>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017, everybody. This is theCUBE, and my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Peter Burris. This is our eighth year at VMworld. Day two, Jon Siegal is here. He's the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. Jon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, yeah. >> So we've been talking a little earlier this morning about the bottlenecks and how that's evolved. It was originally the compute, that was the constraint. Spinning rust became very, very clearly, five, six years ago it was very clear that it was a major problem. VMware did a great job putting forth APIs. It solved that problem, then flash came in. Now the bottleneck, Jon, is shifting to the network. What's going on there? Give us some context. >> Absolutely. Loud and clear, I think, to your point, to the keynotes this week, I think Pat Gelsinger made it very clear, I think, that the era of the hypervisor, we moved beyond that now, in terms of where the monitorization, where a lot of the innovation's happening. And next up to your point is really the network. The era of the network over the next decade. Really, what's important there is assuring that we have a network that is software to find, that can orchestrate resources to put them in the right place at the right time. And so, what we have, is we have a solution called Vscale, actually, which is very relevant to this space, which has a very solid fabric and supports NSX, and uses NSX at its core. Really, what this is about is taking the turnkey experience that customers prefer to have today in the system level, if you will, like we have with VxBlock, for example, and extending that, now, to the data center and actually multiple data centers. I think this is very, very relevant. This is a data center, modern data center type of approach for the future. >> So, Pat, not Pat, but Chad, we had Chad on earlier, we asked Chad, "What's going to be that kind of Dell EMC Cloud experience?" And he went through a couple things. He made the observation that there's going to be, we're on the verge of significant platform competition. Not something that we haven't seen in a while. One of the things that we agreed to, or agreed on, was the idea that, increasingly, we're going to evaluate platforms based on how well they bind to other platforms in the context of what the business needs, workload needs, the realities of the data. One of the things it gets at least me excited about Vscale is that it starts from the premise of, this is how you're going to bind CI and HCI and traditional, you're going to bind it together using this fabric, this set of technologies. Talk a little bit about that. >> Absolutely. I think, to your point here, with Vscale, I often try to paint a picture for customers, what if you could actually move your workloads around, across the infrastructure as you need to? What if you could share resources across CI and HCI? By resources, I mean data protection resources. Could be compute, could be storage, could be network resources. >> Security. >> Security, exactly, across that. What if you could assure that the upgrades, the expansions, the patches are fully interoperable across the data center? That's the experience of Vscale. That's the modern data center approach. And to your point, this is where the future is going for data centers. It allows customers to take what they have today, and legacy infrastructure, and marry that to modern infrastructure in such a way by, on top of that, using orchestration policies and software to find networking. >> And that's different from the sort of original, it's an evolution from the original Vblock, and then that was a block of infrastructure, and you managed that block. And now you're talking about what you called a binding technology across the data center. Is that the fundamental difference, and am I missing something? >> No, that's a great point. I think, to take step back for a second, seven years ago, we jointly engineered, jointly pioneered the CI space with VMware and Cisco. We did that, first of all, what was our premise? Our premise was, how do we simplify IT? How do we help our customers spend a lot less time maintaining and managing and sustaining infrastructure, spend more time delivering IT services, delivering applications faster to market, and those types of things. And the answer was Vblock and VxBlock, to your point. That was essentially a converged infrastructure with compute, storage, networking, and the ability to manage and sustain that across a lifecycle. On one hand, that was at a single system level, but now customers are saying, "What if we could do that across the data center?" That's what Vscale is. It's the same approach. The ability to now sustain that and lifecycle that infrastructure across the data center, and we do that jointly by engineered solutions with Cisco and with VMware. >> I want to share something with you. Peter, you said something to me the other day which I thought was quite instructive. You said, "Look, the technology for this stuff "has largely matured. "It's the people and process behind it, now, "that we really have to worry about." When converged infrastructure first came out, I remember, I wrote a piece talking about the organizational implications, 'cause you had a storage person, a server person, networking person, and advised my readers, get your house in order organizationally beforehand. And as I started to talk to more customers, I met one, an insurance company who was a big Vblock customer. He said, "You got it all wrong. "Here's how a change agent does it. "You put the stuff in, "and the organization will figure itself out." Which I thought was pretty radical. I bring that forward today-- >> But it only works some of the time. (Dave laughing) >> So, what are the organizational implications, as to Peter's point? The technology's maturing, it's maybe been demystified. What are you seeing, in terms of that people and process evolution? >> Well, first of all, we're seeing more and more focus and investment when it comes to IT moving up the stack. Again, what we're trying to do is say, "Do you really want to spend time which, frankly, "isn't necessarily a competitive differentiator "on maintaining that infrastructure, "or do you want to actually hire resources "that can develop the new applications, "develop the services, and move across data centers, "and actually bring new customers on-flight faster "if you're a service provider, "bring new applications online faster "if you're any enterprise out there today "that's trying to make a difference?" What we're seeing here is, I think, the level and sophistication of the IT personnel that's getting hired is different now. And I think what we're seeing is that fewer resources are required to do the day-to-day routine tasks. It's actually become a great opportunity for IT to move up the stack. For example, Inovalon. That's an example of a customer, actually, I think you may have met them, Peter, at Cisco Live. They are a healthcare data analytics provider. So, in a healthcare space, big data's making a big impact. It's about, how do they improve patient outcomes? Big data can do that. Inovalon's at the heart of that. They're a service provider providing data analytics, big data solutions for healthcare providers. They needed a way to, first of all, get to market faster with their solutions. They needed to be able to onboard new customers faster. And, by the way, they didn't have the investments to hire new people. So what they had to do is they had to find a way to triple their infrastructure without adding any resources. And, by the way, they did that. They did that with Vscale. >> Peter: Tripled their capacity? >> Yeah, their capacity, exactly. Their capacity, their capacity in the infrastructure-- >> Not the physical assets, the capacity. >> Exactly, the capacity to do so. That shows you that we're the investment, and that allows them to innovate more and up and up the stack, and that's what we're seeing more and more. >> So, in many respects, what I see you saying, and let me see if I got this right, is that it used to be that the server was the primary citizen, and you configured everything around. And then it became other things. Where we are now is increasingly, the data is the primary citizen, and what we need to be able to do is put in place technologies that can allow the data to be where it needs to be, but very rapidly and quickly share it appropriately based on the workloads, and the only way to do that is look at how you're going to connect data resources together, including applications. To me, anyway, Vscale is this interesting technology that allows you to think in terms of designing your infrastructure around the placement of the data. >> Jon: That's exactly right. >> What about it is so interesting to you? Maybe you could elaborate on that? >> Well, because, at the end of the day, Dave, again, we're trying to look at these data assets, we're trying to figure out how can we create value? I talked to Colin last time. People like to talk about data as the new oil. Well, the problem with that is that oil still follows the rules of scarcity. I use oil here, I can't use it there. With data, I can use data here and I can use it there if I have that fabric in place, that very facile way to connect those data resources together, and that's why I get the amplification on the value of the data, The value of the infrastructure assets that I have in place and the value of the IT organization. That's going to amplify it. What Vscale's allowing people to at least start thinking about, and doing, is to say, "I can share these resources in new ways "if I think in terms of how they bind together "in under control, under management, "so I can very quickly start putting these resources, "reconfiguring these resources in a way "that allows me to generate new levels of business value." >> That's exactly right. >> What's always interested me about just convergence in general was what you were talking about, Jon, and Peter, to tie it to what you just said is, that IT labor problem. I think we're way, way beyond IT management, operations people trying to hold on to their jobs. It really talks to the business value that they're delivering. When you talk to people about, what'd you do with those resources that you freed up, they got their weekends back, or they shifted people into development, application development enablement roles. Maybe not coding, but they're getting into facilitating. >> Oftentimes, what I find is that, in CI, for example, can be a career development path. It can enable career development paths for a lot of IT organizations out there today who are looking as they need to find ways, they can't actually hire additional resources, but what they can do is if they can actually at least help to greatly simplify the day-to-day tasks that they're doing, they can now start to spend a lot less time on those mundane tasks and more time on how they can differentiate the business, which is up the stack, which is developing new applications, developing new services. Exactly right. I think, what we do find, though, is that if CI, if convergent infrastructure in general, and hyperconverge is put in, but the organization doesn't change. >> Let me build on that for one second. I know we got to go. This is really important to me, and I want to test with you very quickly, and then we got to wrap. The computing model. When we talk about computation model, or the computing model, we talk not just about the technology, but the way we think about a problem. The way we approach a problem with technology. What's so interesting about this is that converged, hyperconverged, Vscale, and these technologies are not only a new way of thinking about technology, but they enable a new way of thinking about how we're going to solve a problem. And that to me is the career path for today's infrastructure geeks who've been focused on a product, because they can become more relevant if they help the business think new ways of solving problems, that new computational model. >> And leveraging that data in new ways. I think you're right. Basically, we're creating a fabric, an ecosystem, if you will, to connect all the resources together, and then we have the ability to do software to find, if you will, orchestration. >> And we need those people inside the business. >> And the business benefits because there's a talent war going on, and they get to retain them. So, Jon, we do have to go. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Absolutely, it's a pleasure as always. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (fast electronic music)