(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll go back to San Francisco next year, but here in Vegas, third year in a row, and I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is John Troyer. Welcome back to the program Gil Shneorson, who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC. Gil, great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's still great to see you, John. >> All right, so I caught up with you at Dell World just a few months ago, down the strip. At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle. But since then, that Lyft now has like autonomous vehicles, so we know things can change pretty fast in the area. Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end? What's changed since last we talked? >> Thanks for asking. As you know, we're moving very fast. We're moving very fast, picking up many, many new customers every quarter, but the reason for that is because we keep innovating. So for example, in the show we announced a new G Series, a new 560 which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model, with more memory, more CPU, more capacity. Very popular form factor by our customers. We announced that we are now doing a simship with VMware, we're calling it synchronous releases. Our customers told us that they don't want to wait between a vSAN release and a VxRail release. We announced VxRail participation in Dell's customer loyalty program, which is a lot of features for future proof. We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center, which is kind of a sign for things to come, as where do we need the whole solution to be with networking inclusion. More configurability for VxRack SDDC, in other words, we keep moving forward very quickly. >> Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one. So vSAN, I said when it was first announced, this was the rising tide that will really raise all the ships in what we launched as the hyperconverged environment. VxRail was, at the time, EMC and VMware creating a team together, took the product people, took some various components and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace and was very successful, thousands of customers. vSAN's got 15,000 customers, you've got to be one of the top deployments out. You're all under the Dell family, but is it still made up of those people and how does that teamwork and innovation between various groups work today? >> Look, when we did this there was no runbook. How do you take two teams from two companies? But we discovered all the time that what we've created is extremely powerful. We were growing three times the market. And usually that's not a simple thing and so on both of our sides we're doubling down. On the roadmap, the integration between the companies. And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment, because what you really have to do is move more things towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly because you don't want to forego quality. So we're very happy with this model, and I think customers are happy with this model. You take the software, you put it with a specific configuration, you automate it to match, and you get something that's very resilient, and I think both of us know that and both of us keep investing it because it's working. >> That's great. Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on with what you said about the VMware and the Dell teams coming together. So my tribe is on the VMware side, right? And the VMware admins have always been very involved with storage. And for the last couple years they had been very involved cross-training on vSAN. So I'm kind of curious about the demand for VxRail and where it's coming from. Is it the VMware folks that are saying, "Hey, let's look at this"? Is it the C-level, is it the old storage team, is it the business unit? What's driving this transformation? >> Yeah, I'll tell you. Two years ago you needed to talk to people about why HCI. More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI. And we have a very unique position because we are part of the VMware stack. And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later but HCI has its place, but we're already looking at what multiclouds means from infrastructure standpoint, right? And so, if it's a transformative conversation it would be some sort of an architect in that environment that's transforming. And they'd have a cloud project and they'll have a name for me, Cloud One, My Cloud, one of those. But most of the cases it's still a tech refresh, they're moving from a three-tier architecture, to a consolidated hyperconverge. And vAdmins have a lot to say. The server admins have a lot to say. And the reason they buy an appliance or basically buy our automation, because they realize that it saves them time, and it takes away risk. And many of them, by the way, choose to deploy vSAN on their own with servers which we call ReadyNodes, and they're also very successful. In other words, it's how much value you want on top of vSAN that you're willing to pay for and they're voting with their wallets. >> Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud because it's one of the big themes of the show. And it's funny, because we know that vSAN is a critical component of the VMware Cloud Foundation, the VCF stuff. But I hadn't really thought about, VxRail is just built with vSAN. So I still, even though I know it's a software thing, I think of it as an appliance and something coming from Dell. Talk to us about how VxRail fits into the multicloud world for customers. >> So VxRail, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack. They differ only in parts of the management stack on top of them. There's VxRail manager, there is an SDDC manager that comes from VCF. And by the way, those over time will find their way into somewhere of a consolidated stack. And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is because we have not, we keep innovating with the vSAN team. We keep benefiting from their innovation, we keep adding on top of it. But more and more you'll see us integrate with other parts of the VMware stack. So for example, I think Pat touched on our future or upcoming integration with our Cloud Assembly services. So you can take a software-based management vRealize and manage VxRails that you own as a service. So our current roadmap in investments are not only to invest in being the most resilient, robust, vSAN-based infrastructure, but tying to every part of the VMware stack so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud. So between VxRail and VxRack and the different touchpoints across the stack, we're really weaving it into the entire stack. That's our strength, we are a VMware product essentially. And so we realize that we need to take the whole breadth of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate at every level, so this choice becomes a no-brainer for customers. >> Gil, since VxRail is an appliance, how often does it get updated and are people capable of taking those updates since it's an engineered system like that? >> Yeah, look, in the past, when people wanted a lot of things to work together, they'd qualify them, they'd test them and then they'd go upgrade them manually. Piece by piece through a recipe, if you will. What we've done in the appliance model, we've added our own IP which basically takes all of that and automates it. So what our customers get is a downloadable package from Dell EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update, all of the drivers, all of the firmware involved, and does a one-boot update for each node in the cluster and cycles through it automatically. So, because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware, and by the way, customers are concerned with express patches. Those we do within seven days, or even faster. So every time VMware moves forward, every time we move forward, we package it all up and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically. So it happens as fast as they need it to be, you know what I mean? There's no limitation because it's an appliance, it's the same thing as having a stack. >> Gil, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit up the stack. The early customers that I've talked to, we know that modernizing your applications can be really challenging. A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is step one, modernize the platform, step two, start modernizing the applications. What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers as they go through that kind of transition? >> That's a good question. (chuckles) I think most of the customers we're talking to today are still modernizing the infrastructure. That's the reality. They need a more agile environment because they need to take care of things up the stack and go into development models of all sorts. You can also see that there's a lot of success with our joint work with Pivotal on Pivotal Ready Architecture. And so Pivotal and us have created the Ready Architecture, based on VxRail. The value in that is really Cloud Foundry and what it brings to the table, and the design. And we see a lot of adoption for that, so people are adopting Cloud Foundry as a development model and a deployment model. They're using VxRail as an infrastructure, and obviously because of its ability to migrate across environments, that infrastructure transcends, it makes sense. So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people are still modernizing their base infrastructure to be ready for greater things. >> Absolutely. All right, Gil, want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for from your group as we go through the rest of 2018? >> We're going to keep moving, we're going to keep innovating. We're going to make sure that the solutions fit into the existing VMware environments in a more seamless way every time we work on it. And I got to say, if there are customers watching this Cube interview, I keep reaching out to customers saying, look, we have many, many thousands of customers now. We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them. So if anybody's watching and they're interested in a conversation telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap, voicing their opinions directly to the product group, I know my title and Twitter handle are going to be here at the bottom, I invite people to reach out and talk to us. >> All right, great closing point. Gil, we're always loving fostering conversations and feedback. So, Gil Shneorson, his Twitter handle's on a screen in case Shneorson doesn't come off your keyboard nice and easy. John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we're also, always love the feedback when you send it on Twitter. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

For Las Vegas, it's the cube covering vm world 2018, brought to you by vm ware and its ecosystem partners. Ladies and gentlemen, Vm ware would like to thank it's global diamond sponsors and it's platinum sponsors for vm world 2018 with over 125,000 members globally. The vm ware User Group connects via vmware customers, partners and employees to vm ware, information resources, knowledge sharing, and networking. To learn more, visit the [inaudible] booth in the solutions exchange or the hemoglobin gene vm village become a part of the community today. This presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and k's vm ware. Files with the SEC. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Pat Gelsinger. Welcome to vm world. Good morning. Let's try that again. Good morning and I'll just say it is great to be here with you today. I'm excited about the sixth year of being CEO. When it was on this stage six years ago were Paul Maritz handed me the clicker and that's the last he was seen. We have 20,000 plus here on site in Vegas and uh, you know, on behalf of everyone at Vm ware, you know, we're just thrilled that you would be with us and it's a joy and a thrill to be able to lead such a community. We have a lot to share with you today and we really think about it as a community. You know, it's my 23,000 plus employees, the souls that I'm responsible for, but it's our partners, the thousands and we kicked off our partner day yesterday, but most importantly, the vm ware community is centered on you. You know, we're very aware of this event would be nothing without you and our community and the role that we play at vm wares to build these cool breakthrough innovations that enable you to do incredible things. You're the ones who take our stuff and do amazing things. You altogether. We have truly changed the world over the last two decades and it is two decades. You know, it's our anniversary in 1998, the five people that started a vm ware, right. You know, it was, it was exactly 20 years ago and we're just thrilled and I was thinking about this over the weekend and it struck me, you know, anniversary, that's like old people, you know, we're here, we're having our birthday and it's a party, right? We can't have a drink yet, but next year. Yeah. We're 20 years old. Right. We can do that now. And I'll just say the culture of this community is something that truly is amazing and in my 38 years, 38 years in tech, that sort of sounds like I'm getting old or something, but the passion, the loyalty, almost a cult like behavior that we see in this team of people to us is simply thrilling. And you know, we put together a little video to sort of summarize the 20 years and some of that history and some of the unique and quirky aspects of our culture. Let's watch that now. We knew we had something unique and then we demonstrated that what was unique was also some reasons that we love vm ware, you know, like the community out there. So great. The technology I love it. Ware is solid and much needed. Literally. I do love Vmr. It's awesome. Super Awesome. Pardon? There's always someone that wants to listen and learn from us and we've learned so much from them as well. And we reached out to vm ware to help us start building. What's that future world look like? Since we're doing really cutting edge stuff, there's really no better people to call and Bmr has been known for continuous innovation. There's no better way to learn how to do new things in it than being with a company that's at the forefront of technology. What do you think? Don't you love that commitment? Hey Ashley, you know, but in the prep sessions for this, I thought, boy, what can I do to take my commitment to the next level? And uh, so, uh, you know, coming in a couple days early, I went to down the street to bad ass tattoo. So it's time for all of us to take our commitment up level and sometimes what happens in Vegas, you take home. Thank you. Vm Ware has had this unique role in the industry over these 20 years, you know, and for that we've seen just incredible things that have happened over this period of time and it's truly extraordinary what we've accomplished together. And you know, as we think back, you know, what vm ware has uniquely been able to do is I'll say bridge across know and we've seen time and again that we see these areas of innovation emerging and rapidly move forward. But then as they become utilized by our customers, they create this natural tension of what business wants us flexibility to use across these silos of innovation. And from the start of our history, we have collectively had this uncanny ability to bridge across these cycles of innovation. You know, an act one was clearly the server generation. You know, it may seem a little bit, uh, ancient memory now, but you remember you used to walk into your data center and it looked like the loove the museum of it passed right? You know, and you had your old p series and your z series in your sparks and your pas and your x86 cluster and Yo, it had to decide, well, which architecture or am I going to deploy and run this on? And we bridged across and that was the magic of Esx. You don't want to just changed the industry when that occurred. And I sort of called the early days of Esx and vsphere. It was like the intelligence test. If you weren't using it, you fail because Yup. Servers, 10 servers become one months, become minutes. I still have people today who come up to me and they reflect on their first experience of vsphere or be motion and it was like a holy moment in their life and in their careers. Amazing and act to the Byo d, You know, can we bridge across these devices and users wanted to be able to come in and say, I have my device and I'm productive on it. I don't want to be forced to use the corporate standard. And maybe more than anything was the power of the iphone that was introduced, the two, seven, and suddenly every employee said this is exciting and compelling. I want to use it so I can be more productive when I'm here. Bye. Jody was the rage and again it was a tough challenge and once again vm ware helped to bridge across the surmountable challenge. And clearly our workspace one community today is clearly bridging across these silos and not just about managing devices but truly enabling employee engagement and productivity. Maybe act three was the network and you know, we think about the network, you know, for 30 years we were bound to this physical view of what the network would be an in that network. We are bound to specific protocols. We had to wait months for network upgrades and firewall rules. Once every two weeks we'd upgrade them. If you had a new application that needed a firewall rule, sorry, you know, come back next month we'll put, you know, deep frustration among developers and ceos. Everyone was ready to break the chains. And that's exactly what we did. An NSX and Nice Sierra. The day we acquired it, Cisco stock drops and the industry realizes the networking has changed in a fundamental way. It will never be the same again. Maybe act for was this idea of cloud migration. And if we were here three years ago, it was student body, right to the public cloud. Everything is going there. And I remember I was meeting with a cio of federal cio and he comes up to me and he says, I tried for the last two years to replatform my 200 applications I got to done, you know, and all of a sudden that was this. How do I do cloud migration and the effective and powerful way. Once again, we bridged across, we brought these two worlds together and eliminated this, uh, you know, this gap between private and public cloud. And we'll talk a lot more about that today. You know, maybe our next act is what we'll call the multicloud era. You know, because today in a recent survey by Deloitte said that the average business today is using eight public clouds and expected to become 10 plus public clouds. And you know, as you're managing different tools, different teams, different architectures, those solution, how do you, again bridge across, and this is what we will do in the multicloud era, we will help our community to bridge across and take advantage of these powerful cycles of innovation that are going on, but be able to use them across a consistent infrastructure and operational environment. And we'll have a lot more to talk about on this topic today. You know, and maybe the last item to bridge across maybe the most important, you know, people who are profit. You know, too often we think about this as an either or question. And as a business leader, I'm are worried about the people or the And Milton Friedman probably set us up for this issue decades ago when he said, planet, right? the sole purpose of a business is to make profits. You want to create a multi-decade dilemma, right? For business leaders, could I have both people and profits? Could I do well and do good? And particularly for technology, I think we don't have a choice to think about these separately. We are permeating every aspect of business. And Society, we have the responsibility to do both and have all the things that vm ware has accomplished. I think this might be the one that I'm most proud of over, you know, w we have demonstrated by vsphere and the hypervisor alone that we have saved over 540 million tons of co two emissions. That is what you have done. Can you believe that? Five hundred 40 million tons is enough to have 68 percent of all households for a year. Wow. Thank you for what you have done. Thank you. Or another translation of that. Is that safe enough to drive a trillion miles and the average car or you could go to and from Jupiter just in case that was in your itinerary a thousand times. Right? He was just incredible. What we have done and as a result of that, and I'll say we were thrilled to accept this recognition on behalf of you and what you have done. You know, vm were recognized as number 17 in the fortune. Change the world list last week. And we really view it as accepting this honor on behalf of what you have done with our products and technology tech as a force for good. We believe that fundamentally that is our opportunity, if not our obligation, you know, fundamentally tech is neutral, you know, we together must shape it for good. You know, the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, right? It was used to create mass education and learning materials also can be used for extremist propaganda. The technology itself is neutral. Our ecosystem has a critical role to play in shaping technology as a force for good. You know, and as we think about that tomorrow, we'll have a opportunity to have a very special guest and I really encourage you to be here, be on time tomorrow morning on the stage and you know, Sanjay's a session, we'll have Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner and fourth will be a bit of extra security as you come in and you understand that. And I just encourage you not to be late because we see this tech being a force for good in everything that we do at vm ware. And I hope you'll enjoy, I'm quite looking forward to the session tomorrow. Now as we think about the future. I like to put it in this context, the superpowers of tech know and you know, 38 years in the industry, you know, I am so excited because I think everything that we've done over the last four decades is creating a foundation that allows us to do more and go faster together. We're unlocking game, changing opportunities that have not been available to any people in the history of humanity. And we have these opportunities now and I, and I think about these four cloud, you have unimaginable scale. You'll literally with your Amex card, you can go rent, you know, 10,000 cores for $100 per hour. Or if you have Michael's am ex card, we can rent a million cores for $10,000 an hour. Thanks Michael. But we also know that we're in many ways just getting started and we have tremendous issues to bridge across and compatible clouds, mobile unprecedented scale. Literally, your application can reach half the humans on the planet today. But we also know that five percent, the lowest five percent of humanity or the other half of humanity, they're still in the lower income brackets, less than five percent penetrated. And we know that we have customer examples that are using mobile phones to raise impoverished farmers in Africa, out of poverty just by having a smart phone with proper crop, the information field and whether a guidance that one tool alone lifting them out of poverty. Ai knows, you know, I really love the topic of ai in 1986. I'm the chief architect of the 80 46. Some of you remember what that was. Yeah, I, you know, you're, you're my folk, right? Right. And for those of you who don't, it was a real important chip at the time. And my marketing manager comes running into my office and he says, Pat, pat, we must make the 46 a great ai chip. This is 1986. What happened? Nothing an AI is today, a 30 year overnight success because the algorithms, the data have gotten so much bigger that we can produce results, that we can bring intelligence to everything. And we're seeing dramatic breakthroughs in areas like healthcare, radiology, you know, new drugs, diagnosis tools, and designer treatments. We're just scratching the surface, but ai has so many gaps, yet we don't even in many cases know why it works. Right? And we'll call that explainable ai and edge and Iot. We're connecting the physical and the digital worlds was never before possible. We're bridging technology into every dimension of human progress. And today we're largely hooking up things, right? We have so much to do yet to make them intelligent. Network secured, automated, the patch, bringing world class it to Iot, but it's not just that these are super powers. We really see that each and each one of them is a super power in and have their own right, but they're making each other more powerful as well. Cloud enables mobile conductivity. Mobile creates more data, more data makes the AI better. Ai Enables more edge use cases and more edge requires more cloud to store the data and do the computing right? They're reinforcing each other. And with that, we know that we are speeding up and these superpowers are reshaping every aspect of society from healthcare to education, the transportation, financial institutions. This is how it all comes together. Now, just a simple example, how many of you have ever worn a hardhat? Yeah, Yo. Pretty boring thing. And it has one purpose, right? You know, keep things from smacking me in the here's the modern hardhat. It's a complete heads up display with ar head. Well, vr capabilities that give the worker safety or workers or factory workers or supply people the ability to see through walls to understand what's going on inside of the equipment. I always wondered when I was a kid to have x Ray Vision, you know, some of my thoughts weren't good about why I wanted it, but you know, I wanted to. Well now you can have it, you know, but imagine in this environment, the complex application that sits behind it. You know, you're accessing maybe 50 year old building plants, right? You're accessing HVAC systems, but modern ar and vr capabilities and new containerized displays. You'll think about that application. You know, John Gage famously said the network is the computer pat today says the application is now a network and pretty typically a complicated one, you know, and this is the vm ware vision is to make that kind of environment realizable in every aspect of our business and community and we simply have been on this journey, any device, any application, any cloud with intrinsic security. And this vision has been consistent for those of you who have been joining us for a number of years. You've seen this picture, but it's been slowly evolving as we've worked in piece by piece to refine and extend this vision, you know, and for it, we're going to walk through and use this as the compass for our discussion today as we walk through our conversation. And you know, we're going to start by a focus on any cloud. And as we think about this cloud topic, you know, we see it as a multicloud world hybrid cloud, public cloud, but increasingly seeing edge and telco becoming clouds in and have their own right. And we're not gonna spend time on it today, but this area of Telco to the is an enormous opportunity for us in our community. You know, data centers and cloud today are over 80 percent virtualized. The Telco network is less than 10 percent virtualized. Wow. An industry that's almost as big as our industry entirely unvirtualized, although the technologies we've created here can be applied over here and Telco and we have an enormous buildout coming with five g and environments emerging. What an opportunity for us, a virgin market right next to us and we're getting some early mega winds in this area using the technologies that you have helped us cure rate than the So we're quite excited about this topic area as well. market. So let's look at this full view of the multicloud. Any cloud journey. And we see that businesses are on a multicloud journey, you know, and today we see this fundamentally in these two paths, a hybrid cloud and a public cloud. And these paths are complimentary and coexisting, but today, each is being driven by unique requirements and unique teams. Largely the hybrid cloud is being driven by it. And operations, the public cloud being driven more by developers and line of business requirements and as some multicloud environment. So how do we deliver upon that and for that, let's start by digging in on the hybrid cloud aspect of this and as we think about the hybrid cloud, we've been talking about this subject for a number of years and I want to give a very specific and crisp definition. You're the hybrid cloud is the public cloud and the private cloud cooperating with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations simply put seamless path to and from the cloud that my workloads don't care if it's here or there. I'm able to run them in a agile, scalable, flexible, efficient manner across those two environments, whether it's my data center or someone else's, I can bring them together to make that work is the magic of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation. The vm ware Cloud Foundation brings together computer vsphere and the core of why we are here, but combines with that networking storage delivered through a layer of management and automation. The rule of the cloud is ruthlessly automate everything. We laid out this vision of the software defined data center seven years ago and we've been steadfastly working on this vision and vm ware. Cloud Foundation provides this consistent infrastructure and operations with integrated lifecycle management automation. Patching the m ware cloud foundation is the simplest path to the hybrid cloud and the fastest way to get vm ware cloud foundation is hyperconverged infrastructure, you know, and with this we've combined integrated then validated hardware and as a building block inside of this we have validated hardware, the v Sand ready environments. We have integrated appliances and cloud delivered infrastructure, three ways that we deliver that integrate integrated hyperconverged infrastructure solution. And we have by far the broadest ecosystem of partners to do it. A broad set of the sand ready nodes from essentially everybody in the industry. Secondly, we have integrated appliances, the extract of vxrail that we have co engineered with our partners at Dell technology and today in fact Dell is releasing the power edge servers, a major step in blade servers that again are going to be powering vxrail and vxrack systems and we deliver hyperconverged infrastructure through a broader set of Vm ware cloud partners as well. At the heart of the hyperconverged infrastructure is v San and simply put, you know, be San has been the engine that's just been moving rapidly to take over the entire integration of compute and storage and expand to more and more areas. We have incredible momentum over 15,000 customers for v San Today and for those of you who joined us, we say thank you for what you have done with this product today. Really amazing you with 50 percent of the global 2000 using it know vm ware. V San Vxrail are clearly becoming the standard for how hyperconverge is done in the industry. Our cloud partner programs over 500 cloud partners are using ulv sand in their solution, you know, and finally the largest in Hci software revenue. Simply put the sand is the software defined storage technology of choice for the industry and we're seeing that customers are putting this to work in amazing ways. Vm Ware and Dell technologies believe in tech as a force for good and that it can have a major impact on the quality of life for every human on the planet and particularly for the most underdeveloped parts of the world. Those that live on less than $2 per day. In fact that this moment 5 billion people worldwide do not have access to modern affordable surgery. Mercy ships is working hard to change the global surgery crisis with greater than 400 volunteers. Mercy ships operates the largest NGO hospital ship delivering free medical care to the poorest of the poor in Africa. Let's see from them now. When the ship shows up to port, literally people line up for days to receive state of the art life, sane changing life saving surgeries, tumor site limbs, disease blindness, birth defects, but not only that, the personnel are educating and training the local healthcare providers with new skills and infrastructure so they can care for their own. After the ship has left, mercy ships runs on Vm ware, a dell technology with VX rail, Dell Isilon data protection. We are the it platform for mercy ships. Mercy ships is now building their next generation ship called global mercy, which were more than double. It's lifesaving capacity. It's the largest charity hospital ever. It will go live in 20 slash 20 serving Africa and I personally plan on being there for its launch. It is truly amazing what they are doing with our technology. Thanks. So we see this picture of the hybrid cloud. We've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So let's look over at the public cloud and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world and with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon and on the stage last year, we announced their first generation of products, no better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that it's my pleasure to bring to stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of aws. Please welcome Andy Jassy. Thank you andy. You know, you honor us with your presence, you know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last, uh, year. Yo, can you give us some perspective on that, Andy and what customers are doing with it? Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. Uh, you know, the offering that we have together customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to again, where cloud and aws is very appealing to manage their infrastructure for years to be able to deploy it an aws and we see a lot of customer momentum and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment in transportation. You see it with stagecoach and media and entertainment. You see it with discovery communications in education, Mit and Caltech and consulting and accenture and cognizant and dxc you see in every imaginable vertical business segment and the number of customers using the offering is doubling every quarter. So people were really excited about it and I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is mit. We're there right now in the process of migrating. In fact, they just did migrate 3000 vms from their data centers to Vm ware cloud native us. And this would have taken years before to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. It was really spectacular and they're just a fun company to work with and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases as well. And you're probably the second most common example is we'll say on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. We have great examples of customers you that one in particular, his brakes, right? Urban in those. The brings security trucks and they all armored trucks coming by and they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for Dr. so we quickly built to Dr Protection Environment for $600. Bdms know they migrated their mission critical workloads and Wallah stable and consistent Dr and now they're eliminating that site and looking for other migrations as well. The rate of 10 to 15 percent. It was just a great deal. One of the things I believe Andy, he'll customers should never spend capital, uh, Dr ever again with this kind of capability in place. That is just that game changing, you know, and you know, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach, you know, we promised to make the service available a year ago with the global footprint of Amazon and now we've delivered on that promise and in fact today or yesterday if you're an ozzie right down under, we announced in Sydney, uh, as well. And uh, now we're in US Europe and in APJ. Yeah. It's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world and, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering to and just the quarter that's been out there and probably have the many requests customers has had. And you've had a, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all the regions. The aws has regions and I can tell you by the end of 2019 will largely be there including with golf clubs and golf clap. You guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. Yeah. It's a government only region that we have that a lot of federal government workloads live in and we are pretty close together having the offering a fedramp authority to operate, which is a big deal on a game changer for governments because then there'll be able to use the familiar tools they use and vm ware not just to run their workloads on premises but also in the cloud as well with the data privacy requirements, security requirements they need. So it's a real game changer for government too. Yeah. And this you can see by the picture here basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are and have an availability zone. We're going to be there running on data. Yup. Yeah. Let's get with it. Okay. We're a team go faster. Okay. You'll and you know, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation and you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect and since we went live in the Oregon region, you know, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases and two was really about mission critical at scale and we added our second region. We added our hybrid cloud extension with m three. We moved the global rollout and we launched in Europe with m four. We really add a lot of these mission critical governance aspects started to attack all of the industry certifications and today we're announcing and five right. And uh, you know, with that, uh, I think we have this little cool thing you know, two of the most important priorities for that we're doing with ebs and storage. Yeah, we'll take, customers, our cost and performance. And so we have a couple of things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those on a storage side. We've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block store or ebs with ware is Va v San and we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that as much. It's very high capacity and much more cost effective and you'll start to see this initially on the Vm ware cloud. Native us are five instances which are compute instances, their memory optimized and so this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use ebs by default and it'll be much more cost effective for storage or memory intensive workloads. Um, it's something that you guys have asked for. It's been very frequently requested it, it hits preview today. And then the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate vm ware's Nsx along with aws direct neck to have a private even higher performance conductivity between on premises and the cloud. So very, very exciting new capabilities to show deep integration between the companies. Yeah. You know, in that aspect of the deep integration. So it's really been the thing that we committed to, you know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day. Right on bringing together and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way so that we can deliver new services just like elastic drs and the c and ebs really powerful, uh, capabilities and that pace of innovation continue. So next maybe. Um, maybe six. I don't know. We'll see. All right. You know, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation, you know, completing all of the capabilities of Nsx. You'll full integration for all of the direct connect to capabilities. Really expanding that. You're only improving licensed capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding pks on top of for expanded developer a capabilities. So just. Oh, thank you. I, I think that was formerly known as Right, and y'all were continuing this pace of storage Chad. So anyway. innovation going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today. Andy. Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We know we have a pretty big database business and aws and it's. It's both on the relational and on the nonrelational side and the business is billions of dollars in revenue for us and on the relational side. We have a service called Amazon relational database service or Amazon rds that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate and scale their databases and so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode and will be for a while and a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases but on premises. And so we talked about it and we thought about and we work with our partners at Vm ware and I'm excited to announce today, right now Amazon rds on Vm ware and so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon rds to vm ware's customers for their on premises environments. And so what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to provision databases. You'll be able to scale the compute or the memory or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create, read replicas to scale your database reads and you can deploy this rep because either on premises or an aws, you'll be able to deploy and high high availability configuration by replicating the data to different vm ware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises or an aws and then you'll be able to take all those databases and if you eventually want to move them to aws, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It will be available on Oracle sql server, sql postgresql and Maria DB. I think it's very exciting for our customers and I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership and listen to what customers want and then innovate on their behalf. Absolutely. Thank you andy. It is thrilling to see this and as we said, when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go to market, but also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they wanted cloud on premise, on premise to the cloud. It really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for you Jordan Young, rural 20th. You guys appreciate it. Yeah, we really have just seen incredible momentum and as you might have heard from our earnings call that we just finished this. We finished the last quarter. We just really saw customer momentum here. Accelerating. Really exciting to see how customers are starting to really do the hybrid cloud at scale and with this we're just seeing that this vm ware cloud foundation available on Amazon available on premise. Very powerful, but it's not just the partnership with Amazon. We are thrilled to see the momentum of our Vm ware cloud provider program and this idea of the vm ware cloud providers has continued to gain momentum in the industry and go over five years. Right. This program has now accumulated more than 4,200 cloud partners in over 120 countries around the globe. It gives you choice, your local provider specialty offerings, some of your local trusted partners that you would have in giving you the greatest flexibility to choose from and cloud providers that meet your unique business requirements. And we launched last year a program called Vm ware cloud verified and this was saying you're the most complete embodiment of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation offering by our cloud partners in this program and this logo you know, allows you to that this provider has achieved the highest standard for cloud infrastructure and that you can scale and deliver your hybrid cloud and partnering with them. It know a particular. We've been thrilled to see the momentum that we've had with IBM as a huge partner and our business with them has grown extraordinarily rapidly and triple digits, but not just the customer count, which is now over 1700, but also in the depth of customers moving large portions of the workload. And as you see by the picture, we're very proud of the scope of our partnerships in a global basis. The highest standard of hybrid cloud for you, the Vm ware cloud verified partners. Now when we come back to this picture, you know we, you know, we're, we're growing in our definition of what the hybrid cloud means and through Vm Ware Cloud Foundation, we've been able to unify the private and the public cloud together as never before, but we're also seeing that many of you are interested in how do I extend that infrastructure further and farther and will simply call that the edge right? And how do we move data closer to where? How do we move data center resources and capacity closer to where the data's being generated at the operations need to be performed? Simply the edge and we'll dig into that a little bit more, but as we do that, what are the things that we offer today with what we just talked about with Amazon and our VCP p partners is that they can consume as a service this full vm ware Cloud Foundation, but today we're only offering that in the public cloud until project dimension of project dimension allows us to extend delivered as a service, private, public, and to the edge. Today we're announcing the tech preview, a project dimension Vm ware cloud foundation in a hyperconverged appliance. We're partnered deeply with Dell EMC, Lenovo for the first partners to bring this to the marketplace, built on that same proven infrastructure, a hybrid cloud control plane, so literally just like we're managing the Vm ware cloud today, we're able to do that for your on premise. You're small or remote office or your edge infrastructure through that exact same as a service management and control plane, a complete vm ware operated end to end environment. This is project dimension. Taking the vcf stack, the full vm ware cloud foundation stack, making an available in the cloud to the edge and on premise as well, a powerful solution operated by BM ware. This project dimension and project dimension allows us to have a fundamental building block in our approach to making customers even more agile, flexible, scalable, and a key component of our strategy as well. So let's click into that edge a little bit more and we think about the edge in the following layers, the compute edge, how do we get the data and operations and applications closer to where they need to be. If you remember last year I talked about this pendulum swinging of centralization and decentralization edge is a decentralization force. We're also excited that we're moving the edge of the devices as well and we're doing that in two ways. One with workspace, one for human optimized devices and the second is project pulse or Vm ware pulse. And today we're announcing pulse two point zero where you can consume it now as a service as well as with integrated security. And we've now scaled pulse to support 500 million devices. Isn't that incredible, right? I mean this is getting a scale. Billions and billions and finally networking is a key component. You all that. We're stretching the networking platform, right? And evolving how that edge operates in a more cloud and that's a service white and this is where Nsx St with Velo cloud is such a key component of delivering the edge of network services as well. Taken together the device side, the compute edge and rethinking and evolving the networking layer together is the vm ware edge strategy summary. We see businesses are on this multicloud journey, right? How do we then do that for their private of public coming together, the hybrid cloud, but they're also on a journey for how they work and operate it across the public cloud and the public cloud we have this torrid innovation, you'll want Andy's here, challenges. You know, he's announcing 1500 new services or were extraordinary innovation and you'll same for azure or Google Ibm cloud, but it also creates the same complexity as we said. Businesses are using multiple public clouds and how do I operate them? How do I make them work? You know, how do I keep track of my accounts and users that creates a set of cloud operations problems as well in the complexity of doing that. How do you make it work? Right? And your for that. We'll just see that there's this idea cloud cost compliance, analytics as these common themes that of, you know, keep coming up and we're seeing in our customers that are new role is emerging. The cloud operations role. You're the person who's figuring out how to make these multicloud environments work and keep track of who's using what and which data is landing where today I'm thrilled to tell you that the, um, where is acquiring the leader in this space? Cloudhealth technologies. Thank you. Cloudhealth technologies supports today, Amazon, azure and Google. They have some 3,500 customers, some of the largest and most respected brands in the, as a service industry. And Sasa business today rapidly span expanding feature sets. We will take cloudhealth and we're going to make it a fundamental platform and branded offering from the um, where we will add many of the other vm ware components into this platform, such as our wavefront analytics, our cloud, choreo compliance, and many of the other vm ware products will become part of the cloudhealth suite of services. We will be enabling that through our enterprise channels as well as through our MSP and BCPP partners as well know. Simply put, we will make cloudhealth the cloud operations platform of choice for the industry. I'm thrilled today to have Joe Consella, the CTO and founder. Joe, please stand up. Thank you joe to your team of a couple hundred, you know, mostly in Boston. Welcome to the Vm ware family, the Vm ware community. It is a thrill to have you part of our team. Thank you joe. Thank you. We're also announcing today, and you can think of this, much like we had v realize operations and v realize automation, the compliment to the cloudhealth operations, vm ware, cloud automation, and some of you might've heard of this in the past, this project tango. Well, today we're announcing the initial availability of Vm ware, cloud automation, assemble, manage complex applications, automate their provisioning and cloud services, and manage them through a brokerage the initial availability of cloud automation services, service. Your today, the acquisition of cloudhealth as a platform, the aware of the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry, and we're going to do so much more so we've seen this picture of this multicloud journey that our customers are on and you know, we're working hard to say we are going to bridge across these worlds of innovation, the multicloud world. We're doing many other things. You're gonna hear a lot at the show today about this year. We're also giving the tech preview of the Vm ware cloud marketplace for our partners and customers. Also today, Dell technologies is announcing their cloud marketplace to provide a self service, a portfolio of a Dell emc technologies. We're fundamentally in a unique position to accelerate your multicloud journey. So we've built out this any cloud piece, but right in the middle of that any cloud is the network. And when we think about the network, we're just so excited about what we have done and what we're seeing in the industry. So let's click into this a little bit further. We've gotten a lot done over the last five years. Networking. Look at these numbers. 80 million switch ports have been shipped. We are now 10 x larger than number two and software defined networking. We have over 7,500 customers running on Nsx and maybe the stat that I'm most proud of is 82 percent of the fortune 100 has now adopted nsx. You have made nsx these standard and software defined networking. Thank you very much. Thank you. When we think about this journey that we're on, we started. You're saying, Hey, we've got to break the chains inside of the data center as we said. And then Nsx became the software defined networking platform. We started to do it through our cloud provider partners. Ibm made a huge commitment to partner with us and deliver this to their customers. We then said, boy, we're going to make a fundamental to all of our cloud services including aws. We built this bridge called the hybrid cloud extension. We said we're going to build it natively into what we're doing with Telcos, with Azure and Amazon as a service. We acquired the St Wagon, right, and a Velo cloud at the hottest product of Vm ware's portfolio today. The opportunity to fundamentally transform branch and wide area networking and we're extending it to the edge. You're literally, the world has become this complex network. We have seen the world go from the old defined by rigid boundaries, simply put in a distributed world. Hardware cannot possibly work. We're empowering customers to secure their applications and the data regardless of where they sit and when we think of the virtual cloud network, we say it's these three fundamental things, a cloud centric networking fabric with intrinsic security and all of it delivered in software. The world is moving from data centers to centers of data and they need to be connected and Nsx is the way that we will do that. So you'll be aware of is well known for this idea of talking but also showing. So no vm world keynote is okay without great demonstrations of it because you shouldn't believe me only what we can actually show and to do that know I'm going to have our CTL come onstage and CTL y'all. I used to be a cto and the CTO is the certified smart guy. He's also known as the chief talking officer and today he's my demo partner. Please walk, um, Vm ware, cto ray to the stage. Right morning pat. How you doing? Oh, it's great ray, and thanks so much for joining us. Know I promised that we're going to show off some pretty cool stuff here. We've covered a lot already, but are you up to the task? We're going to try and run through a lot of demos. We're going to do it fast and you're going to have to keep me on time to ask an awkward question. Slow me down. Okay. That's my fault if you run along. Okay, I got it. I got it. Let's jump right in here. So I'm a CTO. I get to meet lots of customers that. A few weeks ago I met a cio of a large distribution company and she described her it infrastructure as consisting of a number of data centers troll to us, which he also spoke of a large number of warehouses globally, and each of these had local hyperconverged compute and storage, primarily running surveillance and warehouse management applications, and she pulls me four questions. The first question she asked me, she says, how do I migrate one of these data centers to Vm ware cloud on aws? I want to get out of one of these data centers. Okay. Sounds like something andy and I were just talking exactly, exactly what you just spoke to a few moments ago. She also wanted to simplify the management of the infrastructure in the warehouse as themselves. Okay. He's age and smaller data centers that you've had out there. Her application at the warehouses that needed to run locally, butter developers wanted to develop using cloud infrastructure. Cloud API is a little bit late. The rds we spoken with her in. Her final question was looking to the future, make all this complicated management go away. I want to be able to focus on my application, so that's what my business is about. So give me some new ways of how to automate all of this infrastructure from the edge to the cloud. Sounds pretty clear. Can we do it? Yes we can. So we're going to dive right in right now into one of these demos. And the first demo we're going to look at it is vm ware cloud on aws. This is the best solution for accelerating this public cloud journey. So can we start the demo please? So what you were looking at here is one of those data centers and you should be familiar with this product. It's a familiar vsphere client. You see it's got a bunch of virtual machines running in there. These are the virtual machines that we now want to be able to migrate and move the VMC on aws. So we're going to go through that migration right now. And to do that we use a product that you've seen already atx, however it's the x has been, has got some new cool features since the last time we download it. Probably on this stage here last year, I wanted those in particular is how do we do bulk migration and there's a new cool thing, right? Whole thing we want to move the data center en mass and his concept here is cloud motion with vsphere replication. What this does is it replicates the underlying storage of the virtual machines using vsphere replication. So if and when you want to now do the final migration, it actually becomes a vmotion. So this is what you see going on right here. The replication is in place. Now when you want to touch you move those virtual machines. What you'll do is a vmotion and the key thing to think about here is this is an actual vmotion. Those the ends as room as they're moving a hustler, migrating remained life just as you would in a v motion across one particular infrastructure. Did you feel complete application or data center migration with no dying town? It's a Standard v motion kind of appearance. Wow. That is really impressive. That's correct. Wow. You. So one of the other things we want to talk about here is as we are moving these virtual machines from the on prem infrastructure to the VMC on aws infrastructure, unfortunately when we set up the cloud on VMC and aws, we only set up for hosts, uh, that might not be, that'd be enough because she is going to move the whole infrastructure of that this was something you guys, you and Andy referred to briefly data center. Now, earlier, this concept of elastic drs. what elastic drs does, it allows the VMC on aws to react to the workloads as they're being created and pulled in onto that infrastructure and automatically pull in new hosts into the VMC infrastructure along the way. So what you're seeing here is essentially the MC growing the infrastructure to meet the needs of the workloads themselves. Very cool. So overseeing that elastic drs. we also see the ebs capabilities as well. Again, you guys spoke about this too. This is the ability to be able to take the huge amount of stories that Amazon have, an ebs and then front that by visa you get the same experience of v Sign, but you get this enormous amount of storage capabilities behind it. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. I'm excited about this. This is going to enable customers to migrate faster and larger than ever before. Correct. Now she had a series of little questions. Okay. The second question was around what about all those data centers and those age applications that I did not move, and this is where we introduce the project which you've heard of already tonight called project dementia. What this does, it gives you the simplicity of Vm ware cloud, but bringing that out to the age, you know what's basically going on here, vmc on aws is a service which manages your infrastructure in aws. We know stretch that service out into your infrastructure, in your data center and at the age, allowing us to be able to manage that infrastructure in the same way. Once again, let's dive down into a demo and take a look at what this looks like. So what you've got here is a familiar series of services available to you, one of them, which is project dimension. When you enter project dimension, you first get a view of all of the different infrastructure that you have available to you, your data centers, your edge locations. You can then dive deeply into one of these to get a closer look at what's going on here. We're diving into one of these The problem is there's a networking problem going on in this warehouse. warehouses and we see it as a problem here. How do we know? We know because vm ware is running this as a managed service. We are directly managing or sorry, monitoring your infrastructure or we discover there's something going wrong here. We automatically create the ASR, so somebody is dealing with this. You have visibility to what's going on, but the vm ware managed service is already chasing the problem for you. Oh, very good. So now we're seeing this dispersed infrastructure with project dementia, but what's running on it so well before we get with running out, you've got another problem and the problem is of course, if you're managing a lot of infrastructure like this, you need to keep it up to date. And so once again, this is where the vm ware managed service kicks in. We manage that infrastructure in terms of patching it and updating it for you. And as an example, when we released a security patch, here's one for the recent l, one terminal fault, the Vmr managed service is already on that and making sure that your on prem and edge infrastructure is up to date. Very good. Now, what's running? Okay. So what's running, uh, so we mentioned this case of this software running at the edge infrastructure itself, and these are workloads which are running locally in those age, uh, those edge locations. This is a surveillance application. You can see it here at the bottom it says warehouse safety monitor. So this is an application which gathers images and then stores those images He said my sql database on top there, now this is where we leverage the somewhere and it puts them in a database. technology you just learned about when Andy and pat spoke about disability to take rds and run that on your on prem infrastructure. The block of virtual machines in the moment are the rds components from Amazon running in your infrastructure or in your edge location, and this gives you the ability to allow your developers to be able to leverage and operate against those Apis, but now the actual database, the infrastructure is running on prem and you might be doing just for performance reasons because of latency, you might be doing it simply because this data center is not always connected to the cloud. When you take a look into under the hood and see what's going on here, what you actually see this is vsphere, a modified version of vsphere. You see this new concept of my custom availability zone. That is the availability zone running on your infrastructure which supports or ds. What's more interesting is you flip back to the Amazon portal. This is typically what your developers are going to do. Once again, you see an availability zone in your Amazon portal. This is the availability zone running on your equipment in your data center. So we've truly taken that already as infrastructure and moved it to the edge so the developer sees what they're comfortable with and the infrastructure sees what they're comfortable with bridging those two worlds. Fabulous. Right. So the final question of course that we got here was what's next? How do I begin to look to the future and say I am going to, I want to be able to see all of my infrastructure just handled in an automated fashion. And so when you think about that, one of the questions there is how do we leverage new technologies such as ai and ml to do that? So what you've got here is, sorry we've got a little bit later. What you've got here is how do I blend ai in a male and the power of what's in the data center itself. Okay. And we could do that. We're bringing you the AI and ml, right? And fusing them together as never before to truly change how the data center operates. Correct. And it is this introduction is this merging of these things together, which is extremely powerful in my mind. This is a little bit like a self driving vehicle, so thinking about a car driving down the street is self driving vehicle, it is consuming information from all of the environment around it, other vehicles, what's happening, everything from the wetter, but it also has a lot of built in knowledge which is built up to to self learning and training along the way in the kids collecting lots of that data for decades. Exactly. And we've got all that from all the infrastructure that we have. We can now bring that to bear. So what we're focusing on here is a project called project magna and project. Magna leverage is all of this infrastructure. What it does here is it helps connect the dots across huge datasets and again a deep insight across the stack, all the way from the application hardware, the infrastructure to the public cloud, and even the age and what it does, it leverages hundreds of control points to optimize your infrastructure on Kpis of cost performance, even user specified policies. This is the use of machine language in order to fundamentally transform. I'm sorry, machine learning. I'm going back to some. Very early was here, right? This is the use of machine learning and ai, which will automatically transform. How do you actually automate these data centers? The goal is true automation of your infrastructure, so you get to focus on the applications which really served needs of your business. Yeah, and you know, maybe you could think about that as in the past we would have described the software defined data center, but in the future we're calling it the self driving data center. Here we are taking that same acronym and redefining it, right? Because the self driving data center, the steep infusion of ai and machine learning into the management and automation into the storage, into the networking, into vsphere, redefining the self driving data center and with that we believe fundamentally is to be an enormous advance and how they can take advantage of new capabilities from bm ware. Correct. And you're already seeing some of this in pieces of projects such as some of the stuff we do in wavefront and so already this is how do we take this to a new level and that's what project magnet will do. So let's summarize what we've seen in a few demos here as we work in true each of these very quickly going through these demos. First of all, you saw the n word cloud on aws. How do I migrate an entire data center to the cloud with no downtime? Check, we saw project dementia, get the simplicity of Vm ware cloud in the data center and manage it at the age as a managed service check. Amazon rds and Vm ware. Cool Demo, seamlessly deploy a cloud service to an on premises environment. In this case already. Yes, we got that one coming in are in m five. And then finally project magna. What happens when you're looking to the future? How do we leverage ai and ml to self optimize to virtual infrastructure? Well, how did ray do as our demo guy? Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Right. Thank you. So coming back to this picture, our gps for the day, we've covered any cloud, let's click into now any application, and as we think about any application, we really view it as this breadth of the traditional cloud native and Sas Coobernetti is quickly maybe spectacularly becoming seen as the consensus way that containers will be managed and automate as the framework for how modern APP teams are looking at their next generation environment, quickly emerging as a key to how enterprises build and deploy their applications today. And containers are efficient, lightweight, portable. They have lots of values for developers, but they need to also be run and operate and have many infrastructure challenges as well. Managing automation while patch lifecycle updates, efficient move of new application services, know can be accelerated with containers. We also have these infrastructure problems and you know, one thing we want to make clear is that the best way to run a container environment is on a virtual machine. You know, in fact, every leader in public cloud runs their containers and virtual machines. Google the creator and arguably the world leader in containers. They runs them all in containers. Both their internal it and what they run as well as G K, e for external users as well. They just announced gke on premise on vm ware for their container environments. Google and all major clouds run their containers and vms and simply put it's the best way to run containers. And we have solved through what we have done collectively the infrastructure problems and as we saw earlier, cool new container apps are also typically some ugly combination of cool new and legacy and existing environments as well. How do we bridge those two worlds? And today as people are rapidly moving forward with containers and Coobernetti's, we're seeing a certain set of problems emerge. And Dan cone, right, the director of CNCF, the Coobernetti, uh, the cloud native computing foundation, the body for Coobernetti's collaboration and that, the group that sort of stewards the standardization of this capability and he points out these four challenges. How do you secure them? How do you network and you know, how do you monitor and what do you do for the storage underneath them? Simply put, vm ware is out to be, is working to be is on our way to be the dial tone for Coobernetti's. Now, some of you who were in your twenties might not know what that means, so we know over to a gray hair or come and see me afterward. We'll explain what dial tone means to you or maybe stated differently. Enterprise grade standard for Cooper netties and for that we are working together with our partners at Google as well as pivotal to deliver Vm ware, pks, Cooper netties as an enterprise capability. It builds on Bosh. The lifecycle engine that's foundational to the pivotal have offerings today, uh, builds on and is committed to stay current with the latest Coobernetti's releases. It builds on Nsx, the SDN container, networking and additional contributions that were making like harbor the Vm ware open source contribution for the container registry. It packages those together makes them available on a hybrid cloud as well as public cloud environments with pks operators can efficiently deploy, run, upgrade their coopernetties environments on SDDC or on all public clouds. While developers have the freedom to embrace and run their applications rapidly and efficiently, simply put, pks, the standard for Coobernetti's in the enterprise and underneath that Nsx you'll is emerging as the standard for software defined networking. But when we think about and we saw that quote on the challenges of Kubernetes today, we see that networking is one of the huge challenge is underneath that and in a containerized world, things are changing even more rapidly. My network environment is moving more quickly. NSX provides the environment's easily automate networking and security for rapid deployment of containerized environments that fully supports the MRP chaos, fully supports pivotal's application service, and we're also committed to fully support all of the major kubernetes distribution such as red hat, heptio and docker as well Nsx, the only platform on the planet that can address the complexity and scale of container deployments taken together Vm Ware, pks, the production grade computer for the enterprise available on hybrid cloud, available on major public clouds. Now, let's not just talk about it again. Let's see it in action and please walk up to the stage. When di Carter with Ray, the senior director of cloud native marketing for Vm ware. Thank you. Hi everybody. So we're going to talk about pks because more and more new applications are built using kubernetes and using containers with vm ware pts. We get to simplify the deploying and the operation of Kubernetes at scale. When the. You're the experts on all of this, right? So can you take as true the scenario of how pks or vm ware pts can really help a developer operating the Kubernedes environment, developed great applications, but also from an administrator point of view, I can really handle things like networking, security and those configurations. Sounds great. I love to dive into the demo here. Okay. Our Demo is. Yeah, more pks running coubernetties vsphere. Now pks has a lot of cool functions built in, one of which is Nsx. And today what I'm going to show you is how NSX will automatically bring up network objects as quick Coobernetti's name spaces are spun up. So we're going to start with the fees per client, which has been extended to Ron pks, deployed cooper clusters. We're going to go into pks instance one, and we see that there are five clusters running. We're going to select one other clusters, call application production, and we see that it is running nsx. Now a cluster typically has multiple users and users are assigned namespaces, and these namespaces are essentially a way to provide isolation and dedicated resources to the users in that cluster. So we're going to check how many namespaces are running in this cluster and more brought up the Kubernetes Ui. We're going to click on namespace and we see that this cluster currently has four namespaces running wire. We're going to do next is bringing up a new name space and show that Nsx will automatically bring up the network objects required for that name space. So to do that, we're going to upload a Yammel file and your developer may actually use Ku Kata command to do this as well. We're going to check the namespace and there it is. We have a new name space called pks rocks. Yeah. Okay. Now why is that guy now? It's great. We have a new name space and now we want to make sure it has the network elements assigned to us, so we're going to go to the NSX manager and hit refresh and there it is. PKS rocks has a logical robber and a logical switch automatically assigned to it and it's up and running. So I want to interrupt here because you made this look so easy, right? I'm not sure people realize the power of what happened here. The developer, winton using Kubernetes, is api infrastructure to familiar with added a new namespace and behind the scenes pks and tardy took care of the networking. It combination of Nsx, a combination of what we do at pks to truly automate this function. Absolutely. So this means that if you are on the infrastructure operation, you don't need to worry about your developer springing up namespaces because Nsx will take care of bringing the networking up and then bringing them back down when the namespace is not used. So rate, but that's not it. Now, I was in operations before and I know how hard it is for enterprises to roll out a new product without visibility. Right, so pks took care of those dates, you operational needs as well, so while it's running your clusters, it's also exporting Meta data so that your developers and operators can use wavefront to gain deep visibility into the health of the cluster as well as resources consumed by the cluster. So here you see the wavefront Ui and it's showing you the number of nodes running, active parts, inactive pause, et cetera. You can also dive deeper into the analytics and take a look at information site, Georgia namespace, so you see pks rocks there and you see the number of active nodes running as well as the CPU utilization and memory consumption of that nice space. So now pks rocks is ready to run containerized applications and microservices. So you just get us a very highlight of a demo here to see a little bit what pks pks says, where can we learn more? So we'd love to show you more. Please come by the booth and we have more cool functions running on pks and we'd love to have you come by. Excellent. Thank you, Lindy. Thank you. Yeah, so when we look at these types of workloads now running on vsphere containers, Kubernedes, we also see a new type of workload beginning to appear and these are workloads which are basically machine learning and ai and in many cases they leverage a new type of infrastructure, hardware accelerators, typically gps. What we're going to talk about here is how in video and Vm ware have worked together to give you flexibility to run sophisticated Vdi workloads, but also to leverage those same gpu for deep learning inference workloads also on vsphere. So let's dive right into a demo here. Again, what you're seeing here is again, you're looking at here, you're looking at your standard view realized operations product, and you see we've got two sets of applications here, a Vdi desktop workload and machine learning, and the graph is showing what's happening with the Vdi desktops. These are office workers leveraging these desktops everyday, so of course the infrastructure is super busy during the daytime when they're in the office, but the green area shows this is not been used very heavily outside of those times. So let's take a look. What happens to the machine learning application in this case, this organization leverages those available gpu to run the machine learning operations outside the normal working hours. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into what the application it is before we see what we can do from an infrastructure and configuration point of view. So this machine learning application processes a vast number of images and it clarify or sorry, it categorizes these images and as it's doing so, it is moving forward and putting each of these in a database and you can see it's operating here relatively fast and it's leveraging some gps to do that. So typical image processing type of machine learning problem. Now let's take a dive in and look at the infrastructure which is making this happen. First of all, we're going to look only at the Vdi employee Dvt, a Vdi infrastructure here. So I've got a bunch of these applications running Vdi applications. What I want to do is I want to move these so that I can make this image processing out a application run a lot faster. Now normally you wouldn't do this, but pot insisted that we do this demo at 10:30 in the morning when the office workers are in there, so we're going to move older Vdi workloads over to the other cluster and that's what you're seeing is going on right now. So as they move over to this other cluster, what we are now doing is freeing up all of the infrastructure. The GPU that Vdi workload was using here. We see them moving across and now you've freed up that infrastructure. So now we want to take a look at this application itself, the machine learning application and see how we can make use of that. Now freed up infrastructure we've got here is the application is running using one gpu in a vsphere cluster, but I've got three more gpu is available now because I've moved the Vdi workloads. We simply modify the application, let it know that these are available and you suddenly see an increase in the processing capabilities because of what we've done here in terms of making the flexibility of accessing those gps. So what you see here is the same gps that youth for Vdi, which you probably have in your infrastructure today, can also be used to run sophisticated machine learning and ai type of applications on your vsphere infrastructure. So let's summarize what we've seen in the various demos here in this section. First of all, we saw how the MRPS simplifies the deployment and operating operation of Kubernetes at scale. What we've also seen is that leveraging the Nvidia Gpu, we can now run the most demanding workloads on vsphere. When we think about all of these applications and these new types of workloads that people are running. I want to take one second to speak to another workload that we're seeing beginning to appear in the data center. And this is of course blockchain. We're seeing an increasing number of organizations evaluating blockchains for smart contract and digital consensus solutions. So this tech, this technology is really becoming or potentially becoming a critical role in how businesses will interact each other, how they will work together. We'd project concord, which is an open source project that we're releasing today. You get the choice, performance and scale of verifiable trust, which you can then bring to bear and run in the enterprise, but this is not just another blockchain implementation. We have focused very squarely on making sure that this is good for enterprises. It focuses on performance, it focuses on scalability. We have seen examples where running consensus algorithms have taken over 80 days on some of the most common and widely used infrastructure in blockchain and we project conquered. You can do that in two and a half hours. So I encourage you to check out this project on get hub today. You'll also see lots of activity around the whole conference. Speaking about this. Now we're going to dive into another section which is the anti device section. And for that I need to welcome pat back up there. Thank you pat. Thanks right. So diving into any device piece of the puzzle, you and as we think about the superpowers that we have, maybe there are no more area that they are more visible than in the any device aspect of our picture. You know, and as we think about this, the superpowers, you know, think about mobility, right? You know, and how it's enabling new things like desktop as a service in the mobile area, these breadth of smartphones and devices, ai and machine learning allow us to manage them, secure them and this expanding envelope of devices in the edge that need to be connected and wearables and three d printers and so on. We've also seen increasing research that says engaged employees are at the center of business success. Engaged employees are the critical ingredient for digital transformation. And frankly this is how I run vm ware, right? You know, I have my device and my work, all my applications, every one of my 23,000 employees is running on our transformed workspace one environment. Research shows that companies that, that give employees ready anytime access are nearly three x more likely to be leaders in digital transformation. That employees spend 20 percent of their time today on manual processes that can be automated. The way team collaboration and speed of division decisions increases by 16 percent with engaged employees with modern devices. Simply put this as a critical aspect to enabling your business, but you remember this picture from the silos that we started with and each of these environments has their own tribal communities of management, security automation associated with them, and the complexity associated with these is mind boggling and we start to think about these. Remember the I'm a pc and I'm a Mac. Well now you have. I'm an Ios. I'm a droid and other bdi and I'm now a connected printer and I'm a connected watch. You remember citrix manager and good is now bad and sccm a failed model and vpns and Xanax. The chaos is now over at the center of that is vm ware, workspace one, get it out of the business of managing devices, automate them from the cloud, but still have the mentor price. Secure cloud based analytics that brings new capabilities to this critical topic. You'll focus your energy on creating employee and customer experiences. You know, new capabilities to allow like our airlift, the new capability to help customers migrate from their sccm environment to a modern management, expanding the use of workspace intelligence. Last year we announced the chromebook and a partnership with HP and today I'm happy to announce the next step in our partnerships with Dell. And uh, today we're announcing that Dell provisioning for Vm ware, workspace one as part of Dell's ready to work solutions Dallas, taking the next leap and bringing workspace one into the core of their client to offerings. And the way you can think about this as Literally a dell drop ship, lap pops showing up to new employee. day one, productivity. You give them their credential and everything else is delivered by workspace one, your image, your software, everything patched and upgraded, transforming your business, right beginning at that device experience that you give to your customer. And again, we don't want to talk about it. We want to show you how this works. Please walk to the stage with re renew the head of our desktop products marketing. Thank you. So we just heard from pat about how workspace one integrated with Dell laptops is really set up to manage windows devices. What we're broadly focused on here is how do we get a truly modern management system for these devices, but one that has an intelligence behind it to make sure that we're kept with a good understanding of how to keep these devices always up to date and secure. Can we start the demo please? So what we're seeing here is to be the the front screen that you see of workspace one and you see you've got multiple devices a little bit like that demo that patch assured. I've got Ios, android, and of course I've got windows renewal. Can you please take us through how workspace one really changes the ability of somebody an it administrator to update and manage windows into our environment? Absolutely. With windows 10, Microsoft has finally joined the modern management body and we are really excited about that. Now. The good news about modern management is the frequency of ostp updates and how quickly they come out because you can address all those security issues that are hitting our radar on a daily basis, but the bad news about modern management is the frequency of those updates because all of us in it admins, we have to test each and every one of our applications would that latest version because we don't want to roll out that update in case of causes any problems with workspace one, we saw that we simply automate and provide you with the APP compatibility information right out of the box so you can now automate that update process. Let's take a quick look. Let's drill down here further into the windows devices. What we'll see is that only a small percentage of those devices are on that latest version of operating system. Now, that's not a good thing because it might have an important security fix. Let's scroll down further and see what the issue is. We find that it's related to app compatibility. In fact, 38 percent of our devices are blocked from being upgraded and the issue is app compatibility. Now we were able to find that not by asking the admins to test each and every one of those, but we combined windows analytics data with APP intelligent out of the box and be provided that information right here inside of the console. Let's dig down further and see what those devices and apps look like. So knew this is the part that I find most interesting. If I am a system administrator at this point I'm looking at workspace one is giving me a key piece of information. It says if you proceed with this update, it's going to fail 84, 85 percent at a time. So that's an important piece of information here, but not alone. Is it telling me that? It is telling me roughly speaking why it thinks it's going to fail. We've got a number of apps which are not ready to work with this new version, particularly the Mondo card sales lead tracker APP. So what we need to do is get engineering to tackle the problems with this app and make sure that it's updated. So let's get fixing it in order to fix it. What we'll do is create an automation and we can do this right out of the box in this automation will open up a Jira ticket right from within the console to inform the engineers about the problem, not just that we can also flag and send a notification to that engineering manager so that it's top of mine and they can get working on this fixed right away. Let's go ahead and save that automation right here, ray UC. There's the automation that we just So what's happening here is essentially this update is now scheduled meeting. saved. We can go and update oldest windows devices, but workspace one is holding the process of proceeding with that update, waiting for the engineers to update the APP, which is going to cause the problem. That's going to take them some time, right? So the engineers have been working on this, they have a fixed and let's go back and see what's happened to our devices. So going back into the ios updates, what we'll find is now we've unblocked those devices from being upgraded. The 38 percent has drastically dropped down. It can rest in peace that all of the devices are compliant and on that latest version of operating system. And again, this is just a snapshot of the power of workspace one to learn more and see more. I invite you all to join our EOC showcase keynote later this evening. Okay. So we've spoken about the presence of these new devices that it needs to be able to manage and operate across everything that they do. But what we're also seeing is the emergence of a whole new class of computing device. And these are devices which are we commonly speak to have been at the age or embedded devices or Iot. And in many cases these will be in factories. They'll be in your automobiles, there'll be in the building, controlling, controlling, uh, the building itself, air conditioning, etc. Are quite often in some form of industrial environment. There's something like this where you've got A wind farm under embedded in each of these turbines. This is a new class of computing which needs to be managed, secured, or we think virtualization can do a pretty good job of that in new virtualization frontier, right at the edge for iot and iot gateways, and that's gonna. That's gonna, open up a whole new realm of innovation in that space. Let's dive down and taking the demo. This spaces. Well, let's do that. What we're seeing here is a wind turbine farm, a very different than a data center than what we're used to and all the compute infrastructure is being managed by v center and we see to edge gateway hose and they're running a very mission critical safety watchdog vm right on there. Now the safety watchdog vm is an fte mode because it's collecting a lot of the important sensor data and running the mission critical operations for the turbine, so fte mode or full tolerance mode, that's a pretty sophisticated virtualization feature allowing to applications to essentially run in lockstep. So if there's a failure, wouldn't that gets to take over immediately? So this no sophisticated virtualization feature can be brought out all the way to the edge. Exactly. So just like in the data center, we want to perform an update, so as we performed that update, the first thing we'll do is we'll suspend ft on that safety watchdog. Next, we'll put two. Oh, five into maintenance mode. Once that's done, we'll see the power of emotion that we're all familiar with. We'll start to see all the virtual machines vmotion over to the second backup host. Again, all the maintenance, all the update without skipping a heartbeat without taking down any daily operations. So what we're seeing here is the basic power of virtualization being brought out to the age v motion maintenance mode, et cetera. Great. What's the big deal? We've been doing that for years. What's the, you know, come on. What's the big deal? So what you're on the edge. So when you get to the age pack, you're dealing with a whole new class of infrastructure. You're dealing with embedded systems and new types of cpu hours and process. This whole demo has been done on an arm 64. Virtualization brought to arm 64 for embedded devices. So we're doing this on arm on the edge, correct. Specifically focused for embedded for age oems. Okay. Now that's good. Okay. Thank you ray. Actually, we've got a summary here. Pat, just a second before you disappear. A lot to rattle off what we've just seen, right? We've seen workspace one cross platform management. What we've also seen, of course esx for arm to bring the power of vfx to edge on 64, but are in platforms will go no. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Now we've seen a look at a customer who is taking advantage of everything that we just saw and again, a story of a customer that is just changing lives in a fundamental way. Let's see. Make a wish. So when a family gets the news that a child is sick and it's a critical illness, it could be a life threatening illness. The whole family has turned upside down. Imagine somebody comes to you and they say, what's the one thing you want that's in your heart? You tell us and then we make that happen. So I was just calling to give you the good news that we're going to be able to grant jackson a wish make, which is the largest wish granting organizations in the United States. English was featured in the cbs 60 minutes episode. Interestingly, it got a lot of hits, but uh, unfortunately for the it team, the whole website crashed make a wish is going through a program right now where we're centralizing technology and putting certain security standards in place at our chapters. So what you're seeing here, we're configuring certain cloud services to make sure that they always are able to deliver on the mission whether they have a local problem or not is we continue to grow the partnership and work with vm ware. It's enabling us to become more efficient in our processes and allows us to grant more wishes. It was a little girl. She had a two year old brother. She just wanted a puppy and she was forthright and I want to name the puppy in my name so my brother would always have me to list them off a five year old. It's something we can't change their medical outcome, but we can change their spiritual outcome and we can transform their lives. Thank you. Working together with you truly making wishes come true. The last topic I want to touch on today, and maybe the most important to me personally is security. You got to fundamentally, when we think about this topic of security, I'll say it's broken today and you know, we would just say that the industry got it wrong that we're trying to bolt on or chasing bad, and when we think about our security spend, we're spending more and we're losing more, right? Every day we're investing more in this aspect of our infrastructure and we're falling more behind. We believe that we have to have much less security products and much more security. You know, fundamentally, you know, if you think about the problem, we build infrastructure, right? Generic infrastructure, we then deploy applications, all kinds of applications, and we're seeing all sorts of threats launched that as daily tens of millions. You're simple virus scanner, right? Is having tens of millions of rules running and changing many times a day. We simply believe the security model needs to change. We need to move from bolted on and chasing bad to an environment that has intrinsic security and is built to ensure good. This idea of built in security. We are taking every one of the core vm ware products and we are building security directly into it. We believe with this, we can eliminate much of the complexity. Many of the sensors and agents and boxes. Instead, they'll directly leverage the mechanisms in the infrastructure and we're using that infrastructure to lock it down to behave as we intended it to ensure good, right on the user side with workspace one on the network side with nsx and microsegmentation and storage with native encryption and on the compute with app defense, we are building in security. We're not chasing threats or adding on, but radically reducing the attack surface. When we look at our applications in the data center, you see this collection of machines running inside of it, right? You know, typically running on vsphere and those machines are increasingly connected. Through nsx and last year we introduced the breakthrough security solution called app defense and app defense. Leverages the unique insight we get into the application so that we can understand the application and map it into the infrastructure and then you can lock down, you could take that understanding, that manifest of its behavior and then lock those vms to that intended behavior and we do that without the operational and performance burden of agents and other rear looking use of attack detection. We're shrinking the attack surface, not chasing the latest attack vector, you know, and this idea of bolt on versus chasing bad. You sort of see it right in the network. Machines have lots of conductivity, lots of applications running and something bad happens. It basically has unfettered access to move horizontally through the data center and most of our security is north, south. MosT of the attacks are eastwest. We introduced this idea of microsegmentation five years ago, and by it we're enabling organizations to secure some networks and separate sensitive applications and services as never before. This idea isn't new, that just was never practical before nsx, but we're not standing still. Our teams are innovating to leap beyond 12. What's next beyond microsegmentation, and we see this in three simple words, learn, imagine a system that can look into the applications and understand their behavior and how they should operate. we're using machine learning and ai instead of chasing were to be able to ensure good where that that system can then locked down its behavior so the system consistently operates that way, but finally we know we have a world of increasing dynamic applications and as we move to more containerize the microservices, we know this world is changing, so we need to adapt. We need to have more automation to adapt to the current behavior. Today I'm very excited to have two major announcements that are delivering on this vision. The first of those vsphere platinum, our flagship vm ware vsphere product now has app defense built right in platinum will enable virtualization teams. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's use it. Platinum will enable virtualization teams you to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise. You could see whatever vm is for its purpose, its behavior until the system. That's what it's allowed to do. Dramatically reducing the attack surface without impact. On operations or performance, the capability is so powerful, so profound. We want you to be able to leverage it everywhere, and that's why we're building it directly into vsphere, vsphere platinum. I call it the burger and fries. You know, nobody leaves the restaurant without the fries who would possibly run a vm in the future without turning security on. That's how we want this to work going forward. Vsphere platinum and as powerful as microsegmentation has been as an idea. We're taking the next step with what we call adaptive microsegmentation. We are fusing Together app defense and vsphere with nsx to allow us to align the policies of the application through vsphere and the network. We can then lock down the network and the compute and enable this automation of the microsegment formation taken together adaptive microsegmentation. But again, we don't want to just tell you about it. We want to show you. Please welcome to the stage vj dante, who heads our machine learning team for app dispense. Vj a very good vj. Thanks for joining us. So, you know, I talked about this idea right, of being able to learn, lock and adapt. Uh, can you show it to us? Great. Yeah. Thank you. With vc a platinum, what we have done is we have put in everything you need to learn, lock and adapt, right with the infrastructure. The next time you bring up your wifi at line, you'll actually see a difference right in there. Let's go with that demo. There you go. And when you look at our defense there, what you see is that all your guests, virtual machines and all your host, hundreds of them and thousands of virtual machines enabling for that difference. It's in there. And what that does is immediately gets you visibility into the processes running on those virtual machines and the risk for the first time. Think about it for the first time. You're looking at the infrastructure through the lens of an application. Here, for example, the ecommerce application, you can see the components that make up that application, how they interact with each other, the specific process, a specific ip address on a specific board. That's what you get, but so we're learning the behavior. Yes. Yeah, that's very good. But how do you make sure you only learn good behavior? Exactly. How do we make sure that it's not bad? We actually verify me insured. It's all good. We ensured that everybody these reputation is verified. We ensured that the haven is verified. Let's go to svc host, for example. This process can exhibit hundreds of behaviors across numerous. Realize what we do here is we actually verify that failure saw us. It's actually a machine learning models that had been trained on millions of instances of good, bad at you said, and then automatically verify that for okay, so we said, you. We learned simply, learn now, lock. How does that work? Well, once you learned the application, locking it is as simple as clicking on that verify and protect button and then you can lock both the compute and network and it's done. So we've pushed those policies into nsx and microsegmentation has been established actually locked down the compute. What is the operating system is exactly. Let's first look at compute, protected the processes and the behaviors are locked down to exactly what is allowed for that application. And we have bacon policies and program your firewall. This is nsx being configured automatically for you, laurie, with one single click. Very good. So we said learn lock. Now, how does this adapt thing work? Well, a bad change is the only constant, but modern applications applications change on a continuous basis. What we do is actually pretty simple. We look at every change as it comes in determinant is good or bad. If it's good, we say allow it, update the policies. That's bad. We denied. Let's look at an example as asco dxc. It's exhibiting a behavior that they've not seen getting the learning period. Okay? So this machine has never behave this This hasn't been that way. But. way. But again, our machine learning models had seen thousands of instances of this process. They know this is normal. It talks on three 89 all the time. So what it's done to the few things, it's lowered the criticality of the alarm. Okay, so false positive. Exactly. The bane of security operations, false positives, and it has gone and updated. Jane does locks on compute and network to allow for that behavior. Applications continues to work on this project. Okay, so we can learn and adapt and action right through the compute and the network. What about the client? Well, we do with workplace one, intelligence protect and manage end user endpoint, but what's one intelligence? Nsx and actually work together to protect your entire data center infrastructure, but don't believe me. You can watch it for yourself tomorrow tom cornu keynote. You want to be there, at 1:00 PM, be there or be nowhere. I love you. Thank you veejay. Great job. Thank you so much. So the idea of intrinsic security and ensuring good, we believe fundamentally changing how security will be delivered in the enterprise in the future and changing the entire security industry. We've covered a lot today. I'm thrilled as I stand on stage to stand before this community that truly has been at the center of changing the world of technology over the last couple of decades. In it. We've talked about this idea of the super powers of technology and as they accelerate the huge demand for what you do, you know in the same way we together created this idea of the virtual infrastructure admin. You'll think about all the jobs that we are spawning in the discussion that we had today, the new skills, the new opportunities for each one of us in this room today, quantum program, machine learning engineer, iot and edge expert. We're on the cusp of so many new capabilities and we need you and your skills to do that. The skills that you possess, the abilities that you have to work across these silos of technology and enabled tomorrow. I'll tell you, I am now 38 years in the industry and I've never been more excited because together we have the opportunity to build on the things that collective we have done over the last four decades and truly have a positive global impact. These are hard problems, but I believe together we can successfully extend the lifespan of every human being. I believe together we can eradicate chronic diseases that have plagued mankind for centuries. I believe we can lift the remaining 10 percent of humanity out of extreme poverty. I believe that we can reschedule every worker in the age of the superpowers. I believe that we can give modern ever education to every child on the planet, even in the of slums. I believe that together we could reverse the impact of climate change. I believe that together we have the opportunity to make these a reality. I believe this possibility is only possible together with you. I asked you have a please have a wonderful vm world. Thanks for listening. Happy 20th birthday. Have a great topic.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Live CUBE coverage at VMworld 2018 continues in a moment. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. - Hello everyone, and welcome to back to theCUBE, live coverage here in Las Vegas with VMworld 2018. This is our three days of exclusive wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, it's our ninth year covering VMworld, when Dave and I started theCUBE nine years ago, Paul Maritz was the CEO, he actually got referenced on stage by Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest Ray O'Farrel, CTO, Chief Technology Officer at VMware, keynote today on stage with Pat; great to see you again, thanks for coming on. - Really good to see you guys again. - So, reaction from the keynote was very positive. Probably, from a content standpoint, probably one of the most meatiest content pieces I've seen, mega news, serious announcement with Amazon, with Andy Jassy coming on stage releasing the Relational Database Service, RDS, on VMware, on-premises. Monster news. That is like, I don't think the world has yet felt the reverb for this thing yet. - But that was only one of the many stories. - [John] That was just one, that was just like (makes explosion noise). And then the CloudHealth acquisition, and you had tons of demos, pretty intense. - [Ray] Well, it's been- - Summarize what you did (laughs) in ten seconds. - Summarize all of that. So, you know, the key thing that we wanted to achieve with the keynote was obviously to make sure Pat drives the the vision that VMware has and, a lot of focus on that was focused on multi-cloud, this view of the world that you've now got multiple clouds emerging. And you know one of our key rules is to make sure that enterprises are able to work across all of those, networking, how we do management, how we work across all of these, and CloudHealth is a key part of that, making it easier to use cloud, in particular multi-cloud. You know as the CTO I get the fun part of tryna you know let our customers know all the cool work that the engineering teams are doing, so one of the things we want to do is make sure we put a lot of good demos in there. The feedback we get from our customers at VMworld over and over again is they want to see demos, they want to know that stuff is real. You can take a look for instance at the hands on labs. I came in here on Saturday night, walked down there about 6:30 am on Sunday morning, and there was people lining up to go in there and use those labs. So what did we talk through? Broadly speaking we spoke to how you can use VMC on AWS, and the easy way it is to migrate vSphere applications onto vSphere on AWS; we had some new features there around live migration. The next thing we spoke about was around RDS itself and what this project is about. Broadly speaking, at its most basic, it allows you to take the RDS components from Amazon but run them in your data center. With all of the implications of that in terms of how your developers work and they build those applications. We spoke about Project Dimension, which is also around a now delivery as a service, a cloud experience, but again, at your infrastructure, whether it's at the edge or whether it's your data center. And, you know we spoke about what we're doing in blockchain, some opensource components that we're doing over there. New features of Workspace ONE, particularly around the relationship with Dell, and how that will now be combined with some of their laptops And, oh and of course, what we did with some of the Nvidia GPUs, demonstrating the ability to be able to run the most sophisticated AI workloads on a vSphere environment. And I suspect I forgot something in that list, but- - [John] You're going to have to hit the pillow tonight and have a good nap, and crash. - [Dave] Project Magma. - [Ray] Project Magma which is a very future looking concept around basically where we think AI and ML is going to be used to drive a lot of the automation moving forward. - [Dave] Self-driving data center, - Self-driving data center. - [Dave] I think you'd call it (John laughs) Are they coinin' a new term there? - No it's great, we can reuse an old term, and you know rebrand it. - Auto pilot. Put your data center on auto pilot. I want to just drill down on one, on the Amazon relationship, because that was obviously the height, big news in there what you're talking about is the depth of the relationship is deep on the partnership side. I want to, and you guys, you pointed that out, I want to amplify that, but I also want to ask you around the RDS demand. You know, talkin' to some of the Amazon sources, they tell me that the demand for this was very strong, over multiple years. So, first on the RDS, the demand, some of the customer feedback, this is not just you guys in a room goin' hey, let's just do this; it makes sense, but it's customer driven. - Yeah, when you look at what VMC on AWS actually is, it's creating this bridge between the on-prem and the private cloud, sorry, and the public cloud on Amazon. But, initially most of that is really an I as relationship, yes we can move workloads, yes we can move VMs, yes we can manage networking, but one of the key things you want from a public cloud or from cloud in general is access to services. So, as we went down that first part of saying we'll give you this basic infrastructure, very quickly customers began to ask for some other things, some other aspects of that, and that of course was services. So after lots of discussions around what are services, one, that are appropriate to be able to put into this new type environment, but which had to demand RDS certainly rode very quickly to the top of that. In the end almost everybody has some form of database in their application, and so it's a very likely start for us to make them. - So I remember when customers first started wanting to run, to virtualize Oracle, with of course VMware; and Oracle, didn't really embrace that early on. They would say things, their sales guys would scare the customers, we're not going to certify it, but then some of the customers said "Dam the torpedoes, we're going to do it." it actually worked great. - [Ray] Right. - Now, I don't know if that's 'cause, just that's the inherent nature of VMware, or you guys had to do some work, so my question is: two fold, was that just the inherent nature of VMware, and what did you have to do or will you have to do to get RDS running the way that customers want it, trust it on AWS, I mean on VMware? - So, in the case of the Oracle situation, we didn't have to do a whole lot to make that happen, we were virtualizing in x86, Oracle runs on x86, and so you got that basic pattern and mix. In the case of RDS, the actual database that you're running on your VMware infrastructure, our database is such as my SQL, we run an enormous amount of those databases already, so that core aspect of getting the database running is not something that's fundamentally difficult for us to do The challenging part is, how do bridge all the management aspects of that? The RDS components, the APIs, that a developer wants to use, and which are used to using over on, with RDS on AWS, so that's where the work is involved. Now by the way, you're implying that maybe this is a future thing, right? A lot of that work has already occurred, in fact, you know the demo you're seeing is not based on this is what we could do at some possible time in the future, it is actually tied to some very close future releases. - [Dave] So recovery, I'm going to be co-, that's future release of recovery and all the things, if something goes wrong, I'm going to be comfortable as a customer that - [Ray] Correct, correct. - You're going to be backed. - Some of those things we still need to work true, because there's tons of features that you can begin to add onto this, disaster recovery, backup, all of those sort of things, and they're not all going to be there on day one, but you can expect us to continue to add all of that. - [Dave] And you'll have all of those? - Correct. - Now the other question I got to ask you is about migration. When I hear the term migration I go, ugh, you know IT practitioners they tighten up, but what I heard on stage today is we're going to make this really easy. But moving data, help me square that circle, Ray, because, you know data, people say data has gravity, speed of light, network bandwidth, proximity. What's the secret sauce that enables you guys to solve those problems? - So the core secret sauce there is if you're virtualized on VMware on-premise, and you're using VMC on AWS, the basic unit of execution is still that virtual machine, and that virtual machine encapsulates the storage, the networking, everything associated with that box, right? So virtual machines have that very core strength of encapsulating not just the application, or some aspect of the, even some aspect of a minimal piece of the operating system, it encapsulates everything which is tied into that box almost on a physical level. So when you say I'm going to move a virtual machine, you're moving the disk, you're moving the storage, you're doing all of those things. So now think of a database running in a virtual machine, it might not even be the applications, just the database, we're able to capture that and represent that as we moved the virtual machine, you're moving all of that as well. Now there's two aspects of that, one of them is moving the underlying storage, the disk, which might well be even a a virtual disk on NFS or something like that, that's slower task, and that's why we leverage vSphere replication for that. And then the final live part which is, it's always the cool part, but is in fact in this stage maybe not the most difficult part, and what we're describing here is moving the actual memory contents of a given VM and flipping it over to VMC on AWS. - [Dave] Okay, so the key there, you've got the replication piece, and then you just unhook the original and then you're up and running. - Correct. Traditional vMotion relies that both servers access the same disk, so I don't need to move the disk, in this case I need to actually move the disk, and that's what the replication does. - [John] Ray, I want to ask you about something that Pat Gelsinger kind of cheesed out on the keynote. You could tell he had so much confidence, he wanted to expand on this one section but he got a couple digs in on it but, he did point out that the telco piece was very big; and only, he had a percent, I think 10% or 20% is virtualized when enterprises are like 80, I forget what now, I forget the exact numbers but his point was: huge opportunity in telco. What was he referring to there? - So, broadly speaking, if you look across most of you know where workloads run, you look at your IT infrastructure, you look at most of the public clouds and private clouds, they're virtualized to an enormous extent. Now when you go into the telco side of things and begin to look at what's happening at the edge, what's happening in the large telco infrastructure, both, a little bit from a cloud point of view, but also from everything to do from all the services and so on that the run; much of that is not virtualized. Now we actually made a very distinct focus on that over the last few years, we created a, basically a product line and a mini business unit, focused on telco, and that's where you see products like the virtual network functions, all of those technologies coming from. But actually the key product from that area is actually VIO, VMware Incubated Openstack, that's because the telco providers, to a large degree, attempted to leverage Openstack, had some challenges of getting the reliability, the stability you need on that, so what we did was merged the hypervisor, the infrastructure of VMware, with the Openstack management APIs, produced VMware Incubated Openstack, and the telco providers are very aggressively taking that on - [Dave] Now, I got to ask ya, whaddya got against capex? (Dave and Ray laugh) Pat said "You should never spend capex for DR again." it was basically- - [Ray] Yep. So I mean, I think the key part of that solution is it is now so, I will use the word easy, the technology behind it is not easy, but it easy for an end user to be able to say: "I can connect my application from a private infrastructure to a public infrastructure, in a way which is very highly connected using NSX, which is easily replicated, which is easily moved; therefore, I now have a ready ability to be able to create DR scenarios leveraging the public cloud." It is easier than it's ever been before, so instead of building another data center to do that, leverage VMC on AWS, leverage those type of technologies to be able to do that. - Ray, can you clarify, or amplify the VMware Cloud Foundations, how does, trials and tribulations over the years has evolved, it's now front and center in the conversation. How has that evolved from a product standpoint, tech, is it integration layer, how are you guys looking at that, what is the role of VMware Cloud Foundation, and what does it mean for your partners and customers? - Yeah, so I think that, your comments about it having a a kind of an early mixed reaction or so on is actually partially because a naming challenge that we called right? VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified story where we basically take the core elements of the SDDC and we combine in management infrastructure with that, which is actually called SDDC Manager, we don't necessarily spell that out but it's combined into that. But that's the key aspect of this, and then we build architectures based on that; so VxRack is based on VMware Cloud Foundation. The infrastructure which runs in Amazon which we manage as part of the VMC on AWS is built on VMware Cloud Foundation. So it's an architectural and, it's an architectural statement as opposed to a product statement. Where the confusion arises, we also have products that people call VMware Cloud Foundation. One of the ones they're with now as an instance of that is for instance VxRack, right? Which is basically a rack of infrastructure, think of it as a really big VxRail, but it's got all of this management software combined with it as well. And actually, you know your comment about that having some mixed reaction, some of that is because of our renaming that - [John] Renaming. - we've done along the way. But that is actually growing, and quite successful product at this stage, so. - It's been getting a lot of good buzz. - It's getting a lot of good buzz, yes. - [John] And the value is what? Times in market on, on solution building, or pull out, what's the main value? - In some way it goes back to the core value of hyper-converged infrastructure, somebody else is taking care of making sure that the software components all blend together; somebody else is making sure that there's any easy way to update and manage all of these things together, and in many cases, making sure it's well integrated with underlying hardware. So it's all around making it easy to get that basic SDDC up and running. - [Dave] So I got to question on your architecture, and I honestly don't even know how to ask it, but, maybe you can help me as a technologist; you've got, you know the VMware architecture which was developed initially decades ago, and now you've got all this microservices, and Kubernetes, and containers comin' into the fore, and you see the quote unquote modern architectures, speed of deployment, software release is much faster, much more cloud-like, cloud first. How do you go from you know the historical architecture to that level, how do you bridge the two worlds? - So, as with any company, as these transitions have taken place, we've had to be able to make sure we invest in those new techniques and new technologies as well. So you see for instance VMC on AWS, you see for instance Project Tango the cloud-based VR realms product. All of those are cloud-based infrastructure using, you know those more, well I guess they're described new or modern ways of developing applications, microservices, containerized, leveraging Kubernetes and so on in the mix. So just like the rest of the industry, we've been doing the same as part of that broader sorry, that broader industry momentum. There isn't a conflict that you, I think might think is there. The bottom line is our primary purpose is to deliver enterprise software which is solid, stable, secure, easily connected to the rest of the infrastructure. And that might sound a little bit boring, but it is the thing that keeps most of the data centers running and safe. VMware's ESX architecture, VMware's VC architecture has been at the very heart of that. And while they've matured over the years, right, they're still at the very heart of that virtualization part of what we do, but all of these other things we do, what we do in terms of cloud monitoring, what we do in terms of Wavefront, what we do in terms of VMC on AWS, they're new code, new architectures, broadly expanding that story, leveraging microservices and the things you would expect in that space. - Well, and VMware has proven to the gold standard in that regard. Maybe it is boring, but it's super important. - [John] So you got some compliments on theCUBE today, for the work you guys are doing, Andy Bechtolsheim was on earlier, a well-documented career he's had he knows a thing or two about networks. He said "VMware as NSX is ..." this is a quote from today, "... is the best solution that's available today that I can use for a use case of the large numbers I have between smooth connection between on-premise and off-premise public cloud, into the future, to edge, and telco, and all other things cloud." - Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that quote. (laughs) - [John] So, instant testimonial. Okay, NSX has become really this, and Pat was giddy about this last year, he's all like, you watch more NSX, you know more goodness coming; it seems to be the center piece to the a lot of the VMware's connection strategies to cloud and other things including manageability. What's the big thing about NSX, what should people know about NSX? - I think the single biggest thing is software-defined networking had a promise, and the promise is this highly flexible, easily configured, and in many ways, automated, or policy-driven in some cases; networking infrastructure. So it's all around that flexibility and fluidity of software-defined networking. The key strength that NSX does, it delivers on that promise, so it's easy to say software-defined networking, it's not easy to build it, right? And that's where I think NSX is proving all of its strength, it is a very strong implementation; I would argue, obviously, the best implementation of software-defined networking. So that testimonial is an echo of that, it's delivering on all the things you expect from a software-defined network. - [John] And what is NSX enabling? - In terms of the cloud connectivity story which you just described a second ago, what it enables is, really in some ways, because it is not tied to a specific infrastructure, I'm able to run NSX on a public cloud infrastructure and on a private cloud infrastructure, or on a hyper-converged infrastructure, but it's essentially the same NSX. It's the same control plane, it's managed in the same way, all of those different instances know how to interoperate with each other. So what it's enabling is this massive ability to have these networks very quickly brought up, connect to each other, and reliably communicate with each other, and be managed in a unified fashion. - [John] And it's targeting one of the hardest things people are working on which is interoperability. - [Ray] Correct, it's also targeting security. I mean one of the things when we think about networking that you should never forget is this key aspect of security, and NSX is clearly targeting that as well. So some of the things, even the features you see around app defense, a combination of app defense and NSX gives you enormous power. Pat's made a good presentation today where he was talkin' about the adaptive micro-segmentation. You can only do that because you have a great NSX underlying that network. - What's interesting about the NSX, just want to get your reaction to is that that the people are talking about here on theCUBE and also in the industry is that by having the security at the application portion of it, when NSX plays, takes the pressure of the network teams; security teams can have comfort in their piece, and then, (laughs) you don't intertwine them. Is that true, or is that ...? - So I'm reluctant to say it's true because the bottom line is, everybody needs to be paranoid, right? (John laughs) So- - Well from a segmentation standpoint, form a cohesiveness, not this finger pointings, there's not a lot of, it's not thorny. - [Ray] Because it moves the networking layer up a level, and that level is closer to the application. But, when I really I looked at, I think the key strength there is because it's software-defined, because it's flexible, where you get a lot of the problems is when applications change, there's a new version of the application, or we're now popping up a new instance of the application; now because NSX is this software layer beneath that, it is able to react to that. So instead of, you know the finger pointing back to the security or networking person saying you didn't reconfigure the network to deal with my new application; instead, the application and the network are intimately bound together. Actually Pat used some phrase today where he said "I think the app is the network" and so, or something like that, he was talking a little bit differently about it, but broadly speaking that's what's going on there. It's all around the flexibility and the fluidity that you get from NSX. - [John] The application is a network! - [Ray] Correct, that's what he said, yes. - Was his word. - [Ray] Yep, yep. - Which I love, to think he's right on the money. Complex and if some services evolve, the service measure are right around the corner. - [Ray] Yeah, highly interconnected, you know what app, think of any application on your iPhone or your Android device, which doesn't rely on about 20 other applications or databases or cloud services. - [John] Well, Ray, we'll have to get you on a white board sometime, and have you do a deeper dive, love this conversation, congratulations. Final word I'm going to ask you, what is this VMworld all about on stage, if you could knot down the technical engineering successes that you've had this year, what's it about this year, what's the scene from your perspective? - So I think one of the key things is, we've got a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years, a lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day; you know, you know you spoke about NSX, NSX is now reaching a real strength right? But that's work we've had to start two and three and four years ago. So to me, that's probably the strongest thing here, products, ideas, research that we've done over the years, development we've done over the years is now becoming real, is getting out and making available to customers; and in the end, that's what we're about, tryna get those technologies to hand to customers. - [John] And we're going to do our job to share that, and we're going to be tracking the successes; and also thank you for inviting us to your radio event where you had your top scientists. - Oh yeah it was great, very good to see you guys there, thank you. - [John] Great to see the energy, and the engineering prowess of VMware continuing strong, technical team, community, and customer base. This is theCUBE, bringing you our hardcore tech coverage here at VMworld 2018, three days, we're in day one, stay with us for more after this short break. (bubbly music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.

(ubeat techno music) >> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. We're here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, John Troyer. John, good to be working with you. >> John: Ah, great to be here. >> Charlie Haney is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Dell EMC Consulting. Charlie, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> So let's see, Michael Dell the other day on theCUBE just yesterday said, look, let me make it clear, we're not trying to replace Accenture. >> Charlie: Right, that's right. >> So what are you trying to do? >> Well, look. We talk a lot about these four transformation pillars throughout the entire week around digital, IT, workforce and security transformation. And our customers are struggling with how to go through that process. And I think we have a unique opportunity to bring the technologies, whether it be hardware, software solutions across Dell Technologies together to go help them through that. And so I think it's important for Dell Technologies to have a set of consulting capabilities that has experience around those technologies and the integration of those technologies and help customers through that transformation journey while consuming our technology. And so that's where we're kind of focused. >> And is it the right inference that your real expertise is on that sort of architectural infrastructure, architectural layer, or do you seep into sort of more nitty-gritty business process type of stuff? >> No, it really probably is closer to the technology. I mean, we partner with many of the larger SIs as well to bring in a lot of their deep business expertise. We are absolutely strongest in our Dell Technologies, no one would hire us to go be an expert on someone else's technology. But if they're going to go do an Azure stack solution built on our hyper-converged platform, who better to go do it? If they're going to go do an SDDC solution with our VxRack kind of solution, embedding VMware and doing automation and orchestration, who better to go do that because those are technologies across Dell Technologies, and we have deep expertise and capabilities to go help them with that. >> So how does that generally work? I mean, you say you've partnered with some of the big guys. A lot of those times, those big guys are at the board level doing some huge transformation. And then what, do you get brought in to do that architecture layer, or does the reverse happen where you're sort of knocking on their door? How does that all shake out? >> I mean, it always depends on the customer, right? I mean, it's not uncommon for us to have a large customer who's investing substantially in an SI and/or within Dell EMC or Dell Technologies products and technologies. And so those large investments from those customers, they expect us to partner and work together to solve their problem. So oftentimes the customer expects us to partner, expects us to work and leverage the capabilities. There's a very large project that we have around data center modernization that actually Deloitte is leading the PMO and we're leading a series of technology work streams within that, and so we're working together to go solve that customer problem. >> Yeah, and they're integrating a lot of different vendors' technology as well. >> Well, Charlie, I'd love to kind of drill down on those work streams, boots on the ground kind of competencies. 10, 20 years ago, we were there and there was a lot more of people who were just shifting boxes in the channel and let's move equipment. It's much richer now, our theme this week, right, was digital transformation, making it real. It's a much heavier load, a much deeper conversation. Can you talk a little bit about those work streams and kind of the competencies that you expect your people to bring to the table and how you're working with the client organization? >> Yeah absolutely. So you've already talked to Howard, I think, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So within Howard's organization, he has a very large services organization that focuses on specific product implementation and support services, right? So 60,000 members strong with partners. And then there's the consulting team that actually augments and extends that. So the consulting team that I represent, we complement that. So when we talk digital transformation, we're talking about helping customers understand what is it to go build a cloud native application? What are the 12 factors of a cloud native application? How am I going to switch my processes to a DevOps agile process? How am I going to leverage a Dell technology platform such as PCF and Pivotal Cloud Foundry from our sister company, to go transform how I build cloud native applications? And so we have a set of capabilities in that space that would go help customers through that journey, partnering with Pivotal. >> How big is your organization right now? >> Several thousand. >> I'm kind of curious, what kind of folks are you looking for to join it? Like yeah, that's a wide range of expertise. You're looking for senior IT leaders, folks that have been doing it before? >> Yeah, usually they're practitioners that have been doing it for a number of years, although something like digital and cloud foundry, those are brand new technologies, right? So you're going to get a mixture of people that have been doing software development for a number of years, and make sure to have people that have maybe born up just recently, really growing with the industry around these new technologies. When you get into IT transformation, you're going to get some of the more hardcore data center, data center consolidation expertise mixed in with business resiliency. And then we're extending that with our private cloud and public cloud or multi cloud sort of services to federate, integrate and then move workloads across those. So as you go from digital into the data center and IT transformation, that mindset usually is a little bit different in the type of individual. >> Are you finding initiatives within your customers, you saw a couple of digital IT workforce and security. Are you finding that they're generally bespoke projects, or is a big mega project, and these are somewhat interrelated or kind of a hybrid? >> Usually, I mean, it is a hybrid. I mean, like workforce transformations sometimes is something that's unique, I would say. So someone's looking at, you know, what is my workforce, how am I going to enable my workforce, how am I going to make them more productive? You usually start out with personas and understanding their workforce, trying to align the right technologies whether it be physical or virtual with the right tools like communication and collaboration to enable them. You start to talk about digital, and it is a hybrid because it's hard to do digital transformation without having the right infrastructure underneath it and going through some level of IT transformation. And so for that, it actually starts to meld together. In fact, a lot of customers, when we talk to them around IT transformation, we talk about, thinking about your application model and helping transform that, your infrastructure transformation, as well as your people and process transformation. And those are things that you shouldn't do sequentially one after another, because you're not going to get business benefit and value until you've actually achieved that. So we actually recommend doing three of those things in sequence with one another, but then maybe chunking it up through MVP so you do it in an iterative fashion but you're hitting your people and process, your application and your infrastructure. And so that starts to then to support things like your digital transformation as you enable the technology that then is going to go right in the cloud native application. >> Let's go through a simple example, take IT transformation, something we've all sort of discussed and somewhat familiar with. You really can't do that and modernize your IT infrastructure without understanding your application portfolio. You can't really understand your application portfolio without understanding the impact on the business and the business process, right? So how far into that do you go? Where do you sort of leave off and some of your partners come in? Or could you do, maybe it's a lightweight business process touch point. How do you handle that? >> Yeah, so we're not redesigning the business process but what we're doing is, if we're looking at say application transformation within the context of IT transformation where many customers don't even know what applications they have, let's be honest. They talk about as CMDB, and oftentimes we look at their CMDB and we go inventory their environment and they're night and day different. >> They have 10 CMDBs. >> Right! So we start out usually with an application portfolio discussion around what are your key applications, what do you have, what are the dependencies around those, and then what is the right disposition as we think about those applications? Are we going to archive it, are we going to retire it? Can we consolidate it, move it? If we're going to move it, sometimes it gets into a cloud suitability study, because where should it get moved to? Are we going to modernize it? Would it benefit from being modernized with a PCF kind of platform? And that will drive those application portfolio decisions. When you get into the cloud suitability, then you're getting into the infrastructure. And am I going to do an on-prem off-prem and things of that nature as well. >> And then that example, you obviously want to understand what business processes get affected, but that's where you stop. If they have to do a business retransformation, then that's something that got to, that's a bigger fish to fry, right? >> That's correct, or we're usually partnering with someone else that's focusing on that level. >> How about security? Who are you working with there? Is it largely the CSO? Or is it still the CSOs and an IT problem, or is the scope wider these days? >> It is wider. I mean, obviously you're working with those individuals but it's so embedded in everything that you have to do today. It's not an afterthought. I mean, if you're building a private cloud within a data center, you've got to be thinking about the security inherent within that. If you're doing business resiliency, one of our biggest business resiliency offers and capabilities is around cyber recovery, which is an air-gap solution to actually have an off-premise copy with an air gap in between it because of cyber recovery issues. So everything we do has a slice of security embedded within it. >> Another question on digital. Oh sorry, John, go ahead please. >> Oh, I was just thinking about, a lot of this is discovery. There's an element of discovery to all this, right, as you go through transformation. What's going to work, what's not, unexpected problems, oh not anticipated problems. How much does this need to be driven from the c-suite from a predetermined conclusion, and how much is their discovery in the ground with the people below the c-suite and then reporting back up for support in the direction of the business? >> Yeah, we have found that it's difficult to undergo any transformation without a ton of executive and senior executive support to go through that. Anything that starts up really from the bottoms up at some point doesn't get the right level of governance and financial support to actually go through it, especially if you're thinking about doing, as I mentioned, around people, process and organizational change, as well as application and infrastructure, you could do any one of those maybe individually, but to do all of those sequentially you need a lot of strong support. And so that's really what we're trying to educate, based on our experience. >> So let's unpack that a little bit because my similar question is who's leading the digital charge? Obviously you're saying it's going to have top-down leadership, but that's a lot of Cs. (chuckles) >> Charlie: Yeah. >> Do you start with the chief digital officer? Where's the chief data officer, if one exists? Where does the CIO fit? Who's leading this? >> I mean, usually if you're focused on a digital transformation, usually it's coming to IT through the business, right? We're working with a large insurance company who's actually building a series of online banking applications using cloud native application development processes. We're teaching them DevOps, we're doing PCF, but all of that came through the business. The business says, this is what we're going to go do to actually go change how we deliver insurance in their case. >> So it's a general manager or a P&L manager or the COO? >> In this case, it was the business owner of that business unit within this insurance company driving into IT, and IT is obviously enabling them to go do that. We are working with a large gold mining company who's focused on IT transformation. They've grown through the years but they haven't actually modernized their infrastructure and they're starting to think about well, what should I be thinking in terms of cloud on-prem and off-prem? And so we went through an entire advisory set of services to help them understand, based on what your needs and requirements are, based on what you have, where you should go, what is the right multi-cloud kind of strategy for you and what is the roadmap to go do that in a realistic sense of terms? And then what would be the financial and investment to go through that process? And that was required because they had to go to their actual board to go get the investment dollars to justify that. >> So when you guys engage with customers, how does it start? What's the catalyst? I mean, as you said off-camera, you guys are talking way more about problems than you are about products. So what are some of the problems that you're hearing? We talked about at a high level digital, IT transformation, et cetera, but how does that conversation start and where does it lead? >> There's two ways that it starts, one is a customer has invested a ton in Dell products, Dell EMC products or technologies, and we find that while they're investing in all this infrastructure because they're modernizing their data center and they're going to go through some level of transformation; and then we actually strap on consulting and work our way up into well, what is the problem, why are you acquiring all this and have you thought about the following things around automation and people and process to wrap around the product installation that you're going through to actually get that value. The other is, like in the mining example, that customer actually was not a Dell EMC consumer, believe it or not. They were an underpinned account and they're like okay, we know we need to go do something, we know that Dell EMC and Dell Technologies has a suite of technologies that we should be considering. Help us understand what you've done for other customers. And it's because of that conversation that now it's leading into a complete set of product and technology opportunities. So those are the two ways, they work hand-in-hand. >> Interesting, so you're either tip of the spear where you're competing with somebody else, or you're basically brought in as part of a big deal where you're really not competing with anybody in that case, right? >> That's right, and we're just expanding and helping them hopefully realize their vision or their value sooner. >> Dave: All right, all right. Charlie, hey, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. John, thanks for hanging out with us. All right, keep it right there. But we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Vegas, everybody. We're rocking. We are rocking. Dave Vellante here with Keith Townsend. This is theCUBE, the leader, get into it! Live tech coverage. (laughing) >> We in the club! >> We are in the club. The Chads are here, Chad Dunn, Chad Sakac. Chad Dunn is VP of Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, and Chad Sakac, needs no introduction, although new role with Pivotal. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Awesome. >> It's exciting man, it's great to be back, like come on, some things change, some things stay the same. It's always good to be on theCUBE. >> So tell us about the new role, let's start there. I know you've talked a lot about it, but you haven't with me, so. >> Yeah, so, in a nutshell, as I was trying to think what do I do next in my career? You know, we had built amazing things in the converged platform and solutions division, VxRail, massive success. >> Dunn: Yep. >> Those things moving into the parts of Dell EMC for more scale and velocity, which is simple. If you imagine the future of tomorrow, you'd go and say, what percentage of infrastructure going to be hyper-converged? Answer, a lot, and it's going to need to have a velocity that's very similar to a server, because what percentage of servers are going to be HCI? Answer, a lot. And so it was a very natural kind of, time to go and say, how do we optimize this thing? And then that gave me a weird, unique, once in a lifetime moment, where I could go and say, what do I want to do? My wife said, I'm telling you a long answer, and you probably want the short one. My wife said-- >> Dunn: You don't know any other kind. (laughing) >> This is Chad skills. >> "Chad, you've been on the road for 13 years, "your children are now 12 and 14, "they're going to be here in the nest "for like another four years, "take time off, I'll go out to work, "you be a stay-at-home dad." That was actually, like, option A. Option B was, there's so much cool stuff going on in the ecosystem, join a startup, do a CEO gig, whatever, and then stay in the family and a ton of support from Michael and from Jeff Clarke and from Pat Gelsinger and Rob Mee, and there was, like, do this at Dell EMC, do this at VMware, do this at Pivotal. And what I realized was the Pivotal thing gave me the opportunity to do the startup-like thing, discover some new parts of my own career, so move up the stack, and do one thing that I've always done, which is be at the intersection of the companies. Because PKS is, fundamentally, an effort that is 50/50, VMware and Pivotal, just like VxRail is a 50/50, VMware, Dell EMC effort. >> Right, right. >> So it was the obvious choice and then I had to have that uncomfortable discussion with my wife that said, "Unfortunately, sweetheart, "I'm back on the road." She said, "Fine! "But at least take one month off "before you go from one thing to the other." We went to Hawaii, surfed. >> Oh nice. >> It was awesome. >> You bring the kids? >> Oh, yeah. >> Beautiful. >> It was awesome. But in any case, it's a, you know, in the same way that when we started VxRail, we were like, how do we go from a market where we're currently not the leader, and quickly accelerate, become number one, in a two-year period? And that requires running fast and iterating. The same thing goes with PKS, PCF and PAS is number one for that universe, but we're not currently number one for the enterprise container distribution. So, that's OK, I like that, now I'm determined and stubborn to make sure that PKS is the best enterprise Kubernetes and container platform. >> Chad D, you were talking off camera about the interest in VxRail, sounds like it's off the charts. >> Absolutely. I mean a ridiculous number of customer meetings that we have here at the show this week. I think it's over 200 customer meetings, just on VxRail, and VxRack SDDC, you know, the VMware hyper-converged stack. And, you know, more and more on Pivotal PCF and PKS. >> Yeah so let's talk about that. You got the guys that are sort of, born Cloud-native and the guys that are trying to transform, they need infrastructure to help them do both, they need partnerships, so lay it out for us. >> So, Keith, you and I have gone on Twitter and talked about this, there's this nature amongst the IT ecosystem, where everybody wants the answer to be A or B. >> Keith: Yes, we do. >> Right, A or B. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yeah A sucks, B is awesome. And you know, debates raged about, you remember like, the era of Doka is going to destroy VMware, you remember that? >> I remember that, seems like just yesterday. >> Because it was just yesterday. (laughing) But what's happened now is everyone's realized that's stupid, that the reality is that Kernel-Mode VMs and containers are going to co-exist, and in fact, the majority of containers are actually going to be deployed on Kernel-Mode hypervisors. >> Netflix's biggest story is optimizations from AWS. They're able to save tons of money by running containers inside of VMs. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Dunn: Absolutely. >> And, you know, I was laughed at a couple of years ago, when I said, you know what, containers and VMs go together, like peanut-butter and jelly, and it does. >> It does and so, look, does it change what people want from the Kernel-Mode virtualization layer? Yeah. So, things like DRS, that are really important if all you do is a Kernel-Mode VM is less important, when resource management is done by something like Kubernetes, but that's a refinement. And so, what we're trying to do now is now that everyone's gotten over the emotion, and what I call the bar-fights, where we're getting into stupid arguments, you know, that are not about something that matters, and now people are getting down to the brass tacks of, how do I make this go? They're realizing, I'm going to use off-prem and on-prem, I'm going to have Kernel Mode VM's and I'm going to have containers, how do I make that work, how do I build a hybrid model that will work for both of those scenarios? And then, frankly, our job as IT practitioners and the vendor ecosystem is to make this as easy as we can. >> Well, you guys know this better than I do, people want to use existing processes and procedures, they don't want to throw that stuff out, I mean I think of it, I remember Big Data and Hadoop that the killer application was sequel. Right, I mean even in the Blockchain world now. >> Sakac: Yep. >> Everybody's talking about writing in JavaScript, right, you've got expertise built up, you don't throw that away. >> No, and I think when you look at the people who are trying to deploy containers on premises, they don't want to worry about the infrastructure, right, they want to look at the new, play with the new, cool things, they want to play with Kubernetes, they want to play with containers as service. They don't want to talk about, OK, well what infrastructure do I need, how do I make those choices? They want something that is very much automated and very much scale-out so it can react the same way that their application does. >> So let's talk about that, let's talk about VxRail, Kubernetes, PKS. If I'm a Cloud-Native guy, I don't care about infrastructure but there has to be infrastructure. So where's the meeting of that conversation? Dell technologies run best on Dell technologies. >> So, again, I'm going to try and force myself to give short answers, because it's so not natural for me. I'm sorry, fellas. When Pivotal engages with the customer, we go and we say, "We give you a platform, PaaS, PKS "and the Function Service," and they say, "What should I run it on?" And the first answer that comes out of someone's mouth is it doesn't matter, you can run it on any cloud you want, which is true on one level. But then if you look at our on-premises projects, the thing that's the biggest holdup is infrastructure that is too rigid, too slow, doesn't work right, is busted. And they're like, damn it, if I want to focus my energies elsewhere, I have to have a base-stack that is just easy and done, right? >> So, help break up the long chat answers. One argument is, you know what, just give someone 128 gig VM, a bunch of vCPUs, and that simplifies the infrastructure. Where does that break? >> It breaks immediately when someone says, I need to add more total compute, or storage, or network, or memory, to my Kubernetes pot. Kubernetes goes, great, I'd like to basically make the cluster bigger, because I've got this resource demand. Then it looks down and says, infrastructure, are you there? And if the answer is, no, it's like, wah wah. Right? (laughing) So what we've managed to do is we've managed with VxRail to go and say, we've made an easy button based off of the customer-standard which is the VMware stack, it's not only something they can count on, they can easily add it, so if they want to add raw compute, storage, or network. It also adds in small increments, so you don't have to have a giant block of infrastructure to go in, you know, so you can grow your Kubernetes cluster, you can grow your physical infrastructure, simple, easy, done. And the biggest part is that Kubernetes makes deploying containers easy, however, PKS makes deploying and versioning Kubernetes easy, VxRail makes deploying and versioning the vSphere stack easy. Easy, plus easy, plus easy, equals easy. >> So is it like a quasi-elastic-beanstalk here? >> Elastic beanstalk, OK. (laughs) >> Is that fair? >> Or maybe a plastic beanstalk, where, you know, it could hold its shape. >> You know, elastic beanstalk is a PaaS, right, but the long and the short of it is is that if you get the abstraction that you need, Kernel Mode VM or container, the container is in a VM, if the whole stack is prescriptive and easy and works, then you can redeploy time, money, and resources, on the things that matter. And that Pivotal ready architecture, which is PCF, on VxRail, is that easy button on-prem. >> So, Chad, the production staff may regret me asking this question, but I have to know this. You're known in the industry for these blog polls talking about face-melting technologies. (laughing) What is face-melting about PKS, and VxRail, gimme some classic Chad. >> I'll give you face-melting. Facemelting to someone who's looking at a container platform and you're looking at Kubernetes is that without them knowing, without them knowing or doing anything, the Bosch part of what PKS does- >> Keith: Oh, Bosch. >> Is basically doing updates, like four times a day, blowing up the entire environment and recreating it and no-one has touched a damn thing, step one. The next thing that's face-melting is that their ability to update the infrastructure, can be done at tens of thousands of sites via API calls. So I'll give you another fascinating example. Kubernetes is generally thought-of as mostly a data-center thing, we've had fascinating interest from retail and other use cases, where they're like, look I get it, I want a Kubernetes, that I could deploy in a store. >> Keith: Yeah. >> And then you go and say, well, do you have a great DevOps practice in the store, in Topeka, Kansas? The answer is, no. But if I say I can basically drive all of the platform updates, including the infrastructure, at thousands of stores around the globe, that's pretty face-melting, no-one else can do that. >> Exactly, and look we see, you know, lots of pockets of Cloud Native popping up in accounts, and a lot of times IT doesn't even know where they're at. You know, these are things that are going to go from a line of business, and all of a sudden become production, have to become production, and IT needs a way to manage that. Rail gives them a way to go in and manage that infrastructure, at a scalable way, and move it from a line of business, into production. >> I'll give you another face-melting, do you mind? >> I'm not calling the shots. >> Bring it on. >> Is your face OK? >> My face is getting there. >> I want to see it like, melted Keith, just melted. People have asked me is that a good thing? And, yeah, it's a great thing. (laughing) So, we were talking about a particular customer, I dunno whether we can name them, can we name them? >> I don't know if we could, I haven't asked. >> OK so-- >> What industry? >> Financial Services. >> And, basically, they use the PCF stack on VxRail, and they're currently using it, for pre-prod. >> Exactly, so they're building all the testing applications to test their classic applications, that are running on VxBlock. >> So they've got a production environment that's like, big, classic, VxBlock, also my former baby, so and I love all my children equally, right. What they are finding is that the simplicity of the PCF on the VxRail Model, is so wonderful and fast and great. But when they want to try and do a capacity add on a VxBlock, or to do an update, like an RCM, it's a lot harder here than it is over here, right. I guarantee at that customer, what they're eventually going to discover is this has been awesome, we're going to keep using VxBlock for something else, but we're not going to deploy PCF, PaaS and PKS, on a VxBlock. >> Exactly, and this is going to trigger refactoring of all those workloads, that say, can I refactor these to be Cloud Native, right. If I can iterate my testing that quickly, can I iterate my production applications that quickly. >> And the ROI on that refactoring is? Fill in the blank. >> No, no it is like a thousand to one. So, again, this is a very hard thing to imagine. >> Talk about business impact. Not financial, but-- >> I'll give you one example that I'm so happy that they actually posted this to YouTube, because the customer's voice in this is incredible. If you YouTube, From zero to 12 million, T-mobile. OK, so this is not me saying it, you can go and you can see it themselves. T-mobile basically, and to all of you T-mobile, you know, subscribers out there, anyone of you guys use T-mobile? I use T-mobile, so, in any case, they have a single, giant, Java app that has a thousand functions in it, right. So, just imagine one app, sitting on a app server, like web-sphere or whatever, and inside that app, there's a thousand API calls, functions, and purposes, right. And because it's so big and monolithic, but this is critical, this is like the thing that runs their ordering systems and like, subscriber functions. It's the heart of the business that any time they needed to update it, to do like a patch, would take seven months. If they wanted to scale it, so like the iPhone launch is coming up, we need to get like three times as much capacity to handle all these iPhone orders in September, it would take them seven months of planning, work et cetera et cetera. >> Sure. >> Sakac: Everyone goes, I could visualize that. Right? >> Right. >> They took one function, just one, and pulled it out, and they said, we're going to do a project, we're going to take this function called, Get Usage, which, as you can imagine, basically pulls up the subscriber's usage data, and we're going to make it into a small micro-service, and we're going to run it on a PaaS, OK. Within five months, that function was getting used 12 million times a day, and they were able to do three CVE updates, so in other words, a Critical Vulnerability Patch, comes out, they were able to do it in real-time. They have eight platform operators, just eight, that are supporting 5,000 developers, sorry 500 developers. Eight, 500. Now, if you look at that and go, what does it mean for them? Well, they reduced the number of outages by almost 90%, the time for an outage went down by 63%, the developers and the dev-ops team are now happy, because this thing auto-scales itself. >> Dave: Ching ching. >> Ching ching, ching, right? >> Right, dudes, we got to go. Chad squared, thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Guys. >> You OK? >> I'm good. >> Your face is melted. >> Your face melted? >> I have water. >> Splash it on your face to bring it back. >> Really, always great seeing you guys, thank you so much. >> Thanks, Dave, it's always good to be on here. >> Thanks very much. Keep right there, everybody, we'll be right back to wrap, right after this short break. (soft music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, Dave Vellante here, with John Siegel, Vice President of product marketing at Dell EMC. John, what does it mean to be a leader in hyperconversion infrastructure? >> First of all, thanks for asking. It's been quite a year, 2017, for us. Just this past quarter, we became the leader, Dell EMC did, and the number one leader in hyperconversion infrastructure, and we want to thank, certainly, our customers out there, as well, We think it was also due to the fact that we have a full portfolio at HCI, and really strong partnerships with folks like the VMware. >> OK, so, how about workload progression? VDI was really sort of the initial sweet spot, it's true, of hyperconversion. Has it evolved, and how has it evolved? >> It has evolved quite a bit, really, I think over the past coupl years we've seen it evolve from HCI really addressing, like you said, VDI workloads, small consolidation-type projects, text EV, really, to a majority of virtualized workloads in the data center. In fact, with the announcement this week, with the support now of 14th generation PowerEdged servers, we think we've taken it to another level where, because of 14th generation power servers, we have the ability to now provide the power, if you will. The performance, and the predictable performance in particular, that workloads require, mission-critical workloads require in the data center. >> OK, so we've ticked the performance box. What about the economics piece? How is hyperconversion infrastructure helping IT operations lower cost? >> Ya know, it's I think that's one of the main reasons that HCI crossed the chasm in the past year. It's because it's become a no-brainer, from an economics perspective. As customers look to transform IT and move away from traditional IT, the TCO advantage relative to traditional IT is 30-40%. I mean, you name it. I think Wikibon's done a number of studies this year, as well. I mean, you name it, across the board. So, it's really become a no-brainer there. And it's also become very compelling relative to public cloud, as well. The on-prem model. So, if you look at whether it's traditional IT, or whether you look at public cloud, I think what we're finding now is true private cloud built on, if you will, HCI portfolio is becoming a compelling way for customers to transform their data center, and to build on top of that cloud-operating model. >> OK, so speaking of public cloud, what's Dell EMC's point of view on cloud generally? >> So, our view is that the cloud is an operating model. It's not a place. So, really, what it's all about is providing that turn-key, self service-type experience, regardless of where your data is, if you will. Whether it's off-prem, whether it's on-prem, I mean, clearly, we don't have a strong opinion of that, other than that we want to make the on-prem experience as cloud-like as possible, and we think that starts with a critical foundation of HCI. >> OK, John. You mentioned PowerEdged servers before, a lot of people say it's just servers, it's a commodity, what say you? >> I'll tell you what. So, first of all, HCI is defined by software, right? And then I think we've talked about in the past, but it's really the combination of software with hardware that really delivers that turn-key outcome that customers expect when it comes to hyperconversed infrastructure. And this announcement is really about that combination of software and hardware, and the hardware, in particular, is the star of the show. It's 14th generation PowerEdged servers. What this brings to the table is powerful, predictable performance, first and foremost. The ability, now, to support mission-critical workloads. This is something that we haven't had the ability to really do before in the past. It can now support mission-critical workloads in the data center, first and foremost. So, it's powerful from that perspective. It's purposeful, in that it can now support any configuration. We actually can support up to 20 million different configurations, I'm not kidding here, when it comes to PowerEdged configurations with VXRail, as an example. And PowerEdged, 14th generation servers are actually purpose-built for HCI. They're addressing over 150 different customer requirements out there, from performance, to reliability, to manageability, to deployment, because, typically, a commodity server's really built as a compute engine. Instead, what PowerEdge servers are about, the 14th generation ones, is they're really, literally, custom-built for HCI, and that's why we think this is going to help take HCI to a whole new level, and allow customers to now start to deploy HCI across their data center to build that foundation for the cloud. >> Excellent. I think you nailed it. To give you the last word, just maybe summarize the announcement, final thoughts, HCI, wherever you want to go. >> I'll tell you what. I mean, we're just so excited. I think HCI has, as I said, become the foundation for the cloud. And, we've got a full portfolio. We give customers choice. You know, regardless of the type of use case they have, regardless of the type of workload they have, we have an HCI answer for our customers. Some customers, for example, want to start small and grow with appliances, others want to actually transform their network, as well. So, we have VxRack, as an example, there, where customers that want to transform more of the stack. We're excited to have that as an option for customers, too. So really, across the board, we're providing anything from Ready Nodes, where customers can do a little more of the work themselves, to appliances like VXRail and Xe series, where it's a turnkey experience across a server the compute and storage, all the way up to VxRacks, where we're making the entire data center, if you will, turnkey, as a foundation for that cloud-operating model. >> OK, awesome. Let's see, I lied. Last word is mine. CrowdChat on December 1, where it's kind of an ask me anything on the announcement. >> Ask me, ask Chad, ask whoever anything. >> Great, and then where do people go to get more information? >> Dellemc.com/HCI. We keep it simple, my friend. >> That's great. John, thanks very much. Appreciate ya comin. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. And we're talking about next generation VxRail product came out almost two years ago. Colin, I want to poke at it a little bit and challenge you somewhat. A lot of people would say great, you know, you've got a great portfolio, awesome company, you're number one, but you're really trying to lock me into VMware at your sister company. You know, Michael Dell owns both companies, what do you say to that? >> Well, I mean, VxRail is jointly developed with VMware. That's a fact. It is the, as such, is the best hyper-converged appliance for VMware environments. And it does require you to run vSphere. But, that isn't necessarily a lock-in. When I talk to customers about this, I always phrase it as, it's a matter of ecosystem choice. And whatever product you purchase today, be it a laptop, be it a phone, you're not just choosing that product, you're choosing the ecosystem behind it. And, the VMware ecosystem is incredible. It's huge, the number of developers, the number of third-party applications, all the support for it is incredible. So, it's not about vendor lock-in, it's about are you choosing an ecosystem that is large enough to support you? Are you choosing an ecosystem that has all of the other third-party vendors? You know, to go to the phone analogy, right, I mean there are phones that die. You know, we can talk about Blackberry or some of the Microsoft phones, that die because there was no app ecosystem for them, right. And again, you want to buy into the ecosystem that gives you the best choice. And VMware certainly is that, and that's why it's the market leader in hypervisors. >> Okay, great, okay let's talk about networking. So, one of the concepts that we talk about a lot at Wikibon is this notion of a single-managed entity, fluid pools of infrastructure, whether it's compute or storage or networking. Now when I think about VxRail, am I correct that you're basically, the networking is not fully-integrated using top-of-rack switch choice, but it's not this sort of hyper-converged infrastructure as I just described it with this single manage entity. Can you address that? >> Absolutely, the network is not included by design. What we find when talking to customers is that not all of them are ready to transform the network. So for customers who want to get started with hyperconverge, who want to consolidate their compute and storage, we have our appliance line, including VxRail. That allows customers a tremendous amount of transformation and tremendous amount of benefit. When customers are ready to transform their network as well, or if they're ready today, we have a sister product, VxRack that allows them to do that. So it's not, unlike other competitors, where they have one solution and they're pushing that one solution, we have a range of products on our portfolio that tailor where customers are along their HCI journey. >> Okay, great, another sort of knock off, if you will, is file support. It's not been something that you've offered before. Where is file? >> It has been a ding on us today. There are customers that want to do file on top of hyper-converge. And some of our competitors have beat us to market on that. However, we're announcing, along with this announcement, the ability to run IsilonSD Edge on top of VxRail. Isilon is the leading file solution on the market. Their SD Edge capability runs on top of VxRail, seamlessly integrates with the VMware environment there. Key use cases for this are edge deployments, where customers want to run compute and file together. And SD Edge has a unique advantage that no one else on the market has, is if you want to do file to core replication, you want to have a bunch of file sites in various remote locations and then you want to consolidate all back to a core location, you can do that running SD Edge on VxRail at the edge and Isilon at your core data center. >> Well, that's awesome, okay, great. I'll give you the last word. What should we know, take aways, why Dell EMC? Wherever you'd like to go. >> We didn't get to be number one in this market by accident. We started out two years ago not number two, not number three, woefully behind. And in the course of two years, through our rapid pace of innovation, really focusing on key customer requirements, not getting distracted by some of the noise in the market, and leveraging the power of our portfolio, we've delivered solutions that customers are adopting, and that are driving us to be number one on the market. >> Excellent, well Colin, thanks for your honest assessment and addressing some of these critical questions. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage at .conf2017. Splunks get together here in the nation's capital, Washington D.C. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us here for two days of coverage. We're joined now by Team Dell EMC I guess you could say. Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of VxRail Product Marketing. Colin, good to see you, sir. >> Likewise. >> And Cory Minton, many time Cuber. Colin, you're a Cuber, as well. Principle Engineer, Data Analytical Leader at Dell EMC, and BigDataBeard.com, right? >> Yes, sir. >> Alright, and just in case, you have a special session going on. They're going to be handing these out a little bit later. So, I'm going to let you know that I'm prepared >> Cory: I love that, that's perfect. >> With you and your many legions of fans, allow me to join the club. >> That's awesome. Well welcome, we're so glad to have you. You've got a big data beard. You don't have to have a beard to talk big data at Dell EMC, but it certainly is not frowned upon if you do. >> John: Alright, well this would be the only way I'd ever grow one. >> There you go. >> I can promise you that. >> Looks good on you. >> I like the color, though, too. Anyway, they'll be handing these out at the special session. That'll be a lot of fun. Fellows, big announcement last week where you've got a marriage of sorts with Splunk technology and what Dell EMC is offering on VxRail. Tell us a little bit about that. Ready Systems is how you're branding this new offer. >> So we announced our Ready Systems for Splunk. These are turnkey offerings of Dell EMC technology pre-certified and pre-validated with Splunk and pre-sized. So we give you the option to buy from us both your Splunk solution and the underlying infrastructure that's been certified and validated in a wide variety of flavors based on top of VxRail, based on top of VxRack, based on top of some of our other storage products, as well, that gives you a full turnkey implementation for Splunk. So as Splunk is moving from the land of the hoodies and the experimenters to more mainstream running the business, these are the solutions that IT professionals can trust from both brands that IT professionals (mumbles). >> So you're both a Splunk reseller and a seller of infrastructure, is that right? >> Indeed. So we actually, we joined Splunk in a partnership as a strategic alliance partner a little over a year ago. And that gave us the opportunity to act as a reseller for Splunk. And we've recently gone through a rationalization of their catalog, so we actually have now an expanded offering. So, customers have more choice with us in terms of the offers that we provide from Splunk. And then part of our alliance relationship is that not only are we a reseller, but because of our relationship they now commit engineering and resources to us to help validate our solutions. So we actually work hand in hand with their partner engineering team to make sure that the solutions that we're designing from an infrastructure perspective at least meet or exceed the hardware requirements that Splunk wants to see their platform run on top of. >> Dave: Okay, cool. So you're a data guy. >> Indeed. >> You've been watching the evolution of things like Hadoop. When I look at the way in which customers deal with Hadoop, you know, ingest, you know, clean or transform, analyze, etc., etc., operationalize, there seem to be a lot of parallels between what goes on in that big data world and then the Splunk world, although Splunk is a package, it seems to be an integrated system. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And, what are the requirements for infrastructure? >> I think that the ecosystems, like you said, it's open source versus a commercial platform with a specific objective. And if you look at Splunk's deployment and their development over the years they've really started going from what was really a Google search for log, as Doug talked about today in the kickoff, to really being a robust analytics platform. So I think there's a lot of parallels in terms of technology. We're still ... It's designed to do many of the same things, which is I need to ingest data into somewhere, I need to make sense of it. So, we index it or do some sort of curation process to where then I can ask questions of it. And whether you choose to go the open source route, which is a very popular route, or you choose to go a commercial platform like Splunk, it really depends on your underlying call it ethos, right? It's that fundamental buy versus build, right? For somebody to achieve some of the business outcomes of like deploying a security event and information management tool like Splunk can do, to do that in open source may require some development, some integration of disparate open source platforms. I think Splunk is really good about focusing specifically on the business outcome that they're trying to drive and speeding their customers' time to value with that specific outcome in mind, whereas I think the open source community, like the Hadoop community, I think it offers maybe some ability to do some things that Splunk maybe wouldn't be interested in, things like rich media analytics, things that aren't good for Splunk indexing. >> Are there unique attributes of a data rich workload that you've accommodated that's maybe different from a traditional enterprise workload, and what are those? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day any application is going to have specific bottlenecks, right? One of the basis of performance engineering is move the bottleneck, right? In enterprise applications we had this evolution of originally they were kind of deployed in a server, and then we saw virtualization and shared storage really come in vogue for a number of years. And that's true in these applications, these data rich applications, as well. I think what we're starting to see is that regardless of what the workload is, whether it's a traditional business application like Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft or it's a data application like Splunk, anytime it becomes critical to the operation of a business organizations have to start to do things that we've done to every enterprise IT app in the past, which is we align it to our strategy. Is it highly available? Is it redundant? Is it built on hardware that we can be confident in that's going to be up and running when we need it? So I think from a performance and an engineering perspective, we treat each workload special, right? So we look at what Splunk requirements are and we understand that their requirements may be slightly different than running SAP or Oracle, and that's why we build the bespoke systems like our Ready System for Splunk specifically, right? It's not a catch all that hey it works for everything. It is a specifically designed platform to run Splunk exceptionally well. >> So Colin, a lot of the data practitioners that I talk to at this show and other data oriented shows like, "Ah, infrastructure. "I don't care about infrastructure." Why should they care about infrastructure? Why does infrastructure matter, and what are the things that they should know? >> Infrastructure does matter. I mean infrastructure, if youre infrastructure isn't there, if your infrastructure isn't highly available, as Cory said, if it lets you down in the middle of something, your business is going to shut down, right? Any user can say, "Talk about what happened "the last time you had a data center event, "and how long were you offline, "and what did that really mean for your business? "What's the cost of downtime for you?" And everything we build at an application level and a software level really rests on an infrastructure foundation, right? Infrastructure is the foundation of your data center and the foundation of your IT, and so infrastructure does matter in the sense that, as Cory said, as you build mission critical platforms on it the infrastructure needs to be highly reliable, highly available, and trusted, and that's what we really focus on bringing. And as applications like Splunk evolve more into that mainstream world, they need to be built on that mission critical, reliable, managed infrastructure, right? It's one thing for infrastructure development, and this kind of happens in the history of IT, as well. It happened in client server back in the day. You know, new applications ... Even the web environment I remember a company was running, one of my clients was running a web server under their secretary's desk, and she was administering in half time. You would never have a large company doing that. >> They'd be back up (mumbles). Before you leave. >> As it becomes more important it becomes more central, but also it becomes more important to centrally manage those, right? I'm a 15 year storage veteran, for good or for worse, and what we really sell in storage is selling centralized management of that storage. That's the value that we bring from centralized infrastructure versus a bunch of servers that are sitting distributed around the environment under someone's desk is that centralized management, the ability to share the resources across them, the ability to take one down while the others keep running, shift that workload over and shift it back. And that's what we can do with our Ready Systems. We can bring that level of shared management, shared performance management, to the Splunk world. >> I'll tell you, one of the things that we talked about, we talked about in a number of sessions this week, is application owners, specifically the folks that are here at this conference, need to understand that when they decide to make changes at the application level, whether they like infrastructure or they think it's valuable or not, what they need to understand is that there are impacts, and that if you look at the exciting things that were announced today around Enterprise Security updates, right? Enterprise Security is an interesting app from Splunk, but if a customer goes from just having Splunk Enterprise to running Enterprise Security as a premium application, there's significant downstream impacts on infrastructure that if the application team doesn't account for they can basically put themselves in a corner from a performance and a capacity perspective that can cause serious problems and slow down the business outcome that they're trying to achieve because they didn't think about the infrastructure impacts. >> Well, and what they want really is they want infrastructure that they can code, right? And we talked about this at VMworld we were talking about off camera that cloud model, bringing that cloud model to your data as oppose to trying to force your business into the cloud. So what about Ready Systems mimics that cloud model? Is it a cloud like infrastructure? Wondering if you could talk-- >> Yeah, I think it's that cloud like experience. Because we know we're in a multi cloud world, right? Cloud is not a place, cloud is an operating model, right? And so I think that the Ready Systems specifically provides a couple of things that are that cloud like experience, which is simple ordering and configuration and consumption that is aligned to the application, right? So we actually align the sizing of the system to the license size and the expected experience that this one customer would have so they get that very curated bespoke system that's designed specifically for them, but in a very easy to consume fashion that's also validated by the software vendor, in this case Splunk, that they say, "These are known good configurations "that you will be successful with." So we give customers that comfort that, "Hey, this is a proven way "to deploy this application successfully, "and you don't have to go through "a significant architecture design concept "to get to that cloud like experience." Then you layer in the fact that what makes up the Ready System, which is it is a platform powered by, in the VxRail case powered by VMware, right, ESX and vSAN, which obviously if you look at any of the cloud providers everything is virtualized at the end of the day for the most part, or at least most of the environments are. And so we give, and VMware has been focused on that for years and years of giving that cloud like experience to their customers. >> You talk about, you mentioned selling, sort of reseller, you've got this partnership growing, you're a customer. So, you have all these hats, right, and connections with Splunk. What does that do for you you think just in general? What kind of value do you put on that having these multiple perspectives to how they operate whether it's in your environment or what you're doing for your customers using their insights? >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day we're here to make it simpler for customers. So if we do the work, and we invest the time and energy and resources in this partnership, and we go do the validation, we do the joint engineering, we do the joint certification, that's work that customers don't have to do, and that's value that we can deliver to them that whatever reason they buy Splunk for whatever workload or business outcome they're trying to achieve, we accelerate it. That's one of the biggest values, right? And then you look at who do they interact with in the field? Well, it's engineers from our awesome presales team from around the world that we've actually trained in Splunk. So we have now north of 25 folks that have Splunk SE certifications that are actually Dell EMC employees that are out working with Splunk customers to build platforms and achieve that value very, very quickly. And then them understanding that, "Oh, by the way, Dell EMC is also a user of Splunk, "a great customer of Splunk "and a number of interesting use cases "that we're actually replatforming now "and drinking our own Kool Aid so to say," that I think it just lends credibility to it. And that's a lot of the reason why we've made the investments in being part of this awesome show, but also in doing things like providing the applications. So we actually have four apps in Splunkbase that are available to monitor Dell EMC platforms using Splunk. So I think customers just get a wholistic experience that they've got a technology partner that wants to see them be successful deploying Splunk. >> I wonder if we could talk about stacks, because I've heard Chad Sack-edge talk about stack wars, tongue and cheek, but his point is that customers have to make bets. You've heard him talk about this. You've got the cloud stacks, whether it's Azure or AWS or Google. Obviously VMware has a prominent stack, maybe the most prominent stack. And there's still the open source, whether it's Hadoop or OpenStack. Should we be thinking about the Splunk stack? Is that emerging as a stack, or is it a combination of Splunk and these other? >> You know, we actually had that conversation today with some of the partner engineering team, and I don't know that I would today. I think Splunk continues to be, it's its own application in many cases. And I actually think that a lot of what Splunk is about is actually making sure that those stacks all work. So there was even announcements made today about a new app. So they have a new app for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, right? So if you think about stacks for application development, if you're going to hit push on a new application you're going to need to monitor it. Splunk is one of those things that persistent. The data is persistent. You want to keep large amounts of data for long periods of time so that you can build your models, understand what's really going on in the background, but then you need that real time reporting of, "Hey, if I hit push on a Cloud Foundry app "and all of a sudden I have an impact "to the service that's underlying it "because there's some microservice that gets broken, "if I don't have that monitoring platform "that can tell me that and correlate that event "and give me the guidance to not only alert against it "but actually go investigate it and act against it, "I'm in trouble." The stacks, I think many of them have their own monitoring capabilities, but I think Splunk has proven it that they are invested in being the monitoring and the data fabric that I think is wanting to help all the stacks be successful. So I don't necessarily put it in the stack. And I kind of don't put Hadoop in its own stack, either, because I think at the end of the day Hadoop needs a stack for deployment models. So you may see it go from a physical construct of being, a bit trying to be its own software that controls the underlying hardware, but I think you're seeing abstraction layers happen everywhere. They're containerizing Hadoop now. Virtualization of Hadoop is legit. Most of the big cloud providers talk about the decoupling of compute from storage in Hadoop for persistent and transient clusters. So I think the stacks will be interesting for application development, and applications like Splunk will be one of two things. They'll either consume one of those stacks for deployment or they'll be a standalone monitoring tool that makes us successful. >> So you don't see in the near term anyway Splunk becoming an application development platform the way that a lot of the-- >> Cory: They may have visions of it. That's not, yeah. >> They haven't laid that out there. It's something that we've been bounding around here. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting. Again, I think it goes back to .. Because the flexibility in what you can do with Splunk. I mean we've developed some of our own applications to help monitor Dell EMC storage platforms, and that's, it's interesting. But in terms of building what we'd I guess we'd consider like traditional seven factor app development, I don't know that it provides it. >> Yeah, well it's interesting because, I'm noodling here, Doug Merritt said, "Hey, we think we're going to be the next five billion, "10 billion, 20 billion dollar ecosystem slash company," and so you start to wonder, "Okay, how does that TAM grow to that point? That's one avenue that we considered. I want to talk about the anatomy of a transaction and how that's evolved. Colin, you mentioned Client Server, and you think about data rich applications going from sort of systems of record and the transactions associated with that. And while there were many going to Client Server and HTTP, and then now mobile apps really escalated that. And now with containers, with microservices, the amount of data and the complexity of transactions is greater and greater and greater. As a technologist, I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. >> Yeah, I think as we kind of go down a path of application stacks are interesting, but at the end of the day we're still delivering a service, right? At the end of the day it's always about how do I deliver service, whether it's a business service, it's a mobile application, which is a service where I could get closer to my customer, I could transact business with them on a different model, I think all of it ... Because everything has gone digital, everything we do is digital, you're seeing more and more machines get created, there's more and more IP addressed devices out there on the planet that are creating data, and this machine generated data deluge that we're under right now it ain't slowing down, right? And so as we create these additional devices, somebody has got to make sense of this stuff. And if you listen to a lot of the analysts they talk about machine data is the most target rich in terms of business value, and it's their fastest growing. And it's now at a scale because we've now created so many devices that are creating their own logs, creating their own transactional data, right, there's just not that many tools that out of the box make it simple to collect the data, search the data, and derive value from it in the way that Splunk does. You can get to a lot of the things that Splunk can deliver from an outcome other ways with other platforms, but the simplicity and the ability to do it with a platform that out of the box does it and has a vibrant community of folks that will help you get there, it's a pretty big deal. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting. I don't know, like under the covers microservices are certainly interesting. They're still services. They're just smaller and packaged slightly differently and shared in a different way. >> And a lot more of them. >> Yeah, and scaled differently, right? And I totally get that, but at the end of the day we're still from a Splunk perspective and from a data perspective, we've still got to make sense of all of it. >> Right, well, I think the difference is just the amount of data. You talked about kind of new computing models, serverless sort of, stateless, IoT coming into play. It's just the data curve is reshaping. >> Well, it's not just the amount of data, it's the number of sources. The data is exploding, but also, as Cory mentioned, it's exploding because it's coming from so many places. Your refrigerator can generate data for you now, right? Every single ... Everything that generates Internet, anything doing anything now really has a microprocessor in it. I don't know if you guys saw my escape room at VMworld. There were 12 microprocessors running this escape room. So one of the things we played about doing was bring it here and trying to Splunk the escape room to actually see real time what the data was doing. And we weren't able to ship it back from Barcelona in time, but it would've been interesting to see, because you can see just the centers that are in that room real time and being able to correlate all that. And that's the value of Splunk is being able to pull that from those disparate sources altogether and give you those analytics. >> Yeah, it's funny you talk about an IoT use case. So we've got these... Our partner, who's a joint partner of both Dell EMC and Splunk, we actually have these Misfit devices that are activity trackers. And we're actually-- >> Misfit device? >> Misfit. Yeah, it's a brand. >> John: Love it. >> It's fitting, I think. But we have these devices that we gave away to a number of the attendees here, and we actually asked them if they're willing to participate. They can actually use the app on your phone to grab the data. And by simply going to a website they can allow us to pull the data from their device about their activity, about their sleep. And so we actually have in our booth and in Arrow's booth we're Splunking Conf and it's called How Happy is Conf? And so you can actually see Splunk running, and by the way, it's running in Arrow's lab. It's running on top of Dell EMC infrastructure designed for Splunk. You can actually see us Splunking how happy conf attendees are. And we're measuring happiness by their sleep. How much sleep-- >> John: Sleep quality and-- >> The exercise, the number of steps, right? So we have a little battle going between-- >> Is more sleep or less sleep happy? >> Are consumption behaviors also tracked on that? I just want to know. I'm curious. >> It's voluntary. You'd have to provide that. >> Alright, because that's another measure of happiness. >> It certainly is. But it's just a great use case where we talk about IoT and the number of sources of data that Splunk as a platform ... It's very, very simple to deploy that platform, have a web service that's able to pull that data from an API from a platform that's not ours, right, but bring that data into our environment, use Splunk to ingest and index that data, then actually create some interesting dashboards. It's a real world use case, right? Now, how much people really want to (mumbles) Splunk health devices we'll determine, but in the IoT context it's an absolute analog for what a lot of organizations are trying to do. >> Interesting, good stuff. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Cory, it's probably not the real deal, but as close as I'm going to go. Good luck with your session. We appreciate the time to both of you, and you and your Misfit. Back with more here on theCUBE coming up in just a bit here in Washington D.C. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: 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, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're live here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage three days wall to wall. On our third day, I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Next guest Pai, who's the Vice President of Alliances and Business Development at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> We cover you user conference, but we're here at VMworld, which is VM ware's conference. >> Yes. >> You guys have a relationship, this is multiple years here. Just give a history, you guys are now a public company, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> You're doing well. Almost a year now. >> Tell us about the history with VMware and VMworld. >> Absolutely. I think our company was built on the fact that virtualization is going to be the future of the data center. Right? And if you look at the evolution over the last few years, that's been validated. We've been a partner with VMware since almost the inception of the company when we came out in 2010 2011. And in 2011, and we've now been in, this is our the seventh year. And we continue to see great momentum with our customers, and our partners, for that matter. As the seventh year, we are very much aligned with how the world is going. You know, hybrid cloud, in our multi-cloud world, and if you look at what we've done with our platform be it hyper-converge or the evolution of where that's going on with our role as Enterprise Cloud OS, we see a lot of synergy in terms of how VMware's approach to a software designed data center. And where we see the world going, "Hey everything needs "to be software defined. "And the architecture that's underneath that, needs to be invisible to customers. I think that's aligning very well, so it's happy to be here and our customers are very happy to see us here, and see both of us working closer together. >> And it's certainly been interesting to see the evolution of the partnership with VMware. When you guys first came out, I was like, "Wow "hot new company, come on in, infrastructure company." And then people realized, "Wow, this hyper-converged infrastructure thing, is really hot. "We should be doing that too." We remember we had Dheeraj on, right after there was a VxRack announcement, and he was welcoming it in, validation of course. First of all it's true, and that's what any smart CEO would say. But then it got very interesting when you guys announced Acropolis. And when everyone was pivoting to hyper-converge, you were pivoting to cloud. So what's behind that trend? How is that going? What are customers telling you? >> Sure. It's a great analogy of how we see the world. If you look how Nutanix germinated early in 2009, there where a couple of key trends in the market. When a public cloud was trying to become a very, very strong direction of where our customers wanted to go. Right? And if you look at what that direction meant, it was simplicity, so I can transmit through a single API, I can make infrastructure invisible, so I can therefore focus on the business and the business application that drives my business. And that's been the direction that we've taken. How do you make things simple for customers? And hyper-converge is an element of driving that simplicity. At an infrastructure level, we would drive that simplicity. And we've taken that theme and driven that all the way though, where we believe that, if you look at our fundamental team, as a Company (mumbles) cloud OS. Which is customers like cloud, but at the same time the direction they want to go is, "Take my applications, "Take it off premise in to a public cloud, "but the benefits of what public clouds mean. "I want it in my data center. "I can start small, grow at my space, have everything "simple to deploy." And that's been the direction we have continued to focus on. And that directionally has provided the true north of how we build our operating system stack. >> So on the customers side, I want to get your take on somethings. You guys have been very customer focused. First of all, you've been great technology, had a unique thing that no one saw, by the way. When we first interviewed Dheeraj, we're like, "This is going to be big." And just like my conversation with Andy Jassy at Amazon, the big winners are the ones who are misunderstood at the beginning. And then it becomes clear, "Why didn't we think of that?" Well, he did all the work. But you guys have to be customer focused. >> Absolutely. The success of VMware the success of Amazon, the success of you guys is to be customer focused. So I've got to ask you. "What are the VMware customers asking you, Nutanix, "to do for them?" What are some of the use cases? Where are you winning? And what does it mean for their customers? >> That's a great question. I think for us, the fundamental driver, what we try to do for customers, is, "How do we make things simple for them?" By simplicity, if you look at what we do is, for example, I'll give a simple analogy. One of the ways that we help our customers simplify infrastructure deployment, is make it a simple upgrade. So we have this concept of one-click upgrade. So what does that mean? What that means is, if a customers has an ESX running at say five dot five, and wants to move to six dot zero, the ability for them therefore to do that non destructively, so with a one click upgrade at a 3:00 p.m on a Wednesday afternoon, they can now upgrade the infrastructure. It upgrades the hypervisor, upgrades our software stack, upgrades the flash drives inside the system, and that ability to simplify a deployment of a VMware infrastructure becomes very easy for them. When they're running Vserv, they say we can more enable them at stacks. That ability to therefore make that simpler is a direction we want to make. Make go. So how do you make things simpler when they're running VMware environment? How do you make it simple to deploy in the EC application? Which is why, if a customer is running Horizon View and they want to deploy Nutanix, our deploy hyper-converge, we make it extremely simple to do that. So you can start small and still go from 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 with just a plug and play architecture, and the one click upgrade of the software stack that sits on top of the infrastructure. So that is simplicity we want to bring to our customers. >> So Pai, we had an interesting, Stu and I, John, we were at Dot Next, interesting conversation with Sunil Polepalli. >> Yeah. >> He had said at the time ... go back. You guys were doing really well and you could've exited the market, he said. We chose not to. We said, "Let's roll the dice and really go for it." That puts pressure on you and your colleagues, you in particular, as a business development executive For TAM expansion, of course the CEO as well. Very important that you now, if you're really going to go for the next level, you got to expand your TAM. And that took several forms. There was the Acropolis piece that got you into the cloud and multi-cloud business, that's clear. There were also an increased number of partnerships. Obviously the Dell partnership, Lenovo partnership, IBM with Picciano's group, very strategic relationships. And then of course, other go to market activities. >> Absolutely. >> I wonder if you could talk about that TAM expansion strategy as an individual who is at the heart of that. And take us through that and the process. >> Sure. Nobody can do this alone nowadays. It's a league of nations methodology, you have to leave in a cooperative world. You have to find a way to grow your market in a way that you can't do it alone. And we recognized that early on. And Deeraj, with the way he's built the business, it's about you can't do it alone. We were a small company back in 2010,. Yeah, we have the vision, but how do you execute in a way that we can take that vision, deliver it to thousands and thousands of customers. We have a multi-faceted go to market strategy, if you want to call it that. We depend very heavily on our partners to make us successful. Be that channel partners that have built up business on Nutanix. Be that the Sirius's of the four sides of the world, or companies like that. Be that as a segment, a part of our OEM strategy. When you have a software that simplifies customer's lives, you want to get it to them as quickly as possible. And I think Dell was early on in seeing that vision and saying, "Okay, I want to bring "that value to the customers." And Dell and Lenovo jumped on early on. Dell about four years ago almost, I'm thinking about how long it's been. And Lenovo a couple of years ago. And really, it allows us to reach a larger swath of customers globally much earlier. And give them the technology allowing them to differentiate themselves over the other, who receives as them, so that they're competitors. It gives them that differentiating factor. So it's a marriage of equals from a technology perspective and from a distribution perspective. If you look at what we did in terms of our technology partnership ecosystem, customers recognize that we're not the only game in town. They want us to partner with their strategic vendors and technology partners. So we built a very strong technology ecosystem. I think a couple of months you interviewed Laura Padilla on my team, on what the technology of the ecosystem does for our customers. Every customer conversation is less about, "Gee, "I like Nutanix, and here's what I want you to do more of." Which is obviously what they would love to do, but at the same time they respect what we do with VMware. Well what are we doing with >> It's a multi vendor world. No one company will dominate anymore. >> Correct. Correct. Exactly. >> Tell of the channel how you guys distribute, you rely on partners. >> Absolutely. >> On the sales side, is it direct? Indirect? What's the mix of business? >> So we don't sell direct. We only go through our channel partners. We have a strong channel partner ecosystem. >> So no direct sales. No one takes orders direct. >> No. Our sales guys work very closely with the channel partners, and they work very closely both with OEM's, and our channel partners. And both of them, for all of our OEM partners, they need to work with us when they're engage us in to a customer conversation, so that they can provide the best solution possible. So they don't go in rogue and say, "Here's Nutanix." And that creates conflict with the customer. >> This channel conflict is a disaster. >> Absolutely. So we maintain that >> How about professional services? Do you push that out to the partners as well? >> As much as possible. We have our own. So we have a services arm. Because at the same time, customers say, "Look. If I've got "Nutanix who's the best leader in understanding what "a technology is." We also have a services arm that allows us to lead with our conversation, but we train our channel partners with that same enablement technology. Saying, "You know what? "We can do it on our own, but we want you to lead that charge." As you know, channel partners lead a lot on services to drive their revenue. So it's not just about product and market, more it's about services, revenue; they can drive it at annuity level. We try the balancing act where we can lead the charge in technology for our customers, but at the same time lean on our channel partners to take that burden on, and therefore drive value for them as well. >> So while it's a multi vendor world, we certainly recognize that, again I come back to the decision that you guys made to be a leader. We sort of had a similar conversation with Robin Matlock, if you look at VMware, they want to be a leader. You have a particular opinion and point of view in the marketplace. And you're putting that forth. You really want to be the center point of management for multi clouds, from a data management perspective. >> Yes. >> And you're certainly growing from the point of your core customer base. That's a big ambition. >> It is a big ambition. >> Maybe we can talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. Our ambition is, if you look at the public cloud, you know five seven years ago, you just brought it up earlier. The ambition is very aggressive. And similarly, if you look at our ambition, we believe that methodology of making things simple for our customers. That does not stop at the hyper-converged world. It starts bleeding in to all the things that make operational complexity a burden for our customers, so they can focus on the business. When you start beating in to what that means, it means addressing some of the layers that make things complex for customers. So if you take your smart phone, all these hundreds of applications you may load on, those are all individual components that make your life easier. But how you bring that simplicity where you one click and you do things. So that's the germination of our methodology of the public cloud is transacted through a single API, but in the world of enterprise, you have hundreds of different vendors that need to work together to deliver the single API. Some of the new technologies we've learned, some of the new products we've launched, Is to bring that simplicity back into light. Be it on an application level. Be at an orchestration level. Or be it an infrastructure level. All those elements need to work together, through a single API for example, to make that simple. So customer's can't say, "I've got Nutanix, but Nutanix "is not the only infrastructure I have. Nutanix "is not just only ... "VMware is not the only hypervisor, I have." So how do I now bring that bridge together, so back to the multi vendor world, I can transact through Dell but I want to buy VMware, but run it on Nutanix, and use this orchestration layer, and go to the public cloud in a hybrid cloud world. And I've offices on oil rigs that need to be treated the same level as someone sitting in a data center. It's a complex world and you need to bring and have an opinionated design at some level, to bring that simplicity in and then diverge outside from that through an API based approach, to say, "You know what? We're not the only game in town." It needs to make sure that other companies can inter-operate, but make thing simple when you are in an opinionated world. >> And let the customer decide. Bringing your simplicity mantra to that world and say, "We think we're the best, here's why, "try it and see for yourself." >> Exactly. Right. So if you look at the new world, the new inner tagline is (mumbles) one OS, one click. That one click drives a lot of our methodology, making things simple. And one OS drives the ability for us to make that simple across the infrastructure stack, which bleeds from the public cloud approach, of what people are starting to like. >> Well Pai, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate the insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Great conversation with the time we got. >> It's great to see you again. Of course Nutanix, there's a lot of coverage on SiliconANGLE dot com, and Wikibon dot com, on YouTube a lot of great content from the next conference. >> Big plug for your show in Nice this fall. >> Yes. >> You guys will have the international conference >> Thank you for bringing that up. DotNext Nice. It's our second year in Europe and our third conference. It's in Nice, November 6th through the 9th, we look forward to having all of our customers there, and learn more about Nutanix and where we're going. >> And Stu will be there to cover it. >> Yes. >> And you guys just a plug on for that. You guys do a good job, great content, and nice digs. You always have it in a great place. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Customer or want to be a customer they have a good deal going on there. We're out of time. Thanks, Pai, for coming on. >> Thank you for being part of that journey, as well. >> That's theCUBE coverage of VMworld 2017. Nutanix, a great pioneer in the space, under the great entrepreneurial leader, Dheeraj Pandey. More CUBE coverage, after this short break. >> Thank you very much. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMWorld 2017 brought to you by VMWare. And its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas for VMWorld 2017. We are on the floor. I'm John Furrier with the Cube with Dave Vellante our next guest is Juan Vega director ready solutions product manager for Dell EMC. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. For my first time, really looking forward to it. >> Okay first what's ready solutions mean? >> So ready solutions are literally a bunch of services that we apply to infrastructure to help build confidence, convenience, and a better customer experience. For folks who are consuming a do-it-yourself, who want to take a do-it-yourself approach to converge systems or SDDS. >> John: So I got the button that says Node-a-Rama. What does that that button? >> Node-a-Rama well, we're launching a bunch of nodes this year right. We have a lot of nodes that we're putting out there for a variety of workloads including vSAN right and with vSAN we're introducing 14 G technology to this you know this show. We just launched it recently and we're bringing lots of new performance technologies in that 14 G space. It'll help a bunch with software defined storage. >> Node-a-Rama, John likes developers, he thought it was node JS or something, he was getting excited. So I wonder if you could talk to something that we've been addressing all week here on the Cube. You see in VM Ware's results a lot of momentum and it's not just, doesn't look like it's a one quarter, I mean three quarters of growth appears to be some momemtum. The AWS deal sort of clarified for customers the Cloud strategy and I think the other piece that we've been talking about is the reality that customers have that you're not able to reform their business and stick it in the Cloud. They're really trying to take the Cloud model and bring it to their data and in order to do that they need simplification. So first of all do you buy that and what are you guys doing to facilitate that? >> I absolutely buy it. I mean if I look at Dell EMC's capabilities across the spectrum right, there's a broad variety of services that we can offer a customer to help them adopt that technology right. We call it sort of absorbing their tech debt as it were. And we can do that from very basic do-it-yourself hardware infrastructure right all the way up through you talked to Colin earlier today and we talked about VxRail and VxRack. We're actually providing sort of life cycle management for those environments. With ready nodes and ready bundles, between those two. There's a little bit more service, a little bit more confidence, a little bit more convenience, a little faster time to value right, on that infrastructure, without really moving the customer to a, an environment where we manage it for them. >> Okay and so why do you need to do that you know? I though VMWare was so simple, push a button and go. Talk about sort of how you're closing that gap. >> It can be simple and once you're in the virtualization layer it absolutely is simple but there's a relationship between the virtualization layer and the hardware that has to be maintained. So why is there an HCL right? Why is, why do we that? Because there's a known relationship between that software and that hardware that enables that virtualization. We're making that easier and easier for customers all the time. >> And virtualization does not equate to Cloud. >> Juan: Of course. >> So how do you look at Cloud. How do you sort of, I don't want to get into what do you define as Cloud but, at what point do customers say yes, this is a viable alternative for me to attack my IT labor problem, to for me to tick the box with my management that I'm you know cutting cost. You know et cetera, what are those attributes that you are driving toward that you see customers demanding today? >> Well I see that space evolving right. And the part that we're focusing on ready nodes, is really focused on that software defined storage component. So as that piece of the puzzle evolves, all right we're trying to remove complexity in that environment right. Go back to that ability to confidently present you with a hardware solution that is absolutely adapted for that software environment. Make it faster time to value so that it's showing up pre-configured with services that help you enable that environment more quickly right and then should something need to be done, you know downstream, say a drive fails or whatever right, we can provide a better support experience by contextualizing that hardware in that environment. So it's a space for customers who are still very much doing it themselves, very much building their own environment right in the software defined storage space. But we're providing a set of services that increase that confidence for them right and make it more convenient, give them a better experience. >> It's interesting you know, this is our eighth VM World. Dave and I have been here since 2010. It's been great run, thank everyone for watching the Cube, we love coming every year. But it's been interesting watching the journey. Software defined data center, the hype was what five years ago? Maybe four years ago. But now it's reality. NSX is baked in there, crown jewel. Crowd native coming in over the top. vSAN has been like this rising star. Server SAN from Wikibon has crushed it on the research side. But I got to ask you, now we're hearing customers deploy new use cases under digital transformation that merged software stacks with hardware stacks. What is the biggest challenge that customers have 'cause they want more vSAN. How are you guys helping customers get more vSAN and what are some of the key challenges that you guys solve. >> Well I think there's a couple things that we're doing. First of all we're enabling a very broad set of hardware including cutting edge technologies that are helping them improve the performance, improve the reliability of their implementations in this space. So today we're looking at six different hardware platforms with about 15 different configurations on the HCL and we're expanding that this month significantly. All of those can be delivered. >> John: On the hardware side. >> On the hardware side. >> Okay got it. >> All those can be delivered in a way that they fit seamlessly into a data center environment that's deploying software defined storage. So, I think helping them simplify that is really how we're trying to make this more of a reality and Dell has always brought strong operationalization to any customer we worked with. >> So I got to ask you on the software side, again software's eating the world, Wikibon's true private Cloud report really validating a lot of the success that vSAN's having. I mean all the actions on premise. Transforming the Cloud operating model which is to be more agile. What is the key software piece of it because now you've got DevOps, the Cloud native side saying hey infrastructure is code. I want you to run invisible. The Ops guys saying wait a minute, we got hardware stacks, you got software stacks, they got to come together. >> Absolutely, so our open manage enterprise solution is our software connection for helping manage that hardware in the vSan vCenter environment. And it allows them to actually move all of the controls for updating and managing that system into one pane of glass which is their vSAN vCenter pane of glass. And so we're really trying to help drive that automation, enable that capability for the do-it-yourself customer. Now if the customer wants to have significantly less tech debt then we're happy to talk to them about VxRail and VxRack where we start adding more management software capabilities to help drive an even better experience. >> One more thing you mentioned tech debts. I want to get that on the table. Real issue is technology debt meaning trying to move faster, take some short cuts or you know move the needle too fast. What are some of the technical debts that customers are getting into and where's, what's good technical debt and what's a bad technical debt? >> Oh that's a tough question. I think that in terms of good, of bad technical debt, let's start there right. Anything is going to be sort of routine, spread across lots of different customers within a base that could be off, offloaded to a service provider who can provide that sort of scale is bad technical debt. So things like driver updates, managing your HCL, paying attention to how to go about replacing a hard drive in a server that's gone down in a node. Right those are sort of bad technical debt. You shouldn't be wasting your resources that are focused on your business outcomes on that sort of technical debt. And even at our most basic level, the ready node, we're starting to provide that level of service to the customer. And I think we advance that even more as we get into our rails and racks. In terms of good technical debt, yet to be determined but I would suspect that a lot of that has to do with developing the code. >> John: Debt you can pay back. >> Right, that you can pay back. >> As I tell Dave, we don't want to take on too much debt and then can't pay it back. We'll be bankrupt. >> And that's the sort of code that's directly tied to your environment right. So for example all of the AI infrastructure that they were building in the keynote today for the pizza company right. That's a good example of I'm developing code that's intellectual property for my business, that's good technical debt. I'm going to pay it off. Gives me a competitive advantage. >> That you could use. >> Exactly right. >> Dave: To pay off the... >> Precisely. >> The investments that you've made. So you, you're a disrupter of sets. I mean you've got John talked about the server SAN. We, it's something we published years ago. And basically you're disrupting an install base that you guys own. Right? >> Sounds like a story I heard a long time ago when virtualization first came on the scene. Oh we're going to be running out of servers. That didn't happen, we're selling more servers than we ever have. >> Oh yeah not that you'll stop selling but you, you've got this massive install base and you're essentially, where appropriate migrating that install base to a new way. >> Of course. >> I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic and what those customer conversations are like. >> Well I think it's important to us to be a trusted advisor to our customers. It's always been Dell's sort of way of doing business right. We roll up our sleeves and we get to work with you. So as this transition is applying, is happening to the industry, I think it's up to us to provide those kind of you know feet on the street services that make it easier for customers to absorb and deal with that transition right. And again I know I sound like the broken record here but it's about helping them have confidence that as they move into this transition, they're not having to deal with all the vagaries of mismatched hardware and software incompatibilities. It's about being able to get faster time to value because we did some of the basic steps like pre-configuring that system so it's just ready to go right. >> And what about workloads? How do you see those evolving? 'Cause that's one piece is simplification and you know tacking the IT labor problem with non-differentiated patching and other stuff. The bad technical debt you guys were talking about. What about workloads, what are you seeing emerge in terms of the types of workloads that have an affinity to these types of systems. >> Well I think you know we heard Chad talk earlier about how the network was becoming sort of the bottleneck right. And I think that we're seeing more and more storage, workloads with an affinity for storage moving into the Cloud space, right into the converted space as that technology begins to evolve. And we're seeing things like the new NVME drives in our 14 G servers. All right we have six X the capacity that we had before which means applications, workloads that have a storage affinity are able to actually start moving into this more, I know you'd only use the work virtualized, but this more software defined space. >> Right. >> All right bottom line if a customer's ready node, you guys are doing some good stuff, vSAN's hot, Gelsinger said the world's going to get much faster, today's the slowest day of your life going forward, or something along those lines. There's the implying that it's going to get pretty crazy. Peter Burris head of research for Wikibon.com said the whole computer industry's been turned upside down, it's going to be landing on the table and it's going to re-sort itself out. When you deal with customers, how, what's that conversation like because they're scrambling to lock down their true private Cloud on on premise. They see hybrid Cloud as that pathway to multi Cloud. That's their end stage but right now they got to take care of business at home. That's like cleaning up their own house in IT, what are some of those conversations when that kind of disruption, chaos, complexity. >> Sure, I think everyone's looking for a little bit more of that confidence right and the whole relationship with their supply chain. We're doing it, our customers are doing it and every time we have that conversation with them it basically boils down to what can you do for me that is going to make it easier for me to deal with this transition. How can I trust that these-- >> So ease of use. Is a big thing. >> Juan: I'm sorry? >> Ease of use. Pretty big deal? >> Not just ease of use, but trust that I'll be supported downstream right. So a ready node builds that for example into its value proposition. We want to make sure that you understand that downstream we know what you're using it for and we're able to help you in that context and that's a real key example of how I think we help build that trust with our customers. >> Michael Dell, final question for you talk about just really, final question for you is that Michael Dell was mentioning the technology synergy between Dell technologies cross the portfolio including VMWare. So the question for you is what are some of the synergies that you guys are getting with VMWare? How does that put it to motion? >> Sure, there are several actually. We've done a lot of our development work in the VxRail space around management in conjunction with VMWare. I think that the evolution of the software defined space is being driven by them and we're happy to participate in it in every way we can. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of development and tech support opportunities that we're finding in that relationship. >> So positive outcomes you guys are having a good time. Certainly VMWare's doing great. Good to see Pat Gelsinger on the upslope in terms of stock prices up over a hundred and four. As of yesterday, I haven't even checked what it was today but certainly clarity in the community, clarity in the ecosystem, clarity in the product. Cloud and IoT Edge. I mean the wave slide is pretty much baked at this point. >> Yup. >> And execution. >> And I'm excited to see Dell EMC having a presence across that whole breadth. >> Yeah Dave was commenting it seems like that new Dell technologies is much more sanity now in the community, it's all sorted out. Looking good, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Juan Vega director, ready solutions with Dell EMC's product management. He's the product czar. Thanks for spending the time. It's the Cube coverage live here at VMWorld 2017, day two of three days of wall to wall coverage. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)