(energetic music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager Windows Server/Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. >> Thank you very much. >> And Bob Ward, the principal architect at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> It's a pleasure. Honor to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. >> Oh is that right? >> Well, it's a big milestone. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. >> (laughs) >> Like what is this thing? >> So it is now been a couple of days since Tatiana Dellis stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. >> Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth and, in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well and we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling us the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware, I'm using my Office 365, I'm interested in doing more and now they're both collocated and I can do everything I need together. >> Yeah it was pretty interesting for me 'cause VMware and Microsoft have had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. The operating system standpoint an everything, but especially in the end using computer space Microsoft and VM weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums, up there talking about that really had most of us sit up and take notice. Congratulations on the progress. >> For me, being in a SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know and virtualization so everybody's coming up to me saying when can I start running SQL server in this environment? So we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. >> Customers, they live in a heterogeneous environment. Multicloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, my Cloud, and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use. >> This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and make our customers just super productive. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, Jeff, there's some of the new specific give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. >> Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But key part of this is, for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well known, well easy to use Azure Infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy, as well, through integration in the portal. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long road map together. >> I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value, so-- >> That's what I do, I'm the SQL guy. >> Yeah, so tell us what's new. >> Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL Server and get access to everything in your corporate environment now. We realize you're not just going to have SQL Server now in your environment. You're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually built a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of radical stuff for the normal database people, right? >> Bob, it's fascinating times. We know it used to be like you know I have one database and now when I talk to customers no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and it's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy are there some challenges. How are customers getting their arms around this. >> I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL Server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called TSQL, it's a programming language. And they don't want to lose it, they want to learn, like, 10 other languages, but they have to access that data source. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL Server. No problem. Just use SQL with your TSQL language to query that data, get the results, and join it with your structured data in SQL Server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. >> And what it helps-- what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about you know, I've had servers and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like it's like baggage it's luggage. I'm like, no, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take better advantage of it. With this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. >> How ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other-- >> It's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL Server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers, like data scientists now, that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL Server so it's actually starting to come a really big deal for a lot of our community. >> Alright, so, Jeff, we had theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned, our 10th year here, at what used to be EMC World. It was Interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options, like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff. But very clearly at the show, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure Stack, always interest in the Cloud, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of the portfolio. >> So the Azure Stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we launched with Azure Stack, which is, again, to give you that Cloud consistency. So you can literally write applications that you can run on premises, you can move to the Cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said this is really awesome, but we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the Cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure Stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And, in fact, here at Dell EMC Dell Technology World here, we actually have Azure Stack HCI Solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here are the show as well and I was just demoing one to someone who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyper converged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell Technologies World. So there's a lot that we're doing together on premises as well. >> Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell is that one of their, what they call Ready Nodes, or something in the VxFlex family. >> Yes. >> That standpoint. The HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out, it made sense that, really, the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings, but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. >> Well, one of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the Cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally, there are some apps that people say hey, I'm obviously going to move that stuff to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on Prem. So, for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Some people want to run SQL up in the Cloud, 'cause they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people who say I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to the Cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. So I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So this new Dell Solutions that have Intel, Optane DC Persistent Memory have lots of cores. >> I'm excited about that stuff, man. >> Oh my gosh, yes. Optane Persistent Memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern, but it's also secure. Because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, ten years old, those don't have things like TPM, Secure Boot, UEFI. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. >> Persistent Memory's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yes. >> Actually, Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL Server to take advantage of that technology. SQL can be I/O bound application. You got to have data and storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access Persistent Memory, bypass the I/O part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVNMe. It's a great example of just using a new technology, but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can Persistent Memory be for your application. >> I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell Microsoft relationship partnership because, you know, these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers, in their 30s and 40s, they're not the startups, been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences. >> Sure. >> Well, first of all, we've been doing it for, like you said, we've been doing this for awhile. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. Now, what we're doing is upping our cloud game. Essentially what we're doing is, we're saying there is an are here in Cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the Cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. >> Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run on Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell, but lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell about taking our ML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack, but even addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell comp-- So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great, it's all about solutions and I'm starting to see that conversation happen a lot lately. >> And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important. Because its customers-- customers don't come to me and say Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre configured, pre validated, pre certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably, I'm going to get the question: Can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows server, but then we go above and beyond, we actually run whole bunch of BurnInTests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security so it's ready to go. Dell EMC can ship it to you and you're up and running versus hey, I'm trying to configure make all this thing work and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume Cloud very quickly, connect right up, and, boom, you got hybrid in the house. >> Exactly. >> Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBEs live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.

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

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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up day three of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. CUBE's live coverage, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman, my esteemed cohost for these past three days, it's been fun working with you, Stu. >> Rebecca, it's been a great show, real excited. Our first time at a Microsoft show and it's a big one. I mean, the crowds are phenomenal. Great energy at the show and yeah, it's been great breaking down this ecosystem with you. >> So, three days, what do we know, what did you learn, what is your big takeaway, what are you going to to go back to Boston with? >> You know, it's interesting, we've been all talking and people that I know that have been here a couple of years, I've talked to people that have been at this show for decades, this is a different show. There's actually a friend of mine said, he's like, "Well look, Windows pays the bills for a lot of companies." There's a lot of people that all the Windows components, that's their job. I mean, I think back through my career when I was on the vendor side, how many rollouts of Exchange and SharePoint and all these things we've done over the years. Office 365 been a massive wave that we watched. So Microsoft has a broad portfolio and they've got three anchor shows. I was talking with one of the partners here and he's like, "You know, there's not a lot of channel people "at this event, at VMworld there's a lot of channel people." I'm like, "Well yeah because there's a separate show "that Microsoft has for them." You and I were talking at an earlier analytics session with Patrick Moorhead and he said, "You know when I look at the buy versus build, "a lot of these people are buying and I don't "feel I have as many builders." Oh wait, what's that other show that they have in the Spring, it's called Microsoft Build. A lot of the developers have moved there so it's a big ecosystem, Microsoft has a lot of products. Everything from, my son's excited about a lot of the Xbox stuff that they have here. Heck, a bunch of our crew was pickin' up Xbox sweatshirts while they're here. But a lot has changed, as Tim Crawford said, this is a very, it feels like a different Microsoft, than it even was 12 or 24 months ago. They're innovating, so look at how fast Microsoft moves and some of these things. There's good energy, people are happy and it's still trying to, you know. It's interesting, I definitely learned a lot at this show even though it wasn't the most sparkly or shiny but that's not necessarily a bad thing. >> Right, I mean, I think as you made a great point about just how integral Microsoft is to all of our lives as consumers, as enterprise, the Xbox, the Windows, the data storage, there's just so much that Microsoft does that if we were to take away Microsoft, I can't even imagine what life would be like. What have been your favorite guests? I mean, we've had so many really, really interesting people. Customers, we've had partners, we're going to have a VC. What are some of the most exciting things you've heard? >> Yeah, it's interesting, we've had Jeffrey Snover on the program a couple of years ago and obviously a very smart person here. But at this show, in his ecosystem, I mean, he created PowerShell. And so many people is like, I built my career off of what he did and this product that he launched back in 2001. But we talked a little bit about PowerShell with him but then we were talking about Edge and the Edge Boxes and AI and all those things, it's like this is really awesome stuff. And help connecting the dots to where we hid. So obviously, big name guest star, always, and I always love talking to the customers. The thing I've been looking at the last couple of years is how all of these players fit into a multicloud world. And Microsoft, if you talk about digital transformation, and you talk about who will customers turn to to help them in this multicloud world. Well, I don't think there's any company that is closer to companies applications across the spectrum of options. Office 365 and other options in SaaS, all the private cloud things, you start with Windows Server, you've got Windows on the desktop, Windows on the server. Virtualization, they're starting to do hyperconversion everything, even deeper. As well as all the public cloud with Azure and developers. I talked to the Azure functions team while I was here. Such breadth and depth of offering that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to play in a lot of those areas even if, as I said, certain areas if the latest in data there might be some other company, Google, Amazon, well positioned there. We had a good discussion Bernard Golden, who's with Capital One, gave us some good commentary on where Alibaba fits in the global scheme. So, nice broad ecosystem, and I learned a lot and I know resonated with both of us, the "you want to be a learn it all, not a know it all." And I think people that are in that mindset, this was a great show for them. >> Well, you bring up the mindset, and that is something that Satya Nadella is really such a proponent of. He says that we need to have a growth mindset. This is off of the Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth research that talks about how important that is, how important continual learning is for success. And that is success in life and success on the job and organization success and I think that that is something that we are also really picked up on. This is the vibe of Microsoft, this is a company, Satya Nadella's leadership, talking to so many of the employees, and these are employees who've been there for decades, these are people who are really making their career, and they said, "Yeah, I been here 20 years, if I had my way, "I'll be here another 30." But the point is that people have really recommitted to Microsoft, I feel. And that's really something interesting to see, especially in the tech industry where people, millennials especially, stay a couple years and then move on to the next shiny, new thing. >> Yeah, there was one of our first guests on for Microsoft said that, "Been there 20 years and what is different about "the Satya Nadella Microsoft to the others is "we're closer and listening even more to our customers." We talk about co-creation, talk about how do we engage. Microsoft is focusing even deeper on industries. So that's really interesting. An area that I wanted to learn a little bit more about is we've been talking about Azure Stack for a number of years, we've been talking about how people are modernizing their data center. I actually had something click with me this week because when I look at Azure Stack, it reminds me of solutions I helped build with converged infrastructure and I was a big proponent of the hyper-converged infrastructure wave. And what you heard over and over again, especially from Microsoft people, is I shouldn't think of Azure Stack in that continuum. Really, Azure Stack is not from the modernization out but really from the cloud in. This is the operating model of Azure. And of course it's in the name, it's Azure, but when I looked at it and said, "Oh, well I've got partners like "Lenovo and Dell and HPE and Sysco." Building this isn't this just the next generation of platform there? But really, it's the Azure model, it's the Azure operating stack, and that is what it has. And it's more, WSSD is their solution for the converged and then what they're doing with Windows Server 2019 is the hyper-converged. Those the models that we just simplify what was happening in the data center and it's similar but a little bit different when we go to things like Azure and Azure Stack and leads to something that I wanted to get your feedback on. You talk business productivity because when we talk to companies like Nutanix, we talk to companies like Cohesity who we really appreciate their support bringing us here, giving us this great thing right in the center of it, they talk about giving people back their nights and weekends, giving them back time, because they're an easy button for a lot of things, they help make the infrastructure invisible and allow that. Microsoft says we're going to try to give you five to ten percent back of your business productivity, going to allow you to focus on things like AI and your data rather than all the kind of underlying spaghetti underneath. What's your take on the business productivity piece of things? >> I mean, I'm in favor of it; it is a laudable goal. If I can have five to ten percent of my day back of just sort of not doing the boring admin stuff, I would love that. Is it going to work, I don't know. I mean, the fact of the matter is I really applaud what Cohesity said and the customers and the fact that people are getting, yes, time back in their day to focus on the more creative projects, the more stimulating challenges that they face, but also just time back in their lives to spend with their children and their spouse and doing whatever they want to do. So those are really critical things, and those are critical things to employee satisfaction. We know, a vast body of research shows, how much work life balance is important to employees coming to their office or working remotely and doing their best work. They need time to recharge and rest and so if Microsoft can pull that off, wow, more power to them. >> And the other thing I'll add to that is if you, say, if you want that work life balance and you want to be fulfilled in your job, a lot of times what we're getting rid of is some of those underlying, those menial tasks the stuff that you didn't love doing in the first place. And what you're going to have more time to do, and every end user that we talked to says, "By the way, I'm not getting put out of a job, "I've got plenty of other tasks I could do." And those new tasks are really tying back to what the business needs. Because business and IT, they need to tie together, they need to work together, it is a partnership there. Because if IT can't deliver what the business needs, there's other alternatives, that's what Stealth IT was and the public cloud could be. And Microsoft really positions things as we're going to help you work through that transition and get there to work on these environments. >> I want to bring up another priority of Microsoft's and that is diversity. So that is another track here, there's a lot of participants who are learning about diversity in tech. It's not a good place right now, we know that. The tech industry is way too male, way too white. And Satya Nadella, along with a lot of other tech industry leaders, has said we need more underrepresented minorities, we need more women, not only as employees but also in leadership positions. Bev Crair, who was on here yesterday, she's from Lenovo. She said that things are starting to change because women are buying a lot of the tech and so that is going to force changes. What do you think, do you buy it? >> And I do, and here's where I'd say companies like Lenovo and Microsoft, when you talk about who makes decisions and how are decisions made, these are global companies. Big difference between a multi-national company or a company that's headquartered in Silicon Valley or Seattle or anything versus a global company. You look at both of those companies, they have, they are working not just to localize but have development around the world, have their teams that are listening to requirements, understand what is needed in those environments. Going back to what we talked about before, different industries, different geographies, and different cultures, we need to be able to fit and work and have products that work in those environments, everything. I think it was Bev that talked about, even when we think about what color lights. Well, you know, oh well default will use green and red. Well, in different cultures, those have different meanings. So yeah, it is, it's something that definitely I've heard the last five to ten years of my career that people understand that, it's not just, in the United States, it can't just be the US or Silicon Valley creating great technology and delivering that device all the way around the world. It needs to be something that is globally developed, that co-creation, and more, and hopefully we're making progress on the diversity front. We definitely try to do all we can to bring in diverse voices. I was glad we had a gentleman from Italy shouting back to his daughters that were watching it. We had a number of diverse guests from a geography, from a gender, from ethnicity, on the program and always trying to give those various viewpoints on theCUBE. >> I want to ask you about the show itself: the 30,000 people from 5,000 different organizations around the globe have convened here at the Orange County Convention Center, what do you think? >> Yeah, so it was impressive. We go to a lot of shows, I've been to bigger shows. Amazon Reinvent was almost 50,000 last year. I've been to Oracle OpenWorld, it's like takes over San Francisco, 60 or 70,000. This convention center is so sprawling, it's not my favorite convention center, but at least the humidity is to make sure I don't get dried out like Las Vegas. But logistics have run really well, the food has not been a complaint, it's been good, the show floor has been bustling and sessions are going well. I was talking to a guy at breakfast this morning that was like, "Oh yeah, I'm a speaker, "I'm doing a session 12 times." I'm like, "You're not speaking on the same thing 12 times?" He's like, "No, no it's a demo and hands on lab." I'm like, "Oh, of course." So they make sure that you have lots of different times to be able to do what you want. There is so much that people want to see. The good news is that they can go watch the replays of almost all of them online. Even the demos are usually something that they're cloud enabled and they get on live. And of course we help to bring a lot of this back to them to give them a taste of what's there. All of our stuff's always available on the website of thecube.net. This one, actually, this interview goes up on a podcast we call theCUBE Insights. So please, our audience, we ask you, whether it's iTunes or your favorite podcast reader, go to Spotify, theCUBE Insights. You can get a key analysis from every show that we do, we put that up there and that's kind of a tease to let you go to thecube.net and see the hundreds and thousands of interviews that we do across all of our shows. >> Great, and I want to give a final, second shout out to Cohesity, it's been so fun having them, being in the Cohesity booth, and having a lot of great Cohesity people around. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, so much I wish we could spend a little more time even. AI, if we go back to the keynote analysis then, but you can watch that, I can talk about the research we've done, and said how the end user information that Microsoft can get access to to help people when you talk about what they have, the TouchPoint to Microsoft Office. And even things like Xbox, down to the consumer side, to understand, have a position in the marketplace that really is unparalleled if you look at kind of the breadth and depth that Microsoft has. So yeah, big thanks to Cohesity, our other sponsors of the program that help allow us to bring this great content out to our community, and big shout out I have to give out to the community too. First time we've done this show, I reached out to all my connections and the community reached back, helped bring us a lot of great guests. I learned a lot: Cosmos DB, all the SQL stuff, all the Office and Microsoft 365, so much. My brain's full leaving this show and it's been a real pleasure. >> Great, I agree, Stu, and thank you so much to Microsoft, thank you to the crew, this has been a really fun time. We will have more coming up from the Orange County Civic Center, Microsoft Ignite. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you in just a little bit. (digital music)

(digital music) >> Live, from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Bev Crair. She is the vice president data center group product development and quality at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, thanks Stu. >> So, Lenovo is a longstanding partner of Microsoft. Why don't you just sent the scene for our viewers, and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership and where you are today. >> So, Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry. And we work really closely together on both innovation, but also making sure that anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo. >> Great, and what about, here at this conference, what are you hearing, what are you seeing in terms of this partnership? >> We have actually six things that we're really talking about here at the conference, which is a lot if you think about it. But the first is the announcement of our ThinkAgile MX, which is that integrated WSSD system. It's pre-certified, you just buy it as itself. There's four or five different sizes of it, if you will. The second one is our Azure Stack, but also our Azure services. So we're now doing both on prem Azure Stack and Azure services, which is really about customer choice. Because a lot of data center customers are really struggling with how do I build a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and what do I do with that. The third thing that we're doing, oh my gosh, I'm not going to remember them all. The third thing that we're doing is our SQL Server performance. We continue to be the best in performance for all of our SQL Server efforts. Our two-socket systems are best performing. Our four-socket systems are best performing, and so are eight-socket systems are best performing. In addition to that, we have, when we're proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019. Again, that's part of that 25 year partnership. It's just something you got to do. And we're really proud of that. The other thing that we've announced here is what we're calling the buy back program. And a lot of companies have buy back programs where you can actually buy back equipment, and you buy back your competitors equipment in order to build your stuff up, but the one thing that's kind of different about what Lenovo's doing is something I call Zillow for systems. So, you actually can go online and put in the systems that you have or the equipment that you have and we give you an automatic, instant quote back. Nobody else is actually doing that. So, it's kind of a Zillowish system where you can see what's my stuff really worth. >> I want to click in a little bit. So, I know the partnership for a long time. I think about PCs, you think about servers, obviously. Lenovo has the gear, Microsoft has the OS and various pieces that go on there. When I look at solutions like WSSD and Azure Stack, Microsoft has a number of partners, maybe help us understand what that partnership means, how Lenovo differentiates from some of the other players out there. >> So, that is one of the things I forgot. One of the things that we've announced today, and that we showed today, and actually Jeff Wosley talked about it in his talk earlier today, is an integration of Microsoft's Windows Admin Center for WSSD, and Lenovo's Xclarity system management system. So, via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can actually not just look at Windows Admin in the Window's infrastructure, but you can actually dig down and really understand what's actually happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on. And that's part of that really close partnership and relationship that we have. >> Can you talk a little bit about the approach to the partnership just because we had a Microsoft Executive on here earlier today, and he said that "our partnerships, we have this, we're able to have "a collaborative and collegial partnership "with our competitors." So, it's sort of part of their DNA." How does Lenovo think about when it partners and how it partners with a competitor? >> Well, but Microsoft isn't actually a competitor of ours. Right? And this is the thing I think that Lenovo, as a company, really is focusing on offering to our customers is choice. Right? We have a co-located lab up in Seattle with Microsoft. We have had for years. We do innovation summits with them, we look at where the technology is going and what is it that we can do together in order to make that more effective for our shared customers and how they deliver in the long run. And so it really is a very strong collaboration. We don't build operating systems. We don't build all of the SQL Server. We don't build the Azure Stack, and the Cloud, and all the rest of that. So, the partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do as well. >> Now, if you look, HCI is one of the things that we've been talking a little bit more about here. Obviously, it makes sense for Lenovo to partner here, but Lenovo also has a number of other solutions. How do you look at it? What are you hearing from customers when it comes to that kind of solution and how Microsoft-- >> It really is about choice. Right, it really is about choice. Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments, and they're seeking partners to help them solve those problems in their environments. And that, and those choices are actually really critical for them. So, when you're working with somebody like Lenovo, where we also offer Vmware, we also offer some of the other solutions that are out there in the market, that, you work with a partner like Lenovo, where we have all of the services and the infrastructure to back that up, plus the long standing relationships that we have with our partners, enables us to offer that kind of choice that allows our end customers to solve their customer's problems. And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. >> Yeah, Microsoft, of course, partners with a lot of companies. I heard in some of the technical key notes, I heard that get mentioned quite a bit. Of course, Rebecca and I were with your team at Lenovo Transform in New York City recently. And maybe for our viewers that might not have caught that show, give us the update, what you're hearing from people about the big partnership -- >> So, we announced a partnership with network compliance, NetApp, at our Transform show last week, I guess it must have been. We've been working on it for awhile, so, just the fact that the announcement happened was really cool. And it's kind of a three-part partnership. The first part is that Lenovo will be branding NetApp's a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has. And it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. Last year, when we launched our largest portfolio of servers, we launched eight all in a single day, and the rest of the Purley platforms followed from my team in the next quarter. This year, with NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. And so, this partnership actually allows us to do that very, very collaboratively. Then the second part of the relationship is joint venture that we're starting with NetApp in China. Given the depth of work that Lenovo does in China, it allows NetApp to actually build their market, and their infrastructure. And I think, some of the customers in China are actually really looking for the kinds of solutions that NetApp has available. And then the third is moving forward to build innovative solutions together. Taking the innovation and the 25 years worth of innovation that my team has done over the years, and all of the work we do in performance, all the number one on client satisfaction, all the number one on reliability for the fifth year in a row, and bringing that into our NetApp alliance. >> One of the themes at this conference, and also frankly at Lenovo Transform, is about company culture and about this idea of the importance of collaboration and creativity and teamwork, and inclusivity. Can you describe a little bit for us how you think the Lenovo culture is similar to the Microsoft one that Satya Nadella is a proponent of and also how it's different? >> How is is similar and how is it different? That's a really interesting question. The thing that I have found about the Lenovo culture that I think surprised me the most, one year in, is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bringing that in to how we build effective solutions together. It is by far the most diverse organization that I've worked in. In lots of lots of ways, but if you look at the senior leadership level, right? You would expect it, given that the company is actually headquartered in Beijing and the United States, and we're on the Hong Kong stock exchange, you would expect it to be Chinese. But it's not. The leadership team is actually incredibly diverse. Way more diverse than I expected. But even on my team, and further down in the organization, a lot of our engineers have spent multiple years overseas. They've raised their kids overseas. They've gone to school overseas. And so the have a very inclusive perspective on how do we solve problems. And they also understand that the way in which we solve problems, isn't necessarily the best way. So, in our conversations with Microsoft and the culture that we create with them together, it becomes very collaborative. 'Cause we go back to what's the customer problem we're really trying to solve. How are we actually helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? And how do we actually help solve humanity's greatest challenges? And that's a together statement, right? With Microsoft and just kind of peeling back the onion on what are the real problems that we need to get to to solve together. >> You mentioned how diverse a company Lenovo is, and that's actually at a time where the technology industry is not known for its diversity. In fact, it's really known for its bro culture. It's the dearth of female leaders. I'm wondering if you could just give me your thoughts on how technology, sort of the state of affairs today is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be? And (Rebecca and Bev laugh) what we need to do to move forward. >> So, I think in part, there's two answers to that. One of them is that the participants in technology are changing. So, if you look around the room and you watch who's here, what you're seeing is that there's a whole generation of new people coming in who've always had technology at their fingertips. And so they think differently and assume differently about what that technology is supposed to do for them. And so just age diversity starts to come into play. But also the people that buy our stuff, right? 65 to 75% of commercial electronics are bought by women. That's a stunning figure when you really think about it 'cause it's very different from the people that actually create or have in the past created that technology. So when you start to see who's buying and why they're buying, you actually have to start to understand that they're buying for very different reasons than perhaps you were creating the technology for. So, an example of this is the new Hub 500 or the Hub 700. Have you seen this? So, it's a link connected system that sits on the table and you push a button and you're automatically connected with everybody that's going to be in your Lync meeting or everybody that's going to be in your Skype meeting. And we had to do a fair amount of work to really understand how people were going to interact with the system or not interact with the system. And even colors like red and green, and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures, and how are we going to display those colors, right? But that's where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play. >> Great. Well Bev, it was a pleasure having you on the show. It was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat digital music)

>> Live, from Orlando Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Carmen Crincoli. He is the Senior Program Manager for Strategy and Ecosystem here at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show Carmen. >> Thanks for having me, really excited to be here, thank you. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about, we're going to talk tech in this interview. But right now we're going to talk about solutions and really explain what the problems are that you are solving for your customers. So, talk about the customer pain points that you and your group are looking to solve. >> Yeah, so, the WSSD program when we conceived it was to address a problem that I think a lot of people who have worked with Microsoft technology are familiar with. We have some really great technology. It's very easy for users to dive in and start using it. But to really be successful requires an additional level of expertise that not every IT shop is going to have. And as it gets more and more complex and we start bringing more and more IT functionality into the stack with software defined technologies, that challenge grows. So we feel like we've had very, very great advances in what our tech can do. And we were watching our customers struggle with it. And we decided that the best was to fix it is to create a solution program and work with our partners who have that expertise to take them, bundle them together with a set of best practices, some additional testing and validation, to ensure that customers are selecting the right hardware for the tasks that they need, and then offer that as a solution instead of as build your own, which is a little more traditional in the Windows world. >> Explain how it works. So, there's a frazzled IT person who's saying "I don't know where to begin, but I have these issues," Can you give us some examples of how you hold a customer's hand through this and walk them through the process? >> Sure, sure. So, I would say the way we approach it right now is if a customer is going to get on board the HCI train, which more and more of them are, right, we're watching the industry shift in that direction pretty rapidly now. And they say, you know, I've heard about the Microsoft technologies, I've heard about storage spaces direct and your software defined networking capabilities, and I want to pursue that. You say, well, don't just go buy some servers or recycled servers off the shelf. We want you to contact some of our partners and talk to them about their solution catalog and say look, this is the kind of workload I'm going to consolidate on it, right. I'm consolidating virtual machines from multiple environments and it's going to be a mix of traditional line of business apps and SQL and I think I'm going to have about this I/O profile. They'll help you size a solution and then deliver it on site and integrate it into your business environment, right. It lets you get something that is more tailored to what you need rather than trying to piece it together. >> I want to hear a little bit more about HCI. But before we do, you got ecosystem as part of what you work on. I think most people understand that Microsoft has a huge ecosystem. Some things are really simple to understand. Server, you guys don't make servers. Operating system sits on top of that. The storage piece of it, I've worked in the storage industry for a number of years, worked with Microsoft. Obviously a huge player in the software layer. But that was back before we called it things like software defined storage and the software defined data center. And, heck, pre-cloud and all that stuff. So, you've been there 21 years at Microsoft. Give a little bit about, you know, where Microsoft thinks they need to play, how you partner with the ecosystem out there, and then we'll get into some of the new pieces. >> Yeah, we've always viewed storage as part of the air you breathe when you're computing, right. So we always partnered with the storage ecosystem to make sure that SANS and NAS devices work inside general IT environments. The shift to a software defined mentality involved some new learning, from a Microsoft perspective. We're taking on some of the integration responsibilities that storage vendors typically had. And that's part of what birthed WSSD as a solution program, was if we have to take on all of the integration work, how do we ensure that that's good quality, right. Just buying some disks off the shelf and plugging them into the motherboard does not result in an enterprise quality solution. So we had to define some parameters and then work with OEMs and partners who know how to do the integration work as well. Put some testing parameters around it, and turn out solutions, software defined solutions, that worked as well as the highly integrated, tested SANS and NAS devices of the last generation. >> Great. I think back, you know, like most people probably know Microsoft for SNB. You had protocols that help people with NAS devices. Help bring us up to speed when things like HCI. So, HCI, technology that's been around for a number of years. Many companies partner with Microsoft. Nutanix is a nearby partner of Microsoft. VMWare partners with Microsoft on some things but is a big player with their Vsan technologies. What do we call the Microsoft HCI solution and how would you compare and contrast it to the existing solutions out there? >> The traditional strength of Microsoft, right. We're very good at partnering, even with people we're competing with. We're very serious about it. Part of our core DNA is partnership and competition at the same time. So, our HCI stack is really about integrating the functionality that's there. I would say, the way we talk about it, there are three main components. There's the storage layer, which is storage spaces direct. There's the networking layer, which we just called software defined networking, which includes a network controller and network virtualisation capabilities. And then there's the computer layer, which is Hyper-V and the additional capabilities we layer in Hyper-V where we think we add a lot of value. Things like secured VMs and security capabilities that we add on. You layer those technologies together and integrate them into a solution with validated hardware, tested hardware, a network controller, network switch, and you get something that you can integrate into a business environment. These are all capabilities that are in Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, right. This is not an additional add-on. It's not a component. It's not a thing that you download. The solution program is really about taking the stuff that's in the box and making sure customers succeed in it without having to bring in all of the expertise into their IT staff from day one. >> Thanks for the explanation. The one piece, if I understand right, Azure stack also has storage space direct in it. So should I look at this as a spectrum of how Microsoft puts the pieces together and the WSSD is just one of the storage fundamental components that plays a few places along the stack? Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, it's kind of a foundational technology. Just like Windows Server is the host layer for all of the upper, higher level workloads, Storage Spaces Direct is the foundational layer for building our storage for all of these hyperconverged solutions. Azure stack's business goals are different, right. They're looking for Azure consistency and really giving an Azure experience to customer on prem. WSSD is more for the traditional IT shop that's used to running their own virtual environments and they're just looking for some infrastructure hosting of virtual workloads. So, we're covering different ends of, I would say, the IT maturity spectrum, with the two solutions. But the underlying pieces are very much the same, right. The plumbing that powers Azure stack and the plumbing that powers WSSD, and the plumbing that powers Azure, is built on a lot of the same core Windows technologies. >> So what are the outcomes of this solutions department? How have you seen changes in customer behavior, and helping them understand the best practices that have emerged as they implement and deploy different kinds of technologies. >> I'd say the biggest thing we've noticed is we get customers to be more successful when they work with our vendors, right. WSSD launched, the origninal version of the program for 2016, launched about nine months after we RTM'd. In that nine month gap, we had a lot of customers who were excited for the technology. We had been talking about it. Our engineering teams do a great job of making people excited for the technology. We get our lovely core IT geeks pumped for this stuff. And they were going out and implementing it on their own, right. Buying hardware that they thought conformed, trying to implement, and we were having a lot of struggles, right. It was generating more sport than we'd like. Customers weren't having the experience we wanted them to have with it. Since we've started the program, and we've been getting customers pointed at our hardware partners that deliver these solutions, we've had a lot more success, right. They're much happier with it. We have multiple stakeholders bought into the success of that customer solution, so the OEMs are just as invested as we are. As opposed to if you buy a server off the shelf, they're like the server's working fine, that's not my problem. So were just seeing a lot more customer success out of it and we want to keep driving that forward with the 2019 version of the solution program. >> Carmen, anything? there are so many announcements that were made at the show. Anything in your space that you want to make sure, kind of highlight that people might have missed? Everybody knows Windows Server 2019's coming, but what does that mean for your area, or anything outside of that one announcement? >> I think the most exciting thing is some of the tech improvements that I know really land with this IT Pro crowd that is here at Ignite. So, yesterday during Erin Chapel, our CVP of Windows Server, during her Windows Server 2019 intro session, she announced a number that we achieved on Windows Server 2019 with Intel scalable persistent memory. I forget what the name of it is. Anyway, it was a crazy IOPS number- >> Scalable optane stuff if I remember because we had Jake on yesterday from Intel. And he was like "Your mind will be blown when "you hear about this". >> It was like 13.8 million IOPS on a 12 node cluster right? We're continuing our engineering focus. We're an engineering company. We love making the tech better. And we're getting people excited for it. And then we're following up with the, by the way, if you want this kind of thing in your environment, or you need it, if you need to deliver it, these are the partners you work with. We partner with them. We engineer with them, right. This is a co-engineering program. Get the solution from them. So, I would say that's the new thing from my space, right. I get to piggyback on all of this great engineering announcement and work and excitement, and say this is how you succeed with the technology. Don't go do it yourself, go to these people. >> And we're here to help you. >> Yes, yes. That's why I'm really grateful that you guys had me on, right. One of the early things I've been told since I took over the program was I didn't even know Microsoft did HCI, and I definitely didn't know that you had a solution program. And I'm like, I know, I will work on fixing that. >> Well Carmen, look, HCI, we understand the virtualisation layer is critical there. Microsoft obviously, one of the top players in that industry. So, we've been waiting to hear a broader story from Microsoft in this space, so congrats on all the progress. >> Thank you, thank you. This has been a really fantastic show so far. We actually have hyperconverged expo in the application infrastructure area, where I have six of the WSSD partners just showing off their solutions in one tight space, along with the engineers who work on the HCI stack at Microsoft right nearby. So if anyone to come check it out, talk to the engineers who wrote the software, talk to the-- >> It's a really small space, you hyperconverged it, right? (Rebecca laughs) >> Yes, it is a hyperconverged space, yes. >> Well, Carmen, thank you so much and I encouage anyone who's here at Ignite to go check out that booth and see what it's all about. >> Great, thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)