>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's cubes. Live coverage. Day three wrap up of Del Technologies World twenty nineteen Java is Dave a lot. There's too many men on set one. We get set to over there blue set, White said. We got a lot of content. It's been a cube can, in guise of a canon of content firing into the digital sphere. Great gas. We had all the senior executive players Tech athletes. Adele Technology World. Michael Dell, Tom Sweet, Marius Haas, Howard Ally As we've had Pat Kelsey, rco v M were on the key partner in the family. They're of del technology world and we had the clients guys on who do alien where, as well as the laptops and the power machines. Um, we've had the power edge guys on. We talked about Hollywood. It's been a great run, but Dave, it's been ten years Stew. Remember, the first cube event we ever went to was DMC World in Boston. The chowder there he had and that was it wasn't slogan of of the show turning to the private cloud. Yeah, I think that was this Logan cheering to the private cloud that was twenty ten. >> Well, in twenty ten, it was Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud twenty nineteen. It's all cloud now. That difference is back then it was like fake cloud and made up cloud and really was no substance to it. We really started to see stew, especially something that we've been talking about for years, which is substantially mimicking the public cloud on Prem. Now I know there are those who would say No, no, no, no, no. And Jessie. Probably in one of those that's not cloud. So there's still that dichotomy is a cloud. >> Well, Dave, if I could jump in on that one of the things that's really interesting is when Veum, where made that partnership with a ws It was the ripple through this ecosystem. Oh, what's that mean for Del you know Veum, wherein Del not working together Well, they set the model and they started rolling out bm where, and they took the learnings that they had. And they're bringing that data center as a service down to the Dell environment. So it's funny I always we always here, you know, eight of us, They're learning from their partners in there listening and everything like that. Well, you know, Dylan Veum where they've been listening, they've been learning to in this, and it brings into a little bit of equilibrium for me, that partnership and right, David, you said, you know that you could be that cloud washing discussion. And today it's, you know, we're talking about stacks that live in eight of us and Google and Microsoft. And now, in, you know, my hosted or service lighter or, you know, my own data center. If that makes sense, >> I mean, if you want to just simplify the high order bit, Dave Cloud. It's simply this Amazon's trying to be enterprised everyone, the enterprise, trying to claw Amazon, right? And so what? The what that basically means is it's all cloud. It's all a distributed computer system. OK, Scott McNealy had it right. The network is the computer. If you look at what's going on here, the traditional enterprise of vendors over decades of business model and technology, you know, had full stack solutions from mainframe many computers to PC the local area networking all cobble together wires it up creates applications, services. All that is completely being decimated by a new way to roll out storage, computing and networking is the same stuff. It's just being configured differently. Throw on massive computer power with Cloud and Moore's Law and Data and A. I U have a changing of the the architecture. But the end of the day the cloud is operating model of distributed computing. If you look at all the theories and pieces of computer science do and networking, all those paradigms are actually playing out in in the clouds. Everything from a IIE. In the eighties and nineties you got distributed networking and computing, but it's all one big computer. And Michael Dell, who was the master of the computer industry building PCs, looks at this. Probably leg. It's one big computer. You got a processor and subsystems. So you know this is what's interesting. Amazon has done that, and if they try to be like the enterprise, like the old way, they could fall into that trap. So if the enterprise stays in the enterprise, they know they're not going out. So I think it's interesting that I see the enterprise trying to like Amazon Amazon trying to get a price. So at the end of the day, whoever could build that system that's scalable the way I think Dell's doing, it's great. I was only scaleable using data for special. So it's a distributed computer. That's all that's going on in the world right now, and it's changing everything. Open source software is there. All that makes it completely different, and it's a huge opportunity. Whoever can crack the code on this, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. Total adjustable market >> well, in twenty ten we said that way, noted the gap. There's still a gap between what Amazon could do and what the on Prem guys Khun Dio, we'd argue, is a five years is seven years, maybe ten years, whatever it is. But at the time we said, if you recall, lookit, they got to close the gap. It's got to be good enough for I t to buy into it like we're starting to see that. But my view, it's still not cloud. It doesn't have to scale a cloud, doesn't have the economics cloud. When you peel the onion, it doesn't certainly doesn't have the SAS model and the consumption model of cloud nowhere close yet. Well, and you know, >> here's the drumbeat of innovation that we see from the public cloud. You know where we hit the shot to show this week, the public have allowed providers how many announcements that they probably had. Sure, there was a mega launch of announcements here, but the public lives just that regular cadence of their, you know, Public Cloud. See a CD. We're not quite there yet in this kind of environment, it's still what Amazon would say is. You put this in an environment and it's kind of frozen. Well, it's thought some, and it's now we can get data set. A service consumption model is something we can go. We're shifting in that model. It's easier to update things, but you know, how do I get access to the new features? But we're seeing that blurring of the line. I could start moving services that hybrid nature of the environment. We've talked a few times. We've been digging into that hybrid cloud taxonomy and some of the services to span because it's not public or private. It's now truly that hybrid and multi environment and customers are going to live in. And all of >> the questions Jonah's is good enough to hold serve >> well. I think the reality is is that you go back to twenty ten, the jury in the private cloud and it's enterprises almost ten years to figure out that it's real. And I think in that time frame Amazon is absolutely leveled. Everybody, we call that the tsunami. Microsoft quickly figures out that they got to get Cloud. They come in there, got a fast followers. Second, Google's trying to retool Oracle. I think Mr Bo completely get Ali Baba and IBM in there, so you got the whole cloud game happening. The problem of the enterprises is that there's no growth in terms of old school enterprise other than re consolidate in position for Cloud. My question to you guys is, Is there going to be true? True growth in the classic enterprise business or, well, all this SAS run on clouds. So, yes, if it's multi cloud or even hybrid for the reasons they talk about, that's not a lot of growth compared to what the cloud can offer. So again, I still haven't seen Dave the visibility in my mind that on premises growth is going to be massive compared to cloud. I mean, I think cloud is where Sassen lives. I think that's where the scale lives we have. How much scale can you do with consolidation? We >> are in a prolonged bull market that that started in twenty ten, and it's kind of hunger. In the tenth year of a of a decade of bull market, the enterprise market is cyclical, and it's, you know, at some point you're going to start to see a slowdown cloud. I mean, it's just a tiny little portion of the market is going to continue to gain share cloud can grow in a downturn. The no >> tell Motel pointed out on this, Michael Dell pointed out on the Cubans, as as those lieutenants, the is the consolidation of it is just that is a retooling to be cloud ready operationally. That's where hybrid comes in. So I think that realization has kicked in. But as enterprises aren't like, they're not like Google and Facebook. They're not really that fast, so So they've got to kind of get their act together on premises. That's why I think In the short term, this consolidation and new revitalisation is happening because they're retooling to be cloud ready. That is absolutely happen. But to say that's the massive growth studio >> now looked. It is. Dave pointed out that the way that there is more than the market growth is by gaining market share Share share are areas where Dell and Emcee didn't have large environment. You know, I spent ten years of DMC. I was a networking. I was mostly storage networking, some land connectivity for replication like srd Evan, like today at this show, I talked a lot of the telco people talk to the service of idle talk where the sd whan deny sirrah some of these pieces, they're really starting to do networking. That's the area where that software defined not s the end, but the only in partnership with cos like Big Switch. They're getting into that market, and they have such small market share their that there's huge up uplift to be able to dig into the giant. >> Okay, couple questions. What percent of Dell's ninety one billion today is multi cloud revenue. Great question. Okay, one percent. I mean, very small. Okay. Very small hero. Okay? And is that multi cloud revenue all incremental growth isat going to cannibalize the existing base? These? Well, these are the fundamentals weighs six local market that I'm talking to >> get into this. You led the defense of conversations. We had Tom Speed on the CFO and he nailed us. He said There's multiple levers to shareholder growth. Pay down the debt check. He's got to do that. You love that conversation. Margin expansion. Get the margins up. Use the client business to cover costs. As you said, increased go to market efficiency and leverage. The supply chain that's like their core >> fetrow of cash. And that all >> these. The one thing he said that was mind blowing to me is that no one gets the valuation of how valuable Del Technologies is. They're throwing off close to seven billion dollars in free cash flow free cash flow. Okay, so you can talk margin expansion all you want. That's great, but there got this huge cash flow coming in. You can't go out of business worth winning if you don't run out of cash >> in the market. When the market is good, these guys are it is good a position is anybody, and I would argue better position than anybody. The question on the table that I'm asking is, how long can it last? And if and when the market turns down and markets always cyclical we like again. We're in the tenth year of a bull market. I mean, it's someone >> unprecedented gel can use the war chest of the free cash flow check on these levers that they're talking about here, they're gonna have the leverage to go in during the downturn and then be the cost optimizer for great for customers. So right now, they're gonna be taking their medicine, creating this one common operating environment, which they have an advantage because they have all the puzzle pieces. You A Packer Enterprises doesn't have the gaping holes in the end to end. They can't address us, >> So that is a really good point that you're making now. So then the next question is okay. If and when the downturn turn comes, who's going to take advantage of it, who's going to come out stronger? >> I think Amazon is going to be continued to dominate, and as long as they don't fall into the enterprise trap of trying to be too enterprising, continue to operate their way for enterprises. I think jazz. He's got that covered. I think DEL Technologies is perfectly positioned toe leverage, the cash flow and the thing to do that. I think Cisco's got a great opportunity, and I think that's something that you know. You don't hear a lot of talk about the M where Cisco war happening. But Cisco has a network. They have a developer ecosystem just starting to get revitalized. That's an opportunity. So >> I got thoughts on Cisco, too. But one of things I want to say about Del being able to come out of that stronger. I keep saying I've said this a number of times and asked a lot of questions this week is the PC business is vital for Del. It's almost half the company's revenue. Maybe not quite, but it it's where the company started it. It sucks up a lot of corporate overhead. >> If Hewlett Packard did not spin out HP HP, they would be in the game. I think spinning that out was a huge mistake. I wrote about a publicly took a lot of heat for it, but you know I try to go along with the HPD focus. Del has proven bigger is better. HP has proven that smaller is not as leverage. And if it had the PC that bee have the mojo in gaming had the mojo in the edge, and Dale's got all the leverage to cross pollinate the front end and edge into the back and common cloud operate environment that is going to be an advantage. And that's going to something that will see Well, let me let me >> let me counter what you just said. I agree. You know this this minute. But the autonomy was the big mistake. Once hp autonomy, you know what Meg did was almost a fatal complete. They never should've bought autonomy >> makers. Levi Protector he was. So he was there. >> But she inherited that bag of rocks. And then what you gonna do with it? Okay, so that's why they had to spend out and did create shareholder value. If they had not purchased autonomy, then he would return much better shape, not to split it up. And they would be a much stronger competitor. >> And I share holder Pop. They had a pop on value. People made some cash with long game. I think that >> going toe peon base actually done pretty well for a first year holding a standalone PC company. So, but again, I think Del. With that leverage, assuming pieces, it's going to be really interesting. I don't know much about that market. You were loving that PC conversation, but the whole, you know, the new game or markets and and the new wayto work throwing an edge in there, I don't know is ej PC and edges that >> so the peanut butter. And so the big thing that Michael get the big thing, Michael Dell said on the Cube was We're not a conglomerate were an integrated company. And when you have an integrated company like this, with the tech the tech landscape shifting to their advantage, you have the ability to cross subsidize. So strategy game. Matt Baker was here we'd be talking about OK, I can cross subsidize margin. You've brought it up on the client side. Smaller margins, but it pays a lot of the corporate overhead. Absolutely. Then you got higher margin GMC business was, you know, those margins that's contributing. And so when you have this new configuration. You can cross, subsidize and move and shift, so I think that's a great advantage. I think that's undervalued in the market place. And I think, you know, I think Del stock price is, well, undervalue. Point out the numbers they got VM wear and their question is, What what point is? VM where blink and go All in on del technology stew. Orcas Remember that Gus was gonna partner. You don't think the phone was ringing off the hook in Palo Alto from their parties? What? What's this as your deal? So Vienna. There's gotta be the neutral party. Big problem. The opportunity. >> Well, look, if I'm a traditional historical partner of'Em are, it's not the Azure announcement that has me a little bit concerned because all of them partner with Microsoft to it is how tightly combined. Del and Veum, where are the emcee, always kept them in arms like now they're in the same. It's like Dave. They're blending it. It's like, you know Del, from a market cap standpoint, gets fifty cents on the dollar. VM wears a software company, and they get their multiples. Del is not a software company, but VM where well, people are. Well, if we can win that a little bit, maybe we could get that. >> Marty still Isn't it splendid? No, no, I think the strategy is absolutely right on. You have to go hard with VM wear and use it as a competitive weapon. But, Stuart, your point fifty cents and all, it's actually much worse than that. I mean the numbers. If you take out of'Em, wears the VM wear ownership, you take out the core debt and you look at the market value you're left with, like a billion dollars. Cordell is undervalued. Cordell is worth more than a billion or two billion dollars. Okay, so it's a really cheap way to buy Veum. Where Right that the Tom Sweet nailed this, he said. You know, basically, these company those the streets not used to tech companies having such big debt. But to your point, John, they're throwing off cash. So this company is undervalued, in my view. Now there's some risks associated with that, and that's why the investors of penalizing them for that debt there, penalizing him from Michael's ownership structure. You know, that's what this is, but >> a lack of understanding in my opinion. I think I think you're right. I just think they don't understand. Look at Dale and they think G You don't look a day Ellen Think distributed computing system with software, fill in those gaps and all that extra ten expansion. It's legit. I think they could go after new market opportunities as as a twos to us as the client business. I mean mere trade ins and just that's massive trillions of dollars. It's, I think I think that is huge. But I'm >> a bull. I'm a bull on the value of the company. I know >> guys most important developments. Del technology world. What's the big story that you think is coming out of the show here? >> Well, it's definitely, you know, the VM wear on del I mean, that is the big story, and it's to your point. It's Del basically saying we're going to integrate this. We're going to hard, we're going to go hard and you know Veum wear on Dell is a preferred solution. No doubt that is top for Dell and PacBell Singer said it. Veum wearing eight of us is the first and preferred solution. Those are the two primary vectors. They're going to drive hard and then Oh, yeah, we'Ll listen to customers Whatever else you want Google as you're fine, we're there. But those two vectors, they're going to Dr David >> build on that because we saw the, um we're building out of multi cloud strategy and what we have today is Del is now putting themselves in there as a first class citizen. Before it was like, Oh, we're doing VX rail and Anna sex and, you know, we'LL integrate all these pieces there, but infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure now it is. It is multi cloud. We want to see that the big table, >> right, Jeff, Jeff Clarke said, Why are you doing both? Let's just one strategy, one company. It's all one Cash registers that >> saying those heard that before. I think the biggest story to me is something that we've been seeing in the Cuban laud, you know, been Mom. This rant horizontally scaleable operating environment is the land grab and then vertically integrate with data into applications that allow each vertical industry leverage data for the kind of intimate, personalized experiences for user experiences in each industry. With oil and gas public sector, each one has got their own experiences that are unique. Data drives that, but the horizontal and tow an operating model when it's on premises hybrid or multi cloud is a huge land grab. And I think that is a major strategic win for Dell, and I think, as if no one challenges them on this. Dave, if HP doesn't go on, emanate change. If H h p e does not do it em in a complete changeover from strategy and pulling, filling their end to end, I think that going to be really hurting I think there's gonna be a tell sign and we'LL see, See who reacts and challenges Del on this in ten. And I think if they can pull it off without being contested, >> the only thing I would say that the only thing I would say that Jonah's you know, HP, you know very well I mean, they got a lot of loyal customers and is a huge market out there. So it's >> Steve. Look at economic. The economics are shifting in the new world. New use cases, new step function of user experiences. This is this is going to be new user experiences at new economic price points that's a business model. Innovation, loyal customers that's hard to sustain. They'Ll keep some clutching and grabbing, but everyone will move to the better mousetrap in the scenario. So the combination of that stability with software it's just this as a big market. >> So John twenty ten Little Table Back Corner, you know of'em See Dylan Blogger World double set. Beautiful says theatre of present lot of exchange and industry. But the partnership in support of this ecosystem. It's something that helped us along the way. >> You know, when we started doing this, Jeff came on board. The team has been amazing. We have been growing up and getting better every show. Small, incremental improvements here and there has been an amazing production, Amazing team all around us. But the support of the communities do this is has been a co creation project from day one. We love having this conversation's with smart people. Tech athletes make it unique. Make it organic, let the page stuff on on the other literature pieces go well. But here it's about conversations for four and with the community, and I think the community sponsorship has been part of funding mohr of it. You're seeing more cubes soon will be four sets of eight of US four sets of V M World four sets here. Global Partners sets I'm used to What have we missed? >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, we're at a unique time in the industry and honored to be able to help documented with the two of you in the whole team. >> Dave, How it Elias sitting there giving him some kind of a victory lap because we've been doing this for ten years. He's been the one of the co captains of the integration. He says. There's a lot of credit. >> Yeah, Howard has had an amazing career. I I met him like literally decades ago, and he has always taken on the really hard jobs. I mean, that's I think, part of his secret success, because it's like he took on the integration he took on the services business at at AMC U members to when Joe did you say we're a product company? No services company. I was like, Give me services. Take it. >> It's been on the Cube ten years. Dave. He was. He was John away. He was on fire this week. I thought bad. Kelsey was phenomenal. >> Yeah, he's an amazing guest. Tom Tom Suite, You know, very strong moments. >> What's your favorite Cuban? I'LL never forget. Joe Tucci had my little camera out film and Joe Tucci, Anna. One of the sessions is some commentary in the hallway. >> Well, that was twenty ten, one of twenty eleven, I think one of my favorite twenty ten moments I go back to the first time we did. The cue was when you asked Joe Tucci, you know why a storage sexy. Remember that? >> A He never came on >> again. Ah, but that was a mean. If you're right, that was a cube mean all for the next couple of years. Remember, Tom Georges, we have because I'm not touching. That was >> so remember when we were critical of hybrid clouds like twenty, twelve, twenty, thirteen I go, Pat is a hybrid cloud, a halfway house to the final destination of public loud. He goes to a halfway house, three interviews. This was like the whole crowd was like, what just happened? Still favorite moment. >> Oh, gosh is a mean so money here, John. As you said, just such a community, love. You know, the people that we've had on for ten years and then, you know, took us, you know, three or four years to before we had Michael Dell on. Now he's a regular on our program with luminaries we've had on, you know, but yeah, I mean, twenty ten, you know, it's actually my last week working for him. See? So, Dave, thanks for popping me out. It's been a fun ride, and yeah, I mean, it's amazing to be able to talk to this whole community. >> Favorite moment was when we were at eighty bucks our first show. We're like, We still like hell on this. James Hamilton, Andy Jazzy Come on up, Very small show. Now it's a monster, David The Cube has had some good luck. Well, we've been on the right waves, and a lot of a lot of companies have sold their companies. Been part of Q comes when public Unicorns New Channel came on early on. No one understood that company. >> What I'm thrilled about to Jonah's were now a decade, and we're documenting a lot of the big waves. One of one of the most memorable moments for me was when you called me up. That said, Hey, we're doing a dupe world in New York. I got on a plane and went out. I landed in, like, two. Thirty in the morning. You met me. We did to dupe World. Nobody knew what to do was back then it became, like, the hottest thing going. Now nobody talks about her dupe. So we're seeing these waves and the Cube was able to document them. It's really >> a pleasure. The Cube can and we got the Cube studios sooner with cubes Stories with Cube Network too. Cue all the time, guys. Thanks. It's been a pleasure doing business with you here. Del Technologies shot out the letter. Chuck on the team. Sonia. Gabe. Everyone else, Guys. Great job. Excellent set. Good show. Closing down. Del Technologies rose two cubes coverage. Thanks for watching

>> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two senior executives from Dell Technologies here with us, Greg Bowen, Senior Vice President, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Garry Wiseman, Senior Vice President, office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on, digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of Cloud stuff, but also a lot of, you know, workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around Client Edge, digital technologies, unified workspaces, all pointing to the benefits of what Cloud and data can do, ultimately at the end of the day, that's what drive great value in apps, but also, user experience. I mean, people are workin', they're mobile, this is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell Digital Way kind of mission. What is that about, tell us about that, 'cause you're doing it in internally, you're not even dog footing, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out, take us through the digital, the Dell Digital Way. >> Yeah, so the Dell Digital Way. If you guys ever Google digital transformation, good luck. The first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there and you know, we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that will allow us to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell Digital Way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture, really the way we interact with the business. Start with the business and the User first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays, and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal all the way through the DM, Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, So we can operate as a multi Cloud environment as well. >> So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training, and this is not just you know, talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone's has all these kind of, they talk the talk, but might not walk the walk. >> It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people, and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment, if they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first 60 that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the Pivotal Way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user centered design. >> How do people get the, how do, how do companies get the people's side right? Because you know, we all kind of work the big companies, you guys are a lot bigger. Now that Dell Technologies, where head of the old world was oh, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize as a matrix organization. You know what agile teams, a lot of kind of HR issues that if someone might be great on one team, not great on another, and so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How you guys get that right? Because that seems to be a big part of it. Because you got to be agile. You don't be doing reorders after the fact Oh, we didn't post the numbers. We weren't successful. Let's reorder, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? >> I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really key, three key skills in this. There's a product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balanced team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today, and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. >> Well, I also have to say, obviously, being a company that presents itself as one that's modern, from a development standpoint, our infrastructure a place where really the next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really, you know, operating in this, this digital age, is another key thing for us to make sure that as we, as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, you know, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace we'd make sure that we have a modern looking workspace, we have, you know, open seating areas, we have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And then, of course, with the technologies, we're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have, you know, the Pivotal methodology we use, but we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the Cloud. We actually have all of the the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in, if we're trying to recruit people like, you know, the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to track, that we're in this, this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the, that's the one big difference. >> South of the playbook then is the playbook to get this right as core team. Get that core fabric of the, whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then put tuning people through. And cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little Cloud, I need a little bit of hyper convergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combined workout. It's kind of like sports. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously, on some the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be, you know, really game for the change and really want to, you know, shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious, and then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really as we go through those, those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in? And who do we want to help you to move forward from a skills perspective? >> So a couple of challenges that I, that I see, I wonder if you could help us understand how you address, you've got the business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, makes sense. But you've got, I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across, how big is Dallas? Like hundreds of thousands of people? Lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, Okay 60%, you know, nail it, and the others, you know, maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burned some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? >> So the good news is, the frameworks that we're building, and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up Cloud native, they're a green field, they've started in the Cloud, they started on PCF. And they are perfectly, really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And, and everything in between. We found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way, the building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. >> Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company, you got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, Okay, this part of the portfolio, we're going to leave alone, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old, (laughing) Oracle database, and we're not going to touch that. But, but how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, the way we've looked at it is really, where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected speeds of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so dell.com, or our b2b site for customers, or anything that's service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the order management system per se. So the order management system, you know, it's, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we we look at it from a portfolio standpoint, and again, from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact with the customers or the employees will feel most immediately? And so that's how we prioritize things in the question. >> Another question, John, I like to ask guys like you, you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but, well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps, champagnes not quite ready yet. (laughing) >> That's want to be champagne, you know. >> So you, I'm sure, have a lot of people trying to hey, try this out, you guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard? In terms of beta testing? You know, do people love you, do they hate you? You like, you tell on them? How does that all work? >> We should be our first and best customer, and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us. But we did put it into a non production environment and started working on okay, how can we utilize this, for maybe non production workloads, some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B, so we can start flexing it, and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what, it's not going to really handle some of our production workloads. But here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. >> Yeah, I was going to say it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we discovered things that either it couldn't do, or other issues with, and the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. >> I presume there's such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product, okay. And so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? >> Yeah, so when we went and did this, we built a business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the Agile pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test driven development, then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused, then say program management focused, so we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors key performance indicator changes, and then actually business metric outcomes. >> You guys make it sound so easy. >> Right, Greg and Garry, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stop. But I want to get you know, one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, that part of the whole Dell transformation, a lot of glue layer in the past, lot of SI like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been? And what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys, for the end users? >> So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been at the company for the last couple years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from, from either business before, but from what I've observed, and from what I've seen so far, integration is actually going very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at scale. We have a North Star. So we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems we want to end up with, with a single system. We're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure. We have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations, from both the entities as they came together, that we're continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell technology. So, from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple years ago, it's very impressive at how well-- >> That, that's where the efficiencies are going to be right there too, right? >> Yes, it's amazing the same of the same, the sales tools as we're integrating those, and making sure that we have tools where the salespeople can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies is another great thing. >> IT guy told me one time, he says "we're in business when we're out of business". >> Correct. Meaning, you've got that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value, you know, capabilities with AI, machine learning, do much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way. Not that you're out of business, but you know what I'm saying, when you're invisible, it's good, right? >> Our job is to enable the business ultimately, and if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. >> Alright guys, thanks so much real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell technology? What's the big takeaway? What's the most important stories? >> Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities and Dell digital. So for us, it's just that, that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis, and using technology to do something with it. And I think, you know, you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. >> Garry. >> I would simply say that, you know, the dream, I'll be able to run workloads in, whether it's your own infrastructure, or multiple Clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've, we've released that with the, the Dell Cloud. >> Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps in every industry that's unique. Tailor is horizontally scalable, but vertically specialized, very, it's like a whole new world. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> Guys, Congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more seems like more. You can see some visibility out there, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here with Dave Vallante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage, two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell technology. We'll be right back.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. So CUBE's live coverage here in Vegas, day three as we wind down three days of deep coverage, two sets, a lot of content flowing on siliconangle.com and theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Day Three's still got a lot of action to it. Rick, Rich Steeves, Senior Director, Worldwide Partner Programs welcome to theCUBE. We just talked about people calling you Rick. >> It's going to happen. >> Rich, welcome to theCUBE. >> It's been an, I'm really honored to be on with you guys. >> Worldwide Partner Programs. Obviously, VMware is hot. Revenue's up, Pat Gelsing was on yesterday. >> That's right. >> Everything's going up and to the right. Lot of things that the bets that VMware made paying off. Still great customer base growing. Cloudified, multiple partnerships. So you guys are in a good market position. >> Clearly. >> Now with the Dell Technologies integration you got touchpoints with Azure. VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation. >> That's right. >> You have a foundational bedrock now to integrate into multiple environments. Really puts the software-defined data centers in play for everybody. >> That's correct. >> Now you're bringing it out to the partners for money-making opportunities where they can deliver value. >> Exactly. >> And get paid for it. Make a lot of profit. >> Win, win, win. >> This is the equation of partnering. >> Correct. >> Where are you guys at right now? Again, a lot of now, partnering, you do joint programs. It seems complex to me. Break if down for us. >> Yeah, well clearly we're at a great moment right now. Where the portfolios coming together. The market opportunities coming together. And we're really looking to help drive a change in the vision in the way that we partner together in the marketplace. To win together with our customers. You know, we feel like our responsibility is if we're going to have the opportunity to win the business with our partners for the foreseeable future and to become that essential, ubiquitous digital platform to help drive innovation together with our partners for our customers during their digital transformation. We fundamentally have to change the way that we look at the business and the way that we engage in the marketplace. We have to make it radically simple. Simple to engage, drive profitability and drive growth. And spend less time focused on, maybe, some of the traditional motions that have been aligned in the channel programs of the past. Around traditional routes to market or silos of complexity within the program. >> Rick, what's an example of old versus new? Give us a couple of them. >> You know, I've had the opportunity to lead and drive some of the changes and transformations. Some of the larger vendor programs in the marketplace. I think there are some pitfalls and traps we've all fell into in the past. And a lot of that has come into really siloing our partners based on traditional routes to market. Here's the bar program. Here's the distributor program. Here's the OEM program. But what we're seeing in this cloud, hybrid cloud, mobile first world, is that our partners are delivering value across the spectrum. And yet, many vendors are continuing to look at their partners as individual segments and silos. We've got to do better, right? And that's really the business proposition and some of the exciting announcements we've had recently. >> Well, I would just add just some complexity standpoint. Because of data and AI and, now, scalable infrastructure, you now have every vertical industry with specialty capabilities apps. >> Quite right. >> So, in a way, your service area for partnering is increased. So not only do you have to simplify the programs, you've got a bigger landscape to take territory on. >> Clearly. As we look at building on the foundation that we've built. Through the compute layer and b-sphere, and the ecosystem of incredibly valuable partnerships that we've built. As we take that across and hyperfocus on accelerating the cloud journey, but also transforming networking and security, or also empowering digital workspace. We've got to look at that broad base of partners and how they're delivering value to their customers. >> So what is the segmentation if it's not by the old traditional buckets? What are the new buckets or seams, really? >> It's a great question. I think we're coming to the market with a simpler proposition that says we want to offer our partners greater flexibility and choice to choose the business model that makes sense for how they want to go to market to solve their customers most pressing IT needs and priorities. Whether I'm a reseller or a cloud-service provider or an OEM. I want to have one engagement model. A consistent experience as I engage with VMware. And I want you to recognize the total value I'm bringing to the customer relationship, rather than the individual piece parts. So, one agreement, any business model, one single program. >> So, let's take some friction out of the complexity, make it simpler. What about specific programs? What are you guys launching? What are some of the news that you're rolling out to get these guys up and running quickly? >> We're really excited. We've had the opportunity over the last few weeks to change what has been in the past the tradition of over a decade the VMware Partner Network evolving to become the VMware Partner Connect Program. So we announced three weeks ago to our most strategic partners the introduction of that one-program framework, offering simplicity and choice. To focus on their customers rather than how we've asked them to engage based on how we're aligned often internally by business unit or route to market. And the reception's really just been incredible. >> The other thing that partners want, and I hear this a lot from my friends that are in the business, own a bunch of firms. Hey, what's in it for me? I need to make some cash. I would need simplicity. I don't need a lot of high cost of sales. And I want to have high margins on what we're doing. But also want to wrap services around it. >> Clearly. >> How are you guys helping that scenario? >> Really in multiple ways. I think for VMware, as we look at the opportunity, and I know you guys had a chance to catch up with Pat. We've got some really bold statements of where we want to grow the business in the coming years, together with our partners. I mean, it's a pretty powerful position to say, we want to double the business together with you in the next three-to-five years. We want to go from 5% of revenue, delivered through SAS and subscription to 20% together with our partners. And that's going to come through a vibrant and committed partner ecosystem. And that vibrancy as we go forward is really going to be in the way that partners differentiate, based on their skill sets and capabilities. Rather than program tiers, names and brands. I'll give you an example. We've had the opportunity in this last year to introduce our Master Services Competencies. Really industry best-of-breed recognition of where partners are unlocking value for their customers. So whether they're driving data-center virtualization, network virtualization or desktop and mobility. We now have the ability to say to our fields, to our services organization, and most importantly, to customers, here is the partner that is going to drive and deliver on the transformation. Through, for the partner, margin-rich services opportunities. And, again, in a lot of these conversations with our partners, as they're making that change and transition many of them from traditional resale business models to cloud. A lot of the services opportunity is really delivering most of the profitability. >> So part of that transition, you just mentioned it, is quadrupling the subscription component. How are you dealing with the obvious challenge of how you compensate for that? What a lot of SAS companies will do is say, "Yeah, SAS, pay by the drink. "But you got to sign up for three years." (laughter) So, it's really not cloud. So how are you dealing with that challenge and how is the channel absorbing it? >> It's a great question. If we look at the economics of the relationship in the past, it's been really focused on the initial transaction. But that transaction in the cloud world, it is an important milestone along the customer journey, but it's only the initial step, right? In this try, buy, proof-of-concept life cycle, we've got to do a better job of taking our investment envelope and wallet and spreading that across the customer journey. Looking at monthly recurring revenue. Looking at the ways that our partners are unlocking value and driving consumption. So, moving it from the initial transaction to deployment, consumption and expand opportunities with our customers. It's going to add tremendous value to the equation. >> So you've got a new playbook, things are changing. >> That's right. >> How you got here is not how you're going to move forward. Whole new ball game. What kinds of mechanisms you guys going to put in place? 'Cause you guys had, Tranel has tried and trued programs. Soft dollars, training. You got to get the word out. >> That's right. >> You got to watch the journey, so you got to instrument that. >> That's right. >> What are some of the things you guys doing to be new and be fast and be relevant? >> It's a great question. I mean, a lot of it comes down to the evangelism, and I'd say frankly, doing a better job of listening to our partners. We've had the advantage through VMware Partner Connect, through our partner advisory boards and councils. Doing the listening along the way to say that this is a program that not only is VMware building, but this is the co-investment and co-building together with our partners. So, from inception to design and concept and, ultimately, to the announcement and rollout. We've had our partners hip-to-hip with us in this rollout. We'll certainly look to leverage opportunities, like VMworld, hopefully we'll see you guys there. >> We'll definitely be there. >> We'll see you guys there. To amplify that message. But the key piece, and this is what our partners tell us, is help me leverage the investments I've made in my VMware relationship today, but position me for the opportunities ahead. Give me a sense of, where do I need to invest. Sometimes ahead of the curve to make sure I'm taking advantage of the program. >> And are you guys funded for that right now? Is Pat getting behind this with actual cash to prime the pump here? What's the update there? >> This is from Pat and e-staff on down. A commitment for the organization. Brandon Sweeney, Maurizio Carli, everyone's really rallied around us. It's one of our top priorities. Pat wants to ensure that we've got that vibrant, committed partner ecosystem that is bringing incremental value to our customer relationships and we're putting the money behind the commitment. >> You got to get the community action going, got to get some content. Doing a great job right here. Question on the customer piece, I want to just shift gears, because end of the day you're, it's an indirect channel ultimately for VMware, but you've got to get deep in it and enable your partners to be successful. They, then, have to think about your customer, too. Their customer, the joint customer. How has that world changed? 'Cause we were talking before we came on camera that with the VMware Cloud Foundation and all the, now, bundling that going on and all the integration. You've got a tight relationship with Dell Technologies, as well as other partners. There's a lot of cross-wired programs. Who gets credit for what, there's some complexity there. But, ultimately, it's an opportunity for the partner, your customers and then their customer, to actually be a cloud-service provider. >> That's right. >> A whole new generation. Take away the system integration challenges that customers want to get rid of. >> That's right. For us, it really comes down to being disruptive by being radically simple, right? Really boiling it down. And you talk about the relationship. There's some great announcements this week around the Dell Technologies Partner Program, change and evolution. And one of our partners, as well as our customers, frankly, have been asking us is, make it easier for us to do business across the full Dell Technologies family, right? All of the strategically-aligned businesses. Whether you look at our VMware cloud, on Dell EMC, VXrail, any number of the engineered solutions that we're bringing to market. It's about adding value to the customer, simplifying the engagement and, really again, driving the profitability for our partners. >> I think being agile, Rich, is going to be key for success for you. And making sure that it's funded, and that the money's going into the partners, >> That's right. >> In the gas tank to get then go faster >> Clearly. And we feel like we have one of the richest programs in the industry that's really driving incremental value for our partners. And I think what you'll see us do is, again, a better job of differentiating of partners that are, certainly, co-investing in VMware. But most importantly, and this is what we hear from our customers, is invest in the partners that have demonstrated the ability to unlock value in this engagement. >> Well, thanks for sharing the insight. We love this topic. I know it's kind of like a channel thing, but it's becoming a very key part for creating value, and also delivering a simple solution for customers. Give a quick plug for what's going on at VMworld, you mentioned VMworld. How do you guys run your partner programs, events? What's on the schedule? Take a quick minute to give a quick plug. >> We've got a few opportunities ahead of us. We're really excited to continue the success around our VMware Empower events. Where we bring both sales and technical enablement conversations to our partners. Certainly, VMworld to be able to-- >> What is that event? The one... >> Empower coming up in Lisbon. We're really excited towards the end of May. VMworld in the U.S., as well as in Amia, >> Do you co-locate an event within VMworld? >> Yes. We also do our Distribution Advisory Board, our Partner Advisory Board. Trying to add as much value, but also, again, do a good job of listening to our partners. >> Great. Rich, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. We'll be following all, we'll be following the money. That's at the end of the day, success is where people exchange of value. You guys doing a great job. We're bringing you all theCUBE content here. Day three, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (synth music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and Etico System partners. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Sin City Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have Varun Chhabra who is the Vice President Product Marketing Cloud Dell EMC, welcome back to theCUBE Varun. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Mark Lohmeyer SVG/PM of Cloud Platform VMware. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling we were talking that it should be a rap song, VMC on Dell EMC. (laughing) Tell us about the news this week. >> Yeah sure. So maybe I can kick it off. So real excited this Monday to introduce the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and you know, as I sort of think back to when we first started discussions together between the two companies, we really had this sort of this angle in mind which was how do we bring the simplicity, the agility and sort of the consumption economics of a public cloud model right, but with the control, the security, the enterprise class capabilities, you know performance that customers expect from an on-prem environment and how could VMware and Dell work together to really jointly engineer something that we think would be really special and achieve those goals, and based on feedback that we got from customers, we're really pleased at sort of the reaction to this, and we think that's really going to hit the sweet spot of kind of best of those both worlds. >> So Varun, Dell EMC's been in the private cloud market for a bit, actually it was somebody on the EMC side that, as far as I know, was credited with coming with that terminology so some of this isn't new. Give us what is new about this offering compared to what we've done in the past. >> Yeah. Great question Stu. So essentially what is really innovative about this is that this is taking the public cloud model to on-premises as Mark said. It's a fully managed service where Dell Technologies and VMware are working together behind the scenes to provide that public cloud like experience, the hands-off operations, the ability to provision resources using a cloud portal right and have it be installed for you and set up. Once it's set up, software patches, operating system updates, hardware updates, all of them are basically going to be managed for you. If there's any support issues, the VMware team will file a ticket for you. You don't even need to file a ticket, it will be managed for you. This issue will be resolved. You know we think that this will be a really transformative way for customers to consume cloud resources, and this is all about bringing that cloud model to the data center where there's so much data, that customers already have. >> All right. So Mark there were ripples in the industry, a couple of years ago when the VMware cloud on AWS was out. >> Right. You know some people may have like hey why wasn't it done on the Dell stuff first but the thing I want to ask is, what have you learned from that AWS engagement and how did that impact what you're doing now on the Dell EMC? >> Yeah it's a great question. So I think one thing, so we learn from our customers right and the feedback they give us? One of the things that they shared is look they really like the fact that we're taking all of that grunge work off the table for them right? I mean if you're an IT department and a customer you're looking at for how you can deliver more value to the business right? And patching our software, upgrading our software, being responsible for hardware issues, that's not adding value to the business right? Ensuring their delivery in the application SLA, ensuring the application is secure, helping reduce cost, those are adding tremendous value to the business right? So the fact that we're able to deliver to them a cloud service, allows them to sort of elevate the value that they can offer and so that was one key insight. We wanted to bring all of those benefits to VMware cloud on Dell EMC on-prem. The second thing I would say is just technically you know, it's a very different model to ship a customer software and hardware and say you manage it right? You're responsible for the SLA versus delivering a true cloud service right? It requires a very different way to run your engineering team, it requires this thing called service ownership right? That you're accountable for the SLA of your code running your production, you need to build out a site reliability engineering team, and it really requires a very close engineering relationship between everyone who's working together to deliver that integrated cloud solution. So we're taking all of those learnings and insights that we got from our experience in the public cloud, and now applying them with Dell to bring those same benefits to customers in the private cloud. >> One of the things that we've talked a lot on theCUBE about, in particular this week, is just how close the Dell VMware relationship seems. You have said Stu, and you really know your stuff, that this is the tightest you've ever seen it. And here you are talking about this jointly designed, engineered. Can you describe a little bit about sort of the culture of this partnership and how these two tech giants work together? >> Yeah I can take a stab at it (mumbles). Look this is not new to us. We have been working together for a long time. But I think as you saw on the Keeno stage with Jeff and Pat together, this is a new level of a relationship in terms of having our engineering teams work together, figuring out how to deliver the best customer experience right? We already see that when we made our announcement three weeks ago with VxRail and VMware cloud foundations, being able to manage the entire life cycle, right from the workload all the way down to the physical infrastructure using VMware cloud foundations. This is a natural extension of that model for us. We're taking some of the same engineering work, the tight integration, and then adding on another benefit of managing this for the customer and making things simpler for them. And you know we think this is just the start. We think there is so much more goodness we can uncover for our customers as part of this journey. >> Yeah I think it's great. The only thing I would add is you know, the analogy I like to use is sort of like weightlifting. This is a muscle that we've been building between VMware and Dell for many years now right? Delivering a full cloud service on top of Dell hardware, that's like bench-pressing 200 pounds right? (laughing) So if you just like had never worked out before and someone gave you 200 pounds to bench-press, you probably wouldn't be successful. Now the good news is we've been working together for a number of years now. We've been building that muscle together between the two companies right? VMware on VxRail, VMware cloud on VxRail, and so now we're taking this next step forward, hey maybe we're going from benching 150 to benching 200. We have the ability to get there right? And so in many ways, our ability to be successful at this is based on the fact that we have been working together so well for a number of years now and building on that. >> Okay so Varun, we look at these different solutions in the marketplace and the space and sometimes it's a little tough to differentiate them because you know, you look underneath the covers and you got a lot of hardware geeks you know? I'm one of them, I'm open the back of the cabinet and show me and I'm like oh I recognize that box and I do this but like say for example, if I go talk to Microsoft and I look at Andro Stack, they like don't really think about the Dell server underneath there and the partner they got to have, this is Azure, so when you think about the operating model, when you think about the consumption model, when you think about the applications, this is "Azure". What I've had a little bit of trouble, and I'm hoping you can help me explain is, I think it's a similar type of story but there is no Dell EMC public cloud. There's VMware in a couple of environments so is that the right model to be thinking of? I mean this is as a service, it's a consumption model but are the applications similar to what I had if I've built a stack with Dell and VMware or you know, give me the compare and contrast as to what I've done before and some of the other options out there. >> Great question and I think it's something a lot of customers ask us as well. Look I think this is a very unique offer compared to what we've seen in the market recently for a variety of reasons. But the first thing I'll start with saying is that customers today are already using VMware and LEMC for their existing workloads right? This is essentially the same platform so the tools that they use today vSphere, it's the extra migrate workloads, NSX, VSAN, they are going to be able to carry forward all the work they've done there on this platform. That's why it's no different from that perspective. So the learnings they have, the processes, the automation, the eco-system of back-up disaster recovery that they use today, they're going to be able to use later as well, with this as well so this is less disruptive for them. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'd say is you know, we think we have a unique advantage because we have a long heritage of working with customers in their data centers. Whether its VMware or Dell EMC or us combined together. Being able to manage the complexity, the thousands of variables in a data center that a customer has, where things are not just homogenous, everything is not standardized, it's very very different problem from talking about a homogenous cloud data center where everything is standardized, everything is built for automation. We think we have a unique capability to be able to do that, and not only from a day zero day one perspective, also from a support perspective. You know this is a fully managed service which means if things are you know, if something breaks, we may have to go down and actually go to the customers site and actually fix that. We have a support organization across VMware and Dell EMC already built today. Full scale. Every single country. Wherever people's data centers are. Again a different support model. We think this will be a journey for folks who don't have that built out, and finally, I think, I'm biased, but I think infrastructure matters. If you're going to take a bet on this platform for your edge locations, your retail locations, your thousands of retail locations, sure it's a fully managed service but you need to have the peace of mind that this is going to continue to work for you. Even in a fully managed scenario, it is disruptive if there's hardware failures. So VxRail is a platform that customers all around the world bet on. There's more than 4000 customers at VMware and Dell EMC have jointly driven success with so we think these are going to be unique factors that will create value for customers. >> Okay. So for the support model I understand. The question we've been talking the various solutions in the portfolio is the nirvana is that cloud operating model that I don't need to worry about what version it's running. Whether the latest security patch is in there because that's been taken care of for me. Are we close to that? Are we at that? How does that look? >> That's exactly the idea. That's exactly what we're going to deliver right? And that's powerful for the reasons you articulated. But even more than that I would say it's an amazing vehicle for us to deliver value and innovation to our customers right? You know, traditional model hey VMware developed software. It takes a year or two to develop. We deliver to the customer. They take another six months to a year to upgrade it, it's two to three years' latency between when an engineer has a good idea or a customer asks for something before they can reasonably get to take advantage of it in production. With this new cloud delivery model that we're building together, that latency shrinks down to potentially just weeks right? Because we are upgrading that service on a continuous basis. We can push those new innovations to our customers much more rapidly and they can immediately begin consuming them. Like literally those new features just show up in the service just like on your iPhone or whatever other service you might be using. Same model can now apply to the data center so its an incredibly powerful thing for our joint customers. It's also real exciting for our joint engineering teams right? You think about an engineer. They take pride in seeing the value of their work being used by customers and we can take that from two to three years, to two to three weeks. That's a tremendous thing. >> Real instant gratification. >> Yeah! >> Which makes for a happier employee, which makes for-- >> Time to innovate more right? >> All of that. >> You got it yeah. >> Great. Well Mark and Varun thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great having you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome on board technologies World. Lisa Martin with Rebecca Night for the first time hosting together. And I have to say this is probably one of my favorite times of del technologies world because we have dogs on the Cube joining us for Michael Angel Pause. We've got Alicia Halloran. She's back. She's a Q. Pietro's here last year. Your Fallen here, Here's OD and Gracie and holding Creasy is Denise Michael's Cox Global Experiential marketing from Del Technologies. Tony's Thank you for joining us as well. Certainly a lot of female power. You right out. He's just letting a male hanging out. Alicia, it's so good to have you back Way have enjoyed being having our set Next. Tio Michael's age. Applause again. This year. It's so great to hear barking. Yeah, when you're talking about, I think I'm at home so true. Talk to us a little bit about Michael's Angel. Pause your experience as a volunteer out. Yeah, D'Oh well, first of all, Michael Angel paused >> is was a static to nonprofit established in Las Vegas, and they have three main programs. They have a community dog program, which really strengthens the bonds between people and their animals. And they have a therapy dog program, which is what these lovelies air part of, and we just love to bring joy and delight everywhere we go. And then they also have a service dog training, which allows people with autism or with their mobility issues or any kind of medical alert. So that's the main process of what Michael Angel paused does way air volunteers with them. We have loved being volunteers with them. Uh, OD is blind, and we managed to get him through the therapy dog program, and we love to come to conferences and just really help people feel better. And Gracie, of course, is just a little beauties. So, >> yeah, so Denise, tell me a little bit about why Dell has partnered with this with this organ, which is a great organization. And why might people need to feel better when they're out of touch? Honor. That's been may be related to this morning's kid note address with the anxiety, sometimes technology way. You do like >> to say we think of everything for Del Technologies world. So what is one more thing? How to surprise and delight our costumers? Air attendees here. And also it's really important for us as Del Technologies to give back to the community. And so it's a great opportunity to give back to great organization like Michael's Angels. Pause and surprise and delight our guests with the with several dogs to pet. Because you know, when you go to a conference when you travel, you miss your pets a lot. A lot of people miss their dogs, and so we're here for them to get a dog fix or maybe just come in for a few minutes. Distress. Er, jetsam dogs come out happy. Everyone who walks in, walks in, smiling and walks out, smiling bigger. So it's a great place. Tio work here, too. >> We were hearing last year that Michael Age, a PAS exhibit exhibit, was one of the most popular places for Get fourteen fifteen thousand people to congregate. Ru. Do you experience the same thing this year? Yes, >> definitely, definitely didn't really. It's been really busy, like these little ebbs and flows like you just catch a breath and then twenty five people are there and they're all like, Oh, it's so great. It's so great to see people relax and be able to kind of sit down and take a breath, which I think is really hard in a conference like this. >> It is, and it's also STD. So you mentioned it's nice to recognize that they're all people. They all have families, a lot of them, whether their pet owners or not. It's just a nice way to just sort of get back to reality, maybe come down from the cloud right on and actually have a little bit of something that just brings a just a smile to your heart. Yes, >> bring some joy even without technology. >> So we know the humans love it. But here, the Toups, how are they doing? Because, as you said, they usually you're going toe spills There. You told each home write and write and how are they handling? They >> handle it. Amazingly, they love to come. You know, the energy is very, very different, so they can be a little bit more rambunctious. They could move a little bit more because they're not working with somebody that is in hospice or you know has an illness. So it's people who are exactly feeling sad that they don't have their animals with them, and they get to get cuddled and squeezed and they love it. So it's a wonderful experience for them. They love to do it. She kind of looks a little sleepy, but that's kind of her way of being like >> he's himself. You're >> yeah, Just loves it. What is some of the reactions elation that you've experience out in the field like, for example, in the hospital or a hospice organization or in firemen's Yeah, that you see patients. Oh, yeah, they light owns, >> they light up. I mean, when you go to a hospital, people are in a hospital, and so everything is very regimented, their way woken up in the middle of the night to do whatever needs to be done. And people are kind of like talking about them, but not actually to them, and that animals don't differentiate there just like we want to sit with you, and that's what we're going to do. We're just going to sit with you, so it gives them a moment to just relax again and not have to think about. When's the next blood draw? When's the next thing that's gonna happen? So it's a really wonderful, relaxing experience for them. It's it's it's and and the joy that it brings. And I think there's a lot of healing in that that when your feel good, you feel good, you have the ability to heal better. And so I think therapy dogs are so important in a in a hospital environment, and >> this is a two step sort of certification program. They become a therapy dog first, and then they would become a service dog. Or can they go into a hospital as a therapy dog to >> go in as a therapy dog? Yes, so that's That's the work that these guys do service dogs or more about if you have something on illness, or that you have some mobility issues that you need balance or you need if you have PTSD that you need to have a dog with you all the time just to kind of keep you keep you together, which I think everybody understands that it feels good to have an animal with you. So these guys are therapy dogs, which is not the service dogs. >> Got it? Yeah. >> Denise, this is your baby. This thing, The show. Congratulations. It was a great show. Fifteen thousand attendees. Eso money partners. So money. A lot of great energy and a great vibe. Can you just talk a little bit? About what? This year's event This this dull world technologies has meant to you. This has >> been a great event every year. It's a great about. But this year, Thea Energy is even higher, so positive it's always really positive. Be here anyway. And so many more people this year, too. It's just a constant Gogo energy all the time. And it's It's wonderful. It's so fun. I love being part of the organization and proud to be able to say that I helped and some a little bit put this together. And so I'm just happy to be here and proud to be a part of Del Technologies to >> Denise before we let you go and get some well deserved. This's also a charity and philanthropy that's close, and Michael Dell's Hart Can you explain a little bit about that? And how he helps veterans in this way? >> Well, how Michael helps veterans or Michael's Angels pause veterans because they both do. >> Michael, let's talk about Michael Dell for since this is kind of his thing, yeah, well, it's, >> um, like for Del itself, a Michael Dell to is very important to him. To give back to the community is is important to us all. And that's a big part of what we dio and this opportunity to that now contribute event. Veterans like these guys go to that veteran homes and help with, um now Del itself. And Michael Dell also contributes Teo many veteran organizations helping veterans with PTSD. And we saw that last year at Del World talking a lot about continue working with veterans, working through PTSD with the art art for veterans. And so there's many organizations like that we work with our Del Technologies and Michael Dell works with, and that give that >> exit was we heard that maybe there was some support financial support for dogs that go through service training to become service dogs for veterans, which is a pretty extensive process and quite expensive. So nice to hear how much it really doesn't mean to the heart of Adele Denise Alicia. Thank you. Someone like you, but I mean, of course, Odeon, Gracie. Humans think they are. Thanks, guys. Really brought a smile to my heart and I got to go home to my dog with first. She's yet, right? Yeah. Like for Rebecca Knight. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Dale Technologies World twenty nineteen. Thanks so much for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell World Technologies here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment. We have Honore LaBourdette. She is the VP, Global Market Development, Telco Business Group. Welcome, VMware, thank you, sorry. >> Thank you, yes. >> Welcome. And we have Kevin Shatzkamer, Senior VP, Networking and Solutions, Dell EMC. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> So Kevin I want to start with you. There was a big announcement this morning, signing with Orange of France. Tell our viewers a little bit more about this. >> Yeah, sure. So, I think as overall Dell Technologies continues to focus on helping our service providers through what is a very complex transition, both in their business, in their operations, in their technology investments, in the operational skill set gaps, in the business models, the architecture's use cases kind of comes across the board of how their businesses are evolving. What we continue to do is focus on a core set of telecommunication service providers that we can partner with very deeply to help in that transformation and use the knowledge gained through that collaboration as a means to expand the Dell Technologies capabilities globally. So, I think that the belief is that when we help solve problems, it not only benefits the service provider we're working with, it benefits the industry as a whole with the lessons learned, so that we can then contribute back. >> And so far, there's been some enthusiasm about this? >> There certainly has. I think it's been a big day for us. Obviously, the first two days at Dell Technologies World, we're extremely focused on new product introductions across the Dell portfolio, and today, with the opportunity to expand the messaging and announce some of the great things we're doing with partners, we're doing with out customers, and we're doing within the ecosystem, I think we continue to drive a very positive message. >> Honore, the networking component is something that we know service providers have a need and is ever-changing. We've watched that expand greatly in the VMware portfolio over the years. I've done plenty of interviews with telcos talking about things like NFV, network functions virtualization, but the big thing everybody's been talking about, the last couple of years it feels like, is 5G. So, maybe we could start there, but talk a little bit about what you're hearing from service providers and how VMware and VMware plus Dell are helping to meet some of those requirements. >> Sure, well, needless to say, 5G is the topic of every conversation we have with our telecommunication customers, and I think that there's a number of areas around 5G that are most prevalent in those conversations. One is really how does the service provider get a return on investment for the huge amounts of monies that they're investing in this infrastructure, right? So, 5G is a new infrastructure, a new technology, that's going to require a refresh of the entire infrastructure. And so, while they're making all of those investments, and they are doing so very aggressively to have a first-mover advantage, in terms of the first to deliver on a 5G technology, they want to work with vendors who can, in fact, accelerate their time to a return on the investment for that infrastructure. So, many of our conversations are really focused around how can we help these service providers actually accomplish that, right? Not just build out, or take advantage of a software-defined infrastructure and all of the technologies that both Dell and WMware offer to them under the umbrella of the Dell Technology Companies, but also, how can we help them accelerate services that they want to to put on top of the 5G technology? I think one of the key differentiators of 5G over its predecessors is that the industry has recognized that it's going to require partnerships in order for the service providers to really get their return on investment. And that's where the partnership with VMware and with Dell and the work that Kevin and I are doing together to focus on service providing is really anchored, right? It's bringing together those partnerships, so that these telecommunication customers can take advantage of our technology and do it very quickly. >> So, there's a real acknowledgement of the need for partnerships? >> Yes. >> So then, how do you show customers that the VMware-Dell partnership is the right direction? >> Well, needless to say, it's anchored in our technology. Kevin and I have been working together for a number of years now, and our partnership really started out focusing on just making sure that the components of the stack worked as promised, right? That we could deliver a high degree of confidence to our customers that when they software-defined the infrastructure on Dell Technology hardware, and then layered on top of that, their virtual network functions, that it would perform our outperform their legacy, bare-metal, vertical-stack equipment. Over time, however, our partnership has progressed to where we're actually collaborating to bring new technology to market together. And one example of that is the City of Las Vegas. We recently announced a Smart City IoT use case, and that technology, that solution, was co-developed with NTT, Dell EMC, and VMware using VMware software, Dell hardware, as well as Dell Storage, Dell Data Analytics and Intelligence, and NTT's infrastructure and points of presence. >> Yeah, I think there's both a technical reality and an operational reality to the technologies that we speak of, right? The technical reality is that the transformation that the telcos are going through around NFV and the direction toward network edge, edge computing, cloud environments, is really just software-defined data center similar to what we've done on the IT side for a long time. So, the technologies that the telecommunications industry is adopting are the technologies that both Dell EMC and VMware have been working on for a very long time. The operational reality is that just taking what you've done in IT and applying it into a telco network is not sufficient. Understanding of the workloads, how those workloads layer on top of infrastructure, understanding that those workloads are in a transformation of their own, and that virtual network functions were not designed to natively consume and compute. They were designed for network appliances, and that there are still requirements that they drive down to the infrastructure was, I think, where Honore and I have been investing for the last several years, right? How do we complement the broad capabilities of both Dell EMC and VMware in IT virtualization software-defined data center, and bring in telco service provider networking expertise and domain knowledge that we can use to be able to really ramp up and accelerate the partnerships we have in the service provider industry? >> That's great stuff. We actually got to do an interview on the smarter cities earlier this week, and a fascinating discussion to see how there's, Kevin, I like what you laid out there. When I look at this space, scale gets talked about a lot, but you talk to telcos, they have a little bit of a different scale, and the management for these kind of environments is also quite a bit different than if you were talking to the enterprise. Are those some of the key items? Where would you say your focus? >> I also think that even further. That the challenges of scale that have been solved in the public cloud are a different set of challenges than the telco industry is really trying to wrestle with, right? In the public cloud, we're taking about a very small number of facilities, and we can build a homogenous architecture within there. We define a standard server. We replicate that server across a rack, replicate that rack across rows, replicate those rows across a data center. The reality is, as we get further and further towards the edge of the telco network, it looks more heterogeneous, right? I need GPUs for particular instances. I have cloud-native applications. I have virtualized applications that sit inside of VMs. I have native Linux environments. I need to handle dense networking topologies. I have east-west traffic, north-south traffic that I need to take into account. And I think that what we've figured out and what we've learned in automating and orchestrating the public cloud is how to handle hundreds of thousands of things at single-digit number of locations. And what we're talking about here is hundreds of thousands of locations with single-digit number of things. >> And that's another key area of the collaboration between the two groups, in terms of how we deliver value to our telco customers. So, rather than us working in silos and delivering yet another disparate technology for managing the edge, cloud, or all these different locations, we're working together so we can bring a cohesive technology to market for them. >> That's right, I think the infrastructure demands and openness and a willingness to be a productive member of a complex and consistently changing ecosystem, and I think that, obviously, Dell EMC does that in our way. VMware does it in their way, but there's clear recognition that the better capabilities are when we work together to really drive the platform and bring the true capabilities of the broader Dell technologies together. >> So, telcoms is a hugely competitive industry, and as you've talked about, there's a lot of challenges, and it's a real transformative moment for this sector. Can you lay out some of sort of what you're thinking about for after 5G, which as you've said, is a hugely expensive investment for these companies? But sort of post-5G, what are we looking at? What's on their minds of your customers? >> So, I don't know that there's going to be distinct, post-5G event, right? I think that 5G, in and of itself, is going to take some time to roll out and proliferate, to the extent that its predecessors is now deployed across all locations all over the world. I do think that 5G, in addition to the infrastructure technology, or the refresh of that technology, a lot of what is going to happen around 5G is, in fact, the applications and use cases that's going to take advantage of 5G. If we about what 5G is capable of enabling, it doesn't just address consumer applications. 5G also will address enterprise applications. And that opens up a whole world of innovation, and again, applications, partnerships, and vendors coming together, who can really help the service providers put those pieces together and deliver on those applications. There's already talk about 6G, although it's very limited. So, it's easy for me to say what's coming next after 5G will be 6G, but I think that there's still a lot of activity and a lot of innovation that will happen around 5G for some time to come. >> Yeah, we know that standards and the consortiums always have to be working. I was looking at terabit ethernet on the networking side. So, I wanted to help kind of bring this conversation together. If you have maybe a customer example, love if you could share who it is, but if not, give us a little bit of anonymity around what it is to help highlight this partnership. >> Sure, I think Honore shared the City of Las Vegas as a great example of where we're enabling the Smart Cities use case. We can speak to MetTel, in terms of the capabilities of Dell Technologies to be able to transform their NFV offerings and really help them bring NFV to market at scale. We can speak to at least one tier-one service provider in AMIA that is delivering a full-stack offering, in which we extended the capabilities of our Ericsson partnership that both Dell EMC, as well as VMware have, to build a complete stack offering of Ericsson, VMware, as well as Dell EMC. >> Yeah, and to Ericsson, there's some of the edge computing in there. I've talked to them quite a bit about what they're doing on their edge offering. >> Yeah, so I think we have a number of examples that we also can't share as publicly. But we continue to collaborate. I think we're driving fantastic innovation. The industry is responding extremely favorably across the board, and I think that the strategy that we have jointly to not just develop technology, but really change the way we engage with telecommunications organizations and service providers to work with them well before they're ready to deploy technology, and also, help them scale their own operations and understand this transformation is really key to the success here. Because just having the best technology at this inflection point in the industry is not enough. We really have to partner to help them understand how to operationalize and monetize that infrastructure. >> And we do have a number of innovation projects, with regards to the edge and far edge with some of the top-tier service providers, in particular, in the Americas, where we're working together for edge solutions. I've got to hear what this far-edge is in a future conversation, because I thought I was getting my arms around it, but -- >> I know, it was edge, and now it's edge and far-edge. >> That's for Dell Technologies World 2020. >> That's right. >> Honore, Kevin, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a great time. >> You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World. There's more to come after this. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager Windows Server/Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. >> Thank you very much. >> And Bob Ward, the principal architect at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> It's a pleasure. Honor to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. >> Oh is that right? >> Well, it's a big milestone. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. >> (laughs) >> Like what is this thing? >> So it is now been a couple of days since Tatiana Dellis stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. >> Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth and, in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well and we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling us the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware, I'm using my Office 365, I'm interested in doing more and now they're both collocated and I can do everything I need together. >> Yeah it was pretty interesting for me 'cause VMware and Microsoft have had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. The operating system standpoint an everything, but especially in the end using computer space Microsoft and VM weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums, up there talking about that really had most of us sit up and take notice. Congratulations on the progress. >> For me, being in a SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know and virtualization so everybody's coming up to me saying when can I start running SQL server in this environment? So we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. >> Customers, they live in a heterogeneous environment. Multicloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, my Cloud, and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use. >> This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and make our customers just super productive. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, Jeff, there's some of the new specific give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. >> Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But key part of this is, for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well known, well easy to use Azure Infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy, as well, through integration in the portal. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long road map together. >> I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value, so-- >> That's what I do, I'm the SQL guy. >> Yeah, so tell us what's new. >> Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL Server and get access to everything in your corporate environment now. We realize you're not just going to have SQL Server now in your environment. You're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually built a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of radical stuff for the normal database people, right? >> Bob, it's fascinating times. We know it used to be like you know I have one database and now when I talk to customers no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and it's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy are there some challenges. How are customers getting their arms around this. >> I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL Server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called TSQL, it's a programming language. And they don't want to lose it, they want to learn, like, 10 other languages, but they have to access that data source. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL Server. No problem. Just use SQL with your TSQL language to query that data, get the results, and join it with your structured data in SQL Server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. >> And what it helps-- what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about you know, I've had servers and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like it's like baggage it's luggage. I'm like, no, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take better advantage of it. With this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. >> How ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other-- >> It's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL Server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers, like data scientists now, that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL Server so it's actually starting to come a really big deal for a lot of our community. >> Alright, so, Jeff, we had theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned, our 10th year here, at what used to be EMC World. It was Interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options, like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff. But very clearly at the show, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure Stack, always interest in the Cloud, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of the portfolio. >> So the Azure Stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we launched with Azure Stack, which is, again, to give you that Cloud consistency. So you can literally write applications that you can run on premises, you can move to the Cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said this is really awesome, but we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the Cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure Stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And, in fact, here at Dell EMC Dell Technology World here, we actually have Azure Stack HCI Solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here are the show as well and I was just demoing one to someone who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyper converged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell Technologies World. So there's a lot that we're doing together on premises as well. >> Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell is that one of their, what they call Ready Nodes, or something in the VxFlex family. >> Yes. >> That standpoint. The HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out, it made sense that, really, the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings, but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. >> Well, one of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the Cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally, there are some apps that people say hey, I'm obviously going to move that stuff to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on Prem. So, for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Some people want to run SQL up in the Cloud, 'cause they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people who say I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to the Cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. So I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So this new Dell Solutions that have Intel, Optane DC Persistent Memory have lots of cores. >> I'm excited about that stuff, man. >> Oh my gosh, yes. Optane Persistent Memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern, but it's also secure. Because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, ten years old, those don't have things like TPM, Secure Boot, UEFI. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. >> Persistent Memory's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yes. >> Actually, Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL Server to take advantage of that technology. SQL can be I/O bound application. You got to have data and storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access Persistent Memory, bypass the I/O part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVNMe. It's a great example of just using a new technology, but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can Persistent Memory be for your application. >> I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell Microsoft relationship partnership because, you know, these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers, in their 30s and 40s, they're not the startups, been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences. >> Sure. >> Well, first of all, we've been doing it for, like you said, we've been doing this for awhile. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. Now, what we're doing is upping our cloud game. Essentially what we're doing is, we're saying there is an are here in Cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the Cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. >> Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run on Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell, but lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell about taking our ML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack, but even addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell comp-- So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great, it's all about solutions and I'm starting to see that conversation happen a lot lately. >> And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important. Because its customers-- customers don't come to me and say Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre configured, pre validated, pre certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably, I'm going to get the question: Can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows server, but then we go above and beyond, we actually run whole bunch of BurnInTests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security so it's ready to go. Dell EMC can ship it to you and you're up and running versus hey, I'm trying to configure make all this thing work and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume Cloud very quickly, connect right up, and, boom, you got hybrid in the house. >> Exactly. >> Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBEs live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier coming to you live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our third day of coverage from two CUBE sets. What do you call that John? >> CUBE Cannon. >> CUBE Cannon of content. And guess who's back? One of our alumni Shannon Champion. >> Hello. >> Director of Product Marketing Dell EMC, Shannon thank you so much for joining us. >> A pleasure as always. >> Day three you still have a big smile on your face. >> I do do, it has been exhilarating, I'm completely exhausted but I'm thrilled to be here talking with you. >> You don't look exhausted but we're thrilled to have you. >> Thank you. >> So everything started, talking about cannons, Michael came out on Monday morning with all the gang, lots of news, lots of information that we've heard throughout the last three days, people are very excited about this. Excited about the deeper collaboration within the Dell Technologies companies. But something that you guys announced that we want to kind of really break through is Dell Technologies Cloud, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, can you help me as a non-technologist understand those two differences, consumption model. >> Absolutely yeah, so it's all in a name really, Dell Technologies Cloud is the unification of the strategies between Dell EMC Cloud and VMware Cloud, one unified cloud strategy called Dell Technologies Cloud. Under that there are offers. So there's two categories of offers, one is the Data Center-as-a-Service, the fully managed, on-prem infrastructure where VxRail is the foundation. People know this as Project Dimension announced last year, it now has a formal, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. So it's an offer underneath the category of Dell Technologies Cloud. >> And the VxRail components, explain VxRail for a minute, I think that's super important, it seems to be everywhere a key part of the architecture. >> It is yeah, so if you are here at the show, you've seen that VxRail is everywhere, it's on stage in lots of demos and it is the core foundation of our Dell Technologies Cloud offers. The collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware to bring VxRail to market kind of showcases the power of what this partnership can do. So it makes sense that this tightly integrated enterprise grade hyper-converged platform is the foundation of these Dell Tech Cloud offers. >> What's some of the use cases that was really driving the project, obviously multiple clouds was a key message here, but what was some of specific use cases you guys were really attacking? >> Sure, so when you look at the Data Center-as-a-Service offer, it's the fully managed capabilities. So customers are going to public cloud for the simplicity, agility, that cloud-like operations. But we started to see customers slowing down the adoption of that to some extent because they needed the security and the control of having infrastructure on premises and that's what we do with Data Center-as-a-Service, basically deliver the benefits of both, in a monthly subscription type model where they have all the infrastructure on premise but they get the benefit of a public cloud-like experience. >> And that's in beta, the announcement in the news was that Project Dimension, now Data Center-as-a-Service, which I love that name by the way, I think it's going to be great. But it's in beta, what does that mean beta? Select customers, preview, what's specific? >> Yeah, it's in beta phase, we have a couple customers that are running it today, so we're looking for customers to help shape the future, help us prioritize, you know, what are the key use cases that they're seeing a need for this technology. So we're looking for a few good companies still, so if anyone's out there interested, hit up our reps. Yeah, it'll be available in the market in the second half of this year, but currently in beta. >> It seems to be great for the edge, shipping a data center is almost like, okay with all this new technology, the bundling's literally nice, you guys did a good job on that. Shipping a data center, it almost was a dream years ago, We'll just ship a data center to the edge. That seems to be the the big use case that people are talking about, the edge of the network's going to have more capabilities, moving data around is not the answer, 'cause of latencies and as Pat Gelsinger would say laws of physics. This is identified as a big sweet spot. Michael Dell commented the edge in the next 10 years is going to be explosive, is that pretty much the core kind of direction? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you know it's called Data Center-as-a-Service and edge is a key use case for Data Center-as-a-Service, but also the core data centers when we are polling our customers they're actually telling us, they have a need for this in both locations, so both are key use cases, the edge obviously for the reasons you pointed out too. >> So talk to us about the customers involvement in the manifestation of Project Dimension. We've been hearing a lot the last three days, you really even felt it on stage from day one. Collaboration, not just within the Dell Technologies companies, we saw Microsoft. But where are the customers in terms of influencing Project Dimension now becoming a reality? >> Sure yeah, I mean this has been a collaboration with customers, but also between Dell EMC and VMware jointly with our joint customers going out to talk to them about the possibility and the promise and the capabilities that are being delivered. So certainly a joint effort from both companies along with our customers to give us feedback in terms of you know, where they see this as a key use case for them. >> Customers just looking for tighter integration, tighter collaboration, what are some of the business imperatives, where your customers are saying, hey guys, this is really the way to go here and here's why. >> Yeah I mean I touched on it a little bit in terms of like, the transparency, the security, the control, the data latency, improvements of having infrastructure on premises whilst still wanting sort of that agility and simplicity of a public cloud-like operating model, and that's essentially what's driving this new category of infrastructure consumption, Data Center-as-a-Service. And we have a whole nother side of Dell Tech Cloud, which is the Dell Technologies Cloud platform and we deliver that through VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, so I mentioned VxRail's kind of everywhere, that offer is available today for customers on premises. And with VxRail it's really the only VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure offering that has full stack integration, we're calling it full stack integration because there is a set of software capabilities for VxRail that tie together what VMware does with the SDDC Manager automation together with the infrastructure management VxRail through RESTful APIs, through software that integrates the two. So for customers, they have a complete seamless all in one management experience with cloud foundation on VxRail. So, we're really excited about that and it's only been shipping for two weeks and already customers are willing to be reference customers for us, talking about the potential, the promise, wanting to work with us on what this could mean for their organizations. >> Was going to ask you about their reactions. >> Give us some feedback on the customer, I'd love to hear what they're saying, obviously demand, what's the main euphoria around it? >> Yeah so, hybrid cloud is part of every customer's strategy and really understanding how they can best get there, what's the simplest and the fastest way for them, has been what they're considering. And if you look at what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, we have a fast and simple way and they back by the promise of both Dell EMC and VMware working together to bring these two technologies in a unified way that's a seamless experience. So, you know the power of hyper-converged is to let businesses get out of the, maintaining the infrastructure so they can focus on business outcomes. The same is true for other use cases like hybrid cloud. So that's what customers are excited about there. >> Yeah Pat Gelsinger says "don't look down, look up." Meaning if you can take advantage of the modernizations of hyper-converged which you guys have been doing for a while, the packaging's more consumable and you bolt on the VMware piece. So then you got consistent cloud operations, but then can focus in on the software. This is the dream of software defined data center, this is what people had hoped for, I think two years ago, but it's kind of, come in now this is reality. >> This is reality, for sure. >> So it sounds like, you've got nearly what 5,000 VxRail customers, it's over a billion dollar run rate, are customers looking at VxRail as a foundational component of really accelerating their modernization of their IT and their data center. >> Yeah, that's been the core of what VxRail's delivered since the start, so it's three years old, as you mentioned nearly 5,000 customers to date. It's the fastest growing HCI system, thanks to that strong customer adoption. But really it's been a catalyst for data center modernization to date. And what we're talking about this week is how it's really going beyond an HCI appliance. So it's the foundation for hybrid cloud for the Dell Tech Cloud offers. And we're also offering up additional deployment options, so people think of VxRail as an appliance, but now they can get it as fully integrated rack with or without networking and if they choose Dell EMC Networking, they get the power of SmartFabric Services integration, for hyper-converged networking can be a pain point now it's fully automated, deployment, life cycle management as part of the full stack, so lots of options. >> Talk about the software innovation, 'cause we've been hearing and this has been happening, they've done a software transition, there's more software engineers than hardware engineers these days, you guys have the system software and some analytical software, how does that play in on the HCI side and where's that sit on the VxRail side, is it on the stacks, so where is your software piece? >> Yeah, thanks so there's really great software innovation from the PowerEdge side from the VMWare vSAN side, but we also have additional software innovation, specifically for VxRail that kind of ties those things together and that now includes VMware Cloud Foundations. So there's things like the RESTful APIs that I talked about that enable VMware Cloud Foundation full stack integration, that also have downstream connectors that allow networking automation. But now we're introducing another piece of software innovation that we're calling VxRail ACE. Analytical Consulting Engine, so you know, it's a marketing term, but what does this do, it's intelligent analytics to further simplify operations. We like to call it infrastructure machine learning for VxRail. So we're excited, we have a data lake, it has an analytics engine and historical data of how customers have been using VxRail to date. Now we're able to have enough data to apply machine learning to that and offer up customers insights into how to best optimize their configurations, forecast consumptions, I was just talking with some customers in a session before about how a few years back they would try and project their resource consumption over a five year period and now they can't even look six months ahead. So a tool like this can help them forecast it. At what point in time am I going to need to add more drives or add more nodes based on my current usage rates and that's pretty powerful technology. >> And with the consumption model changing too to the subscription, this gives them more agility on both sides, proactive planning and also understanding kind of what's going on. Not look back six months to a year like, well we should have bought or over-provisioning, the old days right? >> Yeah exactly yeah, that's good a point. >> So what's the future hold, tell us about where this is going to go next. Obviously selling like hot cakes, congratulations. >> Thanks. >> What's next, where's the next innovation coming, what's going on? >> Yeah I mean, like I said, we're seeing VxRail as more than just a catalyst for data center modernization, a lot of customers are going to keep choosing it for that turnkey simplicity. But we're now enabling fast and simple hybrid cloud and as edge use cases start to emerge, VxRail as a hyper-converged infrastructure has a lot of promise there too, so we really see it as a opportunity and a foundation for a wide range of use cases with our customers. >> So a lot of customers as we mentioned. Any favorite stories that really showcase how VxRail as a foundation for hybrid cloud, customer's cloud strategies, how it's really enabling them to unlock the data capital as it's been talking about here as obviously data has so much potential, but if you can't find it and you can't harness the insights. Any customer stories that really in your opinion speak to, this is really unlocking customer's data so that they can make better decisions, identify new revenue streams and ultimately deliver an awesome customer experience. >> Yeah definitely, I mean we have over 25 VxRail customers here at the show telling their stories throughout. It's hard for me to pick a single one. You know what's interesting is when we just had a session, we had two customers there and we asked them what are the business drivers that VxRail is enabling for you? They both, completely different industries, one is an insurance industry and one was a financial services industry, and they both came back to the same premise of I need to deliver IT services faster to my customer base and I can't spend time being in the business of maintaining the infrastructure, I just need automation that enables me to let my teams accelerate the pace of innovation and stay competitive. So, that's the role that it's playing. >> And in any industry, because as we know, every company these days, if they're not technology companies already, they need to be. >> Yeah that's true, yeah we were just talking about IT as a business, how IT leaders really need to work hand in hand with the CEOs, understand the business strategy and then create their own IT strategy. And really drive a culture around a business plan specifically for IT and technology. Which is a really interesting way to think about it. >> I was going to ask you about cultural change, as we all know that's very challenging to do. These two customers that you mentioned did they talk about that at all, like how it's actually enabling cultural change that drives the business forward. >> Yeah they did actually and you know, the core there is that people is harder to change than technology and tools and processes. Some of the tips that they had were really insightful, one of which is, a lot of people fear change. But if you can inspire them to fear obsolescence more than fearing change, then you can motivate them around that, but also creating a vision for them around what their role will be when they're not maintaining infrastructure will also help kind of inspire them to do things differently. So that was pretty cool to hear directly from customers around how their innovating, inspiring their people. >> Competition real quick, obviously HCI's been very competitive, new other vendors are out there, we know who they are, how do you guys fit in versus the competition, obviously the differentiators, the multiple piece parts of Dell Technologies. But where's the real innovation and competitive advantage that you guys are putting out there? >> Yeah, from a VxRail perspective it's easy. There's no deeper integration with VMware. All customers pretty much are VMware customers, a majority of them right? And being jointly engineered with VMware gives us inherent advantages and an experience that customers come to us and tell us, is superior to others that they're able to find, so we always go back to that and we get validation from our customers on that too. >> Okay Shannon as we wrap up here in the last few seconds. What are some the things you're personally going to be taking away as you hop on that red-eye tonight? >> Personally, I think Dell Technologies World is like the culmination of so much hard work of a ton of people, so I'm going to send a ton of thank you notes to all the people that made this happen, but really reflect on how exciting a time it is in technology, in what we're doing in hyper-converged that plays a role in everything that we've heard this week. And just be proud of what we're doing. >> Awesome, you should be proud, well Shannon thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE again this afternoon we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Go get some rest. >> I will. (laughs) >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies world 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Good afternoon and welcome back to theCube day three of our live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave. >> Hey, Lisa, how's it going? >> Good. Day three. >> It's cold here. >> It's cold in here. I agree. But we're going to lighten it up with some really good conversation. We've got Rob Emsley back on thCube, Director of Product Marketing for data protection, Dell EMC, Rob, great to have you back. >> Great to be back. >> We got show and tell you brought Adam Schmitt network architect from customer GEI consultants. Welcome, Adam. >> Thank you-- >> Time to heat it up. >> What a great topic he's out with data protection. >> It's a hot topic. You're right. All right. So before we turn the way up on the seat, Adam, give us an overview of GEI Consultants who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure, GEI consultants is an environmental water resources, structural an engineering firm, we focus on anything and everything under the sun from structural geotechnical, bio chemical, you know, pretty much anything and everything engineering. >> So important stuff. Talk to us about before you were using working with Dell EMC, talk to us about your, your infrastructure, on prem, hybrid, what were you doing in terms of ensuring that that data was protected was accessible, so insights can be extracted from it? >> Absolutely. So GEI has 43 offices East to West Coast, and each of those offices has their own actual infrastructure that we have to protect at each site, ranging anywhere between three to 15 terabytes of size. So we're talking a lot of data and a lot of different geographical locations that I as a network architect had to worry about protecting, and one of the challenges of our older infrastructure, we were running 40 servers, just doing file level backups and restores, and we didn't have the ability to do any offline site backups in any locations. Now, we did have those in our primary data centers, and we were able to cross backup from each location to another when necessary, but it was, again, only a file level backup, it wasn't an actual full image, and we didn't have a full cloud picture yet that we could expand on going forward. >> So not a really robust data disaster recovery strategy in the event that you had to get something like that. >> It took several times and there are examples that I could give you office lost hardware in their actual infrastructure and we had to do a restore by restoring the files out an off site location, putting it on a USB hard drive and shipping it to that location, and then having to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up and copy the data over not a timely manner of free storage. >> Or inexpensive. >> Robin, in the old days, you'd have an admin in the remote office, they load in a tape and it did recycle the tape every day, you know, you'd have it for a week, and then you'd reuse the same tape over and over again. That was the architecture, state of the art back then. >> Yeah, you probably remember something for those ads, there was a picture of a slightly undesirable individual and says, would you like this person to be your backup admin, which I thought was a little bit strange. But now I think things have moved on a little bit. >> What's the architecture look like today? >> Well, you know, one of the things in architecture is a very key word, because we have a belief in a saying that architecture matters, and when you have a distributed network, where you have lots of edge locations, and you have the requirement to protect them, and bring them back to the edge, the architecture that you deploy, really does make a difference. You know, there's a famous Star Trek line, I've heard it a few times this week that you cannot change the laws of Physics, and the amount of data that you move from the edge to the core, you want to make it as small as possible because if you don't, the amount of time that it takes to get data protected from the edge, especially you have lots of edges becomes a real constraint. So that was something which you know, GEI was able to take advantage of. >> So can you do that at speed? Doesn't that change the laws of Physics anyway? We don't go there, okay, so I wonder if you could share with us kind of how you came to this spot? What was life like before? Did you look at any other vendors, you know, paint the picture for us. >> So working with the Dell EMC technical team, as well as the DPS sales team, we were able to come up with a different strategy going forward. But it wasn't after a lot of trial and error when doing proof of concepts with other companies that, you know, made promises that they could do the backups that we needed off site at different locations geographically, but when it came down to it, we were going to have to fork up a lot of money for infrastructure being installed at every single location, whereas Dell EMC, I don't have to deploy any or any hardware, all I had to deploy was a virtual appliance at each location and we were successful in backing up remotely, we tried various technologies that claim that they could do it, and they didn't work successfully. So after a lot of trial and error, roughly, in total about a year's worth of trying, we finally got Dell EMCs technical team and the DPS came on board and we sat down in front of a whiteboard in Boston, Massachusetts, and said, this is what we're trying to paint as a picture, help me paint this as a full blown architecture and make this happen in this design fashion, and luckily, the Dell EMC team was so experienced and has so many different strategies that they can focus on, they were able to take every little thing that we needed, mark every checkbox and deliver a package with DPS for our solution in our own architecture that answered all of my questions instantly. >> You said virtual appliance it's got to run on something. So what is that actually? It's like serverless, right? >> So we have a physical infrastructure at every location, I deployed a virtual CentOS box, that's proxy that talks back to my data domain and communicates the CVT data changes back for backup. So it's not doing a full consecutive backup. That leaves a lot of headroom left over on your actual production server, so that it's not pegged while staff are using it. So I can kick off backups during the day, it takes a snapshot, and then the data gets backed up without anybody knowing. >> So this is really important as you said, Rob, you can't change the law of Physics. I imagine you got a straw and you got to put all this data through. It's like, it's like when you backup your iPhone for the first time it takes forever now. So you're talking about, you know, changed, just checking the changed data, and putting it through that straw, even though it's maybe a little bigger than a straw, so each day, it's just a smaller amount of data, okay, but what happens on a restore? >> On a restore same instance. So we'll restore that file, if we're doing the file level restore to the data domain, and then copy it wherever we need to on the network. Or if we're doing a full image based backup, we can restore that either to the cloud disaster recovery into AWS or Azure, or we can restore it to the actual data domain and Vmotion it wherever we need to after that point. >> So let's talk about business impact Sounds like there was a lot of trial and error, as you explained, really needing to work with a strategic partner who said all right, I get what you're trying to do, obviously, not easy, but you've been able to implement that. So how is GEI's business positively benefiting from this data protection strategy that you've implemented? >> Well, not just on a financial perspective, because we've eliminated the need for a completely separate off site data center, we have everything running in a cloud environment for CDR, so that we can restore instantly anytime that we need to, so we no longer needed to spend the footprint on another network architect on another infrastructure on all the different things that rely on another infrastructure at a separate location, so on top of financial savings for the company, I mean, we saved a huge amount of money, they're on infrastructure, that's only for disaster recovery, it's not doing anything, whereas we can just spend money on object storage in AWS, and use that as our cloud disaster recovery strategy. When you need it, you pay for it for your instances but otherwise, you're just paying for object storage, it's a lot cheaper than ever having to run a full separate data center. >> Specifically what is Dell's role in that equation in terms of the value chain? >> The data domain, we also got CDR, which allows us to use an appliance on premise to talk to an instance server in AWS or Azure, and it after its normal backup period, the backup completes and then shoots all the data that changed up to AWS in an S3 Bucket, and your data stored there and in a VMDK chunk data, that after need for restore can be turned into an AMI for AWS available, and then online whenever you need it. >> So this is very key, you know, on Tuesday, cloud was a big topic, hybrid cloud reality for the majority of customers and Adam and GEI the leverage of AWS is a great example of what many of our clients are looking to do from their investment in the public cloud. Certainly no GEI today is using AWS as a alternative to having to purchase a secondary disaster recovery site, or having to sign up with a managed service provider that's providing like a co-location service for disaster recovery, so using the public cloud and using the software capabilities around cloud disaster recovery, gives them a tremendous opportunity to save themselves a lot of money and do it very efficiently. >> It's like though friends don't let friends build data centers just for DR. Yeah, if you're going to build it for something that gives you a competitive advantage, okay. >> But it's interesting with some of the plans that Adam's got for the future, you know, you want to share some of those as far as what you're thinking about for the next few years. >> So future plans for GEI is definitely more cloud growth and minimizing the footprint that we have on premise, making it so that we don't have to have infrastructure at every location, consolidation of all of our data, obviously, going forward, GEI is going to continue growing with data, with videos that were modeling for different damn inspections, levy inspections, we're collecting a lot of data. But the problem is having that data geographically everywhere makes it challenging for future admins, including myself to continue to restore and backup and keep everybody happy. It's a really challenging task to continue supporting. So going forward with consolidating all that data into a central location, i.e. multi cloud environments, or Dell EMC cloud that was announced this week, we have the option for leveraging multi cloud instances, and being able to keep all of our instances alive in the cloud, rather than on premise. >> So you said put it on one location you talking physically or is it some kind of logical mapping that you're doing? >> There'll be logical mapping with some type of caching technology at the off site so that it's ready and available-- >> So a mapping that allows you to recover really fast if you need to, what about as part of that future in the roadmap, analytics on that of backup data? >> So the analytics on in terms of how much backups are going on on a nightly basis-- >> So specifically, are you using that corporate for any other reason? Well, let's see, might be looking at anomalous behavior, doing stuff with with air gaps, and you know, investigating that other DevOps activities. >> It's interesting that you say that because we were talking about a Data Domain having an air gap last night, at an event and the air gap method, making sure that your data domain is protected, it puts it in a right only mode, so that nobody can get into your data domain and actually do any damage to your data. Because you're right, you're backing out. There are anomalies that happen. If those anomalies happen to get into your infrastructure into your data backups, you could technically get ransomware or you know, locked out of your own data. Whereas Data Domain does support air gap technology, allowing you to lock down the system and require two admins before any changes are made to it. So definitely going-- >> Read only, read only. >> I think I heard that. But it's it's a good question with respect to data reuse is that, you know, the use case that Adam is currently using is to use AWS as a disaster recovery location, but the ability to spin up his data within AWS, yes, for the purpose of insurance, being able to access those production copies within AWS. But why not be able to use those for other purposes, such as interrogation of the data that was in them? That's all things that really start to evolve the conversation from what do you do for data protection to what do you do for data management? >> Yeah, so let's use some of the tool chains in live in AWS, say for example, apply some machine intelligence and machine learning and see what we find there, maybe anticipate anomalies or find some things that we didn't know. >> Absolutely, especially when users are dumping large amounts of data, we had an instance where before we started to actually seeing large data dumps when our data started to grow in the first place, we were inspecting levees and models in Colorado, and we had three engineers fill up an entire server of 4k videos, and our nightly backup all of a sudden said, Hey, you just got a huge amount of data change in an instant. Were you expecting this kind of change? If not, you should probably start knocking on someone's door, so we were able to use that analysis really quickly. >> So looking at day three of Dell Technologies World lots of announcements, Robbie, you kind of talked about some of those, you know, cloud enabled data protection becoming a big focus for you guys, I'm curious, Adam, to get your thoughts on some of the announcements. You mentioned the VMware on Dell, a cloud on Dell EMC, what are some things that really kind of piqued your interest as, hey, we're going to have more and more data coming, we've got lots of edge devices, they talked yesterday about the edges coming what did you hear that you thought, awesome, this is really going to be integral part of our strategy going forward? >> Definitely, so one thing that was mentioned was Power Protect, and that has everybody's interest right now. Because having the ability of basically an Avamar system with all flash or a Data Domain with all flash gives you obvious IO advantages in the future, that's probably going to be my next hot topic that I'm very vigorously researching everything out to see if in a couple of years or sooner that's going to fit into GEI's infrastructure and give us more benefits going forward. >> What's your biggest data protection challenge in 2019? >> Our biggest challenge up front was definitely moving from one backup strategy to a new backup strategy and that's from file level backups, only to image based backups, that was one of the biggest challenges, because anytime you lift a backup infrastructure out of production, and put a new one in, you're starting from zero, you can't really start from where you left off, you had to get all of that data, and geographically 43 offices doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're collecting data at all of those locations, that was a challenge, getting everything worked out and getting everything backed up in the first place. >> So you're knocking down that problem. If you're in a private meeting with Rob and his engineering team is there, what's the one thing that he could do to make your life easier? >> One thing he could do to make my life easier-- >> Drop prices-- >> Oh, sorry, then I have nothing else to say. (both laugh) >> Sounds like you-- >> Really, is that what you were going to say? >> So if we could enhance the performance of DD Boost, DD Boost already does a lot of performance benefits for what we do, DD Boost, in essence of what your network performance is, if there was a way of tweaking that on new servers, when you implement it, for example, we acquire companies every now and then we're implementing their strategies for their backups, and we have to start new backups, if there was a better methodology of seeding rather than having to go out physically plug in a hard drive and an NFL storage, make a clone of it and transfer it back. If there was a different method of seeding that technology or those backups, that would make things a little bit easier. >> Get on that. >> I mean, nobody can ever have enough performance and then, as Adam said, the big part of the Power Protect announcement yesterday was, you know, the introduction of, you know, the industry's first all-flash purpose built backup appliance with integrated software capabilities, and an all flash, I think, over the coming years is going to get is going to become a definite option for secondary storage workloads, not only for the straight performance of backup and restore speeds, but also for this huge opportunity around data reuse, and I think that you'll start to see more flash appearing in the data center, not just for production systems, but also for secondary workloads and where you're storing copies of production. >> At the end of the day, it sounds like you're probably quite the hero to all those folks that need making sure they have access to that data because that's what is, as we say, it's Michael Dell said it's inexhaustible, it's gold, that's what drives the business forward, that's what allows you to identify new products and new revenue streams. So we'll say congratulations on being an enabler of the business so far, we appreciate you guys sharing what GEI is doing and Rob, we appreciate your insights as well. We thank you for spending some time with us on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> Oh, our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, Dell Technologies World 2019 day three of theCubes coverage continues in just a moment. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, the land of Dell Technologies World 2019, I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier. we're here with about 15,000 of Dell Technologies customers not including, and partners, about 5,000 partners. We're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Jason Mundy, Senior Director, Dell Technologies consulting, from Dell EMC. Jason, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be back, thank you for having me. >> So, lots of news the last couple of days, here we are almost at the end of day two, but you know in Vegas, it's like a time warp, I feel like we just walked in this morning. So, everything talking about cloud, hybrid cloud, we have to have this hybrid cloud strategy. One of the things Jeff Clark talked about this morning and is the five imperatives, is that, not only do customers need to build powerful and modern infrastructures so they can harness the power of AI machine workloads for this tremendous and new amount of data that's being generated, but they've got to have hybrid cloud strategy for multi-cloud. But to customers, we talk to all the time, these terms multi-cloud is challenging to do. It's a fact of a by product of many things, right? M and A for example, different acquisitions. What are some of the consulting services and recommendations that you guys in consulting are offering to customers with, how do we manage successfully in this multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, certainly, so, the Dell Technologies cloud and the VMware cloud on Dell EMC was incredibly exciting news for us, you know, all the Dell Technologies, but also, hopefully our customers, I would think so, that's probably the biggest news that came out of here. And you know, the old adage, I hate to sound so cliche, but we talk about IT being about people, process, and technology, the technology is the easy part. It really is true, especially when it comes to services, and with Dell Technologies cloud, we just made that technology component so much easier for our customers to be able to consume that infrastructure and get up and running. But, the reality is, is to get to a true cloud operating model, there is a number of considerations, right? So first of all, we actually do need to have a strategy and a roadmap to be able to get there. And many customers already have that, many customers are you know, somewhat along the way, but many customers need our help, right? They need somebody to help guide them to that, and so we work with many customers to help them develop the actual strategy, we can build out a roadmap. And one of the most important things too, is building out a business case, right? Looking at what are the benefits to the business and the cost associated with it, because it is a significant investment and they're going to their executive teams, or the board of directors to look for that funding. So we help many customers do that, if they require it. Couple other factors too are, the applications and the workloads, 'cause of course, it really is all about your workloads and your applications. And then the actual operating model itself, where the people and the process are the hardest part, especially the people alright, because that involves change and we don't like change. And so, we do a lot of work to really help our customers, we'll meet them anywhere along the way in terms of where they are, along their strategy or where they might need help. >> What's the biggest percentage of customers mix of orientation or posture? Early adopters, you know, bleeding edge to, in the middle of their journey to just starting, how do you guys see the patterns shaping out, you know, one's that are, you know, doing R and D they're cloud native, they're transforming kind of bleeding edge and then you know, ones that are maybe run out of gas or maybe needs to change the tires a little bit or you know, someone leaves they need some help along the way, and then the early, people just starting to look at it, what percentage mix to you see? >> I think probably the majority of customers are smack dab in the middle. We deal mostly with you know, legacy types of customers. Not the digital natives, right? Who are starting from fresh and building cloud native applications. But legacy types of customers that are really trying to get there, and many of them have you know, certain parts of their IT operating in the cloud, they have multiple public clouds, they might have a private cloud, but very, actually, very few are probably in a true multi-cloud environment, because that involves you know, the inter connectivity, right, of all those different clouds, and then, as I said, the hard part is really building out that cloud operating model. And that requires a fundamental shift in how they organize, how they skill the different processes that they build. >> Jason, what does that mean to a customer when you say, cloud operating model? Do their eyes, you know, pop out of their head? Are they excited? What are they, how do they react to that? 'Cause they have all this existing IT, and maybe they have some shadow IT, they got some Amazon doing some stuff with analytics, who knows, but they kind of are here and they've got to get to there. When you say operating model, what does that mean? Common operating model? Coding? App development? What is that, how do you define the cloud operating model? >> Yeah so, it really involves everything. So customers will have their traditional IT organizations. Built around technology silos, they're really more focused on the technology and project basis, right? Executing IT projects behind the scenes to try to meet the needs of the business. A lot of our customers, most of them obviously are using VMware, so they're starting to get a flavor for what a cloud operating model is, but what is really means is, is to really shift the thinking of IT to be more of a product focused and service oriented organization, that is acting like a product management team where you are providing your product to the business which is IT as a service, and so you have to have different kinds of roles, right? It's less about the technology. That is still obviously important, but you need to have roles like relationship managers to work with the business. You need to have portfolio managers, you need to have folks who are managing capacity and developing those services. Very much like in a product organization that is creating a physical product and selling it to the market. >> So these roles, people, you talked about it, that why we talk about this all the time, people don't like change, change is hard, but it's essential, right? Cultural transformation is a driver of all the other transformations. So when your talking with customers, give us like these enterprise organizations that have been around for awhile like you mentioned and you've got all these different silos of data and people with different perspectives. Something like the news yesterday, Dell Technologies cloud, what has been the perception from some of those customers, in terms of, how is this really going to make things easy for us? I know there were some beta customers, what can you share with us about how maybe, Dell Technologies cloud or even the M word cloud on Dell EMC is going to help those fragmented organizations, even bring the cultures together to leverage that technology to drive that digital transformation? >> Yeah, certainly, so we've been working with customers for awhile, whether it's building out private clouds or building out hybrid clouds, you know, the technology part keeps getting easier, so I think they view this new development, this new platform as a way to really simplify the deployment implementation provisioning of the technology piece so they can focus on that harder part, and that's where they come to us and they'll look for help for, how do I need to design my organization? What types of new processes do I need to setup? And therefore, what kinds of roles and skills do I need to support that while I'm maintaining my legacy environment, my current environment, and I need to move my existing IT people over into that new model. So I think we can sort of eliminate some of the complexities with the technology significantly with this, and really focus on those harder elements. >> I've got to ask you a question, I was talking to Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on the other set, and one of the other things that Pat Gelsinger said that I thought was interesting was, when asked about his success at VMware, where those, these transition years was, he said, he turned headwinds into tailwinds. You know, flipped down the relationship with the cloud goes, to Amazon now they're in Azhur, Michael kind of talks about the same kind of thing, where you know, there's new thing coming to bare here at Dell Technology World this year. That's kind of simplifying whether it's partner execution or helping customers have that, I won't say single painted glass, but single cloud of glass if you will, with Dell cloud. This end to end operating model really is a strategic comparative and advantage for Dell. So, I got to ask you, what are you guys looking at, that when you look at the this show and say, okay, some things have been announced, how does that directly impact the consulting team, because I've can imagine that you're job is going to be accelerated with some of these new things. What are some of the highlights here at the show that you see as really going to pop for you and the consulting group? Because, you know, when you got data centers of service, that's in beta, but still, that's interesting, right? That's turnkey and you've got to VX rail and everything, I mean, seems to be like almost the bundling setup for you guys, what's your take on all this? >> Exactly, so I think, it makes things not only easier for our customers, it makes things easier for us in the sense that we can focus less on the technology integration piece and get to that harder part, the operating model. Helping the customers, you know, figure out what applications and workloads they need to move over and help them with that migration, and it's accelerating the need of customers to move to the cloud. A lot of the research that we saw presented this week demonstrated you know, the sense of urgency where customers, they want to move now, it's no longer, yeah we want to get there, we got to plan, we'll get there eventually. It's like, we need to do it now, how can you help us? So, we can then move to that harder part, so we will see increased demand, we will see increased need for our services and capabilities. >> You know, in the tech world, within Silicon Valley, you hear this term, the glue layer, which is tech terms for you've got to build software to kind of glue things together. This component goes with that components. Proxy servers, all kinds of weird stuff. And the integration message we are hearing here at Dell Technologies, is actually eliminating all this custom glue layer software, where you guys are now integrating it more fine tuned if you will, within the products. But yet they are still separate, you've got secure works, you can get RSA, you can get some things over here. You've got multiple puzzle pieces together there, with integration, how is that going to impact you guys? And of that integration strategy, which one do you think is going to be the most popular with customers? >> Well, there is certainly the need to integrate additional technologies in the customer's environment. They're going to have you know, CMDB's, you know, there's other technologies, you know, beyond Dell that we will help them integrate with if they need that. And then certainly, we'll work with our strategically aligned businesses with RSA's, secure works, parting with VMware to integrate those other technologies. So I think the again, it's about you know, it's sort of, it's like, it's the hierarchy of the level of value of work, the value we can provide back to the customer, so we sort of eliminate some of that you know, base line work, and we're focusing on that more value add. >> The VMware piece is nice to, you've got to like that VMware action there. >> Absolutely, so that's certainly a huge opportunity for us. >> So helping customers make these strategic decisions about their cloud, multi-cloud strategy, we think about the data that is, we hear lots of analogies, data is the new oil. Data is gold, Michael, I think yesterday said, data is inexhaustible, I always kind of think of it as a catalyst in a reaction that you can use multiple times at the same time, I mean it's one of those, it's capital for organizations. So when you're talking with customers that say, alright Jason, help us to understand, based on our types of data, where we should put it so we can get fast access to it, to glean those insights to be able to stay competitive. To identify a new revenue streams, new product streams. What are some of the consulting practices that you guys deliver to help them really look at the data as assets that really can drive business outcomes. >> Yeah, so we actually have some strong capabilities in the data analytics space. So, many of our customers, they understand this. They understand data capital. They understand that the value that they have, from their customer data to all of their product data, and they want to be able to unlock that. They want to be able to monetize it. So, we can help them understand, what data do you have? How do you make sense of it? How do you organize it? Let's build an analytics platform where you can start to look at use cases and build out a strategy to take advantage of those use cases and then start to capitalize on it, right? So we can help them with some of the data engineering. We can help them with some of the data science. We can help them build and implement the actual analytics platforms to take advantage of it. Of course, all built on our hybrid multi-cloud platforms. >> So you are a marketing guy, you must have some really killer customer examples that articulate that value beautifully. Share some of those with us. >> Well specific names, I'll put aside, but we've helped some customers with incredible fraud detection, right? We had one customer that was actually a power company and they had a number of people stealing power off the grid, but they couldn't really pinpoint it. It was a incredibly manual process, we actually helped them build the analytics platform, where they could look at and pinpoint where power was being stolen off the grid. And then they were able to predict where that was going to start happening, and they were able to crack down on it. And significantly reduce the incidents of that happening, and stop it. The savings were tremendous back to the business. >> What's your impression of the show this year? Thoughts on reaction to the news, the announcements. What's the most important story being told here? >> I think, you know, the evolution of the product lines you know, which we start today, some of the new product announcements is exciting, but I think we've really done a great job of connecting that back to the integration of all the technology across Dell Technologies, right? With the unified workspace announcement yesterday, and the Dell Technologies cloud, I think that is really, finally demonstrating, not finally, but really demonstrating in a concrete way, bringing to bare all the power of Dell Technologies, and when we start to put it together, you know, the incredible solutions that we were providing our customers. So we've gotten a lot of, we've seen a lot of buzz, with our customers in the services booth. We've had customers come over and ask us, you know, how do we take advantage of the cloud? Or can I understand, you know, even more about unified workspace and how it can help us? >> It could be a boom for you business? Some more build outs? >> Absolutely. >> More and more work to do. >> Absolutely, it's really going to, it's accelerating customer's demand for those solutions and of course, they're always going to need some level of services to go with that. >> We've heard that spirit of collaboration and integration throughout the last couple of days. Jason we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE again. Talking about what you guys are doing in consulting and helping customers to really make the right strategic decisions to move their business forward, thank you so much for joining John and me. >> Thank you so much for having me, really enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure, for John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live, wrapping up close our second day of two sets of CUBE coverage. As John says, it's a CUBE cannon of content, coming at you. From Las Vegas, we thank you for watching. (outro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Cover Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE! Lisa Martin, day three of Dell Technologies World coverage on theCube. Two sets, lots of CUBE coverage, we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Andy Anglin, the Director of Cloud Strategies at Halliburton Landmark. Andy, thanks for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> So Halliburton, everybody knows the Halliburton name. In fact, Halliburton's celebrating their 100th year anniversary this year. >> That's right, it's a big year. >> It is a big year. Halliburton Landmark, talk to us about what that is. >> So Halliburton is obviously an upstream oil and gas services provider. Landmark is the business unit within Halliburton that provides petrotechnical software solutions to our customers. >> Okay, so customers all across the country, all across the world. >> All across the world. We work with NOCs, with work with independents, we work with the majors, we work with everybody. >> Okay, so, here we are at Dell Technologies World. How is Halliburton Landmark working with Dell Technologies? We're talking about digital transformation of your business, enabling your customers. >> So we're helping our customers through their digital transformation and one of the things that we're helping them do is move their petrotechnical workloads to the cloud. So we're leading the way right now in providing petrotechnical solutions in the cloud. We do that both on public cloud and on private cloud. And for our private cloud solution, which we call Landmark Earth, we've been partnering with Dell EMC for about four years now on building that solution. >> And this is a co-engineered solution. >> That's correct. >> Talk to us about that. What does that entail? >> So what we did was we worked with the Dell EMC engineers. Originally it was the VxBlock technology, but we've since moved it to the VxRail technology. We took that technology and we built the solution, built an appliance and took our blueprint, put that on top of that and then had the two groups work together to co-engineer that, to bring optimal performance and reliability. We're then able to deploy that anywhere in the world. So initially, most of the customers that were interested in it were the customers that were in locations where you couldn't find any public cloud. But now, because of the performance and the reliability that it's able to deliver, we have customers even in places like North America, where most people were originally looking to go to public cloud, now they're looking for the solution. >> So this sounds like it's giving you quite the competitive advantage. >> Absolutely, yeah. We were a little bit ahead of the competition in putting the solution together. We're looking to push to the cloud quickly. >> That's a good place to be, is ahead of the competition. You talked about kind of the speed, reliability, performance. What are some of the other really key values, business values, that your customers are gleaning from this solution already? >> So, couple things. One of things that we can deliver is faster time to value. So a lot of our customers have tried to go do something on their own, and generally speaking, they've met with a lot of challenges trying to do that. They try to build something themselves. It takes a long time. Ultimately it doesn't really work, and so what we can give them is a proven solution that we can stand up very quickly and deliver value to them very fast. The second thing that I would say is that we can significantly lower their total cost of ownership. >> That's always good. >> So our petrotechnical workloads are a little bit unique from some other industries. They're very heavily dependent on GPUs. So our customers are used to having these really massive, powerful workstations, with heavy duty GPUs in them. And in order to manage that type of environment, not only do you have the upfront cost of buying all these workstations, but you now have to go and manage all these workstations individually with these petrotechnical solutions that you've deployed on them, by leveraging a hyper converged infrastructure like we have with the VxRail. With the Landmark Earth appliance, we can provide all of that in a single hyper converged environment, so now you can manage it in one place. So the total cost of ownership, for ongoing operations, is drastically reduced. We also see performance increases that are pretty significant, like we mentioned before, because one of the major things that we do is we load massive amounts of data. And when you're in a client/server environment, that mass of data is coming from a database that's somewhere else. But when you're in a hyper converged environment, your compute and your data are sitting right next to each other, so we can significantly reduce the time to load that data. >> So, how much of this is sort of a cultural shift for the upstream oil and gas industry? >> Absolutely. So oil and gas industry has historically kind of lagged a little bit behind in terms of keeping up with the latest technology. The oil and gas downturn that we went through in the last couple years has really been an impetus to drive that technology transformation, and so a lot of customers are looking for digital transformation strategies in general. And as part of that, this is something that a lot of them are looking into. A lot of the customers that we go talk to are still using that legacy client/server environment, then this is something new to them. And, you know, they don't expect that they would be able to take something and virtualize it somewhere else and get better performance than what they're used to seeing on the front end. >> How is it also, I've mentioned a few minutes ago, this is Halliburton's 100th year. >> Yep. >> Partnership with Dell EMC. How is what you're doing with them and with the Landmark Earth appliance, how is that changing Halliburton's business as well, and even from a cultural perspective? >> So one of the things that's changed in our business model and how we do this, is that we actually leverage the same environment internally. So as our R&D teams are building the solutions, they actually will build and test them on the same type of appliance, which means that when we go deploy it to a customer, the customer's actually deploying the solution on the same environment that it was tested on in the first place. >> That must give them a lot of confidence. >> It does. >> That you've done this. You've established high performance, the results that they have to get. >> Absolutely, yeah. Because a lot of times, when you download software and install it somewhere, a lot of the typical problems that you may run into may just be from nuances or differences in the environment that you're deploying to. So by deploying in the exact same environment that it was built and tested in, it gives you a level of confidence that it's going to perform. >> So, speaking of confidence, how has your confidence changed over the last three days? Lot of announcements from Dell Technologies. We heard, even on the first day, Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya Nadella from Microsoft. A lot of collaboration, a lot of integration as well >> Absolutely. >> Give me your perspectives on that and how you think it will influence the direction that you guys are going in. >> Quite honestly, I'm really excited to see where things are going. I mentioned before, we deliver solutions but in the public cloud and in the private cloud. And so one of the challenges that we face is being able to manage these workloads across these different types of environments, and a lot of the announcements that they've made have been about they can simplify that process and make it where I can manage workloads, and even move workloads, across different cloud platforms, without having to go build that capability myself. So I'm kind of excited to see where this is all going. >> What are some of the things personally that you're going to be taking away from this? >> Personally, for me, I'm going to go back and have some of my technical folks talk a little bit more about what we can do with the Dell Technologies Cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions that have been announced. >> And also with the announcement to VxRail, looking at it really as a foundational component of the Dell Technologies Cloud, which was just announced a couple of days ago, how does that potentially impact the appliance that you've built, leveraging that technology? >> So I think what it does, is it gives us the opportunity to integrate that into our broader solution around, with the different cloud platforms. Since we already leverage the VxRail technology today, we already leveraged the VMware software stack on top of that, but now what we can do is we can layer on another management layer on top of that, that would allow us to look at that across multiple cloud platforms, and that's pretty exciting. >> And then in terms of market opportunities, how does this open the door even wider for you? As we talked about, you've got a lot of customers, you've been around for a long time, it's a well-established industry, who are still using a lot of legacy practices. What you've heard this week, how do you think that kind of kicks the door open for Halliburton Landmark? >> That's actually a great question. I mentioned before that, initially, most of the customers that were interested in the private cloud solution were in places where we didn't have public cloud And now, we're seeing more customers, even where there are public cloud capabilities, coming back to the private cloud because of either data privacy concerns or performance concerns or whatever, which we can deliver. But if we can actually manage this across multiple cloud platforms, then that enables you to create a hybrid cloud approach, where you could have some workloads in the private cloud and some workloads not in the private cloud, and could span out to public cloud for different things. So, for example, if you have workloads that are temporary in nature, so you don't have something that's permanent. You want something that you can send it out to public cloud and, you know, run a large scenario, some type of simulation on it, get some results back, and bring that back, but then use your private cloud environment to actually visualize the results of that. So, it creates some really cool opportunities. >> And the conversations around emerging technologies, AI machine learning, where are your customers, in the upstream oil and gas industry, where are they, with respect to embracing, acknowledging that there's a lot of potential there, I mean, the power of the cloud to harness the power of AI. Where are they with some of those emerging technologies? Is it still pretty early? >> It's something that everybody is looking into right now, right? So everybody is looking into how can these various digital transformation technologies be leveraged within the oil and gas industry. And there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of places where you can plug it in. For example, there's a lot of physics-based modeling that happens in the petrotechnical workflows, but using AI, now you can start doing some AI-based workflows in places where you need a faster solution, such as at the edge. So at the edge, where you might need some kind of a result quickly, and you don't have time to wait 'cause you have to make a decision at the well, you can now do that with artificial intelligence, and you can couple the two together. >> And speaking of edge, one of the things that Jeff Clarke said yesterday, and I have to say this in a Game of Thrones accent, the edge is comin'. But a lot of people have said to us the last couple of days the edge is already here. In the oil and gas industry, there's so much remote, where are customers in terms of embracing what Dell Technologies are saying, it's edge, core, cloud. >> So, the edge is absolutely here, the edge is real, and everybody has varying levels of sophistication at the edge today, and that's another place where there's a lot of effort going on to understand what's the best value for what we can do. So there are places where you need a solution that may not be as expensive, because of the existing investment that you have. There are places where you may be willing to go out and completely overhaul everything, put something new in. There's also greenfield opportunities, where you're building it from scratch and you have opportunities to put things in place. So everybody's looking into the best way to leverage that right now, and that's something that we're working with our customers on. >> So it's already here, it's not coming. Last question, Andy, for you. How does being a partner with Dell Technologies, how is that enabling your business? How do they help you deliver the solutions that you need to to impact your industry? >> So we've worked very closely together from the very beginning, from initially co-engineering the solution. You know, Dell would bring resources out, we would work together to optimize the solution to make it work. But even the sales motions, I mean, we worked together on marketing efforts, we worked together on our sales efforts. We have global teams that work together, we have regional teams that work together, and we bring all those groups together for every opportunity to make the best of it and provide a solution that works best for the customer. >> Sounds like a pretty collaborative relationship. >> It has been. >> Andy, thank you you so much for joining us on theCUBE today and telling us what you're doing at Halliburton Landmark. Pretty cool stuff. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (synthetic rhythmic music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello. Welcome back to the Cube. At least a market with Dave Alonso. We are at Del Technologies World. This is our third day of coverage. As John has been saying, This is a cannon double cannon of Q content. We are pleased to welcome back a couple of alumni to keep. We've got Beth failing Presidents data Protection division from Italians. It's great to have you back. And Sherrod Rastogi also welcome back S VP of data protection product management Guys, Lots of news. The last three days, fifteen thousand or so people. Lot of partners. We've been hearing nothing but tremendous amount of positivity and also appreciation from your customers and partners for all of this collaboration within the Della Technologies company with partners. Some of the news, though, that you were on the keynote stage give us some anecdotes that you've heard from customers and partners the last few days about where Del Technologies is going. >> Yeah, I'm happy too. And you know, a big announcements this week. We're a power protect software and the power protect extra hundred appliance. And what we're hearing from customers is this is exactly what we needed to do because the demands on data protection are changing with more more. Brooke look being distributed with data being more more important and with the risks being more more prevalent that they were looking for us to take a bold step and introduce this next generation software to find platform. And so the feedback you're getting is you've done what you needed to do, and they're looking forward to learning more. >> So I wonder if we could sort of explore a little bit this concept of data management. So data management lead needs different things to different people. Sure, if your database person maybe maybe different from a person who's doing data protection, what does it mean in a data protection context? I think >> first of all, you know, having visibility off your data all across your infrastructure that resides in the edge. The court a cloud across multiple applications in physical virtual environments, right? So having full facility that I think is one component second is not the ability to move the data across seamlessly across any socially target but it is on track in the cloud. Robert Cloud. I think that sort of a second element, the third and probably the most important is how do you actually get value from the data, right? Already, Actually, not only unable to protect it, but make it available at the right time, right place for the right application and be able to use it because, as you know, data is the fuel of the modern visual economy. On making it available is really, really critical. And that to me. So you're combining all of that is what I would consider it at management to be. >> So double click on that. I mean, could you be more specific about the attributes of, you know, a modern data management system? So I >> would say, you know, any modern technology may be modular FBI driven, you know, it really sort of the automate scale performance coverage. All those attributes, I think are very important for any more than data protection product and be able to meet the needs of our customers. You know, high scale hi coverage and rapidly, >> and that gives you a cloud like experience presumably allows you to scale out many a performance. I've seen some of the conversations that start associating with that or scale in place Bath. You talked about that? Yeah, Well, yeah. I want to explore a little bit about your business because you know who knew? Who would have predicted a few years ago? The data protection would always because all of a sudden become this hot space veces diving in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. And of course, you're the biggest player. So everybody wants a piece of your hide. And so and you got a portfolio. It goes back up llegado days. They have amar stuff data, domaine et cetera, et cetera. She had a sort of make sure that that was logical for your customers. Protect those customers that have made investment of you, but also shoma roadmap. Jeff Clark comes in, says, Okay, we're going to simplify, you know, marching orders. Your business in a very rapid time has transformed. Can you talk about that? What's what's taking place in your business? >> Absolutely, David, it's so interesting even comparing last year to this year, right? We're at this pivot point where we're building on the legacy of Trust and I T and knowledge and experience that we have. But we're now setting the foundation to be number one and data protection and data management for the next ten years. Introducing this new set of products were able to bring a customer's forward. We call it the path to power. So in addition to that, bring new customers into the family. We're looking for all those aspects of modern day to management, with simplicity, with multi cloud, with automation and with the new use cases where it's more than just back up. It's CCD are its analytics. It's testing toe. It's validation. So this is whole spectrum of things that we can expand into now that we have this new platform. It's really exciting. >> It is exciting. And yesterday the under Armour video was very cool, and one of the things that they set in there is that there they're leveraging data for brand reputation. I mean, they've got under Armour has incredible brand ambassadors Tom Brady, Steph Curry. But looking at it as not just a business ever. But this is actually tied to our brand reputation, did. It is so incredibly pivotal to the lifeblood of a business. It has to be protected. >> Yeah, and that's a big theme. And you probably something too. But, you know, in this day and time data is no longer something that maybe people in I'd worry about write It is now the lifeblood of most of our customers, corporations and at the same time list, like the threat of malware are very prevalent. And so things like what we've done with cyber recovery always were working with our customers to protect their data. In a survey we just did. With twenty two hundred I t professionals, twenty eight percent of them had had some data loss in the last twelve months. So the risk of data loss is real. And we take our responsibility very seriously to help our customers protect from that risk. >> So I like this message to any source. Any target, any s l a. I would I would had any workload and because on so talk about you're differentiation in the marketplace, that would be great, because it's hard sometimes, you know, squint through all the marketing. And so what makes you guys different specifically thinking >> about Delhi emcee Indiana production historically has its strength in dealing with complex work clothes at high scale, with high performance on having a wide coverage of work has been a strength and actually had very low cost, very efficient, right? So that string we sort of carry on into the future. And what we're adding on is I would say that the next degree off simplification and ease off ease off, install, upgrade use. Making those work was very, very simple, right? So I think that's another dimension. We are God. We're adding our dimension, what we call multi dimensional scale, which is both scale up and scale out the same time when you actually add more notes and more cubes, you are not only capacity, but he also improved performance, right? That's it, architecturally, a fundamentally different way in Harvey approach it. So I think that's an element of innovation, and I think on performance we're introducing our first all flash off Lions industry first, So we're super excited about that. And so I think it just helped our customers in terms of restore interactions store Do those work was a lot faster. Those are some other elements in which we continue innovating. >> That's great. Yeah, so you talk about the power protect X four hundred, which is your flesh. John Rose said something on stage. Beth, I want to ask you, Teo, sort of add some color. Hey, said this is not just secondary storage. It's protected. Managed infrastructure, >> huh? That's great face. >> What? What did he mean by that? And what should we take away? >> I mean, it shows how we're broadening the use cases that these products can help satisfy. And so much of what we're talking about Del Technologies is a simplified infrastructure across the board, not thinking about just point products, but giving the customer that experience of a seamless extendable infrastructure. So protected managed infrastructure means that your infrastructure, something you have, can confidence it's protected and that you also are not just dealing with all of these pieces and parts. But I can think of it has a managed whole. I think that that helps out and talk to John about that. But that's what I take away from what he's saying. >> If I can just add to that, I would say Like, you know, data management is sort of the perfect glue across the whole del technology infrastructure, but a server storage bm We're, you know, eighty, you know, infrastructure pivotal, right? Data management data productions are off, cuts across everything, and we can bring everything together. So >> I would like to add something to that if I make it. You know Beth on sure Art as well. Data protection Backup was always OK. We gotta back it up. Who's gonna? Okay, Bump bolted on. And what's happening is the lines are blurring. Primary storage, secondary storage. You're seeing back up in the e r. Use cases. You talked about analytics and, you know, so many new emerging. That's why it is so exciting. And so because those lines are blurring, you get more value out of the system. It goes beyond just insurance. And that means this could be a lot of money being made here >> if there is. And it is also a really important need, write one thing that we haven't touched on. But I also think it's really important is with our protect we're helping combine self service with centralized governance. So what I mean by that is, if you're a V a madman or Oracle Adnan or a sequel admin, you know, you could have control over protecting your data, but we pair that with a single, you know, governance model. So if I'm the person is responsible for my company's entire, you know, data set, I can still make sure that everything's happening is it should be. And there are no anomalies, so we're really making it as easy as possible, for the business is within our customers to protect and manage their data but not making it the Wild West. Because somebody in the end is accountable for saying I know where all the data is, and I know it's protected, so it's having both of those users. >> So as data protection has really elevated, the stay was saying to become its way beyond an insurance policy. This is absolutely table stakes because data has so much value and so much value that organisations haven't even been able to extract it right, how the conversation within the customer base changed. It's not just to the admin girl or guy anymore. Rightness is Are you saying this really leveled up Tio? Maybe a senior level C level challenge as our business imperative that the state of must be protected and readily accessible at any time. Who are you talking to? >> So answer quickly that I lied to you when we're talking to the eye to decision makers. So seo no, that level data protection strategy has become something that they have in their priority list, right? It's not really in any way what it was maybe five or ten years ago. Now it's something that there's cord of what they hold as their responsibilities, executives and and that's great. It's great to have those kind of conversations because it's strategic. >> Another conversation. Just an example from yesterday, while speaking with one of the chief architects at a major company, they're really talking about cyber security on How do you use Extend? You know what we offer into a full solution across their technology. Do address, you know, doesn't use case right. So I think it's expanding beyond just back up and protection to true protection off the data. Very most mission critical data is available and not just protected. They also want to talk about how can you recover that real quickly in very quick time, so that your operation, when you do have that cyber, if and when you have that attack So I think it's just expanding toe touch. A lot more customers, I would say Our people buying, buying decision makers across >> so that when I talk to people in division I sense a renewed energy. A renewed focus. I mean, GMC before Del. Tell'Em Steve always been really good. Taking engineering resource is to getting products out to the market. But But I I see again more focused effort here and one of the exam to keep pushing on. Is this notion of cloud model so beyond? Just okay, there's a target. How do we now get to that? You know, data protection is a service small. I know that you're working toward that. I know it's, you know, a lot of it's It's early days there, but you've got to be a leader in that, I presume. So. I want to keep watching that pushing that I won if you guys could comment on what coming >> on, both things that you said. First of all, there's absolutely a level of excitement and focus and confidence in what we're doing in the product groups. I'm really changing the way we're developing software so that we have a new customer value coming out every quarter. And they were having clarity between the top level strategies. White downs, what individual engineers are working on. So that's fun and excited because we're truly transforming the way we're developing Product says point one. And the second one, absolutely here, that theme throughout all of what we're talking about. You heard a nun day one, No, giving people that cloud that experience infrastructure has a service which certainly includes data management and data protection so they can consume it in a way that fit step business that scales with business That's automated, that doesn't require, you know, massive manual steps and is more what people expect today was a cloud like experience, even for them on from data centers. Clearly, that's where we're moving. And this one more point is you know, people really want automation they don't wanna have to think about. Did I remember to protect everything? They want the system to do that for them. So you'LL see more of that from us as well. You know how we helping them with machine learning? An A I an automation so they can have confidence that all of the assets are protected even if they haven't remember to do it all. >> I mean, I just add to it. I've bean at Delhi emcee for about a year. >> It >> has been a fantastic journey waiting. It's exciting. It's been awesome. Awesome experience. I totally see the >> focus. And I think that renewed focus the cloud like a model and the innovation. They all go hand in hand because the old waterfall model of okay, we're gonna develop properties shipment every year, eighteen months. Whatever it is that doesn't fly anymore. People want innovations, and now they want to push code every day. Right? So our baby, every quarter at least. >> Yeah. Yeah. Facing new energy to the engineers as well. >> So I mean, I understand that many of your team, if not your entire engineering team, has been trained in agile. Is that my getting it right? Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, >> not just not just like internal train. You guys brought in outside people and really took him through some formal training. Right >> way have in multiple different kinds of training. And we have lots of communications inside to get people coaching. And it's not just a process book that we're following its really a different way of thinking about how you bring customer value in small increments, staying in a good known stay and making sure that we're maximizing our engineering capacity. >> That's big. And I wish we had more time cause that's cultural train. Yeah, yeah, that you guys are really driving. And we also didn't have time to touch on partners, but it can imagine there's a lot of excitement and your huge partner community about what you guys are doing This. Congratulations on all the announcement is gonna have to have you back because there's just so much more to dig into. But back Sherrod, Thank you for joining David me this afternoon on the you go. >> Thank you so much >> for our pleasure. For Dave Volonte and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day three of Del Technologies, World twenty nineteen on the Cube. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. And it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Dell technologies world 2019 to you by Dell technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world 2019 here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host do minimun we are joined by Steve Nolan he is the lead product manager private cloud at CenturyLink thank you so much for coming and direct from st. Louis Missouri thank you thanks for having me today so let's start by having you tell our viewers a little bit about CenturyLink ok centrelink is a very large carrier international with our recent acquisition of level 3 we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles belong to us we're wired into over a hundred thousand buildings globally across approximately 60 countries connected into over 300 data centers so that's kind of our telecom network story I actually work within a division of essentially that handles managed hosting products it's through an acquisition they did a number of years ago called a company called sabes where we now have about 20 years a little over 20 years and managed hosting services to customers in the business and there's been a lot of news this week at Dell technologies world and you your CenturyLink had a big announcement just this morning yes we just released a press release on a two-prong option we've been working on for about six months now it's for a private cloud product that I manage that I released actually a year and a half ago we just added it now Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge six are 640 server and that of course we did that to be able to expand options and choices for our customers to UM open up the opportunities to those situations where we weren't able to get into before so we're very excited about it so it's it's new it's it's exciting it's of course a great great platform very very amazing technology so Steve that the term private cloud you know is it's almost about 15 years old now but there were many years that we didn't all agree as to what private cloud should be you know I run article recently about hybrid cloud and you know even hybrid cloud was basically like oh I had private cloud and public cloud and a bunch of pieces and I put them together and like well the hybrid multi-cloud stories were hearing this mean many of their shows very different we're trying to get our heart around this so you know I'm familiar with Savas you know I've seen century like many times at vmworld so bring us inside that private cloud it tell us a little bit about you know what you've been seeing in the environment some of those key use cases to what customers are doing and and how this is different than you know the virtualized environments of the past certainly so so what we've been seeing happen in the industry and and it's some and you go back a number of years a few years well to the cloud and you have six people what does cloud me and you get six definitions right but what we've seen is that there's this huge move towards public cloud over the last number years the hyper cloud all-day activity we see plenty of it and there's been challenges associated that you don't find out day one you find out over time certain things that were challenged to work with and in a public cloud type of scenario customers at you know what I still want to hold on to some infrastructure and what we're seeing now also do what private cloud is it is a an infrastructure there's a hum percent dedicated to one client and a story all of that infrastructure belongs to one one one company one entity it is not shared nothing is shared that is true private cloud and so that's what what I manage for our company is our private cloud products we're and we've we have one that's been with us not for about 15 years it's on VMware we're a large VMware shop where a hundred percent VMware today we've been working with VMware for I think a total 15 years a little over 15 years and the various types of products and solutions and platforms we work with them for a year and a half to be able to create our new private cloud product that is a hyper conversion infrastructure software fine networking based on VMware's VMware cloud foundation software suite right so that's where the movements are and and what's happening with this now a we want to go into kind of what's happening in the industry in the world is the way that you built infrastructure historically right as you build your compute your network your storage and your security those are the four minimum columns of which technology you need for a solution and then you connect it all together it's some by four different groups for different subject matter expert groups and and it can be very time-consuming to piece all that together now we roll into this hyper-converged world and you just give me a stack of servers that have some cpu some RAM some disks and I layer on some very well designed and architected software like some VMware Cloud Foundation and I define everything from one interface through software it makes of the ability for enterprise customers to be able to move a much faster or making change to the environment I can spin up a firewall in minutes a several a balancer a router that's very powerful compared to how it was done in the past so Steve one of the years expertise I know CenturyLink has is on the networking side of it's something we've heard Dell talking about their networking and how that's expanding the HCI market today and as well as if you talk about that hybrid or multi cloud environment networking is a critical component things like an ST when put into so can you help you know where does that those those pieces fit into your environment where we see that that going and is these are it's a common theme and that we've been talking through a little over a year now and this this topic of milliseconds matter is the edge and so that's where it's really evolving to and that's what we're working towards as well so so one of the things we're doing with our products is moving in our products out to them the data centers many more data centers what we've done in the past and then taking that a step further we go to edge computing because of our telecom expertise and experience and our thousands of points of presence we can put those systems into a pop if you would we can put those systems of course on customer Prem getting the response times down to just a few milliseconds which is critical to business's response times delivery companies or various comers where that that's important to the middle of stiffens milliseconds matters because it saves them money because they're very able to be more responsive to their customers that's exactly what I want to drill into a little bit you say milliseconds matter which is which is absolutely true and you're talking about how customers feel this need to move so much faster and we know about the breakneck speed of technological change can you give us a real business impact I mean as you said this this really is game-changing for so many companies can you just give us an example of a customer you're working with and how this really the ROI on the stuff yeah okay so we're working with some shipping companies who of course they've got the little responders when they delivered the package they have hundreds maybe as many as a few thousand locations they want to be able to put that data right neck in those locations so that the response on that package gets that information faster they they get closure on that they are able to bill faster they're able to move on to the next item faster provide the information to their customers faster those are the real live examples that we're seeing with the Middlesex and spanner type of scenario we actually did a demo of this at vmworld last year we just give an example where and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit and we painted us one page one screen and it took a second going across the internet and it took a half a second to go across the dedicated circuit and so it's like will you take that one page and it's the thousands of pages that one of your employees goes through in a day and then multiply it by your thousands of ploys that's not where we're adding up to cost savings more efficiencies of your employees when they can get that information faster all right so one of the important areas here is that is the management piece so we can understand your partnering deeply with VMware is it primarily the V realized suite for from management tooling anything what's what's special about the CenturyLink offering so relative to my product offering is in the private cloud we actually have because here's the situation customers don't just have one cloud we all know the true story is it's it's not about public or private it's about both it's not about one cloud or one other cloud is about many and so we actually through an acquisition we had done we created a product called cloud application manager it's a multi cloud management product that is designed today to support from one interface I can have a W us as your Google my private cloud product we call the centrally private cloud on VMware cloud foundation our public cloud product all from one interface I can manage my workloads I can monitor the oasis we will manage a monitor those OS as an application for the customer Larrin will be call our managed services anywhere a methodology - for customers that want that management to provide that for them right so it's it's really about it being able to take all those different environments in that hybrid IT solution the vast majority of enterprise folks either have one or are stuck with right and be able to trim it down to singular interfaces to be able to support them how closely are you working with customers on the actual implementation onboarding of these new technologies and making sure that employees are also really onboard with these things so well first of all when we work through solutions with our customers we don't just say here pick this from a menu and so we sit down and design for them so so we're very specific in how we've designed our products to where we actually allow over a thousand configuration options so we want that you have to right-size the infrastructure that's what you start that's the foundation your right size that infrastructure for your work environment for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you allow flexibility to be able to grow it and so we have flexibility to be able to have RAM or storage to those systems or add more systems give the flexibility to grow as you need to grow whatever but it is you want to push it's growing on you fine so so that's where we start with this in that design aspect of this and that's how we solution all of our mana Hosting sub products great well Steve you started this conversation at cube Ricky you're ending a cube alum so thanks so much for coming on the show well thank you for having us having me all right appreciate it I'm Rebecca Nightforce - minimun we will have much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world coming up in just a little bit