>> From the Silicon Angle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Happy to welcome back to the program Trey Layton who's the SVP of engineering with Dell EMC. Trey, great to see you. >> Hi Stu, how are you? >> I'm doing fantastic, thank you. So there's the devil technology summit happening in Austin, Texas. Let's not hide the lead, there's some news around things you've been working on for a while. Why don't you share the update with our audience? >> Well, myself and my team have been working on a new product that we are announcing at Dell technology summit called PowerOne and we are positioning in the market is autonomous infrastructure. It's a great combination of all the wonderful products in the Dell technologies portfolio combined with some very innovative automation that makes integrating the product an autonomous outcome. >> All right, first of all with the name power in it, we know that that's the branding that Dell likes. Something that's going to be with us for a while. You talk about all-in-one. You've got some history, we have some history back pulling various solution together, talk about compute, network and storage, what back in the day we called converged infrastructure. Explain how all-in-one you know, what what is the all in the all in one? >> So first of all, it's a system where you can get all of Dell technologies in one package. The next thing is about building on that decade's worth of experience of building converged products and learning about the different intricacies of integrating those products and instead of relying upon humans to integrate those technologies together to deliver an outcome for a customer, embedding that intelligence and software to make it easy for an operator to drive a configuration, to deliver an outcome for a customer to operate a modern data center environment. >> So it's exciting stuff Trey 'cause you know, the design principle before was let's simplify as much as we can, let's that entire rack if you will, be the unitive infrastructure that people manage, but what I hear you talking about, the automation and software and even you know, we're not replacing the humans, we're augmenting what they're doing by having automation take over. That's powerful stuff. We've talked about intelligence and automation for I'd say all of our careers. So explain a little bit do you know, this autonomous, what really you know, where is that automation and how come it is different today than it might have been five or 10 years ago? >> Well, you think about all the things that we've learned in 10 years of building a packaged product to actually deliver an outcome for a customer. Requiring some degree of manual intervention, but a significant amount of simplicity that we've built in those products to deliver an outcome. One of the things that's true about today is that as organizations are on a digital transformation journey, they are struggling with a high degree of intake of technology, while also maintaining the products that they manage on a daily basis to, quote-unquote keep the lights on. What we have done is say how can we take the innovations that we've built in our products that our infrastructure is code and how can we build software intelligence that understands based on the the operators desired outcome for an integration, we employ Dell engineering best practices to deliver that outcome. So a key element of the product is housing this intelligence and software that drives this automated outcome through best practices for how we engineer products together. >> All right Trey, you've got engineering. Bring us in a little aside of the team you know, building now in 2019. What are the pieces that you had? What's different about the team that you had to build this and is there a unique IP that your team and this product brings beyond what was already available in the marketplace? >> Yes, so first of all the team is a global team that we've actually been in the process of hiring in the last year plus, a year and a half plus and it's a very young team, different skill set. We learned very early on that if we're going to build a product with embedded automation, you needed to have experience and understanding, what are the best practices for integrating the technologies in the product, but simultaneously you needed people who understood how to write code that made that outcome possible and so really bringing and building a global team of DevOps minded individuals that understood open source technologies, that understood our VMware ecosystem, that understood the Dell EMC ecosystem and more importantly, the larger Dell technologies ecosystem for bringing those products together and I'll tell you, it's a diverse culture of individuals. What I'm most excited about is while we're very much focused on delivering VMware outcomes in this first release, the product that we've built is capable of delivering any type of outcome. Whether it be another type of virtualization environment or another type of application outcome. The software is designed to deliver an integration that is designed to support a customer's production operation. The intelligence or the product that we built to do that is called the PowerOne controller and embedded in that is software that a customer can drive either through a user interface or they can use automation technologies that they have in-house to call on this controller programmatically to execute those outcomes as opposed to being chained to a user interface that an operator has to learn as a new element of their environment. >> Yeah Trey, really reminds me of the conversations I've been having with customers over the last decade or more is that core understanding and building my computer infrastructure, my storage infrastructure, my networking infrastructure. I still need to understand some of those pieces, but it is much more about the software, the operating model and it's, as soon as we know, we're living in a software world. >> Well, it's interesting that you say that because you and I both know based on our history that there are complexities that we've worked to make simpler to operate, but a customer today struggles to have expertise dedicated to how do I build an underlying network fabric, how do I deploy a software virtualization layer on top of that Network fabric, how do I deploy storage arrays in a manner where the i/o is optimized not only for performance, but also for survivability. How do I carve up my computer sources in a manner that most efficiently supports the virtualization or container outcome that I'm deploying. There's a tremendous amount of skill that you need to have to employ the best practices to integrate all those technologies together and what we are doing is merely bringing those capabilities in software, so that an operator can say, I want to deploy this many cores with this much memory and associated to this much capacity of external storage and all the underlying in order configuration dependencies happen through the intelligence that we've built in automation to drive the right outcome for the customer. >> Okay, so Trey, when I've been digging into the software world and you talk to the people that are building applications, observability something that's been coming up a bunch. It's not just understanding what I have, but with the flows of information, Ansible, New Relic, that all talking about in a containerized micro-services world, there are different ways that I need to look at the entire system. How does that the kind of mindset and thinking fit into the design of PowerOne? >> Well, it's actually an age-old problem that we've had as we've began to have shared infrastructure to run, whether they be containerized services or virtualized services or contain running in virtualized services. It's how do we associate what's running to the underlying infrastructure so that if we have a problem in the underlying infrastructure that we're managing, that we target a resolution and that resolution could be increased performance so that that service can run better or it could be some type of underlying failure that we want to ensure that as survivability is kicked in, that we employ more resource to support expansion or just a continuation and burst of capability that's needed. When we build PowerOne, we thought about, it is a system. How do we give observability of that system in the context of a system to understand the associated dependencies so that we could quickly guide the operator to identifying the area that they needed to look at from an infrastructure perspective and either influence or simply respond to, instead of a more traditional mode of on-premises management is let me go find where the problem is and see if this fixes it. We have given observability to specifically identify where the issue is and enable the operator to go target that. >> All right, so Trey, you mentioned the traditional model of doing things. What does PowerOne mean for, say for example the X block is something you know, over a decade out there on the market, there's been lots of discussions forever. The Cisco stack, the Dell stack and VMware, you know, all those challenges. So tell us what this means for VX block? >> So first of all, I couldn't say enough good things about the V block team. It's a part of the organization that I'm in. We are very much committed to VxBlock engineering going forward and PowerOne is an expansion of our portfolio as opposed to a replacement of. We value our partnership with Cisco significantly, customers are committed to acquiring Cisco technologies in concert with our storage and data production products and Vxblock is all about giving customers an ability to have a converged experience with our storage technologies and a very unique experience that surrounds the offers that we deliver in that space. I will tell you that the automation that we're building in PowerOne is also something that we're targeting at our entire portfolio as opposed to just isolating into this one product. The dawn of autonomous infrastructure in our minds is not about isolating that technology to one product, but it's about bringing it to our entire portfolio of products to make our customers experiences better in managing and consuming the technologies they buy from us. >> Well, definitely something we've heard from Jeff Clark, Jeff Boudreau and the the team is the portfolio inside Dell EMC is going through a lot of simplification. So the whole autonomous infrastructure, PowerOne, how should we be thinking about where this fits kind of in the overall market? >> So it's very much includes our purpose-built storage portfolio technologies, our data protection, it includes our networking technologies and some unique automation capabilities that we've built in it to enable the IT operator to not have to worry about programming the fabric that we actually sense and understand the changes in the virtualization environment and deploy those configurations to the underlying network infrastructure and it's all about using our power edge portfolio of servers. So PowerOne is very much about consuming our data center technologies all in one package. That positioning in the market is complementary to customers who want to acquire VX block and are looking to pair Cisco technologies with Dell storage and more importantly, our HCI portfolio is a key element of our total offer to customers, where customers are looking to deploy infrastructure with software-defined storage characteristics and a very unique management experience and simplified operations, the HCI portfolio is there as well. So I often engage, specifically as we talk about the exclusively Dell portfolio. It's not an or conversation, it's an and. It's which applications are you deploying in your data center environment? What use cases are you deploying? How is the underlying infrastructure optimized to best address the goals that you have for that deployment? And so that's why we've taken a portfolio approach as opposed to one product to address every use case that's in the market. >> All right so Trey, we've talked a lot about operations and the way we design things. We haven't talked about cloud you know, and very much we believe cloud is as much an operating model as it is a place. It's a journey, not a destination, hybrid cloud is what most customers have today. They have multiple clouds, but we think one of the challenges of the day is is helping to get more value out of the some of what you have then, the individual pieces would be on their own. So where does PowerOne fit into the Dell Tech cloud story and we'd love to also hear just where it fits into the kind of the broader cloud discussions that we have when we're at a Dell show, a VMware show or beyond. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting discussion 'cause I think we begin to drift into saying a thing is cloud and I think more outcomes are cloud and it's a combination of software and infrastructure. PowerOne is an infrastructure element that is very much a part of the Dell technologies cloud strategy, but Dell technologies cloud is more about our entire portfolio of software and infrastructure participating in a common ecosystem to deliver that cloud outcome for customers and so Dell Tech, so PowerOne is absolutely a part of the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about continuing down the automation enhancements path to make those outcomes more possible for customers as we go throughout time. So initially, PowerOne is very much an infrastructure resource in Dell technologies cloud. Over time, you're going to see even greater enhancements as you will see enhancements across our entire portfolio of technologies in participating in the larger Dell technologies cloud ecosystem story. >> Okay, and just to connect the dots 'cause when I look at those pieces and we talked about, as customers are doing hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, if they're VMware shop VCF is an important piece of that and that is part of VMware cloud on AWS, what they're doing with Azure, with Google. So this plugs in if you, you know, my words into that broader multi cloud, hybrid cloud discussion that customers are having. >> Absolutely, you think about it in layers. We are building an infrastructure layer at Dell EMC that enables that Dell technologies cloud layer to be possible through the VMware ecosystem of technologies, making that multi-cloud, that private cloud functionality realized. The VMware ecosystem is robust in its approach to supporting multi cloud environments as well as deploying the virtualization and container technologies that are critical for building in a modern enterprise and so we are an element of that strategy as opposed to the exclusive pinpoint resource in the strategy. All of the infrastructure products in the portfolio will participate in the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about the innovation that we can bring and making the Dell technology strategy and vision more easily realized by our customers. >> Okay and Trey, when I think of PowerOne, what market segments do we think are going to kind of be the first customer for this and any specific rules or inside a customer that should be the ones looking at this? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as we look at markets, you look at organizations who are looking to deploy a data center resource. We go as small as four servers, but candidly, if you're deploying a data center with four servers, there are other items in our portfolio that are better positioned like hyper-converged to start in that place, but if you're looking to deploy data center where you're looking to go 10s, 20s, hundreds of servers and you want external storage in the offer, then PowerOne is a great starting point. If you think about the scalability and we haven't touched on it, that we've built in PowerOne, at launch, we're going to support 270 servers in the architecture. Very quickly, we will expand into supporting what's described as a multi pod architecture where we will get beyond 700 servers and then move into thousands of servers where the architecture is actually designed to support over 7,600 servers. In concert with that, at day one, we will support multiple storage arrays as well. So deploying multiple Power Mac storage raised as a storage domain to support this. So when we talk about markets, we talk about the ability to address medium sized organizations data center use cases all the way up to the largest enterprises or service providers in the world data center deployments in an all Dell technology stack. >> All right, Trey, give us the final word on this. One or two things you want people to understand and know about PowerOne as they walk away. >> So I think the most important thing to take away is that this is a way to acquire Dell technologies products all in one place, in one package, in a incredible user experience. The way we're going to sustain that user experience and maintain that value proposition to customers is around the autonomous infrastructure packaging that we've built in the software that we're delivering. Utilizing some of the most advanced automation characteristics that are out there on the market, combined with some of the brightest minds to integrate these technologies together. Customers just need to get to production operations and when you can acquire a product that houses the intelligence to get to that outcome faster, there's a greater return on your invested capital when you're buying this product and that's the most important thing I think to walk away from. We are committed to helping get our our customers get to operational outcomes faster and these technologies that we've built in this product are delivering on that promise. >> Well Trey, congratulations to you and the team. We always love to see when you go behind the scenes, we kind of rebuild from a clean sheet of paper building on the history that you have, listening to your customer strongly and having somethings ready for today's modern era. Thanks so much. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all our coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group I'm Stu minimun and you're watching the Q's coverage of wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program got a CIO in the house Russ Roderick who is the with chin bro that's correct how you doing to be here excellent so third year for yourself at the show first first impressions at the show what brings you back yeah third year I've really enjoyed it each of previous years I skipped a year last year travel related issue but I think the layout I like the naming convention change I like everything about it I think this is an excellent program that technology excellent they felt pity on me when they did the name change if you heard because saying the whole user group Dell EMC winslet Technology Group was a bit of a tongue twister but that's you know first world problems so Russ wrote for people that don't know tell us a little bit about chin bro yeah so Tim bro is a construction company headquartered in Pittsfield Maine we're nationwide where we do our projects we're in numerous markets from building infrastructure oil gas chemical industrial manufacturing we have a lot of projects done every year in the hundreds range and we were a little under a billion dollars got about 2,500 team members across the country okay and is the CIO you know how BIG's your team how many locations do you manage and you know tell us yeah let's go there for sure yes so I have 30 person team we have everything from application development to help desk to data analytics business intelligence teams I have infrastructure organization I have field support business analysts and we're a full-service organization all right so restless first start with with chin bro would you know what are some of the biggest challenges you're facing into business what does that term digital transformation resonate with with with your world it does the construction industry is very interesting it's a low margin industry right and so as a result of that we're always always looking to save money we're always looking to be lean we have a major initiative in the company around lean transformation some of that is digital related you know getting off of paper moving into paper forms into electronic forms and then not having to touch the data too many times so we have been moving too for quite a few years now so it's not new to the organization but it is a big challenge okay so absolutely we see that a lot what is the role of IT to the business these days so we have gone from being the elevator music as I like to call it like we're in the background you know we're kind of there to a strategic partner and I've reported from finance and I've moved to into the up to the CFO from CFO excuse me into the CEO role and it's been a great challenge there's some other organizational changes that we're looking at but we're no longer that background music we're very strategic in what we do we actually run several committees for the company looking at project prioritization workflow prioritizations and helping the organization to build an application roadmap new strategy yeah I love that I mean when you talk to us organizationally it says a lot you know under the CFO your call center we are moving under the CEO your strategic to the business right all right you talked about application so let's go there first because that's you know that application modernization is big challenge when I talk about modernization I always say you know application is a long pole in the tabs so what what does that mean to you what what kind of transformations are you going through inside yeah again our industry is dealing with a lot of fragmented software and it's a it's a problem a lot of industries face but ours I feel is we're on the very tail end of the industries that have moved to digital that have moved to modernization of our apps a lot of our products are on-premise our ERP system we've been on for 20 years for example and they've they've modernized we're getting it to mobile our imaging and workflow systems are starting to get more modernized but they're their legacy products and it's difficult when you have to deal with infrastructure that we have in the construction world we don't always have connectivity so we have to have a lot of offline we do all work with Citrix and it can be very problematic yeah you've been doing with the issues that we talked about with edge computing and IOT is you know something you've been living with for years right absolutely so IOT is one of those transformational pieces for us as well you know we have a lot of equipment that's one of the parts of our business you know 25,000 pieces of gear and heavy iron and we don't have a really good solution in place today that we're monitor all of the the meters and the performance and the of those devices so we're looking to IOT to help us get a better picture of that at an aggregate data level okay so I love we started up the stack with the applications let's come down a little bit tell us about your infrastructure what what are you using today how long you been using it for Winslow's in in the mix there's o windows absolutely in the next Dave we've moved from the traditional data center I had a lot of servers and racks and and moved to a V block and the X block with the X rail and our disaster recovery center out in Chicago and we did that because we had you know all the traditional problems of maintenance and and patching and licensing and everything and we never really had to deal with any of the power and heat and energy problems were up in Maine so we don't we're not an issue with cooling but that was a challenge for us having to manage all that stuff so we worked with Winslow and Dell EMC to figure out how do we get into the hyper converge to move away from all those server for administration and management and we did that project a little over a year ago implemented a little year ago and we've seen tremendous opportunities and for how we how we provision equipment and how we manage that need for the applications you know standing up new environments virtualizations really helped us do yeah so did you roll up the VX block and the VX rail together or the were those two sever they were slightly delayed so we did the X block first and then a few months later we did the the VX ray okay so the V block and the VX block after it been around for a number of years that you know 8 10 years at this point VX rails a little bit newer there's some people out there that are like oh wait HCI takes over the whole market tell us why each of those solutions and you know what was it an application price thing what what how did that go yeah we looked at it wasn't necessarily that we were in you know any position where you had to have this massive return on our investment right we built our business case around disaster recovery we our data center our primary or secondary were in the same town you know so we had all those elements of disaster recovery that were a problem for us so when we looked at the solution we wanted to be able to replicate our data more effectively get away from the traditional tape backup models and really help provision the equipment as quickly as we could in the event of you know a disaster and get ourselves recovered business continuity wise so it was a financial decision obviously that we had that we had thing had to pay for itself in which it did but we didn't spend a lot of time really kind of honing in on it has to be an ROI and a payback it was it was really about performance and disaster so is the VIX Bach in the primary and the BX rail and the secondary correct okay really cool on any you know what would you sell your peers is you after you've rolled us out any learnings that you had or the things that you'd go back and you know adjuster tweak no actually we had a really incredible experience working with with Winslow they were able to help us work through all of our any of our production issues very quickly we did replication through zurdo so that's moving our data very efficiently and my my IT team feels very confident that should and we're doing a test later this year but should we have a production incident we'd be able to recover lessons learned you know I think it's it's more about planning your work you know making sure that you've got your activities planned and that you're looking at the operational performance of the applications great all right Russ last question I have for you as a CIO how things been changing yeah you've been in the role for seven years you've moved inside the organization what are some of the things that are changing and some of the things that aren't yeah so the CIO role I believe personally is really kind of gearing towards more of a strategic element you know being part of that business making sure that we're not just providing those generic services of you know ping power and pipe right we're there for the business to understand what their business processes are all about and how they run their workflows and use their applications on a daily basis most of my conversations with my vice-president peers and and business leaders isn't around the technology that's being used yeah they're interested in iPhones and tablet devices but they're really geared at how do I help them solve their business problems and that's where IT is really evolving and the CIO role is doing a lot of that it wraps around that you know the teams you have around you and the strategic elements of the organization and just to follow up on that to do the SAS applications that your business using following under you is there any public cloud in there - what we do we have we have a hybrid cloud solution so we do a lot of on-premise solutions but we have several cloud and they're they're growing as needed but we have a business model that basically says let's look at our infrastructure internally first as a as an employee-owned private company we tend to gravitate towards keeping in-house but we have several business solutions that are in the cloud that are providing value all right well rust pleasure to meet you take so much for you to us and Congrats on everything that Kimbrough is done thank you very much back with lots more coverage here at wtt transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun and thanks so much for watching the Q [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its The Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> Welcome to The Cube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman And this is the second of three days of wall to wall coverage we have here at The Sands convention center and I am thrilled to welcome to the program, back to the program, Michael Dell, who is the CEO of Dell Technologies. Michael thank you so much for having us here and thanks for joining us on The Cube. >> Oh, great to be here. Thank you guys for all the great coverage. You always do a wonderful job getting into the technical details and kind of exploring everything in depth and we appreciate you and your team being here. >> Well thanks so much. You started off the keynote talking about the platform for the possible, said it was 34 years in the making. Now this is my 15th year at the show formally known as EMC World. I'd attended the Dell Show for a number of years, so tell us, start with what's really different now about the company's all together, it's renamed now, Dell Technologies World. Why is this the platform for the possible? >> I'm kind of amazed and inspired when I step back and look at what our customers are doing with our technology and we have hundreds of technical sessions here where we get in depth as we've always done at, historically, EMC World, but we're also taking a broader view and saying, "Hey, what's this really all about?" What's the impact on the world? This was one of the motivations for bringing together Dell and EMC and VMWare, and Pivotal and the whole family and it's working. So we're telling the story through the eyes of our customers and it is really an amazing time when you think about what's going on in the world. We have this incredible platform that's been built over the last 30 years, but now there are all these new enabling technologies that are going to take it much further and the domain of information technology is not the IT department anymore and we're seeing that in a big way, so it's a super exciting time and obviously we think we're a unique company across digital transformation, IT, workforce security and it's working. So it's all good, Stu. >> Michael, one of the great lines we liked in the keynote was today we'll have the most change that you've ever had in your life, but compared to what we'll see tomorrow, it's going to keep changing faster. When I look at the Dell Technologies family, I know a lot has changed. Pivotal just went through an IPO. I have to imagine the tax laws changing in the recent administration has impact. What's changed since the day one decision to purchase EMC, the largest merger in technology history to today, maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what's happening inside the family that's different. >> You know, there've been a lot of reports about the tax law. That actually was not much of a change. Kind of inconsequential change. It's very good for the broader industry growth and kind of broader economic growth and we're quite excited about that and so I see it as a net positive. You know, when we step back and go back a little bit in time here to 2009 when Joe and I first talked about this idea, 2008-2009. Wasn't the right time, financial crisis. We re-started it in 2014, announced it in 2015. Here we are four years after we had the last set of initial discussions and it's all come together very well. Look, I mean, the revenues are much stronger that we thought. Business is excellent. The demand is very strong. There's a portfolio effect. I think you're seeing increasing integration of the family of businesses, particularly with VMware and Dell EMC and Pivotal. And the relevance of what we are doing has never been greater and so we're able to have conversations with companies that are very different that we had before. At the same time this is occurring, the business leaders and the chief executives of companies are waking up to the power of technology, whether it's because of some new disruptor showing up or because they realize that they have to change and evolve. Used to be it was just us folks in the tech world that were in this fast changing world where everything was moving very quickly and we used to, when people wanted to come work for us, we'd say, "Hey, how do you like it when things change? "How are you dealing with ambiguity?" If they didn't like it, we'd say, "Yeah, you probably shouldn't come work here "because you won't be happy "if things are changing all the time." It's like that in every business now and, like you said, it's only going to get faster. >> Right. So, wondering if, you look at the portfolio, Michael. One of the things since the EMC acquisition and it's a pretty broad portfolio. There's some streamlining that I understand's happening. How do you balance the streamlining with the breadth of portfolio, make sure you're reaching the customers? >> There's absolutely some kind of simplification and optimization of the expansive set of capabilities we have. We also have some incredible platforms and so what you want to do is rally around the platforms and that's exactly what we're doing, so you'll see us not only create a very seamless and logical path for every customer, but rally around the winning platforms and you already detect that as a theme here at Dell Technologies World and it's going well. >> When you look at your overall portfolio, wonder if you could talk to some of the macroeconomic things happening, on margins that are happening. If Dave Alonte was here, are we talking a half of your business is client. You've got the ISG portfolio. That transformation of when Dell went private and now bringing EMC in, which allows you to change things. How do you look at that and what does Dell look like when you get to, say, the 2020, 2030? >> You know, right now it looks great and I think it'll look even better in 2020. What I see is we have positioned ourself as the essential infrastructure company and there's a massive infrastructure build-out and it's on the edge, it's a distributed core, and it's the cloud, and cloud is not just the public cloud and everybody's kind of figured that out now. We were saying it before it was cool, So if I think about the different businesses, you know Pivotal's doing great and we don't need to say too much about that because it just went public and we're in a bit of a quiet period, but the Pivotal business is a great business. VMware is doing fabulously well. Pat did a great job yesterday with the keynote and I think if you watch the keynote, you see, wow, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, VMware, really, really working together at a very deep level. And then you go into our client business. Client business is growing really fast, but not as fast as our data center business. The data center business is growing even faster, so we're gaining share. You'll see it in the first quarter. We'll gain share in storage, we'll gain share in servers, we'll gain share in clients, and there's a portfolio effect where customers look across everything that we're doing and they say, "Yeah, I don't really want "to deal with 25 little companies. "I want to have a bigger relationship "with Dell Technologies." So bringing everything together, putting real effort behind these big platforms that we have, and look, we've got some big new initiatives. NSX, network virtualization. You know I'm a big believer in that and I think this is ultimately bigger than server virtualization and we're in an ideal position with our open networking and VMware NSX to drive that forward. >> Michael, both Allison and Jeff brought some great customer stories up on stage. One of the things sometimes you hear out there it's like, well, Dell, they're just an infrastructure company, and infrastructure, you know, I care about my data, I care about my applications. What's the role of infrastructure and maybe give us, what does infrastructure mean to you when we talk about those digital transformations that you're helping your customers through? >> Well you sort of go back to what's the plot here? And the plot is better outcomes, results, and success for a business. Well how do you do that? Well you do that with data, right? And people talk about clouds. Well what are clouds? The clouds are built on infrastructure. It's a bit like the internet. 20 years ago we'd say, hey we have the internet, we have the internet product strategy, Vice President of the internet, internet product division. Where's all that now? It's just everywhere. Cloud, AI, very, very similar. At the core of all this is the data and the computer science. You want to have artificial intelligence machine learning? Got to have data, so that's infrastructure. AI is eating software and software is eating hardware, but AI doesn't run on software. Software doesn't run on software. Software runs on hardware, so you got to put it all together, right? And that's exactly what we do. >> Alright, Michael what learnings have you had going through this? I know there was a lot of planning. We talked to Howard yesterday, talking about some of the cultures coming together, the big survey they did that like the top five things across everybody. It was like, not only were the top five things in agreement, but even the order was in agreement, but have to imagine that there were some things, bringing these large companies together. I might notice that in the keynote so far it's been all people that came from the Dell side that are up on stage. PowerMax Bob I know is from the EMC side, but mostly from the Dell side. What have you learned so far? How have some of those cultural pieces come together and how do you keep a quite large organization rallying and focused around what's an ever-changing and broad portfolio? >> You know, it's been a lot of fun, first of all to have so many unbelievably talented people join our company and that was a real delight because there's just a wealth of enormously talented people now in our company. Over-communicating, listening, getting to know them, understanding their point of view, and ultimately creating a shared vision and an aspiring vision for what we want to do in the future. And then, of course, when you're winning, everybody sees it and everybody's excited and they want to be part of it and they're engaged and it's working. So, certainly during the period before the integration and still today, we're in the business of technology and we've got products and services, but ultimately it's a people business right? And the talent comes in and walks out every single day, so you got to keep them engaged, excited, and fortunately we're doing that. And we're adding a lot more, so we need a few more thousand sales people, so if you're really talented and you know how to sell stuff, come join us at Dell Technologies, because we're hiring more sales people. >> Well Michael, I think you're going to get calls there. On a personal note, I've been watching on social media. Everybody's really, you give your time back. You spend time. I know something you really enjoy is speaking to people, understanding what's going on, getting into it, and for someone, Michael you created all of this and you've been there, just giving your time and getting involved is impressive. I've read like every book that Walter Isaacson's done. We're going to see a biography from him about you some time in the future or? >> Well look, I think if you're honored enough to have a biography by Walter Isaacson, that's pretty good. I'll leave that to him. He's a great one for sure. Look, I mean, I just think this is my job right? (laughs) Our job is to be with our customers, be with our people, learn, listen. That's how we become a better company and I wouldn't know what else to do if I wasn't doing that. >> Yeah. One of the things in your keynote you spoke about is helping customers, making it real. Like in Jeff's keynote, it was that the business and the IT are becoming one and the same. Maybe if you, do you have any good customer stories or how are you helping customers making it real? >> Yeah I think this topic of change management is really important because let's say you're a customer and you come to Dell Technologies World and you see this amazing, dizzying array of new things and you're like, "Wow, that sounds great but how do I do it?" And so, I'll give you one story. We met with a large, rather large company, and they had a situation where for any number of reasons, the IT environment was sort of put on hold for a couple of years. There were things going on around them that were beyond their control. They just really couldn't do anything, so the environment very quickly atrophied and they wanted very quickly to get up to speed and needed a lot of help and so we pulled in our professional services team. Make no mistake, we're not trying to replace Accenture or TCS or something, but a thin layer of architecture consulting to very quickly help them map out what the new architecture should look like and then go make it happen. And of course, we have lots of partners all over the world that also are engaged in helping that happen. But we're very aware that change management is a big topic for a lot of our customers and we're spending a lot of time on how do we make it easier, so make these more ready-made solutions for the fast track to the modern data center, like the VX Rack, VX Rail, V Block Solution. >> Yeah, we touched on it briefly, but that concept of change, when I talk to customers, one of the challenges they have is they learn about something, they get ramped on it. By the time they've rolled it out, there's something else that it's like, oh wait, maybe I should have waited. It used to be, oh geez, I should have started that project two years ago and now it feels like, wait, maybe I should wait another year because things are changing so fast, economics are changing. How do you work with customers and, internally, how does the team manage this just unprecedented rate of change? >> I think there's a pretty massive movement going on across organizations to be more agile and it kind of started in software development, some technical organizations, but now you're seeing it spread. We're certainly working as a company to do more and more of that and I think we're living in a very dynamic world. First we had the internet and all the things that that brought. Now we have the 5G and the block chain and autonomous computing and all kinds of new things that are being explored out there and so we have to be highly adaptable and flexible. I think companies that aren't able to do that are going to have a problem. We are in a way blessed that we grew up in a world where if we didn't do that, we'd have been out of business a long time ago. >> Michael, you mentioned crypto. We've talked to the VMware and Dell EMC teams that are starting to look at those technologies, do some of the underlying things, but you're a big investor. You've made some big things, everything from, I think about the radio frequencies in the sports arena. What do you think of this whole crypto, Bitcoin, all that. What's your take on that from a personal side? >> Well look, as a personal investor, I have almost none of my money in cryptocurrency, so I'll be clear about that. I'm a massive believer in distributed computing and block chain, but I don't have a lot of my money, or really, in anything to speak of in cryptocurrency, so maybe I'm missing out on the next great investment opportunity. Don't really know. I guess we'll find out, but big believer in distributed computing and block chain. >> Yeah I think you'll be doing okay either way, Michael. Want to give you the-- >> It's worked out pretty well so far, so I'm... >> (laughs) Want to give you the final world. There's so much here, over 14,000 people, lots of tracks. I've been talking to all my friends. It's a great nerd fest as I think some people have said, so always geeking out. Give us a final takeaway, what you hope people walk away, and what maybe they understand Dell Technologies a little better about than they might not have in the past? >> Well first, very grateful for our customers, for the trust they place in us. It's really gratifying to see how the Dell Technologies capabilities have resonated, and look, I think a lot of people are a bit surprised at all the capability we have across the company. That's really the purpose of this event is to bring it all together, explain the capabilities we have. We want them to engage in the hundreds of technical sessions that we have, but still come away with, I wish I could have gone to some more, right? And so we have all those online and for us this is also big ears. We're listening and we're learning. We're hearing from our customers and we're going to go take that back and bring the next set of innovations and we want to be the trusted partner for our customers. We think there's never been a better time to be doing what we're doing and there's a business investment cycle that's technology-led that's very powerful and there's no company on the planet that has the capabilities Dell Technologies has across all the four transformations. >> All right, well Michael Dell, thank you so much for joining us here. Really appreciate getting to talk with you and getting to cover this event. We have two more days full of live coverage here from Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman And you're watching The Cube. Thanks Michael. >> Michael: Great, thanks Stu. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and this the wrap of .Next, Nutanix's customer event, #NEXTConf and this is theCube, the leader in the live tech coverage for enterprise technology. Stu, second day. I got to say, Nutanix has always done a good job, innovative venues, they do funky, fun stuff with marketing, we haven't seen the end of it. We have another keynote today, there's a keynote tomorrow morning, big names, Bill McDermott's here, we just saw Peter MacKay, Chad Sakac is here. Who am I missing? >> Stu: Diane Greene >> Diane Gree was up yesterday. >> Y'know, thought leaders, had the CEO of NASDAQ on this morning Dave, y'know really good customers, thought leaders, Nutanix always makes me think a little bit, which I really enjoy. My fourth one of these Dave, usually by the fourth show I've gotten to, it's like I've seen it. Have we made progress, where are we going? >> I thought Sunil Podi's comment was really interesting, he said, "Look, we saw the trends, "we knew that hardware was going down." I mean, they're essentially admitting that they were a hardware oriented company, infrastructure company, we saw what was happening to infrastructure and hyper-converge, and we could just packed it up then, sold the company for a bunch of money, there were rumors floating around, you know they were pre-IPO, they easily could have sold this thing for a billion plus, all could have cashed out and made a buncha dough, and they said, "Y'know what, we're going to do something "different, we're going to go for it." You got to love the ambition, and so many companies today just can't weather that independent storm. I mean, you've seen it over and over and over again. The last billion dollar storage company that remained independent was NetApp, that was 14 years ago, now Nutanix isn't a storage company, but look around here, look at the analysts, a buncha storage guys that have grown up, and it's to me, Stu, it's a representation of what's happening in the marketplace. Storage as we know it is going away, and it always has transformed, y'know it used to be spinning disc drives, then it was subsystems, then it was the SAN, now it's evolving, these guys call it invisible infrastructure, call it whatever you want, but it's moving toward infrastructure as code, which is just a stepping stone to cloud. So your thoughts on the event, the ecosystem, and their position in the marketplace. >> Right, they reach a certain point, they've gone public, can they keep innovating? Look at a number of announcements there, we spent a lot of time talking about the new CloudZi service out there. >> Si? >> Zi. >> Zi, zi, sorry, you got it. (chuckles) >> Pronunciation of some of these, "it's Nutanix, right?" >> Nutonix, Nutanicks, (chuckles) >> They made jokes about the company last year, but this year, that's product, we're talking vision. The ink is still drying on the relationship with Google, doesn't mean they haven't been working for a while, but where this deal goes, interesting to see where it is six months from now, a year from now, because also Google, small player, I mean it wasn't to be honest, I was at the Red Hat Summit and they had a video of Andy Jassy saying, "We've extending AWS with OpenShift." And you're like wow. Red Hat has a position in a lot of clouds, but for Andy Jassy to make an appearance, Amazon, the behemoth in the cloud, that's good. Look, getting Diane Greene here, I said number one, it gives Nutanix credibility, number two it really pokes at VMware a little bit, she's like, "Oh, I did this before." And everybody's like, "Well, she's here now at Nutanix." Nutanix wants to be, that they've compared themselves to both Amazon, I think we hear it was Sunil or Dheeraj in an analyst session said they "want to be like the A Block." Not the V Block that EMC did, but the Amazon Block for the enterprise, or the next VMware, they talked about the new operating system. It's funny, in a lot of my circles, we've been trying to kill the operating system for a while, I need just enough operating system, I want to serverless and containerize all of these things because we need to modernize, and the old general-purpose processor and general-purpose operating system has come and gone, it's seen its day, but Nutanix has a play there. When I look at some of the things going on, we're talking about microsegmentation Dave, we're talking about multi-cloud and some interesting pieces. I like the ecosystem, I like that balance of how do you keep growing and expand where they can go into, leading the customers, but they're delivering today, they've got real products, they've got real growth, sure they have some challenges as to that competitive back and forth, but you asked Chad Sakac if this reminded him of Dell EMC, and kind of that partnership that they had for years, reminded me a little bit of kind of EMC and VMware too, once EMC bought VMware, VMware, the relationship they had, HP, and IBM, and other companies that they needed to treat as good or better than EMC. They're some of those tough relationships, and Dell with Nutanix, their partner, not only do they do Dell XC, but now they're doing like Pivotal on top of it, they can do Hyper-V deployments, Lenovo's another partner, Nutanix is broadening their approach, there's a lot of options out there and a lot of things to dig into, interesting, they keep growing their customers, keep delighting their customers, it reminds me of other shows we go to, Dave, like Amazon re:Invent, customers are super excited, You tell me about the Splunk conference and the ServiceNow conference where those customers are in there, they're excited, and Nutanix is another one of those, that every year you come, there's good solid content, there's a customer base that is growing and exciting and sharing, and that's a fun one to be part of. >> So, I want to ask you about VMware, it's kind of a good reference model. EMC paid out, I don't know, $630 million for VMware, which was the greatest acquisition in enterprise IT history, no question about it in terms of return. A couple questions for you, you were there at the time, you signed the original NDA between EMC and VMware, kind of sniffed em out. Would VMware's ascendancy been as fast and as successful, or even more successful, without EMC? Would VMware have got there on its own? >> I don't think so Dave, because my information that I had, and some of it's piecing together after the fact is VMware was really looking for that company to help them get to the next state. The fundraising was a little bit different back in 2003 than it was later, but rumors were Semantic was going to buy them. Everybody I talked to, you'd know better than me Dave, if Semantic had bought them, they would have integrated into all their pieces, they would have squashed it, the original talent probably would have fled much sooner. EMC didn't really know what they had, I had worked on some of the due diligence for some of the product integration, which took years and years to deliver, and it was mostly we're going to buy them. Diane had a bit of a tense relationship with Joe Tucci kind of from day one, and it was like okay, you're out there in Palo Alto, we're on the other coast, you go and do your thing, and you grow, and by the time EMC had gotten into VMware a little bit more, they were much bigger. So I think as you said, they're one of the great success stories, EMC did best in a lot of its acquisitions where it either let it ran a division and go, or let it kind of sit on its own and just funded it more, so I think that was a-- >> Well, and the story was always that Diane was pissed because she sold out at such a low price, but that's sort of ancient history. The reason I brought that up is I want to try to draw the parallel with Nutanix today, and come back to what you were saying about the A Block. When you look at Amazon, we agree, they have a lead, whether that lead is five years, seven years, four years, probably more like five to seven, but whatever, whatever it is, it's a lead, it's substantive. Beyond the infrastructure, the storage and the compute, they're building out just all kinds of services, I mean just look at their website, whether it's messaging, on and on and on, there's database, there's AI, there's their version of VDI, there's all this big data stuff, with things like Kinesis, and on and on and on, so many services that are much, much larger than the entire Nutanix ecosystem. So the reason for all this background is does Nutanix need a bigger, can Nutanix become it's ambition, which is essentially to be the next VMware, without some kind of white knight? >> So my answer, Dave, is if you look at Nutanix's ambition, one of the challenges for every infrastructure company today, if you think okay, we've talked about True Private Cloud, Dave, what services can I run on that? How can I leverage that? Look at Amazon, y'know a thousand new services coming every year, look at Google, they've got TensorFlow, really cool stuff, they've got those brilliant people coming up with the next stuff, how do I get that in my environment? Well, Nutanix's answer, coming at the show was we're going to partner with Google, we're going to have that partnership, you're going to be able to plug in, and you want to do your analytics and everything, use GCP, they're great at that, we're not, we know that you need to be able to leverage Google services to do that. The Red Hat announcement that I mentioned before, another way how I can take OpenShift and bridge from my data center and my environment and get access to those services. The promise of VMware on Amazon, yeah we're going to have a similar stack that I can go there, but I want to be able to access those VMware servers. Now, could it suck them eventually into all of Amazon and leave VMware behind? Absolutely, it's tough to partner with Amazon. So, the thing I've been looking at at almost every show this year is how are you tying into and working with those public clouds, we talked about it at VMON, Dave, they have Microsoft up on stage, they have partnerships with the public cloud-- >> David: HPE was up there. >> But the public cloud players, if you're not allowing your customers and the infrastructure that you're building to find ways to leverage and access those public cloud services, which not only are they spending $10 billion a year for each one of the big guys on infrastructure to get all around the globe, but it's all of those new services ahead, moving up the stack. To stitch together that in your own environment is going to be really challenging, how many different software pieces, how do I license it? How do I get it on, as opposed to oh, I'm in the public cloud, it's a checkbox, okay I want to access that, and I consume it as I need it, that consumption model needs to change, so I think Nutanix understands that's directionally where they want to go, I look at the Calm software that they launched and say hey, you want to use TensorFlow? Oh, it's just a choice here, absolutely, go. Where is it and how do I use it? Well, some of these details need to be worked out, as Detu said, "it's not like it's one click for every application, any cloud, anywhere." But that's directionally where they're going to make it easy, so all that cool analytic stuff that we cover a lot on theCube, a lot of that is now happening in the cloud, and I should be able to access it whether I'm in my private cloud or public cloud, and it's just going to be consumption model, whether I have certain characteristics that make it that I'm going to want to have that infrastructure for whether that's governance or locality, we talked to Scholastic yesterday, and they said, "Well when you've got manufacturing "in books, I need things close "to where they're coming off the production line, "otherwise there's things that I'm doing "in the public cloud." So that's there we see, when I talk to companies like I do here, at the Vienna show last year, when I talk to Christian Reilly with Citrix, who had been at Bechtel for many years, there's reasons why things need to live close to what's happening, y'know we've talked a lot about Edge, and therefore public cloud doesn't win it all, I know we had one guest on this week that said, "Right, depending on what industry you're is, "is it a 30/70 mix or a 70/30 mix?" There's a lot of nuance to sort this out, and this is long game, Dave, there's this change of the way we do things is a journey, and Nutanix has positioned themselves to continue to grow, continue to expand, some good ambition to expand on, like the five vectors of support that they have, so I've liked what I've heard this week. >> So in thinking about what we're talking about VMware, the imperative for virtualization was so high in the early 2000's because we were coming out of the dot com bust, IT was out of favor, VMware was really the only game in town, there really wasn't a strong alternative, had by far the best product, Microsoft Hyper-V was sort of in-concept, and KVM and others were just really not there, so there really was no choice, it appealed to 100% of the IT shops, I mean essentially. So I wonder though, today, is the imperative for multi-cloud the same? The fundamental is yes, everybody has multiple clouds. But this industry has lived in stovepipes forever, and has figured out how to manage stovepipes, it manages them by fencing things off. So I wonder is the imperative as high, you could maybe make an argument that it's higher, but I'm still not quite getting it yet, as it was in the early 2000's, where the aspirin of virtualization to soothe the pain of do more with less was such an obvious and game changing paradigm shift. I don't see it as much here, I see people still trying to figure out okay, what is our cloud strategy? Number one, number two is the competition seems to be much more wide open, it's unclear at this time that any one company has a fast-track to multi-cloud. >> I think you've got some really good points there, Dave. A thing that I've pointed out a few times is that one of the things that bothered me from the early days with VMware is from an application standpoint, it tended to freeze my application. I didn't have a reason to kind of move forward and modernize my application. Back in 2002 it was like oh, I'm running Windows NT with a really old application, my operating system going to end of life, well maybe it's time to uplift. Oh wait, there's this great virtualization stuff, my hardware's going end of life too. No, shove it in a VM, let's keep it for another five years. Oh my god, that application sucked then, it's going to suck even more in five years, and workforce productivity was way down. So, the vision for Nutanix is they're going to be a platform that are going to be able to help you modernize your environment and how do we get beyond, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it a lot of the cloud-native pieces, how does that fit in? Starting to hear a little bit more of it, a critique I'd have on HCI about two years ago was it was the same applications that were in my VMware SAN, not VSAN, but my just traditional storage area network was what was running on Nutanix. We're starting to see more interesting applications going on there, and look, Nutanix has a bullseye on them, there are all the HCI direct replacements, there is the threat of the cloud, and I haven't heard as many SAAS applications living on Nutanix as I do when we talk to all flash-array companies, Dave, every single on of them can roll out, here's all these SAAS deployments on our environment, just scalable environments that build that for the future. I haven't heard it as much from Nutanix. >> So VMware was aspirin , Nutanix originally started as aspirin, and now they're pivoting to vitamin. Who are they up against? Who do you like? Who are the horses on the track? Let's analyze the race and then wrap. >> Yeah, so when Nutanix got into this business, it was well, they're helping VMware environments, it was 100% VMware when they first started that relationship with VMware was really tough, they've lowered that too, they've now got what, 28% is running HV, they've got a little bit on Hyper-V, but they've still got about 60% of their customers are VMware. So VMware, y'know, huge challenge, VSAN has more customers than anyone in the hyper-convergent infrastructure space, easy, number of customers, but virtualization admin has taken that. Microsoft, huge potential threat, Azure Stack's coming this year, it's been coming, it's been coming, it's really close there, all the server guys are lining up. Microsoft's a huge player, Microsoft owns applications, they're pulling applications into their SAAS offerings, they're pulling applications into Azure, when they launch Azure Stack, even if the 1.0, if you looked at it on paper and say Nutanix is better, well, Microsoft's a huge threat to both VMware, which uses a lot of Microsoft apps, as well as Nutanix. So those are the two biggest threats, then of course, there's just the general trend of push to SAAS and push to public cloud where Nutanix is starting to play in the multi-cloud, as we talked about, and COM and the DR cloud services are good, but can Nutanix continue to stay ahead of their customers? They're ahead of the vast majority of enterprises, but can they convince them to come on board to them, rather than some of these big guys? Nutanix is a public company now, they're doing great, but yeah, it's a big TAM that they're going after, but that means they're going to have a tax from every side of the market. >> I see HCI as one where you got a leader, and that leader can make some good money. I don't see multi-cloud as a winner-take-all market because I think IBM's going to have its play in multi-cloud, HPE has its play in multi-cloud, Dell EMC is going to have its play in multi-cloud. You got guys coming out of different places like ServiceNow, who's got an IT operations management practice, builds business big, hundreds of millions of dollars of business there, coming at multi-cloud, so a lot of different competitors that are going to be going for it, and some of them with very large service organizations that I think are going to get there fair share, so I would predict, Stu, that this is going to continue to be, multi-cloud is going to be a multi-stovepipe cloud for a long, long time. Now, if Nutanix can come in and solve that control plane problem, and demonstrate substantial business value, and deliver competitive advantage, y'know that might change the game. It's difficult at this point in 2017 to see that Nutanix, over those other guys that I just mentioned, has an advantage, clear advantage, maybe from a product standpoint, maybe. But from a resource standpoint, a distribution channel, services organization, ecosystem, all those other things, they seem to me to be counterbalancing. Alright, I'll give you last thought. >> Yeah, so it's great to see Nutanix, they're aiming high, they're expanding into a couple of areas, and they keep listening, so I hope they keep listening to their customers, expand their partnerships, SAAS customers would be really interesting, service provider is something that they've gotten into little bit, but plenty more opportunity for them to go there. Dave, personally for me, to it have been a company I've watched since the earliest days, it's been a pleasure to watch, y'know I think back, right, VMware you said, I think it was a hundred person company when I first started talking to them and Diane Greene, and I look at where VMware went. I've been tracking VMware for now five years, and reminds me a lot of some of those trends, for a 20 person company, I said to hear almost 3000 boggles the mind, I've been to their headquarters a bunch. So it's been fun to watch the Newton army, and they've been loving watching it from our angles. >> Well and these events are very good events, and so there's a lot of passion here, and that's a great fundamental for this company. So I'm a fan, I think it may be undervalued, I think it very well may be undervalued. >> Wall Street definitely doesn't understand this stuff. >> Alright Stu, great working with you this year, (chuckles) this month, this quarter, this month, certainly this show, so great job. I really appreciate it >> Stu: Thanks, Dave. >> There's a big crew behind what Stu and I, and John Ferrier, and Jeff Frick, and others do here. Here today with us Ava, Patrick, Alex, Jay, you guys have had an awesome spring. Brendan is somewhere, I guess Brendan is doing the keynote right now. So, fantastic job, as always, Kristen Nicole and her team, writing up the articles. Jay Johanson back at the controls, Bert with the crowd shots. Everybody, really appreciate all your support, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you, we got a little break, I think, in the action, cause it's July Fourth, well it's Canada year, or Canada week-- >> Canada Day and Independence Day next week. >> And Independence Day in the United States, and then we'll be at Infor Inforum, second week of July, I'll be there with Rebecca Knight and the crew, so watch for that, check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news, Wikibon.com for all the research, and theCube.net to find all these videos, Youtube.com/SiliconAngle, it's everywhere, if you can't find it, you're not on Twitter, you're not on social. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we're out. (lo-fi synthesizer music)