000 data centers through our VCPP network and Rackspace being one of our top 10 partners. So you start, to start seeing this mix of VMware everywhere. Whether it's trough our service provider cloud the customer manage cloud or even a hyper scale VMware cloud. You now have the ubiquitous VMware infrastructure to play with. >> At some point it's just cloud. (chattering) >> That is a great point, when I talk to customers most of them, they have a cloud strategy it's usually not a hybrid or a multi or all these things. Here's the nuance I want to, you know, ask for a second then I definitely want Bobby to jump in with what he's been talking to customers about. You know, hybrid cloud is a reality because customers have their own data centers and they have public cloud. The ideal of multi cloud, customers have multiple clouds, but, you know, one of the definitions I put out there is, multi cloud exists when the multi cloud solution is more valuable than the sum of the pieces. And I'm not sure that we're quite there yet. I think we're starting to move down that path. But what are you both seeing? And does that resonate with what you see today? >> Yeah like, all of our customers have workloads in multiple locations and trying to provide the assessments of where to put the right workloads at the right time is one of the key values that we hold dear. And before we ever talk about where we're going to but a workload we assess whether, what our clients environments is and determine, maybe this is an AWS workload maybe this is a WMS workload maybe this workload really belongs in the data center for, due to laws of the lands laws of gravity and physics. >> And I think, what's happening, really is any application, typically choosing a platform or the cloud service that's driving the decision. Collectively what ends up happening because of that, you are in multiple clouds. So, I think what's it's a result of the reality that applications are driving location and platform choices and the way to drive consistency is trying to pick a few common things whether it's kubernetes as a platform or VMware, right? Those are a way to, kind of, unify these desperate choices that are made individually. That are collectively making each of our customers multi cloud, right? >> Ajay, I want to piggyback on that because you talked about the applications driving a lot of the choices, when applications teams in my experience are, kind of, making the choices they don't care about a centralized strategy and obviously, this very powerful partnership can support multiple places and ways around your workloads. How do you lead the witness, a little bit towards simplification and just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. >> Yes, so I think what's happening from our perspective is depending on which side of the IT house you're at if you're part of the core IT that's running and maintaining mission critical systems you're really looking for something that's reliable, performance scalable, secure. And you, maybe, looking at a hardware refresher looking at your data center strategy and you're looking to migrate that workload. You're not really looking to re-change the app just because it's cool. >> Bobby: Right. >> If you're part of digital transformation effort you're looking to say, okay how do I get something out there quickly? >> Bobby: Right. >> How do I integrate on the average my data and application assets while leveraging cloud services? >> Bobby: Right. So, we're seeing this tension in some ways where the, kind of, net new is really pushing the envelope of cloud with self service elasticity, new capability while as the old guard is like I got to keep my running business, running keep it secure. And how do you bridge these two worlds and bring them together? We call it DevOps and, you know, ITA and the traditional, kind of new developer. Reality is, you're trying to bring the two worlds on a common platform. Whether it's VM's or containers and so the exciting part for us is, how do we unify? How do we deliver this experience and give them the choice, where it makes more sense. And blur the lines between public and private. Those are just locations and makes more sense for your customer or your application that you can drive. >> Bobby: Right, excellent. >> We find ourselves in those conversations, all the time trying to bridge two sides of the equation at a customer and trying to get them together on a uniformed strategy and weighing the pros and cons of different locations or different workloads. So, it's not easy, it's not a challenge of course. >> Peter, I'd love you to bring us inside some of those VMware on AWS customers because, you know, some of the first customers I talked to, it was, you know, I'm a VMware shop and there's a part of your group that's like oh my gosh, I can't change and this was a driver saying hey, you don't need to, we can bring you along. But, the value, once again needs to be Oh hey, I need to do some innovative things I want to be able to access some of those cool amazing services that, you know everybody is providing on a daily basis. So, you know, are you seeing that progression are there any interesting use cases that are coming out? >> Progression is the word, we could call it progressive transformation inside Rackspace. Like, you're a VMware customer let's bring you ion the journey towards public cloud. And let's help you leverage those address services. So, we find ourselves in a great position where a very large number of engineers, that support our native AWS workloads, we've brought those two groups together from our VMware expertise and address expertise. So when a customer lands on a VMware address I consider it a failure, if they haven't transformed part of the application in three months. If they're not really consuming those native AWS services. And that's what we really try inject. It's like, get our AWS engineers looking at those workloads let's start consuming those native services and that's what we're finding really exciting about how customers are starting to adopt and starting to plug and play into some of those services. >> Oh I look at it, as you know, you'll see a team Sanjay called it M&MS, migrate and modernize but a part of the migrate is often modernize your infrastructure first by putting on a modern cloud platform. And then modernize your application using cloud services. How it says, it's M-M and M, right, to follow through because it's not just about lifting and shifting keeping the old crap as it is. You got to really start to look at how do you drive innovation drive your Cube to a better place. So that you can operate it more affectively and then modernize for application results. And your service blocks, are really catered to helping that customers. So you can talk a little bit about how they're building the services that compliment our offer. >> Yeah, so our service blocks is... In the past, we offered them one big block manage service to a customer. We realized, let's decompose that and offer the customer what they need at a specific point in time. So we, think about Lego blocks, where at some point you may need, just some support or at some point you might need some architectural services and design and other times you might say cost optimization. That sort of stuff. So over time, we're adding on these Lego blocks if you will, to add a customer, to give them what they need at the point they need it, and not more. So, it's an exciting concept that every month, we're adding more services. We launched a Rackspace manage security service block today specifically for VMware cloud. So, we continue to add these and provide incremental value. >> I want to ask you a little bit of a controversial question. There's a saying, pioneers take the arrows but settlers take the land. >> Right >> So, if I'm a technology leader how do I embrace all this newness without getting shot, partnering with your firms. >> So, you know, we always say lock-ins bad but reality is, we always choose to reject technology platforms. And if you're a VMware customer I hate to say it, you're running on VMware infrastructure you have VMware ecosystem, you have VMware run books you have VMware partners, managing your on-prem assets what if I could you a path forward on any cloud of your choice without having to change any of your day-tot-day operation while leveraging the innovation future. What is the safest path for you, Mr Customer? And so, in this world, you can think of us being laggard in some sense. Because we're not pushing them to a single destination. We're giving them that choice, leveraging the strength. I think the innovative part that we've done today has really brought containers and VM'S in a single solution. We talked about containers killing VM'S two years ago, right? You know, VMware was getting trouble with docker VMware was going to be trouble with Openstack. Where are those two companies today and where is VMware? It's about simplifying for the customer a common solution. And we're taking those choices away and making this easy. Giving partners who can help them on their journey. So, I would say we're the safer choice. >> Okay >> That will be my response. >> Peter, we're not going to ask you about Openstack. (Giggles) >> I'm really back to VMware, it's working progress. (Giggles) >> Interesting point, the settlers right? At this point VMSware and AWS is two years old I think that first year, what was definitely some pioneers our there. But now I think we're really in there where the settlers are coming on and we're seeing large-scale adoption in the platform and now that VMware is offering more and more services, natively we can add more those managed services and help those customers really transform and not worry about the underlying IS that's rock-solid at this point. >> Peter, I would like you to get into it a little bit, kind of, the containerization and the kubernetes, you know, Docker, obviously a lot of hype, but containerization that's hugely important, you know a lot of the keynote this morning was talking about cloud native. I talked to lots of customers, you know there's some that, yes, they will want the VMware journey but many of them say, well, If I'm going to cloud I can just use containers. Why would I have the overhead of VM's? when cloud founders was originally created it was not for that type of environment. So where does that fit into, you know your world containers? >> Yeah, we actually launched some more services on that today as well, some more professional services and manage services, so safely around advanced kubernetes support, across all our platforms so this isn't just a VMware announcement this is on AWS, Microsoft, Badger and Google. So, another exciting progression, or hybrid could story and making investments in those resources to deliver kubernetes. We also launched a cloud native service block today, as well, that is really giving customers access to deep engineering skills and giving them cloud reliability engineers that can help them transform their workloads and get them ready for the cloud. >> I think, for us, if you... Project (mumbles) sorry tan zoo as a solution, and project pacific. Our two marquee announcements we made this week and if you look at the way we're focusing on the bull run manage aspects of the full life cycle and our active participation in the kubernetes community we're starting the beginnings of what I felt, like Java in 2000 when I was at BA, right? Where Weblogic and Java was the runtime for rolling and building new apps. Kubernetes and containers are the new runtime for building distributed apps across Cal platforms. And we're in this early journey and we are uniquely in opposition with the combination of pivotal for build. With project Pacific we're bringing containers into V&V-sphere, so VM's and containers become first class. Trough your point, we demonstrated eight percent performance improvement over bare metal on a V-sphere container based solution. Starting to engineer, based on a key scheduling work that we do in the kernel and in the hypervisor we're driving that deep into the kubernetes platform into the core platform itself. And then manage is going to be the new interesting bit. What is that control panel that everyone is going to fight over? And the manage services partner can help them choose. So, I think the battleground is more and more going to manage I think we secured our base with the runtime. And the bill will be about choice. (Mumbles) >> And Tan zoo is music to our ears we can now, again, focus on what's the additional manage services and service-- >> How do you help customers build apps? And change the engineering culture is what you provide. We just give you the runtime across any of these clouds. >> We want to help everyone, transform applications also transform the culture and how they do their business all that rapport-- >> Engineering transformation is a big one. Sajay transformation we talked about, internally for us VMware, same with our customers. You got to change the mindset of how you build the applications. In this container service based architecture >> Agree, agree >> What else is keeping folks up at night? That you talk to? Love to know that, just hot tail. >> Nothing keeps me up at night it's an exciting world we live in so loaded question, what excites me? What excites me is the progression, that VMware is making and the announcement Lydon video and GPU access link I think, early next year. I think that can be another wave of VMC adoptions. So, not keep me up at night but keep me interesting and excited. >> I think to that point I can build on what Pat said about tech for good, I mean we have a joined customer feeding America, right? We're now taking technology and making it available so that, you know, the 60 000 plus distribution centers they have, are up all the time. They're not even worried about infrastructure. They can focus on feeding the cause which is, I think 47 million people being fed. It's scary, right? >> Well, we want to bring it back to the organization of the discussion, you said you're helping customers with because we are worried you know, about how racking, stacking, configuring how doing all of those things, you know how do you help them? I talked to a number of customers at this show and they said look, my roles in my organization is still hardware to find And it's tough to move into a software role but if I want to get into the6 tech for good I need to be able to uplift my skills uplift my organizations, yeah. >> It's difficult, right? Organizational changes differ for every company but as part of the digital transformation there is also organizational transformation so we're having customers think about what is the progression form a VMware administrator to a DevOps-- >> Or cloud, I bet. (Giggles) >> It's not easy, it's your short answer on that. >> I think for us, is really starting to drive the cultural chance providing the tools and bring the self service in where they can be a coach, right? Be the trailblazer, who can come in and help change your organization. Teach them how to do it right. Not everyone will get there, hopefully bulk of the organization can shift right. >> Peter, I want to give you the final word you know, your partners and customers to understand. Take aways from VMware 2019. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, as usual thanks for having us. I think, Tan Zoo is really exciting. The progression that we're making with adding service blocks on top of VMware and AWS and or other hybrid cloud announcements. So, great to be here, but the Tan Zoo is kind of the story of the show. >> For me, it's a VMware is here to stay. We want to be, be have been, your strategic partner for the last decade. We're here to stay for the next decade. We're going to help you solve these hard complex problems and give you the choice you need. Across a broader ecosystem of partners and solutions. so, very excited to be here and to deliver that value. >> And Peter, thank you so much for joining us again, Bobby Allen, thank you for co-hosting. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.

[Voiceover] Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by Vmware and it's ecosystems sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016 at the Mandalay Convention Center. We're in the hang space where The Cube is located. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We're here with Chad Sakac the President of EMC's Converged Platform division formerly known as VCE. Welcome back. Great to see you. Fist pump. >> It's good to see you. >> Seven years we've been doing The Cube you've been on it every single year. >> I can't believe it. >> We love having you on. >> The Cube has become a fixture of VMworld for me. Seeing you guys. Your good looking faces. It puts a smile on my face. But I can't believe it's been seven years. That's insane. >> Yeah. The seven year itch as they say in VMworld. So I got to ask you. You're always candid and colorful. But you've seen the transition. You've been in the trenches. Coding. Now you're president of a division. Big division doing great. >> It's terrifying isn't it? (laughs) >> It's interesting. The Cube is bigger. We're all getting bigger. What's your take right now? You've seen the journey. Seven years. Where are we? >> VMworld has always had a huge community. One of the things that's been defining about VMware's whole journey has been the community. And that's one thing that has stayed pretty constant. Right? There's a lot of people here. This time in Vegas. Previously in San Fran. They share a passion and a love for all things that Vmware is doing. That said. It's a very different show. It's a very different context. It's a very different ecosystem. Literally at the beginning it was one product. Right? Now if you look at the keynotes they have to struggle to get all of the awesome into an hour and a half and do it in two days. Right? And they can only hit certain highlights. Sanjay did a great job today. Kit did a great job. My favorite, Yanbing. Yanbing Li has got passion, energy and loves her baby vSAN. But imagine trying to cram all of that stuff in previously in years past. If you go back seven years that would've been all of Vmworld would it had just been on just one thing. Right? And then obviously the other thing that's going on is the entire ecosystem has changed. So we're seeing consolidation in the ecosystem. But we're also seeing, I think Pat actually did the best job I've ever seen of that realistic balance of what's happening in traditional IT, private, public hybrid cloud models. And how that's going to play out over the next few years. But there' no question that public clouds are a huge part of the landscape for here. For now. For tomorrow. Forever. >> Pat got some criticism on Twitter. Also, some blog posts out there said that the keynote was a snoozer. But it was straight talk. And that's what the ecosystem wants and we're hearing. Stu might have his own opinion on this but what I'm hearing is I want to see the path. I want to see where VMware is going to be going so I can get behind that train. Clarify. Show me the straight and narrow roadways so I can turn up the gas a little bit. >> There's the expression that basically says the customer is always right. Or the people are always right. You can trust the people. Sometimes the customer is wrong. And sometimes the people are wrong. So last year they went bananas over vMotioning of VM between two clouds. Because it plays to the base. It plays to the audience who are like I love vMotion. Why wouldn't vMotion between clouds make sense? The reality of it is that while that was cool and technically accurate. This year's demonstration of basically saying no, you're not going to motion vm between on prem and public clouds very often, if at all. But you will need to be able to do things that bridge public clouds. Is actually a much more correct and relevant answer for the market. Now the difficulty is is that sometimes you're telling people things before there ready to fully internalize it. >> Embrace it. (laughs) It's shock of the system almost. Really. So you play the base. It's a lot like politics in that way. But I got to ask you the question. >> By the way. Just like in politics if you constantly play to the base you never move forward. >> Yeah. And this has always been a diverse ecosystem. So let's start with the cloud things. Obviously ecosystem is back on the table, I'd say. It's front and center. It's always been front and center but as it consolidates we're seeing its straight path. The question that people want to know is. Will everyone have fair access to the VMware as an independent company visa the new big mega merger was announced by Michael Dell just minutes ago that September seventh will be the close date. >> What are you talking about? >> Dell Technologies. >> What? (laughter) >> You can talk about it. Dell announced it. Michael tweeted about it. >> We're not bait and switching you. We'll show you his tweets if you want. >> I'm joking. I'm joking. And by the way, I'm so pumped and so excited. Frankly, I think not everybody understands exactly what's going on inside the industry. The server storage and networking ecosystems as stand alones are actually shrinking. As workloads move to SAS. As workloads move to public cloud IOS. The parts of the ecosystem that are growing are customers that are basically saying they want converged, hyper-converged and turnkey software stacks and that's they way they want to consume. They want to simplify stuff down. To be able to pull that off you have to have all the ingredients inside the stack. Increasingly, you will not be able to be competitive without having all the those components in the stack. And this is why I am passionate that convergence hyper-convergence and convergence and also turnkey software stacks will be at the center of Dell Technologies. And I keep telling Michael and he keeps agreeing which is a good thing. Right? The reality of it is is that we cannot, in spite of that statement being true, it is also true that people will continue to want variability. That may a be a declining set but it's a bigger set of customers. And the customers are like I'm all in on turnkey. So this one is smaller but growing faster this one's a much bigger ecosystem of, I'll mix and match whatever I want and put it together. Alright? So if you look at Yanbing's section. So she said HP with vSAN. Then she went VxRail and Yanbing thanks for the shout out during the session. That was awesome. They were powering basically some great events with Di data and powerful things in small packages. That's a highly integrated system. And then they brought up a customer that was totally building it themselves. Right? So it literally in a span of two minutes you had the continuum of build it yourself, a turnkey thing and it build it yourself. So will it be sustained? Yeah. Can you expect that we are going to lean in like crazy on our integrated stack? Yeah. But will we do it in exclusion of the ecosystem? No. >> There's just different use cases. >> Yeah. VxRail is winning in the marketplace because it's a highly opinionated vSphere HCIA. If you don't have vSphere. You don't like VMware it's not the HCIA for you. Right? However, more customers say yes than they say no. And that's awesome. But we know that we're going to need to create a next generation of the Microsoft Azure stack. On prem HCIA. It won't be built by the VxRail team. But there customers want it that way. And we're not talking about it a lot this week. But last week we launched VxRack new treno which is a turnkey open stack KVM SUSE based thing. Choice baby. >> So Chad, first of all the Dell deal is announced. So this is the final nail in the coffin of VCE, correct? >> Absolutely. Of course not. The reason that we are shifting the way we talk about VCE is something really simple. If I say VCE what's the first thing that appears in your brain? >> Stu: vBlock. >> Va-blah vBlock. And that's a good thing in a sense. >> How much revenue did you do last year, Chad? >> Three point five plus billion dollars. Almost entirely in vBlock and VxBlock. >> That would be a nice a public company on it's own. >> On it's own. Right. And growing at 40% cumulative annual growth rates. That is amazing. Right? >> It's not a fail. >> And by the way the thing that's interesting is that hasn't slowed down one iota in spite of the fact that everyone knows the Dell deal is going to close. However, the difficult it is is that we are no longer just he vBlock group. We have these hyper converged appliances that are growing like sync and customers are voting with their feet and their dollars. I think in a short amount of time we'll be the number one by customer, by revenue HCIA player in the market. But furthermore, we also do these turnkey cloud stacks. So realistically VCE is more of a product brand than it is a company brand. And we're no longer a separate company. We're a part of VMC and on the seventh we'll be part of Dell EMC. >> Chad, can you help us connect the dots? We've got the converged infrastructure. The platform. You've got some SUSE team. Talk about SAS and public cloud. How does Dell, EMC, VMware stay relevant going forward and play a part in that whole story? >> So it's a great question. I'm going to try to see if I can do this in an uncharacteristically concise way. Do you believe that hybrid cloud models will win? >> Stu: Sure. >> Chad: Do you really believe it? >> I mean what we have today isn't really good hybrid cloud but that's where we need to go. >> So, by the way, we need to make the on premise clouds as simple and easy to consume in utilized modes as the public clouds are. >> Stu: Love that. >> Chad: Right. However, I think that it is inherent that economics, governance, data gravity will always balance out some workloads biasing toward public. Some biasing towards private. Furthermore, do you think that there will be one cloud model that will win? Will it all be the VMware SDDC cloud? Will it all be Azure? Will it all be Amazon? Will it all be cloud foundry? Will it all be SoftLayer? >> Well Andy Jassy has an answer for you but many people will differ with that. Including Satcha and Michael and everybody else. >> I think that there's never been in the history of all time any sustained period where there's a singularity of a stack. >> VMware has done pretty good for a while. >> Yep. But, by the way, there's never been in all of history any extended period of time when there's been a singularity of a stack. Right? So our point of view is very simple. My mission in the converged platform division today is basically to build turnkey CI and HCI to power VMware powered clouds and Cloud Foundry power clouds. Tomorrow, meaning on the seventh, immediately my strategic posture toward Microsoft pivots. EMC has always had a partnership with Microsoft but nothing like Dell's. Right? So immediately, I'm going to go. Well we must have the best on and off premises version of the Microsoft Azure stack. Dell currently leads in that market but it's very early days of that. We go from having two clouds both on and off premises. To a third one that we add. And then of course there's a fourth one which says if you want to run your most mission critical, business critical, classic apps. Virtustream is the way to go for an SAP legacy landscape. That you want to put in the cloud. That needs to have an on premise variant too. So, four clouds. Each one on and off premises. Each one available in Capex or utilitized models. If we can pull that off we can be the strongest cloud player on the market bar none. I think that's cool. >> With the choice as the key sales pitch to the client which is pick the cloud that does the best job. >> The thing that's interesting is that sometimes choice is a euphemism for blah. Like I have no strategy. I have no opinion. It's just pick whatever you want and assemble it. What I'm describing is something a little different. Which is a choice between four highly opinionated turnkey offers. >> Okay. >> Right? Now of course, we'll enable customers to build there own things but I think that over time less and less customers are going to want to do that. >> And Chad, I think that points to what we've seen in the wave of converged infrastructure and cloud is we need to get out of that heterogenous mess where I've got the poor guy buried in wires. Running around. Trouble tickets and everything else like that. It needs to be simpler. We need to have the management tools. Chad, I want to get your viewpoint on VMware. One of the criticisms I've heard is kind of the cloud management stack. We've been swinging a bunch at this and we don't yet have a solution that customers are happy with. Where do you think we are? Where do we need to go? >> So, you've been around the block on this and customers who are watching this have been around the block on this. Cloud management platforms are tough. Its actually a very, very fragmented market. With very little consolidation in the past or even looking forward. Now inside that space vRealize is actually the strongest. And it's the most deployed. It's the most widely used. But again, I don't want to make it sound like ahh we're number one. Right? Clearly there's a lot of work to be done. Last night I was talking with Sajay who heads up the vRealize suite team. And what we've seen is that the team has done a lot of work out of the 6.x, 6.5 dot and you know 6.X days into the 7.X days. And customer feedback is that it's much closer to the mark. A in terms of core product workflow, upgrade-ability. All of those sorts of things. But also in the fact that it actually has extended out to be able to automate and deploy on top of Azure and AWS. In the beginnings of the extended cloud connects vision. Now that said. In those four opinionated cloud stacks. Now this is my personal opinion, here Stu. So I always have to safe harbor all that jazz. (laughs) I think that what you see is you see those highly opinionated cloud stacks. The CMP layers, the top part of it, being able to speak to each other but always favoring their own ecosystem. Right? I think that we're going to be in that mode for a long time. >> So Chad, some people might not be aware that in addition to the VCE products in there that the solutions piece and the cloud that you have. The progress that you've made. We've talked to some of your team. I think we've got Peter coming on today. Can you talk about the EHC NHC maybe even share a bit of revenue if you can. >> Yeah. Sure. First things first, it's important to understand this at its core. The original idea of VCE, which is now eight years old, was a basic premise that says we have a pile of giblets that are all awesome. However, customers struggled to assemble them. And they want to have a turnkey offer that they can lean on us to not only deploy but sustain, support as a single offering. That was the origination story. Replace server networking compute with hypervisor, IT business operations a CMP all of those things and you have the enterprise hybrid cloud. We started getting lots of feedback from customers. We love vSphere. We love vRealize. We love vRealize automation and operations. We love all of this log-in sites stuff. We're all in with Vmware can you guys give us the easy button? Right? And so we started on version one. Then on version two, version three, 3.5 and this week we announced version 4.0. Right? We're now up to hundreds of customers so it's still in the hundreds. But it is the most curated. The most turnkey way to get the VMware SDDC deployed. Now, I still think we have a long ways to go. Because we need to make it so push button, easy. And cloud foundations that Pat announced on Monday. Is a core part of that. Think of cloud foundations turning to validated designs and the enterprise hybrid cloud being the ultimate manifestations. >> Chad, just a clarification. Hundreds of customers but from a revenue standpoint that's probably bigger than the hyper-converged market. >> So you know what's fascinating. That's actually a fact. So I hadn't really thought about it. But we're currently on a revenue run rate that we don't disclose publicly, but I'm like, how do I tiptoe around this? It is larger than the largest HCIA players by a good market margin. >> Right. >> So you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of annual revenue. And customers are saying, look I'm in. I saw the keynote. I'm aligned with VM where I want to go. Right? And enterprise hybrid cloud is designed to do that. We keep reiterating on it. On virtual geek there's a whole slew of details on the 4.0 lease. And then the other thing that we started to see is we started to see customers say, I get it. With the enterprise hybrid cloud you've made my IT operations for classic IT better. How do you help my developers build the digital enterprise? Which doesn't start with infrastructure. And it doesn't start with IAS. It starts with the way developers see the world. Which is the platform layer. And we're on version 1.1 now of the native hybrid cloud which is targeted at how do we build a platform for building cloud native apps? And that starts not with infrastructure. Not with VMware. Not with EMC. Not with servers or network. It starts with cloud foundry. >> Chad, we got to wrap. I want to get one final point in and I want to get your thoughts on it. It's more of a historical perspective but also kind of a futuristic. Take your EMC hat off and put the personal Chad hat on. The ecosystem. Where is it going to go? Obviously it's consolidating. Which means it's shifting. So the old ecosystem was great and robust as you mentioned. It's not necessarily dying. It's just shifting. It's consolidating. So that means it's shifting to something else where there will be growth. Where is it moving? Where is that puck going so people can skate to where the puck will be? >> That's a great question, John. I'm always a geek at heart. I'm always going to run that vSphere cluster in my basement. It gives me joy and gratitude on cool new intel NUC. Great stuff. But in my new job. (laughs) as the leader of a big business. The broad landscape picture is fascinating. This isn't actually rocket science. You can decode it remarkably and quickly. In industries that are declining or under pressure. Secular pressure. Consolidation is inevitable and you have to pick your partners wisely. I think people underestimate how much giants that they would think of as safe and secure bets are under pressure. Michael was wise enough to take first mover advantage. Because in those periods no one has shrunk themselves to success. Right? Conversely, you see very diversified ecosystems. When you see a very diversified ecosystem ergo cloud management platforms. Ergo security, like oh my goodness, the number of security startups and players. A hyper converged startups. I count 39 of them at the last turn. Right? They go through a life cycle of explosion of ecosystems and then inevitable consolidation phase. And people look at that consolidation phase and say oh, the fun is all over. No that means that the fun has begun because your actually starting to really move the needle at customers. Right? So you can expect to see consolidation and security space. You can expect to see by the way very disruptive point technologies occur. The container ecosystem is going to explode and then consolidate. And when you see that consolidation happening the container act Sysco acquisition is one of the earlier indications in that space but just one of them. It means that it's moving from sizzle to steak. Again, look at the open stack ecosystem. About a year ago everyone was like, all the fun is over. All of them have consolidated down into the big massive players. It's because people are now getting down- >> John: Rubber is hitting the road. >> Rubber is hitting the road. >> So where is it going now? Where is the fun going to be? >> The fun is definitely going to be very much in new data fabrics and new applications. There's no rocket science there. The space that you saw the tip of the iceberg on the cloud. Cloud connection of how you can bridge. Bridge doesn't mean migrate it means create connective tissue between on premises and off premises clouds. It's going to be really, really interesting. I think one thing that is fascinating is roles for human beings that span functions. That is the new magic mojo. When I find someone who is a developer. Who understands infrastructure they've got mojo. When you find someone who understands the span of what's going on inside the ecosystem that person's got a bright future. >> As they say in baseball, the players have to have multiple tools in their bag. Chad, we got to break but great conversation. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Good seeing you. Congratulations on all your business success and September seventh is going to be the big close date for the mega transaction. >> It's going to be awesome and by the way guys, congrats to you. Seven years of this is great. I can't wait for next year. It'll be a lot of fun. >> Thanks. Chad Sakac here inside The Cube. Where all the things are happening at VMworld inside the Hang Space at the Mandalay Bay this year for VMworld 2016. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. You're watching The Cube. (upbeat music)