>> the CUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the CUBE'S coverage day one, Dell Technologies World 2022 live from The Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. We've been here the last couple of hours. You can hear probably the buzz behind me. Lots of folks here, we're think around seven to eight thousand folks in this solution expo, the vibe is awesome. We've got two guests helping to round out our day one coverage. Ryan Fournier joins us, senior director of product management Edge Solutions at Dell Technologies. And MuneyB Minttazuddin vice president of Edge Computing at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Yeah. >> Isn't it great to be here in person? >> Oh man, yes. >> The vibe, the vibe of day one is awesome. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah. >> I think it's fantastic. >> Like people give energy off to each other, right? >> Absolutely. So lots of some good news coming out today so far on day one. Let's talk about, Ryan let's start with you. With Edge, it's not new. We've been talking about it for a while, but what are some of the things that are new? What are some of the key trends that you are seeing that are driving changes at the Edge? >> Great, good question. We've been talking to a lot of customers. Okay, a lot of the customers you know, the different verticals really find that is a common theme happening around a massive digital transformation and really based on the pandemic, okay. Which caused some acceleration in some, but also not, but many are kind of laggers left behind. And one primary reason is the culture of the OT, IT, you know, lack of barriers or something like that. The OT is obviously the business outcomes, okay. Focused where the IT is more enabling the function and it'll take retail. For example, that's accelerated a significant usage of an in-store frictionless experience, okay. As well as supply chain automation, warehousing logistics, connected inventory, a lot of the new use cases in this new normal post that pandemic. It's really that new retail operating landscape. >> Consumers we are so demanding, we want the same experience that we have online and we want that in the store and that's really driving a lot of this out of consumer demand. >> Oh yeah, no. I think, you know, retail you know, the way you shop for milk and bread change during the pandemic, right? There was pre-pandemic. The online shopping in the United States was only 5%, but during the pandemic and afterwards that's going to caught up to 25, 30%. That's huge. How do you bring new processes in? How do you create omnichannel consumer experiences where online well as physical are blended together? Becomes a massive challenge for the retailers. So yes, Edge has been there for a long time. Innovation hasn't happened, but a simple credit card swipe When you used to pre-pandemic, just to go do your checkout now has become into a curbside pickup. Integration with like, it's just simple payment card processing is not complicated like, you know, crazy. So people are forced to go in a way and that's happening in manufacturing because they're supply chain issues, could be not. So a lot of that has accelerated this investment and what's kind of driving Edge Computing is if everything ran out of the cloud, then you almost need infinite bandwidth. So suddenly people are realizing that everything runs out of cloud. I can't process my video analytics in a store. That's a lot of video, right? >> So we often ask ourselves, okay, who's going to win the edge? You know, we have that conversation. The cloud guys? VMware? You know, Dell? How are they going to go at it? And so to your point, you're not going to do a round trip to the cloud too expensive, too slow. Now cloud guys will try to bring their cloud basically on prem or out to the edge. You're kind of bringing it from the data center. So how do you see that evolution? >> No, great question. As the edge market happens, right? So there's market data now which says enterprise edge workloads in the next five years are going to be the fastest growing workloads. But then you have different communities coming to solve that problem. Like you just said, John is, you know, hyperscalers are going, Hey, all of the new workloads were built on us, let's bring them to the edge. Data center workloads move to the edge. >> Now important community here are, you know, Telcos and Service Providers because they have assets that are highly distributed at the edge. However, they're networking assets like cell towers and stuff like that. There's opportunity to convert them into computer and storage assets. So you can provide edge computing POPs. So you're seeing a convergence of lot of industry segments, traditional IT, hyperscalers, telcos, and then OT like Ryan pointed out is naturally transforming itself. There's almost this confluence of this pot where all these different technologies need to come together. From VMware and Dell perspective, our mission is a multi-cloud edge. We want to be able to support multi-cloud services because you've heard this multiple times, is at the edge consumers and customers will require services from all the hyperscalers. They don't want buy a one hyperscaler suit to suit solution. They want to mix and match. So not bound. We want be multi-cloud south bound to support IT and OT environments. So that becomes our value proposition in the middle. >> Yep. >> So Ryan, you were talking about that IT, OT schism. And we talk about that a lot. I wonder if you could help us parse that a little bit, because you were using, for instance retail, as an example. Sometimes I think about in the industrial. >> And I think the OT people are kind of like having an engineering mindset. Don't touch my stuff. Kind of like the IT guys too, but different, you know. So there's so much opportunity at the edge. I wonder how you guys think about that? How you segment it? How you prioritize it? Obviously retail telco are big enough. >> Yep. >> That you can get your hands around them, but then there's to your point about all this data that's going to going to compute. It's going to come in pockets. And I wonder how you guys think about that schism and the other opportunity. >> Yeah, out there. It's also a great question, you know, in manufacturing. There's the true OT persona. >> Yeah. >> Okay, and that really is focused on the business outcomes. Things like predictive maintenance use cases, operational equipment effectiveness, like that's really around bottleneck analysis, and the process that go through that. If the plant goes down, they're fine, okay. They can still work on their own systems, but they're not needing that high availability solution. But they're also the decision makers and where to buy the Edge Computing, okay. So we need to talk more to the OT persona from a Dell perspective, okay. And to add on to Ryan, right. So industrial is an interesting challenge, right? So one of the things we did, and this is VMware and Dell working together at vMware it was virtual. We announced something called edge compute stack. And for the first time in 23 years of vMware history, we made the hypervisor layer real-time. >> Yep. >> What that means is in order to capture some of these OT workloads, you need to get in and operate it between the industrial PC and the program of logical controllers at a sub millisecond performance level, because now you're controlling robotic arms that you cannot miss a beat. So we actually created this real time functionality. With that functionality in the last six months, we've been able to virtualize PLCs, IPCs. So what I'm getting at is we're opening up an entire wide space of operational technology workloads, which we was not accessible to our market for the last 20 plus years. >> Now we're talking. >> Yeah. And that allows us that control plane infrastructure to edge compute. There's purpose built for edge allows us to pivot and do other solutions like analytics with the adoption of AI Analytics with our recent announcement of Deep North, okay. That provides that in store video analytics functionality. And then we also partner with PTC based on a manufacturing solution, working with that same edge compute stack. Think of that as that control plane, where again, like I said, you can pivot off a different solutions. Okay, so we leverage PTCs thing works. >> So, okay, great. So I wanted to go to that. So real-time's really interesting. >> 'Cause most of much of AI today is modeling done in the cloud. >> Yes. >> The real opportunity is real time inferencing at the edge. >> You got it. >> Okay, now this is why this gets so interesting. And I wonder if Project Monterey fits into this at all. because I feel like so why did Intel win? Intel won, it crushed all the Unix systems out there because it had PC volumes. And the edge volume's going to dwarf anything we've ever seen before. >> Yeah. >> So I feel like there's this new cocktail, you guys describe this convergence and this mixture and it's unknown. What's going to happen? That's why Project Monterey is so interesting. >> Of course. >> Yeah. >> Right? Because you're bringing together kind of hedging a lot of bets and serving a lot of different use cases. Maybe you could talk about where that might fit here. >> Oh absolutely. So the edge compute stack is made up of vSphere, Tanzu, which is vSphere's you know, VM container and Tanzu's our container technology and vSphere contains Monterey in it, right. And we've added vSAN a for storage at the edge. And connectivity is SD-WAN because a lot of the times it's far location. So you're not having a large footprint, you have one or two hoses, it's more wide area, narrow area. So the edge compute stack supports real-time, non-real-time time workloads. VMs and containers, CPU GPU, right. >> NPU, accelerators, >> NPU, DPU all of them, right. Because what you're dealing with here is that inferencing real time, because to Ryan's point, when you're doing predictive maintenance, you got to pick these signals up in like milliseconds. >> Yes. >> So we've gone our stack down to microseconds and we pick up and inform because if I can save this predictive maintenance in two seconds, I save millions of dollars in you know, wastage of product, right? >> And you may not even persist that data, right? You might just let it go, I mean, how much data does Tesla save? Right? I mean. >> You're absolutely right. A lot of the times, all you're doing is this volume of data coming at you. You're matching it to an inferencing pattern. If it doesn't match, you just drop, right. It's not persistent, but the moment you hit a trigger, immediately everything lights go off, you're login, you're applying outcome. So like super interesting at the edge. >> And the compute is going to go through the roof. So yeah, my premise is that, you know, general purpose x86 running SAP is not going to be the architecture for the edge. >> You're absolutely right. >> Going to be low cost, low power, super performance. 'Cause when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, you're going to blow away the performance that we've ever seen on the curves. >> There's also a new application pattern. I've called out something called edge-native applications. We went through this client-server architecture era. We built all this, you know, a very clear in architecture. We went through cloud native where everything was hyperscaled in the cloud. Both of the times we optimize our own compute. >> Yeah. >> At the edge, we got to optimize our owns data because it's not ephemeral compute that you have in hyperscale compute space, you have ephemeral data you got to deal with. So a new nature of application workloads are emerging. We call it edge-native apps. >> Yep. >> And those have very different characteristics, you know, to client server apps or you know, cloud native apps, which is amazing. It's driven by data analysts like developers, not like dot net Java developers. It's actually data analysts who are trying to mine this with fast patents and come out with outcomes, right? >> Yeah, I love that edge-native apps Lisa, that's a new term for me. >> Right, just trademark it on me. I made made it up. (panel laughing) >> Can you guys talk about a joint customer that you've really helped to dramatically transform in the last six months? >> You want to shout or I can go-- >> I think my industry is fine. >> Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at VMworld we talked about Oshkosh, which is again, like in the manufacturing space, we have retailers and manufacturers and we also brought in, you know, Proctor and Gamble and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the customers look at us jointly because you know edge doesn't happen in its own silo. It's a continuum from the data center to the cloud, to the edge, right. There's the continuum exists. So if only edge was in its own silo, you would do things. But the key thing about all of this, there's no right place, it's about that workload placement. Where do I place the workload for the most optimal business outcome? Now for real-time applications, it's at the edge. For non-real-time stuff it could be in the data center, it could be in a cloud. It doesn't really matter, where VMware and Dell strengths comes in with Oshkosh or all of those folks. We have the end-to-end. From you want place it in the data center, You want to place it in your charge to public cloud, You want to derive some of these applications. You want to place it at the far edge, which is a customer prem or a near edge, which is a telco. We've done joint announcements with telcos, like South Dakota Telecom, where we've taken their cell towers and converted them into compute and storage. So they can actually store it at the near edge, right. So this is 5G solutions. I also own the 5G part of the vMware business, but doesn't matter. Compute network storage, we got to find the right mix for placing the workload at the right place. >> You call that the near edge. I think of it as the far edge, but that's what you mean, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Way out there in the (mumbles), okay. >> It's all about just optimizing operations, reducing cost, increasing profitability for the customer. >> So you said edge, not its own silo. And I agree. >> it's not a silo. Is mobile a valid sort of example or a little test case because when we developed mobile apps, it drove a lot of things in the data center and in the cloud. Is that a way to think of about it as opposed to like PCs work under their own silo? Yeah, we connect to the internet, but is mobile a reasonable proxy or no? >> Mobile is an interesting proxy. When you think about the application again, you know, you got a platform by the way, you'll get excited by this. We've got mobile developers, mobile device manufacturers. You can count them in your fingers. They want to now have these devices sitting in factory floors because now these devices are so smart. They have sensors, temperature controls. They can act like these multisensory device at the edge, but the app landscape is quite interesting. I think John, where you were going was they have a very thin shim app layer that can be pushed from anywhere. The, the notion of these edge-native applications could be virtual machines, could be containers, could be, you know, this new thing called Web Assembly Wasm, which is a new type of technology, very thin shim layer which is mobile like app layer. But you know, all of these are combination of how these applications may get expressed. The target platforms could be anywhere from mobile devices to IOT gateways, to IOT devices, to servers, to, you know, massive data centers. So what's amazing is this thing can just go everywhere. And our goal is consistent infrastructure, consistent operations across the board. That's where VMware and Dell win together. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, excellent. And I was just talking to a customer today, a major airline manufacturer, okay. About their airport and the future with the mobile device just being frictionless, okay, no one wants to touch anything anymore. You can use your mobile device to do your check-in and you've got to you avoid kiosks, okay. So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the kiosk. Now you need a kiosk for like checking baggage, okay. You can't get in the way of that, but at least that frictionless experience, for that airport in the future, but it brings in some other issues. >> It does, but I like the sound of that. Last question guys, where can customers go to learn more information about the joint solutions? >> So you can go to like our public websites obviously search on edge. And if you hear at the show, there's a lot of hands on labs, okay. There's a booth over there. A lot of Edge Solutions that we offer. >> Yeah, no, this is I guess as Ryan pointed our websites have these. We've had a lot of partnership in announcements together because you know, one of the things as we've expressed, manufacturing, retail, you know, when you get in the use cases, they involve ISPs, right? So they you know, they bring the value of you know, not just having a horizontal AI platform. We like opinionated models of fraud detection. So we're actually working with ecosystem of partners to make this real. >> So we may even hear more. >> The rich vertical solution, I call it the ISVs. They enrich our vertical solutions. >> Right. >> Oh, WeMo is going to be revolutionary. >> All right, can't wait. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me today and talking about what Dell and vMware are doing together and helping retailers manufacturers really convert the edge to incredible success. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. Thanks Lisa, thanks John for having us. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE. We are wrapping up day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. We'll be back tomorrow, John Farrer and Dave Nicholson will join us. We'll see you then. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat 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 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 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)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got Pat Gelsinger back on theCUBE. He stopped by yesterday, did a flyby after his keynote to kick off our intro section. He's back for the sit-down. >> (laughs) Welcome back. >> I can't get enough of you, Pat. >> CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger. >> Yeah, I love to photobomb you guys, so it was great. >> Anytime. I know you're super busy, business is going great. And you know, what a three years its been. I remember the keynote you gave at VMworld a few years ago. This was really on a time where, I would call it the seminal moment for you because you saw a vision, and we've talked privately and on theCUBE about, and you gave this speech of this is going to be the preferred future, and it was very visionary-oriented, but it ended up happening. That became the beginning of a run for VMware. And since then, you've been kind of chipping away and filling in all the tech pieces, the business model, and deals, with Amazon and now Azure and others. How are you feeling about it? What's the highlights? What's your perspective of where we are now? What's the notable accomplishments? >> Well you know, it's been just great. And you think about the run that we've been on where we, five years ago, we described a hybrid future. And you know, most people said, what are you, stupid? And you know, student body right to the public cloud. And now everybody is starting to understand the difficulty of replatforming, right? And says wow, this is really hard. I can spend millions and millions of dollars, in fact, one customer's estimate was that they were going to spend almost $1 billion replatforming all their applications to the cloud. And when they got them cloud-native, what do they have? The same apps. So imagine going to your board and saying I'm going to spend $1 billion just so I can be on the cloud, but give you no new business value. You've got to be kidding! And that's why this hybrid future, and as I like to joke, Andy, five years ago, Andy Jassy said if you're running your own data center, you're stupid. And Pat said if you're using Amazon, you're stupid. And now we're doing bro hugs on stage with each other. (laughter) >> And by the way, hybrid, you picked that trend that was right. Multi-cloud, though, came out of more a reality, less of an operating vision, 'cause hybrid cloud, you know, you saw the dots, connected those dots, but I think multi-cloud was much more of just a reality. When people started to realize that as I started doing stuff on premises, wow, I got native workloads on the cloud, and there are benefits for being in the cloud first for certain workloads. But then the multi-cloud thing comes up. >> And I think everybody has started to realize, and I really, as I would say, I think every CIO needs a three-cloud strategy. Making their private data centers into a proper operating private cloud. And some of this week's announcements, I'm sure we'll get back to those a little bit, to me are just a huge dimension. You know, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, you know, a huge accelerant of making your private data center op like a private cloud, right, at scale. Second, you need a primary public cloud partner. And I think most people should pick a primary. Not one, a primary, and then a secondary cloud, right, you know, as their partners. And then you have your range of SAS offerings. And I think that needs to be the core, right, of every IT, CIO's strategy for the future. And our objective is to create an environment between what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation, and now VMware Cloud on Dimension. What we're doing with Amazon, our preferred partner for the public cloud offering. What we announced this week with Azure, right? Our 4000 other cloud partners, including, you know, very successful relationship with IBM. And saying, okay, that's your infrastructure. And the bulk of your workloads should run on a VMware environment that we can operate across that, with the same tools, the same interfaces, the same security, the same management tools, and then use the other cloud services as they bring you business value. You're a fan of Tensorflow? Go for it, baby. Right? You know, and use it in your app. You love function as a service with Lambda, go for it. But the bulk of your workload should lay in here and use these where they have business value. >> And to follow up on the three legs of the cloud stool, the CIO's legs, number three is for what? Is it for risk mitigation, exit strategies, or more specific best-of-breed, horses-for-courses type of workloads. >> Yes, yes, and yes. To some degree, really it's saying, nobody wants to say, I'm only in one. Right? Nobody wants to lock in for it. Also you know, clearly, hey, you know, these are technologies that break. You get more resilience that way, right? You want to be able to manage your cost environments. There's clearly this view of okay, you know, if I can do one, two, and three, I can do N. 'Cause most people are also going to end up picking, oh, I'm in Hong Kong. Okay, I need a Hong Kong cloud, because my data can only go there. You know, I'm in Malaysia, oh, they require all data to be there. 'Cause a practicality, if you're a big enterprise company, it's not just going to be three. You're going to need to be four, five, and six as well, for regional. And then you're going to acquire somebody, they're using a different partner. It really says, build an operational environment that works that way. Give myself business flexibility. I have application flexibility, and if I've done that, I really can move to the other environments that my business requires. >> I think one of the reasons why you guys have been so successful, if I go back five or six years, I remember you laying out the market, the market segmentation, you're obviously close to customers. You're a very clear thinker. You've obviously looked at the market for multi-cloud. How do you describe that, how do you look at the TAM, how big is it? >> Well you know, if you think about cloud today, right, we're closing in on $100 billion of the public cloud. You add SAS to it, you know, you got almost another $100 billion at that level. And you know, the overall data center market is probably on the order of, you know, $1 trillion-ish. >> Give or take. (laughs) >> Yeah, on that order. And then you know, you throw the operations costs inside of it, you're probably looking at something that's, you know, on the order of $2 trillion as well. So this is a big market, right? You know, part of the excitement that people are seeing in this cloud environment, is that they can just go faster. And as I described in the keynote today, we want to enable every one of our customers to stop looking down and look up, right? Spend less time looking down at the infrastructure. We're going to operationalize it, we're going to automate it for you, we're going to take care of it so that every one of your engineers can become software engineers building app and business value. >> I want to ask you on that point, because one of the things, I was talkin' last night, the analyst said at the briefing or the reception was, having a debate with one of the strategists in Dell, and I'm like, look it, outcomes are great at the top of the stack. Looking up, you want outcomes. But during the OSI stack days, no one cared about outcomes. It was either token ring or Ethernet. Speed won, so certain things have to be speed-driven, world-class, and keep getting better. And so that's what we're seeing as an infrastructure requirement. Horizontal scalability, operational scale. So that's a speeds and feeds game. So the outcome there is faster (laughs), and simpler. Up the stack, data becomes a big part of that. That, more, is where we see outcome. Do you see it that way, Pat? Because you know, again, infrastructure is often, that's how they said it on stage. We want to have whole new-paved, new infrastructure for this generation, essentially a refresh of infrastructure. Okay. Well, what does it look like? It's got to be fast, got to be flexible, software-defined. Your thoughts? >> So you know, clearly, I mean, what we're trying to do is we build this common infrastructure layer. And build an environment that allows you to be fast, but also allows you to be in control and cost-effective. Because if you would say, oh, I just want to be fast, ah, that doesn't work, right? We still have limited budgets, and you know, people, someday there's a CFO day of reckoning. But you also have to realize, part of the hybrid cloud laws that I described this morning, you know, one of those is the laws of physics, right? Hey, my factory automation for robotics needs to be 40 milliseconds, period. And if I round-trip to the cloud at 150 milliseconds, guess what? (laughs) >> Latency. >> Right. You know, my image recognition for being able to detect my autonomous vehicle is less than 50 milliseconds. I can't round-trip to the cloud. It has to be fast, right, but we also need to be able to push more of this data, more of the inference of my machine learning and AI closer to the edge. That's why, you know, you heard Michael talk about, and Jeff talk about this explosion of data. Most of that data will be at the edge. Why? Because every camera, you know, every sensor will be developing it, and I'm not going to round-trip it to the cloud because of economics. I can't afford to take all that data to the cloud. It's not just the latency. >> Latency matters. >> Yeah. And so for that, so I can't take it to the cloud, I got to be able to compute locally. I got to be able to apply the inference of my AI models locally, but you know, I also then need to scale aspects of cloud as well. My third law, of course, was regulation, where you know, guess what? I was just with a major customer in Latin America, and they said they are repatriating 100% of their data and applications out of the public cloud, 'cause the new president, right, is assisting on data only in his country for all of their nationalized resources and assets. >> So that's driving the change. This brings up the multi-cloud kind of thing earlier. You guys got to play in all the ponds out there, in the industry. But let's talk about on-stage here at Dell Technologies World. You were on-stage with Michael Dell and Satya Nadella, and I was lookin' up there. I'm like, man, the generational knowledge of the three people on-stage, the history. >> (laughs) I think that just means I'm getting old. (laughs) >> Well I mean, you've seen it all. I mean, from Intel, to EMC, to VMware. Dave and I, Dave's a historian of tech, as he'll self-claims, but I'm up there, I was pretty blown away. You guys are leading the industry. What kind of moment was that for you, because now you've got Microsoft doing a deal with VMware. Who would've thought that would happen? >> Well, maybe two different aspects to it. You know, one is, I've known Satya for over 25 years. You know, he was sort of going through the Microsoft ranks, Windows NT, SQL, et cetera. (laughter) You know, at the same time I was. So we got to know each other. Almost 25 years since our first interactions. When Michael Dell first came to Intel to meet Andy Grove to get microprocessors so he could start his business, I was there. So I mean, these relationships are decades old. So in that view, it's sort of like, hey Satya, how's the wife, you know. (laughter) Hey Michael, how's Susan doing? Really, it-- >> But you haven't even gone anywhere, you're still in the industry. (laughs) >> Yeah. But then to be able, the announcement was really pretty special in the sense that I call it 20 years in the making. You know, not a year or two, 20 years in the making, 'cause VMware and Microsoft has essentially been at odds with each other for two decades. You know, at that level. And to be able to be on-stage and saying, that's right, we're cooperating on cloud, we're cooperating on client, and we're cooperating on futures, okay, that's a pretty big statement as well. And I think customers respond very positively to that. And you know, I'm-- >> It's been a bold move, and you also made a bold move with the cloud, too, Pat. I got to say, that was another good call. Partnering with Andy Jassy. Again, once, both idiots, I guess, calling each other clever, you know. (laughs) Hey, public cloud, at odds, partner. Boom. >> And I really think this idea, moving headwinds to tailwinds. And you know, the Amazon partnership with Andy, and as we say, it's our preferred cloud partner, VMware Cloud, our native US hub, VMware-offered service. You know, super committed to it. We're closing in on 2000 customers on that now. >> Clarify the Amazon relation. I saw some press articles that kind of missed, skewed a little bit. They kind of made it sound like the Azure deal was similar to the Amazon deal. So just explain the difference between the VMware deal with AWS and Andy Jassy, that relationship, and the other cloud ones. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, thank you. And what we're doing with Amazon is VMware is offering a cloud service that I operate for customers, that runs on Amazon. And that is a VMware-delivered service. They're our preferred partner. We're not bashful about that, that if we have the choice, that's the one to go to. It's going to be best. But what we've done now with Azure is we've made the VMware Cloud Foundation, the same underlying components, available with CloudSimple and Virtustream, they're partners, to have a VMware Cloud Foundation offering delivered by Microsoft as a first-party service. So VMware Cloud, VMware is delivering it. In the Azure for VMware services, that's being delivered and supported by Microsoft. >> And that's the same deal you did with IBM. >> It's very, the same-- >> Google and other ones. >> Yeah, the same as we've done with our 4000 other cloud partners, right? And obviously, Virtustream and CloudSimple are part of that 4000, and they're making the VMware Cloud Foundation available to Azure customers now. >> And what's the benefits to VMware's customers for those deals? >> Well, imagine that you're somebody in, Walmart was quoted in the press release, as an example. Walmart's a big VMware customer. Walmart is also a big Azure customer. So their ability to say, oh, I can have a hybrid environment makes a lot of sense for that kind of customer. So we really do see it as saying, you know-- >> Customer-driven, basically. >> Absolutely. And people said, which are you going to sell to us? Well in most cases, customers have already decided who their major cloud partners our. We're saying that VMware offering, even though we're first and best with Amazon, we're saying as they make their cloud choices, we'll have a valid VMware Cloud Foundation offering available. >> And best, I want to understand best. Best is, in part, anyway, because of the engineering you guys have done. When we interviewed Andy Jassy in November at re:Invent, he said you can't have a lot of these types of partnerships. And it's very deep integration. Is that why it's best? And what makes it best? >> Yeah, I call it first and best for two reasons. One is because we are engineering, we are co-engineering, the bits first get done on VMware Cloud, and then we make 'em available to the other partners. That's where we're doing the core engineering, the innovation. Andy has hundreds of engineers working on this. I have hundreds of engineers working on it. So it's first and best from an engineering sense. And, given it's my service and my offering, we're selling it aggressively in the marketplace, positioning it as part of the broader set of solutions and leveraging that, like you saw this week with the Dell EMC offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. It's leveraging all that first and best work to now bring it on-premise as well. So it really is both the engineering as as a go-to-market. >> I'm going to ask some CEO questions. (laughs) So Tom Sweet has said they're happy to have the Class V transaction behind them. I'm sure you're glad, too. Thank you. That was very generous of you. >> (laughs) >> You've been incredibly good at acquisitions. I mean, obviously Nicira, Heptio, CloudHealth, AirWatch, I mean, on and on. >> VeloCloud. >> VeloCloud. I mean, most acquisitions, frankly, don't live up to their objectives. I think that's not the case for VMware. So now you're, good news is you draw off a lot of cash, so you're building up that pot again. How do you see, going forward, use of that cash? R and D, M and A, maybe you could make some comments there to the extent you can? >> Yeah, and you know, we said the primary ways we use cash, stock buybacks and M and A. And that continues. We did the special one-time dividend, which helped Dell go public. Everybody's happy. The market's responded super positively on both the Dell side. They're up, what, 40% since they go public. VMware up almost 50% this year. Just tremendous. >> Tremendous, $80 billion value now, awesome. >> Yeah, just tremendous. And, right then, we said going forward, it's business as usual for us. We're going to continue to do stock buybacks. We're going to continue to do M and A's. As you've said, we're good at this acquisitions stuff. And part of that is, I call it, imagine you're a hot startup company. And you say, do I want to be part of VMware? And we try to answer these questions. Do we have vision alignment? >> (laughs) >> Second is, can we accelerate your vision? Because most startups, you know, I mean, you talk about unicorns and so on like that. But what really motivates them is their vision. And if they believe their vision is going to be accelerated as part of VMware, so they're on this and we're going to turn 'em to that, aw man, they get excited. Do we have a cultural fit? I mean, with every CEO of our acquisitions, and HR does, we really, are they going to fit our team? Because you know, cultural issues, you can't butt your heads day and night. Life's too short. >> Certainly VMware, you guys are (laughs) that culture's very hardcore. Work hard, play hard. (laughter) >> Yeah, and you know, it has to be this deep drive for technical innovation, right? The technical due diligence that we do with our startups. Right? It's sort of like, you know, this is like a PhD exam for these, I mean, they really got to know their stuff. >> Yeah, so people don't fit in the culture at VMware, and there-- >> And we've said no to a number of potential acquisitions over cultural issues as well, if they're just not going to fit. And hey, we're not going to be perfect, but the fact that we can bring these companies in, accelerate their vision, give 'em a culture that they're excited about. You know, we have maybe 90-ish% success rate. The industry average is below 50% >> Yeah, fantastic track record. I mean-- >> And that just gives us the ability to do organic and inorganic innovation, which to me is like, a potent recipe. >> And you got the radio conference coming up. What will your talk, theCUBE will be there. Pat, you've created great shareholder value. You turned those headwinds into tailwinds, and we were watchin' the whole time. It's been great to watch. And what's next? You have your VMware tattoo still on from VMworld? (laughter) Like you have a jail tattoo? >> No, I'll tell you >> Cute tattoo. >> a little inside, I'll tell you a little inside story. My wife, you know, after the VMworld keynote with the tattoo on, we were leavin' on vacation two weeks later. And all she said to me after the keynote was what's that tattoo thing, it better be gone by the time we leave for vacation. (laughter) It's like, there was no, honey, that was a great keynote today, it's like, that better be gone! (laughs) >> Nothin's better than watchin' that video and that CUBE sticker we had on your hand. Pat, great to see you, as always. Great commentary, great analysis. Congratulations on all the success with VMware. Again, the transformation's just getting started. We're seeing a lot more good things for you guys as well. >> Yeah, and you know, this has been a great week in some ways. I sort of joked this morning on-stage that, it almost felt like VMworld. We talked about VMware technologies and that Dell partnership accelerating so well. >> It's not AMCWorld, it's DellWorld now, it's a whole new vibe. >> (laughs) And you know, with that, you know, I just really believe in the superpowers that I talk about, we're just getting started. So we're going to be doing this a long time together. >> What's on your plate in front of you now? You got VMworld coming up in a few months. Priorities, objectives, what's on your plate? >> Well, I have to leave some of the secrets for what we're cookin' up for VMworld this year. But some of these steps clearly, in the developer container space, super important for us to really make some progress there. Obviously, we'll have some incremental cloud announcements as well. >> ContainerWare rhymes with VMware. (laughs) >> Yes, that's very good! We have an advertisement on that coming out, so a new ad. But it really is, I think, that topic area's one that, how can we really solve that for customers that really can deploy at scale containerized environments for an enterprise workload. So, excited about that area. And you know, maybe just a few deliverables from what we announced this week. >> Alright, take your CEO of VMware hat off, put your CUBE analyst hat on. What's the most important story here at Dell Technologies World, if you were a commentator? You can't say VMware 'cause that's biased, but you got to be objective. You can say VMware if an objective. What's the most important storyline here as a backdrop for Dell Technology Worlds, what's the real net net to customers? >> Well you know, I think, and I'll say, as exciting as the Microsoft announcements were, I think the most important thing was VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, on-prem. Because to me, you know, the fact, I go to CIOs, and I've done this probably five times since the keynote finished on Monday. And I say, how many of you have fully updated your hardware, your firmware, your operating systems, your networking stack, your compute stack, your management on the latest releases, all of them patched, upgraded appropriately for your environment? >> And they say, their eyes roll. (laughs) >> And the answer is none. Not some, none. I have customers that are askin' me to extend support for vSphere 4.5. It's like, what, that's been EOL'ed for a year and a half, what are you talking about, right?! But the reality is that most people go to the cloud, public cloud, not because it's more cost-effective or because it's better, it's because it's easier. So what we've really said is we can make easy in the private cloud and truly deliver that hybrid cloud experience. And I think the customers really experience the TCO benefits, the acceleration, the reductions in their operational environments, the personnel associated with it, the security benefits of being always patched, upgraded the most release. You know, now you're talkin' about attacking that other $1 trillion of operational costs that they're bearing in the personnel and so on. To me, that is like, so powerful if we really get that engine going. >> And the simplicity that comes out of that, is just-- >> You know, and again, the demo that we showed. That was the VMware Cloud on AWS being able to demonstrate, now, a complete picture into the on-premise environment. That's powerful. >> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. I know he's got to go. Thanks for your generous time, I know you're really busy. Again, Pat Gelsinger. >> Love you guys, thank you. >> Thanks, Pat. >> Love you too. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, creating a lot of shareholder values, got a lot of tailwinds at their back. VMworld's coming up, theCUBE, of course, will be there with two sets. As usual, theCUBE cannons, two sets here, firing cannonballs of content here at Dell Technology World. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

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

(upbeat tech 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, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas of Dell Technologies World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my esteemed co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, who is the VP solutions of product marketing at VMware. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. You guys are veterans. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to talk about the VMware, Dell EMC storage portfolio. It is better together, which sounds like it's a theme for a political campaign. Walk our viewers through, give us some examples of how you are jointly coming up with solutions. >> Yeah, I'll start if that's all right. I think that a lot of what we've seen is that the Dell Technologies cloud strategy is such an important thing about what we're talking about today, but what we've also seen is that when we're looking to use the cloud, external storage is an important part of that strategy, so what we've already done is we've collaborated together to validate VCF with both unity and power max. And that's really the beginning of our journey together, to enable that external storage to be part of the workload domain, to have SDDC manager not just manage the other parts of the infrastructure, but to manage external storage and that you can have resiliency and performance for those workloads that need it, those kind of high value workloads that need it, and that's really the beginning. We think it's going to get much broader, much deeper integration as we continue to work together. >> Yeah and I think as a continued theme, and our solutions as, you know, Caitlin was pointing out, again, you know, what's most important and what's customers want out of this and their evolution of, you know, workloads, which are very data center centric and, you know, clients of our architecture with a very specific infrastructure, design, application, shifting towards more cloud native and public cloud hybrid applications. So, that has a different nature of storage requirements that got to evolve from block storage, file storage, object storage. That evolution needs to happen and not only happens better together with VMware and Dell EMC, so. >> So, Caitlin, I think back to this is the 10th year we're having theCUBE here, what used to be EMC World and it used to be you talked about VMware and storage and it was okay, let's go through the integration points that we had and EMC would say "we're as good or better "than everybody out there" and check all the boxes here. There's a shift today when we're talking about not just working with it, but, you know, integrations of products really it looks more like joint solutions. We know in VxRail, there's, you know, joint development that happens on, so give us a little bit about that difference about, you know, 2019 storage with Dell EMC and VMware versus the past. >> Yeah, and there is a shift, right? We're here together. (laughs) >> Absolutely. And our teams, our product management teams, our organizations are coming together, they're spending a lot of time together collaborating on what our strategy is together. How do we best approach that so we can bring solutions to our customers that provide that level that Dell Technologies can really provide that no one else can? And it's truly something unique and differentiated and what we're talking about today is really just the beginning. There's a lot more to come on that front. >> And you know, I think also the integrations in the past where I would call them API, interface driven, now like you point out, it's co-engineered starting with the solutions like VxRail, cloud foundation, and the co-engineering makes a big difference because we're sharing road maps. We're sharing hey, what are we thinking about performance? What are we thinking about, you know, application requirements? And that's very different to just, I'm going to partner with you, I'm going to pass from APIs, you going to call some APIs, and that has an impact on like ready solutions, it is cloud foundation, a full stack with life cycle, SDDC Manager. That kind of integration only happens with co-engineering. >> Talk a little bit about the partnership and this better together. We talked about the products and the solutions, but I want to hear about the cultural, the cultures of the two companies. We know, I mean they're both technology powerhouse, both technology optimists. How would you describe the different cultures and how you can reflect each other and collaborate with each other in different ways? >> You want to start with that one? >> Sure, I think it's very interesting coming from, you know, west coast software, agile, we're like hey, we'll have VMworld in a few months, but you know, we're still from a software agile world. We're coming out with new services for Vmworld, we're not defined yet. And then working with, you know, Dell EMC folks who are, you're already looking at performance, infrastructure, planning, so the road map alignment of, you know, every three months, I'm going to come out with software innovation, whereas you have to put a lot of thought process into how to do this. It's actually had been quite interesting. You know, it's I would call it interesting because it was tough. It was tough initially to kind of figure out how do you kind of, you know, bring a cohesive road map where you're making 12 months, you know, infrastructure, investment in road map to three months of software cycle, but I think it's actually come together really well. >> And at the end of the day, we're talking the same customers and we're solving the same problems and in a lot of ways, that kind of legacy Dell EMC's side has come from the infrastructure, from the bottom up, and then the VMware kind of has come from the top down, and bringing those two together, although our development cycles have a different kind of time span against them, we're trying to solve the same problems for our customers and that's really where a lot of those innovations are going to continue to come. >> One of those interesting points you talk about from the bottom down and the top, bottom down and bottom up and top down. Sorry, >> (laughter) it's been a long day so far. >> We forgive you. We forgive you. >> These new waves of technology, you know, remember back to, you know, when flash rolled out. There were things that needed to do the infrastructure layer and there's stuff that happens on the application side. We are seeing a real renaissance in what's happening in the storage industry. Talk about NVMe, storage class memory. It's not just okay I have some new gear and I have to redo it, but, you know, it dramatically changes, you know, we're getting ready to scuzzy stack when you talk about the applications side, so, you know, I'd love to hear how this comes together and, you know, what's in the product today and how are you developing these together? >> Another interesting example that almost crosses those two is CloudIQ. So CloudIQ is something that we've developed in-house. It's an agile developed software application that is a cloud native app developed with pivotal, runs on a Dell EMC cloud. That's run out of our side of the house and it came out actually with Unity three years ago today. We now have that not just across our core storage portfolio, but we have that now with VM health insights, as well, where we've actually taken that approach where we can give that impact as well, and I think that that just shows you kind of how we do have those pieces of the culture too coming together and trying to bring these solutions together. >> I know, and I think again, you know, thinking customers first, right. We talk about this, you know, multi cloud, hybrid cloud environments where people are taking their workloads, they compute storage, networking requirement, and they're trying to migrate their workloads back and forth, but, you know, there's a more important part of the workload migration is also the data migration, right, so how do you take, you know, data migration and look at different data sources, look at your data bases, look at your, you know, different kind of data migration, and that's where, you know, storage is so critical. It's easy to take a snapshot of a workload and move it across, but then, if you have to pin it on a very seamless data migration pad, you have to have really clear storage strategies, which will support your, you know, hyper converge, your hybrid cloud, your external storage strategies that you got to map to that migration pad. >> Yeah and a service that we're going to announce tomorrow I started to kind of address that too, of like, how do you combine some of the public cloud compute and the agility of that with using these native array-based replication to get the data there, right, and combining not just that simple data movement, but having that application awareness and that application consistency, which is so critical for things like disaster recovery, which is one of the main things we certainly hear from our customers, how do I used the public cloud as my DR site? They don't want to run their own disaster recovery data centers. Customers of all shapes and sizes are really going there and something that we're announcing tomorrow is another example of that so we'll talk more about that one tomorrow, but we've got some more news on that one as well. >> So, in talking about the trends in cloud, we know that it's a multi cloud world, it's a hybrid cloud world. You were just talking about the different ways in which customers want to do their work and the different places they want to do it, public, private. What are some other trends that you're seeing and where do you think we're going to be talking about it in the years to come on this? >> Sure, like, you know, I think the traditional workloads is breaking out into two things. One is do I migrate into the cloud? And the second is I'm rewriting the application to be more cloud native. And it's not the entire application, and it's a classic example, I'm sure all of you do mobile banking, right? And guess what? I've worked with, lot of financial companies are doing this. It's a really cool, cloud native mobile application where I'm doing all my mobile banking, but then, my query goes to a main frame in a banking ledger, which is still, you know, where your banking ledgers maintain. And then pull through a three tier application through a web and database tier, pushed out to the cloud, and accessed by a cloud native environment. Where I'm coming at is even though it looks very modern, a lot of customers are maintaining this computer history museum, which all these apps are scaling through and that's not going away in our lifetime, because, you know, there's a lot of complexity in there, and it's really how we help our customers in the journey to pay off their technical debt and move over to newer technologies, be it cloud, cloud native, and get a clean start. You know, if you're a startup, you don't have all these technical debt, but unfortunately a lot of the large companies have these technical debt and how we help customers, because they're really lost. They're like I don't know what to do, there's so much coming at me, and they need the help, and I think that that's where the power of Dell Technologies comes together in giving them that journey. >> Yeah and the bank is a really good example. We have a customer who's exactly that example where everything from the main frame that runs all their transaction processing that they've always run to their mobile applications all run off of a power max, and part of this journey for them is that they absolutely need that infrastructure, but they also need to simplify their operations as much as possible and I think one platform to consolidate all that on is true in banks, and governments, and hospitals around the world and I think that that's part of where we see a lot of this pull of how do I get that cloud experience, but how do I still use that infrastructure that I have? >> Caitlin, everybody's trying to squint through the new announcement of the Dell Technologies cloud there and what does this mean to the storage people, you know, what storage is underneath that? Is that something that they see it, will they recognize it? I was wondering if you can help eliminate that some. >> Yeah and some of this will be a little clearer too tomorrow as we talk through a little bit more of the details, but if you think through the Dell Technologies cloud strategy essentially as two parts, the Dell Technologies cloud announced today and then Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure that we'll talk through tomorrow. So the Dell Technologies cloud, what we announced today, essentially has two different flavors announced today and then one that we kind of said where we're going in the future. One is the Dell Technologies cloud platform, which is essentially the VxRail infrastructure and that's that first offer, and then there's the data center as service, the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. The third one, which was only mentioned quickly today, is that validated design. So that's leveraging our best of breed three tier architecture, including storage with that. The term that Jeff used today was VCF ready. Right, it validated with VCF, that's with Unity and Power max today. Again, that's the beginning, but you can picture what we're doing with validated design, is really enabling us to offer our three tier architecture, best of breed, across all three tiers, and leveraging VCF for that life cycle management, etc. >> And again, it's giving customers those choices to say hey, do I want to keep and maintain my, modernize my infrastructure, or do I have, you know, and this is the trend shifting where hybrid, you know, people will be talking about that, it's just the trend shifted only in the last couple of years for hybrid in, shut down my data center and go to the cloud. Now it's really kind of gone two way. The streets changed from not just going from data center to the cloud, but also coming from cloud to the data center, so the interesting challenges become about not just taking the requirements of your, you know, client server architecture and migrating it to, you know, elastic cloud architecture, which also taking that elastic EC2, you know, Azure environment and landing them into your data center environments managed a service, so that comes with its own challenges, but that's where customers want it to be, because you know, they're going "I've built so much IP, natively in my cloud, "applications that I've built over the years "and now I have a need for it closer to my data center "or my users or my edge and I really need to bring it back" And that's, you know, having challenges from a storage perspective. Now, they were not designed for client server, they were designed for cloud native elasticity, so I go to build storage architecture that's supposed there. >> And I think the other pieces that, and we'll talk some about this tomorrow, but this Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure is kind of a, the other side of the coin, where we think about Dell Technologies cloud, that's really transforming into a cloud operating model and you're purchasing infrastructure to really transform that, but a lot of our customers want to use the cloud for very specific use cases. They want to replace tape and they want to archive to the cloud, right, so we have the capabilities and we'll continue and the vast capabilities of simply moving data from your infrastructure into public cloud, converting into object and putting in there, so you've met the cost profile, and you can maybe finally get rid of tape. I think I've for 14 years been trying to get rid of tape in the industry. Haven't gotten there yet. But then there's things like offering your data services, storage, data protection, data services in a cloud, so offer to find assets in the cloud or even as a service consumption of our infrastructure. So again, more on that tomorrow. And then there's the how do you manage that infrastructure and the data itself? Having that visibility on that and that's really that kind of cloud data insights piece of that. So that's really the cloud enabled infrastructure piece is really about getting to how do I leverage the cloud for disaster recovery, for archiving, for analytics? That type of thing. So, a lot of the things we'll talk about tomorrow more focus on those types of cases as well. >> Well you've given us a lot of tantalizing tidbits about what we're going to hear tomorrow, so thank you-- >> So now you have to tune in. >> We will be here. You better be here too. >> I know where to find you. >> Caitlin, Muneyb, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was great. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have a lot more of our, theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat tech music)

(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. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. There's about 15,000 people here, about 4,000 of Dell Technologies' partners, lots of folks. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, a couple of guests. We've got Melanie De Vigan, VP of Digital Workplace Portfolio from Atos. Melanie, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> And we have Justin Grimsley, Product Marketing from VMware. Justin, thank you for joining Stu and me as well. >> Yep, good to be here. >> So, workplace. One of the big themes from this morning's keynote, one of the themes that we've actually heard all day is, we talk about digital transformation, we talk about it at every event. It's essential. But, people are essential for digital transformation. And we have this workforce that has changed so much in the last few years. Some of the stats that were shown this morning, I think I remember seeing 81% of people now work outside of a traditional office. And about half the people, and I'm one of them, and I know Stu is too, work in at least three different places in a single week. So, in order to enable digital transformation to be real, it's got to start with the people. So Melanie, talk to us about transformation of the modern workplace, and what Atos is doing to facilitate that. >> Yeah, I think we've seen a big change in the market lately, where in the past successful organization would be focusing on employee productivity, but lately all of them realize the importance of employee engagement and employee experience. This morning, Pat mentioned the fact that ideally, engaged employees were going to drive success of the company. What is very striking is that if you compare that to the fact Gallup released a study last year saying that 87 percent of employees are not engaged. So you can see the huge gap, and how by focusing on this employee engagement, by transforming the employee experience, you are actually going to contribute to the business. And I think, really, when we talk about employee experience, we need to look at it from a wholistic point of view. So at Atos, we used to talk about "people, places, and platforms." "People" is all about the company culture, how people are engaged, what type of leadership in the company. It is about digital inclusion and accessibility. "Places," of course, is about from where you work. You mentioned the stat about mobility and from where people work. It's also about the building itself, and how the building is going to foster collaboration. And of course the "platform," it is about the IT, the technology that is going to enable all of that. What are the tools that you give to the end user, to the employee to be able to perform his jobs, so it starts with a device, it is about the collaboration solutions that are going to foster and help changing the mindset, changing the way people work. >> Alright. So, Justin, how does VMware tie into the picture that Melanie was painting there? >> Absolutely, I think this is why Atos, VMware, and Dell are such good partners, right? Our visions are so well-aligned to that employee experience that you guys were talking about. For us, the three major trends that we see are that users are no longer tied to the company network. They're not tethered to their cubicle with that Cat 5 cable. They're working shoulder-to-shoulder with their customers, or in the coffee shop, or at home. They're accessing all sorts of different types of applications now. It's not just legacy Windows apps, it's SaaS applications, it's virtual apps. And then the third trend is, they're using all sorts of different devices. And so, as companies are really looking to attract and retain talent, they want to enable employees to use the devices that they love, to be productive how they want to be productive. And so, many employees that we see now use two or three different devices. They might use their Dell laptop to be really productive and crank out work. They might use their iPhone or their Android device as well, and the applications that are available to them there. And so, we really see these three trends comin' together as a way for organizations to change how their employees work. And Atos and VMware and Dell are coming together to help enable that for our customers. >> So Justin, I don't know if it struck others, but for me, seeing Pat Gelsinger and Satya Nadella up on stage together was impressive, because Dell and Microsoft have a long, long relationship. VMware and Microsoft, it's an interesting relationship there, you know. End-user is something that we actually have seen Sanjay and his team with end-user computing growing out. But, can you comment on the news of the week, as well as the importance of bringing Microsoft into this discussion? >> Absolutely, you know, I think with everything that you said, the one thing I would say is that I think VMware compliments Microsoft very well. So, when we look at the end-user computing space, for years now, we've looked at how can we-- as Microsoft introduced Windows 10-- how can we bring that into the fold and extend a great experience on Windows 10. When you look at Office 365, I just did a session earlier and the number of hands that went up that are deploying Office 365, VMware has a great story around conditional access for those applications and providing a great experience. And so I think what we see now is this: customers are making different investments. Some customers are making investments in Microsoft 365, and others are making them in Workspace ONE, and so now, we can maximize those investments so they can get the most out of their end-point, and their end-user computing strategy. It's really a "one plus one equals three" scenario. And then we have services from companies like Atos, and Dell, and others that are coming around to help drive transformation across any of the devices that employees are using. Whether it is a Windows 10 PC, or whether it is a mobile device and accessing Office and other applications on it. So it was really powerful to see, I think, Satya, Pat, and Michael onstage this morning, coming together. >> Indeed, it was really, really impressive. I think just the fact that they were onstage were the most powerful message, for end-user computing at least. >> So Melanie, we look at this importance of employee engagement-- you mentioned, Justin, talent attraction and retention. What is Atos doing to actually-- there's got to be another-- maybe it's employee transform-- well, it's workplace transformation, really, right? But how are you kind of leading in that, to really drive business outcomes, like a business being able to generate more revenue, because "hey, we're enabling our workforce "and the way that they want to work." And as Justin said, with all the devices that they say, "let me use what I'm familiar with." >> Yeah, so one thing for us which is really key, is that, I mean, all this employee experience, it's a really nice story, but if we just talk about it, it remains a story, and we can't really do anything about it. I heard many people say this morning, "it's about the data." And this is what we're doing. What we're really looking at now is how do we make this employee experience tangible? So, it's all about moving toward a data-driven approach. So we are going to collect all the data. So again, we have this "people, places, and platforms," so we're going to collect the data from the devices. At Atos, we manage 4.5 million devices, so this is that much data matrix that we can collect to understand what's happening and what's going. It is the same with the feedback of the End-user, understanding how they work, like on a collaboration solution, understanding how people are working with each other, how they can change, so that at the end, we are going to be able to give some insight. We're going to be able to give some insight to the employee, so that again, he can understand what he can do differently. We're also going to give insight to the organization. It can be the IT department, it can be the HR department, it can be the facilities. It's all about bringing all of that together, so we give this wholistic vision and be able to drive the change, this is what we're targeting. >> Yeah, I love that. If you look at digital transformation, one of the most important things is, I need to have my business being driven by data, I have to have those feedback loops. What I'm curious is, what are some of those key measurements, how are you looking at these environments today when I have all this data, versus maybe how I would have done things in the past? >> Yeah, so, indeed, and this is where today, we are working away from this service-level agreement, the way we used to measure the IT services. People talk a lot about this watermelon effect, where it's all green outside, but red inside. So, all the KPI are green, meaning the server and infrastructure is working, but at the end, the end-user is not happy. So today, we are talking about experience-level agreements, so it's about defining metrics, which are really going to show how does the service perform, and what makes sense for the employee at the end. So more or less, we're moving away from the infrastructure, and we're getting closer to the business, taking measures that are really going to show what is going to impact the business. >> Just to build on that, I think what's one of the interesting things that we see now is that IT teams aren't just measured on cost. They're being measured more and more on employee experience. We're seeing companies do employee net promoter scores now. How can we elevate the employee experience from the day they start at the company, to the day they retire, right? And so, I think that's what Atos and others are really bringing together for their customers, and for our joint customers. >> And that's cultural impact at a business. Whether it's a business that's been around 35 years, as long as Dell has, or one that's maybe younger. That cultural change is hard. We talk about that at every event, with every company, because, especially for veteran employees, or more seasoned, who are used to certain ways of doing business, that company has to transform culturally as well, for their digital transformation to enable them to become the leaders that they want. So I'm hearing that one of the things that Atos is enabling is that cultural transformation. It's not just about having new KPIs and changing SLAs, it's driving change for entire business units to impact that whole company. >> Yeah, and to be able to do that-- So we still want to be data-driven, so we're going to get this KPI, but with KPIs, there is no "one size fits all." There is not one KPI that we're going to apply to all our customers. It is a war that we're doing with the customer to understand what is key for them. An example, which is a bit... I don't know if it's funny or interesting, is we have this customer for whom we have these tech bars, you know, the walk-in bar where an end-user can go and get coaching, support, help from a technician. And so, we had this customer where the tech bars were very successful, so there were more and more people going there. And because there were more and more people, they started queuing, and we said, "Okay, there's an issue. "we don't want people to be queuing." So we went into a discussion with the customer. At the beginning, everybody's idea was, "Okay, let's put more people behind the desk, "so they can help." And when we had this discussion with the customer, it turned out it was not a good solution, because it was a company with a very strong family culture, very centered about the relationship and the network, and these tech bars, they were meant to be a place where people can go and chat with each other, and share about what's going on. So, instead of putting more people behind the desk, we talked about adding coffee and cookies at the desk so people are willing to go. I mean, this is just an example, but it's just to say, it's not about measuring how long someone is going to wait at the desk, it's about understanding what is important for this customer, and then we can define with them the key matrix that we need to follow. >> That's excellent. And a tech bar, that's a bar I can get behind. (laughing) Melanie, Justin, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, we appreciate your time and it's always exciting to hear how the employee experience is so pivotal and critical to digital transformation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Oh, our pleasure. We're Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching us live in Las Vegas. Day one of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technology World's 2019. Thanks for watching. (electronic techno music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Dell Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> The one Welcome to the Special Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante breaking down day one of three days of wall the wall Coverage - 2 Cube sets. Uh, big news today and dropping here. Dell Technology World's series of announcements Cloud ability, unified work spaces and then multi cloud with, uh, watershed announced with Microsoft support for VMware with Azure are guests here theCUBE alumni that Seo, senior leader of'Em Where Sanjay *** and such a great to see you, >> John and Dave always a pleasure to be on your show. >> So before we get into the hard core news around Microsoft because you and Satya have a relationship, you also know Andy Jassy very well. You've been following the Clouds game in a big way, but also as a senior leader in the industry and leading BM where, um, the evolution of the end user computing kind of genre,  that whole area is just completely transformed with mobility and cloud kind of coming together with data and all this new kinds of applications. The modern applications are different. It's changing the game on how end users, employees, normal people use computing because some announcement here on their What's your take on the ever changing role of cloud and user software? >> Yeah, John, I think that our vision , as  you know, it was the first job I came to do at VMware almost six years ago, to run and use a computing. And the vision we had at that time was that you should be able to work at the speed of life, right? You and I happen to be on a plane at the same time  yesterday coming here, we should be able to pick our amps up on our devices. You often have Internet now even up at thirty thousand feet. In the consumer world, you don't lug around your CDs, your music, your movies come to you. So the vision of any app on any device was what we articulated with the digital workspace We. had Apple and Google very well figured out. IOS later on Mac,  Android,  later on chrome . The Microsoft relationship in end use the computing was contentious because we overlapped. They had a product, PMS and in tune. But we always dreamed of a day. I tweeted out this morning that for five and a half years I competed with these guys. It was always my dream to partner with the With Microsoft. Um, you know, a wonderful person, whom I respect there, Brad Anderson. He's a friend, but we were like LeBron and Steph Curry. We were competing against each other. Today everything changed. We are now partners. Uh, Brad and I we're friends, we'll still be friends were actually partners  now why? Because we want to bring the best of the digital workspace solution VMware brings workspace one to the best of what Microsoft brings in Microsoft 365 , active directory, E3 capabilities around E. M. S and into it and combined those together to help customers get the best for any device. Apple, Google and Microsoft that's a game changer. >> Tell about the impact of the real issue of Microsoft on this one point, because is there overlap is their gaps, as Joe Tucci used to say, You can't have any. There's no there's no overlap if you have overlapped. That's not a >> better to have overlapped and seems right. A gaps. >> So where's the gaps? Where this words the overlapping cloud. Next, in the end user world, >> there is a little bit of overlap. But the much bigger picture is the complementarity. We are, for example, not trying to be a directory in the Cloud That's azure active directory, which is the sequel to Active Directory. So if we have an identity access solution that connect to active directory, we're gonna compliment that we've done that already. With Octo. Why not do that? Also inactive Directory Boom that's clear. Ignored. You overlap. Look at the much bigger picture. There's a little bit of overlap between in tune and air Watch capabilities, but that's not the big picture. The big picture is combining workspace one with E. M s. to allow Office 365 customers to get conditional access. That's a game, so I think in any partnership you have to look past, I call it sort of these Berlin Wall moments. If the U. S and Soviet Union will fighting over like East Germany, vs West Germany, you wouldn't have had that Berlin wall moment. You have to look past the overlaps. Look at the much bigger picture and I find the way by which the customer wins. When the customer wins, both sides are happy. >> Tearing down the access wall, letting you get seamless. Access the data. All right, Cloud computing housely Multi cloud announcement was azure something to tell on stage, which was a surprise no one knew was coming. No one was briefed on this. It was kind of the hush hush, the big news Michael Delll, Pat Girl singer and it's nothing to tell up there. Um, Safia did a great job and really shows the commitment of Microsoft with the M wear and Dell Technologies. What is this announcement? First, give us your take an analysis of what they announced. And what does it mean? Impact the customers? >> Yeah, listen, you know, for us, it's a further That's what, like the chess pieces lining up of'Em wars vision that we laid up many years for a hybrid cloud world where it's not all public cloud, it isn't all on premise. It's a mixture. We coined that Tom hybrid loud, and we're beginning to see that realize So we had four thousand cloud providers starting to build a stack on VM, where we announced IBM Cloud and eight of us. And they're very special relationships. But customers, some customers of azure, some of the retailers, for example, like Wal Mart was quoted in the press, released Kroger's and some others so they would ask us, Listen, we're gonna have a way by which we can host BMO Workloads in there. So, through a partnership now with Virtue Stream that's owned by Dell on DH er, we will be able to allow we, um, where were close to run in Virtue Stream. Microsoft will sell that solution as what's called Azure V M, where solutions and customers now get the benefit of GMO workloads being able to migrate there if they want to. Or my great back on the on premise. We want to be the best cloud infrastructure for that multi cloud world. >> So you've got IBM eight of us Google last month, you know, knock down now Azure Ali Baba and trying you. Last November, you announced Ali Baba, but not a solution. Right >> now, it's a very similar solutions of easy solution. There's similar what's announced with IBM and Nash >> So is it like your kids where you loved them all equally or what? You just mentioned it that Microsoft will sell the VM wear on Azure. You actually sell the eight of us, >> so there is a distinction. So let me make that clear because everything on the surface might look similar. We have built a solution that is first and preferred for us. Called were MacLeod on a W s. It's a V m er manage solution where the Cloud Foundation stack compute storage networking runs on a ws bare metal, and V. Ember manages that our reps sell that often lead with that. And that's a solution that's, you know, we announced you were three years ago. It's a very special relationship. We have now customer attraction. We announce some big deals in queue, for that's going great, and we want it even grow faster and listen. Eight of us is number one in the market, but there are the customers who have azure and for customers, one azure very similar. You should think of this A similar to the IBM ah cloud relationship where the V C P. V Partners host VM where, and they sell a solution and we get a subscription revenue result out of that, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. Our reps will get compensated when they sell at a particular customer, but it's not a solution that's managed by BM. Where >> am I correct? You've announced that I think a twenty million dollars deal last quarter via MacLeod and A W. And that's that's an entire deal. Or is that the video >> was Oh, that was an entirely with a customer who was making a big shift to the cloud. When I talked to that customer about the types of workloads, they said that they're going to move hundreds off their APs okay on premise onto via MacLeod. And it appears, so that's, you know, that's the type of cloud transformation were doing. And now with this announcement, there will be other customers. We gave an example of few that Well, then you're seeing certain verticals that are picking as yours. We want those two also be happy. Our goal is to be the undisputed cloud infrastructure for any cloud, any cloud, any AP any device. >> I want to get your thoughts. I was just in the analysts presentation with Dell technology CFO and looking at the numbers, the performance numbers on the revenue side Don Gabin gap our earnings as well as market share. Dell. That scales because Michael Delll, when we interviewed many years ago when it was all going down, hinted that look at this benefits that scale and not everyone's seeing the obvious that we now know what the Amazon scale winds so scale is a huge advantage. Um, bm Where has scale Amazon's got scale as your Microsoft have scales scales Now the new table stakes just as an industry executive and leader as you look at the mark landscape, it's a having have not world you'd have scale. You don't If you don't have scale, you're either ecosystem partner. You're in a white space. How do companies compete in this market? Sanjay, what's your thoughts on I thinkit's >> Jonah's? You said there is a benefit to scale Dell, now at about ninety billion in revenue, has gone public on their stock prices. Done where Dellvin, since the ideal thing, the leader >> and sir, is that point >> leader in storage leader inclined computing peces with Vienna and many other assets like pivotal leaders and others. So that scale VM, Where about a ten billion dollar company, fifth largest software company doing verywell leader in the softer to find infrastructure leader, then use a computing leader and softer, defined networking. I think you need the combination of scale and speed, uh, just scale on its own. You could become a dinosaur, right? And what's the fear that every big company should have that you become ossified? And I think what we've been able to show the world is that V M wear and L can move with scale and speed. It's like having the combination of an elephant and a cheetah and won and that to me special. And for companies like us that do have scaled, we've to constantly ask ourselves, How do we disrupt ourselves? How do we move faster? How do we partner together? How do we look past these blind spots? How do we pardon with big companies, small companies and the winner is the customer. That's the way we think. And we could keep doing that, you'll say so. For example, five, six years ago, nobody thought of VMware--this is going before Dell or EMC--in the world of networking, quietly with ten thousand customers, a two million dollar run rate, NSX has become the undisputed leader and software-defined networking. So now we've got a combination of server, storage and a networking story and Dell VMware, where that's very strong And that's because we moved with speed and with scale. >> So of course, that came to an acquisition with Nice Sarah. Give us updates on the recent acquisitions. Hep C e o of Vela Cloud. What's happening there? >> Yeah, we've done three. That, I think very exciting to kind of walk through them in chronological order about eighteen months ago was Velo Cloud. We're really excited about that. It's sort of like the name, velocity and cloud fast. Simple Cloud based. It is the best solution. Ston. How do we come to deciding that we went to talk to our partners like t other service providers? They were telling us this is the best solution in town. It connects to the data center story to the cloud story and allows our virtual cloud network to be the best softer. To find out what you can, you have your existing Mpls you might have your land infrastructure but there's nobody who does softer to find when, like Philip, they're excited about that cloud health. We're very excited about that because that brings a multi cloud management like, sort of think of it like an e r P system on top of a w eso azure to allow you to manage your costs and resource What ASAP do it allows you to manage? Resource is for materials world manufacturing world. In this world, you've got resources that are sitting on a ws or azure. Uh, cloud held does it better than anybody else. Hefty. Oh, now takes a Cuban eighty story that we'd already begun with pivotal and with Google is you remember at at PM world two years ago. And that's that because the founders of Cuban eighties left Google and started FTO. So we're bringing that DNA we've become now one of the top two three contributors to communities, and we want to continue to become the de facto platform for containers. If you go to some of the airports in San Francisco, New York, I think Keilani and Heathrow to you'LL see these ads that are called container where okay, where do you think the Ware comes from Vienna, where, OK, and our goal is to make containers as container where you know, come to you from the company that made vmc possible of'Em where So if we popularized PM's, why not also popularised the best enterprise contain a platform? That's what helped you will help us do >> talk about Coburn at ease for a minute because you have an interesting bridge between end user computing and their cloud. The service is micro. Services that are coming on are going to be powering all these APS with either data and or these dynamic services. Cooper, Nettie sees me the heart of that. We've been covering it like a blanket. Um, I'm gonna get your take on how important that is. Because back Nelson, you're setting the keynote at the Emerald last year. Who burn it eases the dial tone. Is Cooper Netease at odds with having a virtual machine or they complimentary? How does that evolving? Is it a hedge? What's the thoughts there? >> Yeah, First off, Listen, I think the world has begun to realize it is a world of containers and V ems. If you looked at the company that's done the most with containers. Google. They run their containers in V EMS in their cloud platform, so it's not one or the other. It's vote. There may be a world where some parts of containers run a bare metal, but the bulk of containers today run and Beyonce And then I would say, Secondly, you know, five. Six years ago, people all thought that Doctor was going to obliterate VM where, But what happened was doctors become a very good container format, but the orchestration layer from that has not become daugher. In fact, Cuban Eddie's is kind of taking a little of the head and steam off Dr Swarm and Dr Enterprise, and it is Cooper Navy took the steam completely away. So Senses Way waited for the right time to embrace containers because the obvious choice initially would have been some part of the doctor stack. We waited as Borg became communities. You know, the story of how that came on Google. We've embraced that big time, and we've stated a very important ball hefty on All these moves are all part of our goal to become the undisputed enterprise container platform, and we think in a multi cloud world that's ours to lose. Who else can do multi cloud better than VM? Where may be the only company that could have done that was Red Hat. Not so much now, inside IBM, I think we have the best chance of doing that relative. Anybody else >> Sanjay was talking about on our intro this morning? Keynote analysis. Talking about the stock price of Dell Technologies, comparing the stock price of'Em where clearly the analysis shows that the end was a big part of the Dell technologies value. How would you summarize what v m where is today? Because on the Kino there was a Bank of America customers. She said she was the CTO ran, she says, Never mind. How we got here is how we go floors the end wars in a similar situation where you've got so much success, you always fighting for that edge. But as you go forward as a company, there's all these new opportunities you outlined some of them. What should people know about the VM? We're going forward. What is the vision in your words? What if what is VM where >> I think packed myself and all of the key people among the twenty five thousand employees of'Em are trying to create the best infrastructure company of all time for twenty one years. Young. OK, and I think we have an opportunity to create an incredible brand. We just have to his use point on the begins show create platforms. The V's fear was a platform. Innocent is a platform workspace. One is a platform V san, and the hyper convert stack of weeks right becomes a platform that we keep doing. That Carbonetti stuff will become a platform. Then you get platforms upon platforms. One platforms you create that foundation. Stone now is released. ADelle. I think it's a better together message. You take VX rail. We should be together. The best option relative to smaller companies like Nutanix If you take, you know Veum Where together with workspace one and laptops now put Microsoft in the next. There's nobody else. They're small companies like Citrix Mobile. I'm trying to do it. We should be better than them in a multi cloud world. They maybe got the companies like Red Hat. We should have bet on them. That said, the end. Where needs toe also have a focus when customers don't have Dale infrastructure. Some people may have HP servers and emcee storage or Dell Silvers and netapp storage or neither. Dellery emcee in that case, usually via where, And that's the way we roll. We want to be relevant to a multi cloud, multi server, multi storage, any hardware, any cloud. Any AP any device >> I got. I gotta go back to the red hat. Calm in a couple of go. I could see you like this side of IBM, right? So So it looks like a two horse race here. I mean, you guys going hard after multi cloud coming at it from infrastructure, IBM coming at it with red hat from a pass layer. I mean, if I were IBM, I had learned from VM where leave it alone, Let it blossom. I mean, we have >> a very good partisan baby. Let me first say that IBM Global Services GTS is one about top sai partners. We do a ton of really good work with them. Uh, I'm software re partner number different areas. Yeah, we do compete with red hat with the part of their portfolios. Relate to contain us. Not with Lennox. Eighty percent plus of their businesses. Lennox, They've got parts of J Boss and Open Stack that I kind of, you know, not doing so well. But we do compete with open ship. That's okay, but we don't know when we can walk and chew gum so we can compete with Red Hat. And yet partner with IBM. That's okay. Way just need to be the best at doing containing platform is better than open shifter. Anybody, anything that red hat has were still partner with IBM. We have to be able to look at a world that's not black and white. And this partnership with Microsoft is a good example. >> It's not a zero sum game, and it's a huge market in its early days. Talk >> about what's up for you now. What's next? What's your main focus? What's your priorities? >> Listen, we're getting ready for VM World now. You know in August we want to continue to build momentum on make many of these solutions platforms. So I tell our sales reps, take the number of customers you have and add a zero behind that. OK, so if you've got ten thousand customers of NSX, how do we get one hundred thousand customers of insects. You have nineteen thousand customers of Visa, which, by the way, significantly head of Nutanix. How do we have make one hundred ninety thousand customers? And we have that base? Because we have V sphere and we have the Delll base. We have other partners. We have, I think, eighty thousand customers off and use of computing tens of millions of devices. How do we make sure that we are workspace? One is on billion. Device is very much possible. That's the vision. >> I think that I think what's resonating for me when I hear you guys, when you hear you talk when we have conversations also in Pat on stage talks about it, the simplification message is a good one and the consistency of operating across multiple environments because it sounds great that if you can achieve that, that's a good thing. How you guys get into how you making it simple to run I T. And consistent operating environment. It's all about keeping the customer in the middle of this. And when we listen to customs, all of these announcements the partnership's when there was eight of us, Microsoft, anything that we've done, it's about keeping the customer first, and the customer is basically guiding up out there. And often when I sit down with customers, I had the privilege of talking hundreds of thousands of them. Many of these CEOs the S and P five hundred I've known for years from S athe of'Em were they'LL Call me or text me. They want us to be a trusted advisor to help them understand where and how they should move in their digital transformation and compared their journey to somebody else's. So when we can bring the best off, for example, of developer and operations infrastructure together, what's called DEV Ops customers are wrestling threw that in there cloud journey when we can bring a multi device world with additional workspace. Customers are wrestling that without journey there, trying to figure out how much they keep on premise how much they move in the cloud. They're thinking about vertical specific applications. All of these places where if there's one lesson I've learned in my last ten twenty years of it has become a trusted advisor to your customers. Lean on them and they will lean on you on when you do that. I mean the beautiful world of technology is there's always stuff to innovate. >> Well, they have to lean on you because they can't mess around with all this infrastructure. They'LL never get their digital transformation game and act together, right? Actually, >>= it's great to see you. We'Ll see you at PM, >> Rollo. Well, well, come on, we gotta talk hoops. All right, All right, All right, big. You're a big warriors fan, right? We're Celtics fan. Would be our dream, for both of you are also Manny's themselves have a privileged to go up against the great Warriors. But what's your prediction this year? I mean, I don't know, and I >> really listen. I love the warriors. It's ah, so in some senses, a little bit of a tougher one. Now the DeMarcus cousins is out for, I don't know, maybe all the playoffs, but I love stuff. I love Katie. I love Clay, you know, and many of those guys is gonna be a couple of guys going free agents, so I want to do >> it again. Joy. Well, last because I don't see anybody stopping a Celtics may be a good final. That would be fun if they don't make it through the rafters, though. That's right. Well, I Leonard, it's tough to make it all right. That sounds great. >> Come on. Sanjay Putin, CEO of BM Wear Inside the Cube, Breaking down his commentary of you on the landscape of the industry and the big news with Microsoft there. Other partner's bringing you all the action here Day one of three days of coverage here in the Cubicle two sets a canon of cube coverage out there. We're back with more after this short break.

>> 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 back to the cubes Live coverage of Del World Technologies Here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have two guests on the seven, both both Cube veterans. So we have Varun Cabra. He is the VP product Marketing Cloud Delhi Emcee and Moeneeb unit. Minute Soudan VP Solutions Product marketing at VM. Where. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having >> thanks for having us. So we just had the keynote address we heard from Michael Dell Satya Nadella Pack Girl Singer It's a real who's who of this of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What? What did we hear? What is what is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective? >> So, Rebecca, what? What we hear from customers again and again is it's a multi cloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments, but we saw that mentioned five on average cloud architectures in customer environments and what we keep hearing from them is they There are operational silos that developed as part of the to set the fellas that are different. The machine formats. All of these things just lied a lot of lead to a lot of operational silos in complexity, and the customers are overwhelming or willingly asking William C. As well as being Where is that? How do we reduce this complexity? How do we we'll be able to move, were close together? How do we manage all of this in a common framework and reduce some of the complexity? So there's really they could take advantage off the promise of Monte Club. >> Yeah, so many. The Cube goes to all the big industry shows. I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like intel and in video, up on stage for the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, patent Sanjay, or, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage with Google Cloud of a couple of years ago, there was Sanjay up on St Come here. They're searching Adela up on stage. So let's talk about that public cloud piece China. We know you know the relationship with a wsbn were clad in a ws sent ripples through the industry on you know, the guru cloud piece. So tell us what's new and different peace when it comes to come up to public clouded. How does that fit with in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify. You know what Aaron said, Right? We think about customer choice first. Andrea Lee, customer choice. As you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers make this choice off. I need to make this, you know, a multi cloud world. Why're they going towards the multi clothing world? It's because applications air going there on really well, where strategy has bean to say, How do we empower customers without choice? Are you know, eight of us partnership is as strong as ever, but we continue to eat away there, and that was their first going to choice a platform. And Patty alluded to this on the stage. We have four thousand cloud provider partners right on the four thousand block provider partners we've built over the years, and that includes, you know, not small names. They include IBM. They, like, you know, they've got in Iraq space. Some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy is always being. How do we take our stack and and lighted and as many public laws? It's possible. So we took the first step off IBM. Then you know, about four thousand. You know, other plot providers being Rackspace, Fujitsu, it's Archie. Then came Amazon. I'm is on being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today we kind of further extend that with Microsoft and, you know, a few weeks ago with Google, right? So there's really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi Claude fees his abdomen right. You got two worlds, you couldn't existing application and you're looking Just get some scale out of that existing application and you're building a lot of, you know, native cloud native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drilled down one level deep, you know? So if I'm in as your customer today, my understanding it's Veum or STD. Sea Stack. What does that mean? You know what I use, You know? How is that? You can feel compare? Do I use the Microsoft? You know System Center. Am I using V Center? You know, >> shark now, and this is really again in an abdomen. Calm conversation, right where they were multiple announcements in here just to unpack them there. It's like, Hey, we had the Del Technologies Cloud platform. The Del Technologies clock platform is powered by, you know, Delhi emcee infrastructure and be aware Cloud Foundation on top, where slicing your full computer network storage with the sphere of visa and a sex and management. Right. And the second part was really We've got being where cloud on a deli emcee. The system brings a lot of the workloads which stood in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation off workloads back on. You know, on the data center are the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers and who have built native I pee in the public cloud beyond Amazon beat ashore who want to now bring some of those workloads closer to the, you know, data center or the edge. Now this comes to how do I take my azure workloads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why's that? I need you know, we have large customers, you know. You know, large customers multinational. They have, you know, five hundred thousand employees, ninety locations will wide. Who built to I p or when I say I p applications natively in cloud suddenly for five thousand employees and ninety locations, they're going ingress egress. Traffic to the cloud public cloud is huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers? Right. And this is where taking us your workloads. Bringing them, you know, on prime closer salts. That big problem for them. Now, how do I take that workloads and bring them closer? Is that where we landed in the Veum wear on Del, you know AMC Infrastructure? Because this big sea closer to the data center gives me either Lowell agency data governance and you know, control as well as flexibility to bring these work clothes back on. Right? So the two tangent that you're driving both your cloud growth and back to the edge The second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native workloads. We're able to bring them closer. Your data center is freely though the value proposition, right? >> Well, we heard so much about that on the main stage this morning about just how differently with modern workforce works in terms of the number of devices that used the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. >> You talk a little bit about the >> specifics in terms of customers you're working with. You don't need a name names. But just how you are enabling the >> way get feedback from customers in all industries, right? So you don't even share a few as well Way have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their workloads on VM where today, right as as have many Morgan is ations, and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or moving back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change that machine formats and just make it a little easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches right in the cloud, right? But then they don't they don't necessarily want adopt a new machine format for a new standardized platform. That's really what Thie azure announcement helps them do, Just like with eight of us, can now move workloads seamlessly to azure USVI center. Use your other you know, tools that you're familiar with today. Already to be ableto provision in your work clothes. All >> right, so for and what? Wonder if we could drill into the stack a little bit here? You know, I went to the Microsoft show last year, and it was like, Oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack even if you look at the box and it's very much the same underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of the ex rail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you believe there's two pieces? This there's the VCF on Vieques rail and then, you know, just help. Help explain >> s o for the Del Technologies Cloud Platform announcement, which is, as you said, VX rail in first hcea infrastructure with Mia McLeod foundations tightly integrated, right, so that the storage compute and networking capabilities of off the immortal foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage off it. In the end structure. This is all about making things easier to consume, right, producing the complexity for customers. When they get the X trail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use the metal foundations to be able to manage and automate those workloads. So we're packaging this up out of the box. So when customers get it, they have That's cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated, cited the engineering teams have actually worked together. And then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those workloads to public loud, using the same tools, the same, the MSR foundation tools. >> And, you know, uh, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while, and I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has bean when you know yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, this hybrid cloud world and what we really mean. Is that really where? Cloud foundation stack, right? So when we talk about the emcee on eight of us, is that Cloud foundation stack running inside of Amazon? When we talk about you know, our partnership with the shore, he's not being where Cloud Foundation stack running on a shore. We talk about this four thousand partners. Cloud certified IBM. It is the Cloud Foundation stack and the key components being pulled. Stack the Sphere v. Santana Sex and there's a critical part in Cloud Foundation called lifecycle management. It's, you know, it's missed quite easily, right? The benefit of running a public cloud. The key through the attributes you get is you know, you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure of software. And the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the interoperability between you compete network storage. And that is a huge deal for customers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this interrupt and, you know, view Marie Claude Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. Not not just Kee. >> Thank you for bringing it up because, right, one of the big differences you talk about Public Cloud, go talk to your customer and say, Hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running and the laughter you and say like, Well, Microsoft takes care of that. Well, when I differentiate and I say Okay, well, I want to run the the same stack in my environment. How do I keep that up today? We know the VM where you know customers like there's lots of incentives to get them there, but oftentimes they're n minus one two or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it's more cloud like enough today? >> Yeah, absolutely. So. So there's two ways to do that to one of them is because the V m. A and L E M C team during working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest word in supported right right out the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's gonna work on your your hardware or vice versa. So that's one level and then with via MacLeod and L E M C. We're also providing the ability to basically have hands off management and have that infrastructure running your data center or your eyes locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to tell technologies into somewhere. To be able to manage that solution for you is really, as Moody said, bringing that public loud experience to your own premise. Locations is long, >> and I think that's one of the big, different trainers that's going to come right. People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, Hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but the same time I want to rely on, you know, dull and beyond Where to come and help us build it together. Right? And the second part of announcement was really heavy and wear dull on the d l E M C. Is that Manager's offered the demo you saw from June. Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you could connect click of a button, roll it back into a data center as well. It's an edge because you have real Italy. Very little skill sets where night in the edge environment and as EJ Compute needs become more prolific with five g i ot devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model. There is well and not really the beauty off, you know, coming to be aware. And Delta, you know Del DMC del. Technology's power is to maintain that everywhere, right? I >> won't ask you about >> innovation. One of the things that's really striking during American executive, Even though I obviously have my own customers, >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers. Write as as Del Technologies is Liam, where we have the advantage of working with so many customers, hundreds of thousand customers around the world we get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting edge things that customers are looking for? And then we can not take that back to customers like Bank of America who may have taught about certain scenarios right that we will learn from. But they may not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their street, so that drives a lot of our innovation. Very. We are very proud about the fact that we're customer focused. Our invasion is really driven by listening to customers on. And, you know, having smart people just work on this one to work on this problems. And, >> you know, customer wise is a big deal customer choice. That's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key, too. If you just look at being where's innovation were already talking about this multi claude world where it was like, Hey, you've got workloads natively. So we How do you manage? Those were already ahead and thinking about, you know come in eighties with acquisition of Hip Tio and you if you think about it, you know, we've done this innovation in the cloud space established this hybrid credibility on we've launched with Del Technology. Now we're already ahead in this multi cloud operational model. We're already ahead in this coop in eighties. Evolution will bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice. Because of the end of the day, we're here to South customer problems. I >> think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly, because container based, >> yeah, I just wonder if you could spend on a little bit. You know what? One of the things I said via Moore is great. It really simplified and by environment, I go back. Fifteen years ago, one of things that did is let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth. Begin with my heart was out of date, my operating system at eight, sticking in of'em and leave it for another five years, and the users that are like, Oh my gosh, I'd need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think you know the application is probably the crux of the business, right? >> We'Ll call in the tent from >> change applications of Evolve. This is actually the evolution journey of itself is where they used to be, like support systems. Now they become actually translate to business dollars because, you know, the first thing that your customer awful customer touches is an application and you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about this old applications and new applications. And they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications? Where do they need to line and then make a choice off? What infrastructures? The best black mom for it. So really can't flip the thing on. Don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect APS to it. I think at first and then make a charge on infrastructure based on the application need and and really look like you said being where kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and make sure that you'll be EMS could run everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say. Doesn't matter if it's of'Em based. It's a cloud native will give you the same, you know, inconsistent infrastructure in operations. >> Okay, we're in that last thing. Could you just tell us of the announcements that were made? What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely So Del Technologies Cloud Platform that's based on the X Trail and via MacLeod Foundation is available now as an integrated solution via MacLeod and Daddy and see the fully managed offer is available in >> the second half of this >> year. It's invader right now. And as you saw, we have really good feedback >> from our customers. And then I think >> the, uh, the Azure BMR Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and many Congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here. Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Little coverage to sets three days, tenth year, The Cube at M. C and L World. I'm still many men. And thanks so much for watching

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin joined by John Troyer, and we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, distinguished alumni Bask Iyer, the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware. Bask it's great to have you here. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> So we were joking before we went on that we're right next to the therapy dog area, so always nice to have a technology conversation populated with dogs barking. >> No I like the dogs better if you want to talk about dogs or guitar, I would rather prefer that over >> Oh I could talk about that all day. So talk to us about, you are the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware, first Dell Technologies World, 14,000 attendees >> Right. >> In person. >> Yep. >> 6,500 technology and solutions partners here, another expected 30,000+ people engaging with the livestream, the on-demand videos. Big, big focus this week. Love to get your perspective on the role of the CIO, the role that you have now, you know you a few years ago, it was truly all about technology, now it's really about your involvement in the corporate strategy. Talk to us about the vision that you're setting, with Michael Dell, with your peers in IT and other stakeholders at Dell Technologies. >> Okay. No it's a great event I love this. A lot of these are colleagues, other CIOs. So they know, they want to know really do you use it inside Dell. A lot more credibility when you talk real stories about how you use it in Dell. The first thing is when I started this career there was no such title as CIO. That itself is pretty new. We were just the geeks who kind of ran everything. And then you became head of IT. So it was very strongly technical, and then they said you needed leadership and business skills, the pendulum swung one way to all business and leadership skills and no technology, and then came back to we should need both of that. And then you have business and general management, so every year the job changes. What I'm finding though, which is good and bad, is nothing goes away. You still need to know the technology, you still need to know the business skills, soft skills, still need to be a general manager. What is now is a lot more on the strategy. So the importance of strategy though is you never talk strategy if your operations is not good. Right nobody cares. But if your operations is somewhat good, you better not talk about operations. So I tell people don't keep on saying your trains are running on time. It has to run on time, if it doesn't, if it runs recently on time, talk about strategy. So now it's an important job to do that, and your question about in a technology company, I am the customer. I'm probably one of the very few people who actually signed a purchase order within Dell Tech to buy Dell or EMC or VMware. So they're interested in the customer's perspective. So you're the internal voice of the customer. We are also using all the tech that we make, and we need to give feedback to the developers and the R&D folks. So we call it drink our own champagne, but not our own Kool-Aid, you know what I mean. >> I like that. >> So sometimes you get carried away by the marketing things that we do. The challenge though is you working with Michael Dell, you're working with Pat Gelsinger and everybody else, and thousands of engineering fellows and so on, who know IT, who've invented a lot of things in IT. So you cannot really keep up with them. You know you need to know enough to hold your own, but if you try to compete with them, that is not a good thing. So luckily for me I was a good B student, I'm comfortable with A students around me. So you have you to be comfortable that you're not the smartest one in the room, but you're still contributing. That's the change you have. It is surreal to go in front of a Pat or Michael or other people and talk about digital transformation. And they're making eye contact they want to know how, what do you mean by digital transformation? How do you do it internally? What's your plan? So every once in a while you pinch yourself and say I can't believe this is happening. But it does happen. >> So Bask, I mean digital transformation is a theme of the show, right? >> Yeah. >> Make it real. As you talk with other CIOS, do they feel like they have a seat at that table? Are they the driver, are they the implementer? You start to hear more about a Chief Digital Officer, is that, does the CIO became the CDO, are they different? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah I'm very strong on the fact there's a again if the CIO focus only on operations and cost, then people say your trains are running on time lets get somebody clever to do the innovation and digital. You don't want to leave that, that is the cream of the crop. So I think if you're a good CIO, you want to be the Chief Digital Officer for the company. You don't want to have two CFOs, one for Wall Street and one for doing the real work. You don't want to have two salesperson, one for putting the numbers and one actually selling. So you need to have one technology person. Some companies may be so complex that you may consider that. I started as a chief Digital Officer in Hunnewell, ended up as the CIO for Hunnewell for example, but you need to have people who are very collaborative, those two have to work very closely together. It's very difficult to find one person who's collaborative and nonpolitical to be a leader of an IT organization. To find two and working as a team is complicated. So that's what I want. So I'm not a big supporter of that although I could see why it would happen, if you will. Okay. >> Lisa: So drinking your own champagne I like that by the way, you are in this role, it's interesting that you say you still kind of feel like you're pinching yourself when you're talking to a Michael Dell or a Pat Gelsinger, but you're up there having to implement digital transformation within Dell Technologies and all the companies underneath. >> Sure. >> That's a pretty big seat at the table. How are you sort of embodying the theme of this event and making digital transformation real for Dell Technologies? >> So I go very practical and I give, yesterday I talked to my fellow CIOs on the mistakes I've made. Right I came as the VMware CIO, we've already done this journey in a couple of years ahead of time. So wouldn't it be a cut and paste? Given the hybrid cloud, given the best end user environment possible and you're done. You already have that start. But I made the same mistake every CIO makes, we preach this but we don't follow it. It's not just the technology, it's people, process, culture, and technology, and I jumped on the technology, and I'm kicking myself to say, first three months didn't make a whole lot of progress. I was just yelling like a madman to say why is it not getting done. And then you have to go back into I have to hire the right people. So lets talk a few things. I made changes to the leadership team. Certain people were not comfortable in the pace of change. We did it respectfully but we had to have people who can actually lead the change. That was first. Then we called something about putting T back in IT. Which a long time in IT what we have done is we've outsourced, off shored, treated IT as a commodity and then we have program managers and leaders. Every magazine asked us to do that. Well, guess what we've been wrong. I think I've been wrong, doing that. You do need technologies right now. You cannot do digital transformation without understanding the technology. So we have to staff internally, we have to get good folks. Still manage the cost right, that doesn't go away, but you have to do the right thing. So IT, first get the right people, the process for it, what it dawned on me is we are talking about Agile and DevOps and continuous development. Those are all IT, geeky terMs. Those are not business terms. Those are not business terms even in Dell technology. Because there are manufacturing folks and HR folks and finance folks and so on. So I looked at fast experience of somebody like Hunnewell or GE. Remember they adopted Lean Six Sigma some kind of process to transform their company. And even me who's an IT geek had to go through a green-belt certification or a black-belt certification. And I revolted I said why would I do that, I'm an engineer why would I go through this stupid course, but it was required otherwise you don't get promoted. So now you need a prescriptive process to change the culture. So digital transformation needed that. Luckily for us we took the pivotal way, which we have within our company. We made it the Dell Digital way, since you still have to write it in your own language if you will. That is the process we use, we train our folks and our customers, our clients as I call them, customer is the person who buys the products from us, client is all the colleagues. So finance folks have to know what Dell Digital way is. You cannot do requirements the old way, and throw it over the wall and expect me to develop. You have to get into the room, With me and draw it on the wall and be able to design it together. So that's been a good change. And the culture changes with us because initially people are thinking, this guy's coming from Silicon Valley, he's not going to stay here, he's going to do all these things, he's going to get either fired or leave. So people try to run out the clock a little bit. So it takes a little bit of time to work on the culture and say innovation is not only demanded from you, but you have to keep the trains running on time. You have to chew gum and walk at the same time. So that's the process we go through. >> I love what you just described Bask because both in terms of culture and in technology, that actually makes for an interesting set of IT careers, right. That turns IT into a very interesting career again. >> Right. >> Many of my colleagues are IT pros, do you have any advice for somebody who is maybe in the start, the middle of their career, maybe specializing in something but they have I think this dream at the end of the tunnel, maybe the CIO is where they want to be. What do you see, how do I prep to be a CIO now, to be a CIO in say ten years? >> I'd tell him are you crazy? (laughs) Do you know what you're getting into? But here's what there's some truth to it. Getting a job is really easy I think. Doing the job is very difficult. So I tell 'em, get prepared for the job. Also, you should have some passion for technology. If you're a sportswriter, I mean I'm into sports, so you can give me all the magazines you want, I can see all the videos, I can watch 'em all day long. I can retire just watching sports all day long, or playing occasionally. You have to have the passion in technology because things keep coming at you. So we think Blockchain is cool by the time it get off the seed it's going to be something else. You have to be interested and passionate to keep up with that, right. So first thing is can you keep up with the change. Are you actually interested in it? Michael Dell sends you a text in the middle of the night, I don't think he expects me to react but I do. Because he's reading something and he's hearing something from the customers. You need to be interested in learning. So I said you have to be a lifelong learner, passionate on technology, and also learn the ropes because I always felt when I was younger I wasn't given the opportunities at the right time. I felt like am I going to die before I become a vice president or a CIO or whatever? It felt to me that it took a little longer than I wanted it to but thank god because once you got the job you were prepared for it. So that's one of the things I tell people is get prepared. Get into learning. Also the job changes all the time so I can't really write a book on it. You have to almost be like a chameleon in a sense. You got to learn so the last few years was technology, then it was business, then it was soft skills, transformation, ERP implementation, now it's business strategy, it's not going to stop. Technology is going to keep coming as a wave. So be ready for adapting and adopting to the changes if you will, right. >> I'm glad that you brought up people because it's not just systems and processes, none of this comes to fruition, companies don't transform IT, transform digitally, deliver more differentiated products without the people. We had some folks on earlier I think day one with Dell EMC Education Services, we've talked to the Channel folks about the things that they're enabling and one of the things that I think is really important that you brought up is all the things you said, I made all these mistakes. But those are opportunities not just for you to learn and grow, but also for you to share with the people that look at you and say I want to be Bask Iyer on stage. >> Yeah. >> You know in a few years because it's really all about being brave enough to say you know what I didn't know this, or I made a mistake, actually maybe it wasn't a mistake, maybe if I didn't go this path I wouldn't have learned and gotten more solidification under my feet to be able to be up there and get a text from a Michael Dell [Bask] That's right. >> In the middle of the night. >> That's right. >> So your advice to the next generation I think is key but I also really respect identification of hey all the things that maybe I did them wrong and encouraging more people as they want to grow their careers to not be afraid to go I don't know this. This this is an opportunity for me to learn. >> Yeah you cannot be the I wish I was the smartest room in Dell Technology, you know that is not possible. You're not even talking about the senior managers you have to talk to the fellows and engineers we have who I just nod and pretend like I know what they're talking about, it's just amazing. So you need a little bit of the humility I think to learn what you want to learn. But have the confidence right. You cannot have nothing and come and work here because I always tell people working in a tech company versus being a CIO of a regular company and I've done both, it's like getting to a batting cage and all of a sudden the balls are coming at 150 miles an hour. You better be prepared to face it. So you have to figure out can I face a ball at 40 miles or 60 miles or 150 miles. So you need to prepare yourself to get there. But having said that though, we are all learning. We are all growing, we all make mistakes. In fact I learn a lot from my millennial kids. They seem to know more about this than I do. I learn a lot and I do something called reverse mentoring in Silicon Valley, which is all the people from LinkedIn, Google, they want to learn from me because they think I'm the greatest CIO whatever, and I want to learn from them. I ended up at the end of the session learning a lot more from them and I feel actually guilty that the mentoring session has gone the other way but, that's what keeps it's interesting is the minute you feel like you know everything or you've done it, very risky in a technology profession, especially in a CIO profession. >> Lisa: So wrapping up the show here, talk to us about some of the things, and in the spirit of learning, what are some of the things that you've heard from customers about, whether it's the new product announcements or new partnerships or just the new areas that Dell Technologies is going in, what has the feedback been like? >> People love the fact that they saw Pat onstage and talk about VMware and Dell working together. People want to see the independence of VMware as well, and they want Dell and VMware working together. They want to see both. They want to make sure that there is the fierce independence that VMware is known for, and the fact that they're working together. That was good to hear because if you do one or the other people get freaked out. The fact that the best private cloud in the world is getting hooked up to the best public clouds in the world, that's a good message for people because they don't want to be locked into a cloud discussion or other kind of stuff. So you want to have the freedom to do that. A lot of people are now expressing interest in IOT and other kind of places and why the edge is important again. What tends to happen in my profession is we talk about IOT last year, this year we talk about AI and ML, guarantee next year's going to be something else. The technology sweet spot takes three, four, five years to hit. So if you just chasing the next wave because you want to be cool and fun you're missing out on opportunity to leverage this. So lot of buzz around the whole world is going to be wired, everything's going to have sensors, the amount of data that comes in and how to manage it and secure it. A lot of CIOs are saying we should get on top of that. Before it's done to us. Lot of buzz on that. I freaked out. I, like any other geek, went to the show to see the cool techs that everybody has. I went to the Dell booths to see the latest laptops because sometimes they don't show us the latest things >> (laughs) >> they keep it for the show. And then Michael Dell is in the booth. He didn't think it was funny but I thought Michael Dell in a Dell booth in Dell World, that's like you want to go buy a Mustang and you find Mr. Ford in the dealership. So I thought it was hilarious and I was shocked and he was just amused to say why do you think that is so funny. But it's nice to have a founder who's like an icon in the industry. Is he listening? Let me stop. (laughs) >> (laughs) He is a big fan of theCUBE. >> Thank you, then I'm not going to say anything nice about him. >> So, last question You talked about last year was IOT, now it's AI and ML, next year's going to be something else, are the people that are chasing those trends the ones that need the therapy dogs the most? (laughs) >> Yeah I think so because you know we have no time for anything these days, we are chasing the next shiny object. When AI and IOT come together, this is going to be fascinating for me. I worked on industry controls and so on, but if every wall could talk, and every object could talk to you what it would be telling you? And humans cannot comprehend it, because the wall is going to tell you so many things. So and so walked by, so and so sat here, whatever. You need artificial intelligence to filter it and say, you know Eric Clapton was here because that's the only thing maybe you want to know. I don't want to know about anything else. That requires AI to process and say this is what Bask would be interested in. And the rest of it doesn't really matter. So this combination I think is very powerful and I'm pretty excited about what if everything, what if dogs could talk, what if walls could talk, What if thermostat could talk >> Oh I'm waiting for that. >> So it's going to happen in our lifetime, pretty soon. >> Lisa: Well Bask thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights of how you're leading the charge as the CIO, right up there with Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger and all those big cheeses, but also how you're bringing the technology to the people and really like you said drinking the champagne. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for your time. >> Thank you for the time. >> And we thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live day three of Dell Technologies World, right next to the dog therapy center if you need a little break, come say hi and stop by and see some dogs. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer, stick around we'll be right back after a short break. (techno music)