>> 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)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special Cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

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