>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Raphael Meyerowitz, he is the VP Office of the CTO at Presidio, And Jake Smith, who is the Director Data Center Solutions and Technologies at Intel. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're both CUBE alums. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's great to be back. >> So, I want to start by laying out for our viewers, why you're here, and if you're part of the Microsoft ecosystem: Intel, Cisco, Dell and others. Can you explain a little bit, to our viewers, the roll you play in this ecosystem. >> Well, for us, Microsoft is a long time partner. I mean, it's pretty well documented, we don't want to go there today, but at this particular event we're announcing a bunch of new product solutions. We're announcing new technology capabilities. And at four PM we're going to announce some world record results, for performance with an operating system in an application environment. So it's a very exciting time for Intel to be a part of this event. >> Well, this is quite a tease. (giggles) Can you give us a little-- >> You're going to have to wait 'til four PM. I will say, it has to do with Windows Server. It has to do with Xeon scale of a processor family. And, our future Optane products. >> Well, so, these are all great lead ins. And, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about all of these things. You want to go through, a little bit, where we are with each of those businesses? >> Yeah, at Presidio, we've mostly been partnering with Intel for a long time. And one of the things that we've seen also, is how Intel has developed their ecosystem of partners. The software, like today, if you look at today what was in our today with desktop as a service with citrix. That's something that we have been involved in, probably, for about 10 years. And now we actually seen that come to market. We're not just, the control plane is in the cloud. But, the actual, virtual desktops are in the cloud. And, we think that that's going to be a really good viable options for our customers with Office 365. >> Raph, maybe expand on that a little bit for our audience. You know, one of the things I always say is you talk in this multi-cloud heterogeneous world. You want to follow the apps. You want to follow the data. Well, you know, the desktop is part of where those applications and data live. So, how does that, you know, tie into all the cloud stuff we've been talkin' about, the last few years? >> So, for a lot of customers, one of the reasons they move to cloud is really for simplicities sake, alright. When you look at the desktop, the desktop is really not necessarily being the most simple thing in the world. Whether it's virtual, or whether it's physical desktop. By having the control plane in the virtual desktop in the cloud, where you can consume it with Office 365. And also through Microsoft. And you can buy it through a single entity. Customers are already going to see a lot of value in that. And we think it's really going to play in the market really, really well. Upper Enterprise customers and some Healthcare customers may take a little bit more time to adapt to. >> Jake, one of the things we talk, for years, we talked about people did their upgrades based on the tick-tock of the Intel fees there. >> Correct. >> Now we're talkin' about things like, you know, Windows as a service, going Evergreen. Maybe, how does that relationship, the old traditional Wintel versus the cloud era. Upgrades. You're talkin' about the new latest generation. How do we think about that? >> You know what, I'm not going to use that, the merged term, because that's, you know. The work that Windows does on Xeon scalable processor family has been amazing. But, typically, we've done a two to three year cycle on a server release. With our new road map, which we announced in August, which you were there for, so thank you. We're actually going to release a new CPU every year. We're releasing a new CPU every year because we have to deal with the fact that cloud customers, in Azure, want to have the availability to the latest and greatest technology, right now. And partners, like Presidio and Raph's team, have developed technologies, like Concierge, which he'll talk about, that give customers the ability to manage their hybrid cloud environments, both in the cloud and on premises. When you start giving customers that flexibility they want the choice to say, I want to deploy your latest Xeon scalable processor family, Skylake processors this year, and next year, I'm going to maybe skip a year before I deploy your next version. >> Yeah, thanks Jake. One of the things that we've done at Presidio, we've tried to innovate ourselves, and we listen to our customers, and we know where our customers pain points are. So, Presidio Concierge is something that we developed from the ground up, that provides both shared space applications, provides customers with the usage on their shared space applications, how they're consuming their licenses, and also provides them with an allessor sign, so the infrastructure's a service. A lot of customers, when you talk about multi cloud, it doesn't always necessarily always mean the Harper scalers, right. It could mean shared space products, as well. So, we developed this product from the ground up in combination with Intel, and it's something that our customers are starting to use a lot, and we think that there's going to be a great grow in their first product. Some of the features that we actually give to our customers are actually for free, because we know that our customers are really battling with figuring out their usage patterns, internally. >> Well, I want to hear about those pain points. What were the problems that you were trying to solve with Concierge? >> So, some of the pain points, you know, we have customers today that get invoices from some of the public cloud companies or their service providers or with their infrastructures service. And the invoices are 50 pages long. They can never actually figure out what their true costs are. So we, through a shared space platform, that we developed from the ground up, we can provide customers with all of those metrics around their licenses. Plus, also, their usage around infrastructure as a service, as well. >> And, what has demand been like? >> The demand's been really good. Actually, when we launched product about two, three months ago, we were already at 20 customers. And we've seen a lot of interest. Presidio has about 7700 customers nationally, that we call on today. And we've grown tremendously, we have about a three billion dollar infrastructure partner today that provides both on premises and public cloud services. >> Yeah, I like, you brought up the fact that customers are looking for simplicity. Unfortunately, today, cloud is no longer simple. You know, I would say if you said, okay, If I went to my server vendor of choice and wanted to configure something, versus I went to my cloud vendor of choice and try to configure something, cloud might even be more challenging for somebody to do. But, one of the areas that we're trying to help customers get some simplicity back, is if you look at solutions like Azure Stack. So, Rebecca and I interviewed Jeffrey Snover earlier today, and that was the goal they had, was to give, kind of, that operational model and even some of the services from Azure and put them in my data center. Was wondering if Intel and Presidio are both partnering with Microsoft on this. What are you seeing, what are you hearing from customers? Any proof points as to how the roll outs are going, on there? >> We at Presidio, we are one of the first Azure Stack partners. Probably, about a year and a half ago, when it was actually announced and when it went, yeah, I think it was June of last year, and we partnered with Cisco, Dell, and also HP in the space, and we seen demand from our customers creep up. Single node solutions. We've seen demand with Single node PLC solutions are being deployed today. And then, in the public sector, we're also starting to see customers that are interested in it because it will provide them with a gateway to the public cloud in the future. >> Yeah, we're seeing the exact same thing. Obviously, we've been partnering together for some time. The beauty of Azure Stack is it's optimized for Xeon scalable processor family, as well as Intel Optane technologies, both the SSDs and in the future, our persistent memory capabilities. What we like in our work that we've done on Azure Stack and Azure Stack development, is that customers have had a lot of releases to begin to determine where Azure Stack's going to fit in their overall portfolio. And that's how you really have to look at Azure Stack, is how do you manage your portfolio between the cloud and on premises. Azure Stack is a great tool for that. >> You know, leading up to the release of Azure Stack, I talked to a number of service providers that had pent up demand. Leading up to this show, I was hearing a lot of non-North American interest. Can you give us any characterization as to how the roll out's going? >> Yeah, I think when you look at non-North American interest, there's a lot of localization, that has to take place in a lot of those countries. Maybe there's not actually an Azure, a public cloud Azure in those countries today, which is something that Microsoft is building towards. So, customers want to get used to their API's, they want to keep their data local. And when they're the same API's, on premises versus in the public cloud for all of their applications. And that's why I think you see, especially in Europe, as an example, a lot of countries in Europe where actually, data sovereignty's a big issue, alright. The data's not allowed to leave the country that they're actually in. And the demand, I think will, I always say, Microsoft, version two or version three. They always get it right. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. They've proven to us, they get this right all the time. >> I want to follow up on something you were just talking about, though with, sort of, risk management being a really big, hot opportunity. The next generation of risk management and mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there, and what you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, so, Presidio developed the next generation risk management framework, called NGRM. So, we found we do a lot of security with Cisco, Palo Alto. We have a lot of security vendors out there that we deal with, but what our CIO's were really looking for is they were looking for a single dashboard that could actually provide them with a scorecard: Green, Yellow, or Red. Basically saying this is where we're at in our security strategy and this is what we need to remediate right away. They can take that to their board, they can also use that internally for all of their CSO's and also all their internal IT infrastructure personnel that they have. So, it's something that we've seen customers adopt, because it provides that analysis and the remediation and it's not necessarily tied to a specific product. Again, this is a shared space platform that we developed from the ground up, because our customers are always saying, "Well, there's always security vulnerabilities. "How can we constantly check on this?" Right? And it doesn't matter whether you're running Azure, whether you have on-premises solutions, or whether you have some other cloud provider, we can provide that holistic view for customers today. >> One of the announcements that I think surprised everyone. I mean, things like Server 2019, we all expect. The open data initiative, the commentary that we had is if you talk about digital transformation. I mean, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP. Two companies at the center of it. What does it mean? When will customers see the benefits of this? And any commentary of digital transformation in general would be great. >> Well, typically, we've been involved in a lot of these open standards, and they typically take three to five years to work their way all the way through the system and build the proper ecosystem and standards. And then work their way into the product lines. I think, in this particular instance, there is a driver. We talked about the driver of cloud and why we, we Intel, are now producing chips every year, and you're not waiting for the three year release cycle. Well, the open data initiative, I think, falls into that camp. I think you're going to see an escalated transition to the open data initiative, because people have to be able to move their workloads. Presidio recognized it very early on in the process. We've been working with them for some time. But that's one of the values that they bring to customers, is their ability to do that. But, more and more customers and more and more data are being stretched and there has to be compatibility between file systems, file format, and data classification. The open data initiative is a start in that direction. >> Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I could give you also is we always talk about IT transformation. We have a large customer that's actually a fleet truck company that underwent IT transformation, and they came to us and they said that they actually needed telematics on the trucks in the fleet of trucks. And the reason was because a lot of these trucks are breaking down and they would send it to a mechanic and the mechanic would diagnose it. So, we actually created, in partnership with Intel and with Microsoft, this telematic platform that actually can provide the customer, in real time, with what issues they actually have with the truck. And it saves the customer a lot of money. That's the type of information that customers are looking for. This customer has on premises data, plus, also in the public cloud, and I think stretching it and providing analytics around that is really important. >> And is it possible to take away the silos? I mean, you seem to be an optimist here. >> I'm very optimistic that we can take away the silos, but I'm also realistic. The only way to take away the silos is to develop new applications, new capabilities. And as my friends in Windows Server Team will tell you, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, how do we use virtualization and container technologies to take old legacy data and carry it forward onto new modern IT infrastructure. And when you can do that, then you can extract value from the data. If you can not take it from an old, antiquated infrastructure to a new infrastructure as Presidio has done, you stranded the data. And that's where you have those silo breakdowns. So, I think we're developing the tools, but we're not all the way there. >> Yeah, you look at Windows 2019 coming out, there's Linux support in Windows 2019. Who would ever think that Microsoft would be releasing Linux support. >> Microsoft loves Linux. >> Microsoft loves Linux now, right? >> And they will in get it. >> And they'll get it now as well. Microsoft is really developed their ecosystem. Our partners also around the open API's and what they've been doing over the past few years. And I think customers are really starting to embrace that. And you look at even another feature that's coming with Windows 2019 with Storage Spaces Direct. Right, I think Microsoft, this is really going to be their entry into the Apple convert space. Customers are going to start building, they'll have to converge platform based on Windows 2019 Data Center. >> Wondering if you can give a little more color here, Raph. You and I lived through, kind of converged and hyperconvergence, when we wrote our original research at Wikibon, it was VMware is the one that's going to get everybody talking about it, but the one eventually that will be very important here is Microsoft. 'Cause, Microsoft owns the apps. They've got the operating systems, so absolutely, they can be critical in the HCI space. What are they doing and how does Presidio and partners go to market with this? >> So, I mean, when you look at Windows 2016, Windows 2016 was really the first iteration of Storage Spaces Direct. Windows 2019 has really improved upon that, and we're starting to see customers become more interested in that. The reason is because customers want a single platform that they can easily manage with a single operating system. So, there used to be the war, as you mentioned Stu, between VMware and Harper-V. ESXi and Harper-V. I don't really see that being talked about anymore. It's more around the features and the robust features that customers can actually get on as quickly as possible. I don't know if you have anymore. >> Well Raph, you're absolutely right on. I think people have taken virtualization for granted. We added virtualization technology in Xeon in 2006 and they've sort of taken it for granted. Obviously, VMware is a big partner for both Microsoft and Intel, but the reality is is that in a hyper convergent environment, you need a file system, you need an operating system, and you need apps. And Microsoft has all that capability. As you'll hear at four o'clock, we announce world record numbers and it's spectacular. And the reason for it is in our last version of Windows Server 2016, we delivered 16 million IOP's in a hyper converged environment. That got Raph and his team off the table saying, okay, you guys are legitimate. You have a legitimate platform now. But it's not good enough. We think this new instantiation that we've already started to announce in Windows 2019, and Jeff Wolsey announced it earlier today and started talking about the features in Project Honolulu. We think those kind of transitions are what it's going to take for Enterprise customers to begin to break down those silos that you discussed, and really start to look at their data holistically, build data lakes that can scale, and build frameworks that are, I don't even want to use the term convergent anymore, but hyper scalable. >> Yeah, I mean, to tie into that, right. You look at what Intel has developed around Optane and some of the storage platforms that they've come out with. 10 years ago? Intel wasn't really known as a storage company, right? But, you look at all the storage vendors out there today, they really are putting Intel aside. And when you start looking at what Storage Spaces Direct is going to deliver and some of the robustness around Optane, we really think that it's going to be something our customers are going to embrace with Windows 2019 and future versions and sequels. >> So, Raph, I got to give Presidio a lot of credit, though. We launched a program called Intel Select Solutions, and it really allowed us to take Windows and Storage Spaces Direct and create a solution that included both the CPU, the networking, the SSD's and the memory. And Presidio has led that. And so because we have these Intel Select Solutions for Storage Spaces Direct with Presidio, we have the flexibility now to give customers package solutions that are pre-configured. >> Great. Well, Jake and Raphael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just in a little bit. 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>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And the band played on. You might be able to hear the guitar player off in the distance. It's that time of day here at Dell EMC World 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on The Cube. We are officially, John and I now, Node-O-Ramas. (laughing) We have joined the blue button club. We'll explain that in just a little bit. Tell you what it's all about. Here with me to do that is Armughan Ahmad, who is the SVP of Blueprint Solutions and Alliances of Dell EMC. Just had a launch. >> Yeah. Had to be one of the two. And Brian Payne who is the VP of Product Management in the server division at Dell EMC. Brian, thank you for being with us. >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me >> All right, so first off, let's talk 14G. Big server news, you guys make. I'm sure that's really had a lot of your attention this week. A lot of people want to know, Brian, what's up? Tell me about the excitement you generate with that announcement. >> Absolutely, it's generated a ton of excitement and it's not just been this week. It's been a lot of build up for driving a new generation of servers into the market. We start with what our customers are telling us that they're interested in, and with this generation we focused on the typical things you would expect, like how can we run workloads more effectively than the current generation of technology. However, as we look into the landscape as people drive digital transformation, the workloads are changing, right? There are a lot of new workloads. There's a lot of new technology that our customers need to sort out and figure out, where do I apply where in order to run things more effectively? And so we're focused on that in terms of delivering portfolio breadth so that our customers will have the capability when they need it to run their applications well. So that's one thing that is exciting and new. But aside from that, which is running our customers' applications, we're also focused on how can we make our customers more agile and effective through the automation tools that we've designed into this generation of servers? And then, lastly, security has been a big focus. And it's not bolted on security; it's integrated security built into the server throughout the supply chain and throughout the life cycle of the server. Those are the big things that have resonated with our customers as we've announced the next generation of servers. >> I was kind of kidding on the top there talking about the Node-O-Rama buttons. Both of you are wearing yours. So tell us what is that all about? What's Node-O-Rama going on there? >> So Janet Moore, who's actually in our product marketing group, came up with Node-O-Rama because as we were getting ready to launch 14G, awesome servers, Poweredge 14 Generation, we wanted to be ready for VSAN ready nodes 'cause customers really wanted to take storage and take that software-defined storage and ensuring when you take software-defined storage you want to really run it on a server platform to drive the next generation of IT transformation and digital transformation eventually. But we also wanted to the same thing with Microsoft Spaces Direct. We also wanted to do the same thing with our ScaleIO, software-defined scale out storage capability. But then not just stop there. We also have SAP HANA ready node, which is our SAP HANA for commercial and midsize customers. So that's where Node-O-Rama really came in. We've got a lot of nodes. So right now we're launching our Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node that got launched on Monday. So we're totally excited. We have the most ready nodes in the industry right now. >> So we were talking in our intro this morning on our other set, David Floyer, analyst at Wikibon, and Keith Townsend, another analyst. We were kind of looking at this announcement here. The big takeaways were really, really strong hyper-converged ACI message. Seeing that across the board. VMware is the glue layer between all this. And then finally, reality of hybrid cloud. So we were just talking about the ready systems. How does this all work? Because now, those are three nice areas developing. How does Node-O-Rama fit in that? How should they think about ready nodes, the context of that scene? >> Well, one thing that I mentioned a moment ago is just this idea of complexity that customers are dealing with. We still have, through our ready systems, we're able to offer simplicity for customers that want to buy a full system-level solution, but not everyone is, for a variety of reason, is ready to do that. However, they're left with saying, "Okay, I can buy servers from Dell, Poweredge Servers "and go run my workload, "but what do I pick? "I want to move to a software-defined storage. "I want to run something like SAP HANA. "Can somebody simplify that process for me?" And that's where ready nodes come in. It really streamlines the selection of technology where we've done the testing. We've done the validation to figure out what's going to run well and then we can point customers in that direction. And we can also streamline the services, the service offering around that. So it's really about making it simpler for out customers throughout the lifecycle of picking the technology and then deploying and managing. >> What about operational support? Efficiency, ease of use there? What's your position on that? >> Absolutely, operational support is streamlined and then if you have an issue with a ready node and you call up Dell services, they're going to immediately recognize what you have and be able to get you back up and running and working more effectively, more quickly. >> So where's the Nexus here, alliances and then what you're doing there? How's that coming together? >> Yes, so I lead our solutions business unit that is powered by our technology alliance partners, so VMware VSAN ready node, Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node. ScaleIO happens to be our own IP, so that's a ready node, and then SAP. So those are the alliance partnerships. And then what my group does is we work very close with Brian Payne and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, whose at GM, for our server division, and Robbie Penaganti. That server division, it's all about the server right in the center of it so if you are going to drive a software-defined data center, you have to get a server right in the middle and make sure that server's not only scalable, it's intelligent, but it's also secure. So what we do is we actually take that server that's ready from their side and they certify it. We then take that in my group. We validate it, we make sure that the firmware that needs to be changed, the buyout that needs to be changed. The service capability, the sales enablement that we have to put out there. So it becomes a ready node, right? >> So tell me about the old days. I'm just kind of going, "Wow! "That sounds really easy" but it's not. They, in essence, have to build a server that's going to be ready for whatever composed solution you put together, whether it's VMware, Edge, or whatever. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> They have to then make the enablement happen. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> So in the old days, what was it like? Compare and contrast what it was in the old days. Go to the server guy and say, "I need these servers to support this, this and this" and then they go do it. >> Brian: Yeah. >> And months later. Take us through why is this different for the customer? >> It actually starts very early in the process as we look at the technology landscape, working with Armughan's team to figure out what technologies are going to change and transform the efficiency of how we run applications. It starts with defining the servers arm-in-arm with the team that's responsible for delivering those applications, figuring out what's going to work, develop it, and then bring it to market. And then it's really about streamlining that selection process for our customers. How can we make it easy for them to pick the right things and then quickly procure that and deploy that in their environment and start getting the business results that they're after? >> So time to market for the solution is optimized in that scenario? >> Brian: Oh yeah. >> You call in for the server, 14G. (finger snap) You have it all prepared, ready for you to go. >> So John, in the past, let's go back a few years, right? Our 13G servers at that time, or any other servers in the industry, were really developed for multi-workloads. They weren't developed for specific workloads. What we have now done at Dell EMC, and this is the synergy that Marius was talking about earlier that you were mentioning, which is we take our server group, we work hand-in-hand in our server group right up front, so that's 14G, as our 14th generation of Poweredge servers were being designed, Brian Payne and I, and our teams work very close together to say, "Okay, what are the top workload orientations "that we want to go after?" So software-defined storage, definitely top priority. Now, who should we be working with? VMware VSAN, of course. Microsoft Hyper-v Spaces Direct. Our ScaleIO business, because we know a lot of the customers want to do that. But then, in addition to that, we said, "Okay, ready nodes is good. "That's fantastic." But we know customers go from build to buy continue. So they'll be customers who would want SAP workload orientation, they would want Oracle workload orientation. They want Sequel workload orientation. But then those are your traditional apps. But now you're moving into the next generation apps of machine learning, AI, which is starting with high-due clusters and analytics clusters. So our partnership between server product group and our solutions product group. My product group does not exist without server product group. We have to ensure, and by the way, same thing goes for storage product group, our data protection product group, and our networking product group, as well as our CI and ACI product group. What we do is we, essentially, work right up front and make sure that that workload orientation is start through right in the beginning. >> John: What's the customer reaction? >> You want to take that. >> Yeah, sure, I was just going to add one piece and I'll address that. Conversely, the server isn't going to do anything without the application running on top of it. So that's where we go hand-in-glove here. Customers are very pleased with it. The adoption rates have been very strong of what's been in the market and then as we're bringing a breath of fresh air with the next generation technology, customers are very eager to begin adopting. >> John: What's the reaction to this announcement because the 14G had the fanfare yesterday when it was talked about, but what is the reaction to the 14G and the ready server nodes now? >> I'll give you an example, first of all, on our revenue growth. So we actually picked some major workload so VSAN ready node. We'd announced that about six months ago and our VSAN ready node business is through the roof right now on 13G. 14G launches as soon as the summer. Ashley Gorakhpurwalla mentioned on stage sometime this summer. As soon as that launches, we will be ready with 14G. But right now we have ready nodes already in the market on our 13th generation platforms. And as soon as we started launching these solutions we're finding that our customers, more importantly our channel partners as well, because they find that it's much easier, John, for them to deploy that. We're also seeing that same 13G to now 14G migration related to high-performance computing. A lot of customers are taking that on and the growth has been really fabulous. >> Yeah, I think if you rewind the clock before ready nodes and say, "What was the world like?" We had customers that were deploying and trying to deploy things like VSAN or other software-defined storage, and they were running into problems and us, VMware, we're trying to help customers navigate that, but what we found was there were dependencies in that stack in the underlying infrastructure, and so the ready nodes really came out of that how can we improve that customer experience and make sure that what we deliver is going to be trusted and reliable. >> And shipping around the summer, which is right around the corner. >> That is 14G is going to ship but right at the same time, our ready nodes for VSAN ready node and Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node and ScaleIO ready node will ship at the exact same time 14G Poweredge servers ship, right? But keep in mind, we're already selling all of the 13G-based platforms for ready nodes, ready bundles, and ready systems. >> John: I tell you, just knowing the channel partners, they're going to love this. >> Oh yeah. >> Because it's so peaked and not a lot of training involved and they can pick up the training and services (finger snap) right out of the gate, target workloads, good engagement of customers. Makes a lot of sense. Hangs together in my mind. Congratulations. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, so Node-O-Rama, this is the button here. >> Armughan: It's right here. >> Check out the ready nodes. It just sounds great. Ready, alert, fire jets go. (laughter) Take off in the aircraft carrier. >> There is nothing like being an honorary Node-O-Rama. So thank you very much for the pleasure. >> Getting ready to Rama. >> Always good seeing you guys. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Armughan: Thank you. >> Back with more coming up here. Dell EMC World 2017 Live from Las Vegas. 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