>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2017. This is the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas on day one of the event, a really exciting, high energy general session kicked things off. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined by two folks from VMware. We've got Cube alumni Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM of the storage and availability BU. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Good to be here. >> Lisa: And we've also got Matt Amdur, your first time on the Cube, principle VMware chief architect. >> Thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you guys here so been waiting with baited breath, a lot of folks have, for what are VMware and AWS going to actually announce product-wise. Really exciting to see Pat Gelsinger on stage with Andy Jassy today. Talk to us about, as the world of hyper-converged infrastructure is changing, what does VMware cloud on AWS mean for, not just VMware customers, but new opportunities for VMware? >> Yeah, that's a great question Lisa. Let me get it started. You know, I think my biggest takeaway from the exciting keynote, a couple of things. One is private cloud is sexy again. You know, so we've been talking about cloud a lot, but there is so much opportunity and tremendous growth associated with private cloud, and certainly hyper-converged infrastructure being the next generation architecture shift is going to drive a lot of the modernization of our customers' private environment, so that's certainly very exciting. The other aspect of the excitement is how that same architecture and consistent operating model is extending into the cloud with our AWS relationship, and this is also why I have my colleague, Matt, here, because he's been the brain behind a lot of the things we're doing on AWS. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Yanbing, and I tell you, for years, it was like, ah, storage is sexy, storage is hot. Cloud's kind of sexy and hot, so we found a way to kind of connect storage into that. Matt, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what happened here. This isn't just, oh, you know, we're not layering, you know, VMware on top of the infrastructure as a service that they have. Last year, we kind of dug in a little bit with Cloud Foundation. Talk to us, what did it take to get this VMware cloud onto AWS, bring us inside a little bit, the sausage making if you would. >> I think Andy talked about this a little bit at the keynote this morning, where it's really been an incredible, collaborative effort between both engineering organizations, and it's taken a lot of effort from a huge number of people on both sides to really pull this off, and so you know, as we started looking at it, I think one of the challenges that we faced, and Andy mentioned this this morning was there was this really binary decision for customers. If you had vSphere workload, do you want them to bring them to the public cloud? There was nothing that was compatible. And so, we really sat down with Amazon and said, okay, how can we take advantage of the physical infrastructure and scale that Amazon built and provides today, and make it compatible with vSphere, and if you look at what we've done with VSAN on premise as an HCI solution, it's become a sort of ubiquitous storage platform, and it offers customers an operational and a management experience for how they think about managing their storage, and we can take that and uplift it into the cloud by doing the heavy lifting of how do we make VSAN run, scale, and operate on top of AWS's physical infrastructure. >> One of the things that I found was really interesting this morning was seeing the, I couldn't see it from where I was sitting, the sort of NASCAR slide of customers that were in beta. Talk to us a little about some of the pain points that you're helping with VMware cloud and AWS. What are some of those key pain points that those customers were facing that from an engineering perspective you took into the design of the solution? >> Sure, so I think if you look at it, some of the benefits that we see with public cloud infrastructure that our customers really want to take advantage of are flexibility and elasticity. One of the challenges that you have on premise today is if you need new hardware, you have to order it, it's got to ship on a truck, someone's got to rack it and hook it up, and if you're trying to operate and keep pace with your competition, and you have a need to allocate a lot of capacity to drive a project forward, that can be a huge impediment, and so what we wanted to do is make it really easy for our customers to configure, deploy, and provision our software. And so, one of the really interesting things about VMware managed cloud on AWS is that it's a managed service, so some of the things that, you know, we've talked about VCF and the things that we've done on premise to streamline physical infrastructure management is taken to the next level. Customers don't have to worry about managing the vSphere software lifecycle. VMware is now going to do that for them, and Amazon is going to manage the physical infrastructure, and that removes a lot of burdens and gives customers the opportunity to focus on their core business. >> If you think about, you know, Stu, you touched on Cloud Foundation, we were using Cloud Foundation to automate how our customer consumed the entire software-defined data center stack. And you think about moving that same goodness into, you know, the VMware cloud on database, and you know, really removing a lot of the complexity around managing your own infrastructure. And so that customer can truly focus on their value adds, through, you know, developing the next generation of applications that enable their business. It's been a great extension of what we're solving on premise to the public cloud. >> Yeah, I wonder if we can drill in a little bit deeper on this. So you know, most customers I think understand, okay, if I needed to set up a VSAN environment right, I got to get my servers, how long it takes, what skill set I had, virtualization admins have been doing this for a few years now, and congratulations, you've got the number up near 10,000 customers, which is, you know, great milestone there. Walk us through, you know, when we're saying okay, I want to spin it up. If I know, swipe a credit card and turn on a VM, is it as fast? And what is that base configuration, what kind of scale can it go to? >> Sure, so to start with, what was announced today for initial availability, you can come to the VMware portal, so if you come to our portal, you give us your credit card, obviously, and then you can provision between four and 16 nodes. So you pick how many nodes you want. And you give us a little bit of networking-related information so we can understand how to lay out IP address ranges so we're not going to conflict with what you have on premise. And then you click provision, and in a few hours you'll have a fully stood up SDDC. And so that's going to include a vCenter instance that we've installed, all of the ESXOs we've provisioned from Amazon, we install ESX, we configure VSAN for you. And it's basically like getting a brand new vSphere deployment, and you can start provisioning your VM workload as soon as it's ready. And then once it's there, if you want to grow your cluster, you can dynamically add hosts, on the order of about 10 minutes. And if you want to remove capacity, you can remove hosts as well. So it gives you that elasticity and flexibility from the public cloud. >> Awesome, so we're early with some of the early customers. I'm curious, do you have any compare contrast as to what they like about, you know, doing it the Amazon, you know, VMware cloud on Amazon versus my own data center? Of course there's things I could say, okay, I could spin it up faster, but I could turn it off and then not have to pay for it. What, are we at the point we understand some of those use cases to tell why they might do one versus the other? >> Yeah, I think lots of the customers interested in this new model are really liking that common operating experience. It has some of the flex of customers you've heard about this morning, you know, Medtronic for example. They are a VMware Cloud Foundation customer. They are running entire, you know, SDDC through VMware Cloud Foundation, but because they really enjoy that experience and that simplicity that brings, now they're extending that into the cloud. So they're also one of the earlier customers for VMware cloud on AWS. So having that common operational experience is a big value prop to our customers. >> And I think we really see customers wanting both, right? The customers, you mentioned before, the private cloud is sexy again. The customers who have a lot of workloads, that makes sense to run in a private cloud. But they also want the flexibility of how they can take advantage of public cloud resources. And so depending on the problem that they're trying to solve, they view this as a complement to their existing infrastructure. >> And I have to think, some of the services I have available are a little different. Things like disaster recovery, if I'm doing it in kind of that cloud operating model, a little different. I now have Amazon services I can use, and VMware announced a whole, what was it, seven new SaaS services which kind of spanned some of those environments. >> Yeah, so the SaaS services we announced, they are truly across cloud. Cause they not only limit to a vSphere power cloud, they truly are extending into this cross-cloud, multi-cloud world of, you know, heterogeneous type of cloud environments. And now, you know, you spoke about DR, and certainly for someone coming from the storage and availability background, you know, in terms of our, BU's role that we're playing in our cloud relationship, you know, certainly we are trying to provide the best storage infrastructure as part of our cloud service. But we are also looking at what are the next levels of data-related services, whether it's data mobility, application mobility, disaster recovery, or the futures of other aspects of data management. And that's what we've been focusing on. You know, we have lots of customers, you know, even thinking about what's happening with, you know, Hurricane Harvey, I still remember the Hurricane Sandy days. A lot of our site recovery manager customers told us, you know, how SRM has saved their day. We're seeing the power of a disaster recovery solution. And now with the cloud, you can totally leverage the economics and the flexibility and scalability that cloud has to offer. So those are all the directions we're working on. >> So we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the closure of the Dell acquisition of EMC and its companies. Would love to understand, looking at this great announcement today, VMware cloud on AWS, from a differentiation perspective, what does this provide to VMware as part of Dell EMC, this big partnership with AWS? >> Yeah, so let me, you know, maybe take it back a step, not just the AWS relationship but really look more broadly, what we're doing together with Dell. And certainly, you know, starting with the storage business, we're doing amazing work around our entire portfolio of software defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure. And the good thing is, as Stu pointed out, we're seeing tremendous growth in our core business around VSAN. You know, 10,000 customers, expanding rapidly. But we're truly firing from multiple cylinders of both consuming it as a software model as well as working with partner like Dell EMC, TurnKey appliance, such VxRail. They're seeing tremendous success. So we are extending into our partnership around data protection. This is why I'll be coming to the Cube with Matt Felon to talk about all the great things we're doing around data protection collaboration, both for on prem as well as in the VMware cloud for AWS. So lots of things happening in different parts of the business unit. So but coming back to VMware on AWS, I think we're thinking about leveraging the strength of our portfolios, say this is not just a full VMware stack, but there is some of the Dell technology IPs we're pulling in. So for example data protection, they're part of our ecosystem, being one of the very first partners, enabling data protection on top of AWS. Yeah, so Matt, anything to add? >> Yeah, I think, you know, when we look to what's made us so successful on premise, it's been that extended storage ecosystem of which Dell EMC is a huge part of. And we continue to see that value as we go to the cloud. Yanbing mentioned backup and disaster recovery as sort of the obvious starting points, but I think beyond that there's a bunch of technology that they have that's equally applicable whether or not you're running on premise or the public cloud. And the tighter we can integrate and the more we can take advantage of it, the more value we can derive for our customers. >> So VSAN 6.6 is now out. You know, any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight there, and any roadmap items that you can share that are being kind of publicly discussed, you know, here at VMworld? >> So yeah, 6.6 was definitely a big hit, you know, with encryption and also lots of the cloud analytics and things we were doing has been really hitting, you know, the hard core of what our customers are looking for. So going forward with VSAN, we talked about AWS, our relationship with AWS for a long time, but the fundamental product-level innovation is happening inside VSAN as well. One of the big focus is really looking at our next generation architecture that truly enables the leverage of all the new device technology. You know, I keep saying, a software defined product is really driven by sometimes hardware innovation, and that's very true for VSAN. So at the foundational layer, we're looking at new hardware innovations and how to best leverage that. But moving up the stack, we're also looking at cloud analytics and, you know, proactive maintenance. I was just talking to one of our customers about what it takes to support, provide support in 2017. It's all these automatic intelligence, proactive, you know, you heard Pat talk about Skyline. This is a new proactive support approach we've provided, and there will be a lot of cloud analytics that's driving technology like that. >> I was going to say, on the analytics side, what are you hearing from customers with respect to what they're needing on analytics as they have this big decision to make about cloud, private, public, hybrid, what are some of the analytics needs that you're starting to hear from customers that would then be incorporated into that roadmap? >> So from our view, we're looking at lots of the infrastructure-level analytics. Certainly there is also lots of the application-level analytics. But from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to Matt's earlier point, customers do not want to really worry about their, you know, the plumbing around their infrastructure. So we're gathering analytics, we're pumping them into the cloud, we're performing, you know, intelligent analysis so that we can proactively provide intelligence and support back to our customers. >> I think it really, it helps customers to understand things about how their using their storage, how they're using their data, what applications are consuming storage, who needs IOPs, who has latency constraints, all that type of data. And being able to package that up and show it to customers in real time and help them both understand what they're currently doing and future planning, we see a lot of value in. >> Matt, I'm curious, one of the challenges you have as a software product is you need to be able to live in lots of different environments. Amazon is kind of a different beast, you know, they hyper-optimize is what I said. There's kind of misconception now. They're oh, they take, you know, white box and do this. I said, no, they will build a very specific architecture and build 10,000 nodes or more. Without sharing any trade secrets, any lessons learned or anything, you know, that kind of is like, wow, this was, you know, an interesting challenge and here's what we learned when you talk cause the challenge of our time is building distributed architectures. And I'd have to think that porting over to Amazon was not a, you know, oh, yeah, I looked at the code and everything worked day one. So what can you share? >> I think goes back to sort of the really interesting and tight collaboration from the engineering aspects. And it's really been phenomenal to see the level of detail that Amazon has in terms of how they operationalize hardware and what they can tell us about the hardware that they're building for us. And so I think it really highlights some of the value that you see in the public cloud, which is, it's not just about having physical infrastructure hosted somewhere else. It's about having a company like AWS that's understood how to deploy, monitor, and operate it at scale. And that goes to everything from how they think about, you know, the clips that are holding power cables into servers to how they think about SSDs and how they roll our firmware changes. And so from an engineering standpoint, it's been a great collaboration to help us see the level of detail that they go to there, and then we're able to take that into account for how we design and build solutions. >> Yeah, we are definitely taking all that learning into, you know, how to build cloud scale solutions that truly empower, you know, cloud scale operations. And lots of the operation learning, you know, that we get from this exercise has been just tremendous. >> Yeah, well one of the bits of news I saw is that VMware's IT is now running predominantly or all on VSAN, right? What can you tell us about that? Are there still storage arrays somewhere inside the IT? >> So we're extremely excited about this, and we have a visionary CIO, Bask Iyer, I know he was a Cube guest as well. So he's been really pushing this notion of VMware running on top of VMware. So we have 119 clusters, you know, 30,000 VMs, probably close to 1,000 hosts, and seven petabytes of data running on VSAN. And so if VSAN as a product doesn't hold up, you know, I get to experience it firsthand. So it's been pretty phenomenal to see that happen. We are also deliberately running a range of different versions of VSAN. There's, you know, some that are GA versions. There are some that are cloud edition that's yet to be made GA to our customers. So this really helps us develop much more robust software. If you see what's happening here in the hands on lab, that's being powered by VSAN as well behind the scenes. >> VMware's done a great job of leveraging kind of core competencies, like VSAN for the software defined data center. As you mentioned, 10,000 customers, I think Pat said adding 100 a week, >> Yanbing: Yeah. not sure if I heard that correctly. Wow, that's phenomenal. So as, and another thing that he said that was interesting, right before we wrap up here, is we're moving from data centers to centers of data. As customers are transitioning and really kind of figuring out what flavors of cloud are ideal for them, are you seeing any industries really leading the charge with respect to, for example, VMware cloud on AWS? Are you seeing it in, you know, we saw Medtronic, but health care, financial services, any industry specificities that you're seeing that are really leading edge that need this type of infrastructure? >> I think it's happening across many different industries. So tomorrow, I'm going to be in a session called Modernizing Data Center, but there is also lots of emphasis what's happening on the edge. So I have been exposed to customers from health care, customers from, airline customers, so we're going to be probably talking about examples of airbus 380, you know, the biggest airplane that's been ever built, and they have 300,000 sensors on the plane that's generating tons of data, and those data are being processed by technology like VSAN. And just, you know, stories across different industry. And I think that data center to edge story is very powerful. And this is also why the next generation architecture such as HCI make it happen. Clearly we've seen tremendous adoption in the data center. Now we're seeing adoption in the cloud. And I have to say, it's not just the VMware cloud on AWS. We have about 300 cloud provider partners to VMware that's adopted and deployed VSAN to different degrees. And now we're seeing it go to the edge. We have some amazing announcement this morning around HCI accelerator kit that is really providing a much more affordable solution to enable really edge use case. >> Fantastic, well tremendous momentum, great growth, we wish you guys the best of luck. Congratulations on everything announced today. And we hope you have a great rest of the show. Yanbing Li, Matt Amdur, thanks so much for joining us on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Woman: Absolutely. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live from day one at VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright music)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live, from New York City, it's the CUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. Welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Radhika Krishnan. She is the VP and GM of Software Defined Infrastructure at Lenovo. Thanks so much for joining us. You've been on before so, welcome back. >> Yes, I have and it's a pleasure to be back on again, thank you. >> So I want to start out by talking about something we've been hearing a lot about today, and that is Lenovo's lack of legacy and how that makes it easier for your company to innovate and to sell to customers. Can you talk a little bit about that from your vantage point? >> Absolutely, Rebecca. So if you look at our, and, you know, there are a lot of legacy vendors that have incumbent businesses that have been built on very customized, very proprietary offerings. I'll point to my own background. I spent a chunk of my career in storage, a chunk of my career in networking, and a chunk of my career in servers, and if you look across all of the offerings that come out from these vendors, these are usually high-margin; they're very rich offerings. And so, as the industry has moved toward software define, there is less of a motivation on the part of these vendors to really embrace software define entirely. Now, Lenovo does not have that baggage. We're not looking to protect any legacy businesses; there is no concern around cannibalizing an existing stream of revenue or profit. And so we are truly able to innovate from the ground up. >> Radhika, so, the software define really is the intersection of pulling some of those pieces into standard, typically x86, components. Can you bring us inside a little bit, the ThinkAgile, the new brand that's announced. Seems maybe you're going to get a new job title (laughter) to match that branding, but it feels like it all kind of pulls together to Lenovo's server as a core piece and then adding software on top of it. >> That is absolutely spot on, Stu. If you think about it, our code expertise is in building highly reliable, high performing servers and if you think about where software define is headed, it's all anchored around a core server platform or a platform that can deliver processing capabilities, which we're extremely capable. I mean, we've got the industry's best supply chain, as you heard. Highly reliable platforms, variety of benchmarks, and so forth. So we've got the basis, the foundation, for being able to innovate with software defined on top of it. >> Can you bring us inside the ThinkAgile family, as it were. There's some partnerships, there's OEM, there's some technology Lenovo has. What fits under this umbrella? What do we have today, and what's coming soon? >> Absolutely. So, the way we think about ThinkAgile is, we want to deliver to our customers the simplicity, the agility, and the cost economics that they may get in a public cloud in on-prem infrastructure. So, if you had to net it out, our vision really is to deliver on the benefits, and more and so, to that end, the way we have it architected is as two sets of offerings. So, we have appliances which essentially take capabilities, like software defined storage and hyper converge, blend them with our very capable platform, and deliver it as a turnkey offering. We're also bringing to market large scale solutions. Keeping in mind that there are customers that want to consume the entire infrastructure, end to end, in a single turnkey offering; we're bringing those to market as well. And we're seeing a very strong response for both of those types of flavors. >> When you're talking about innovation, and you're a tech veteran who has spent your career at various companies, large and small in the industry, how does Lenovo approach innovation? Especially because it is a large company, 43 billion in sales, 52,000 employees around the world. How do you stay in the start-up mindset, or do you? >> Well we absolutely do and that's actually one of the, as I mentioned earlier, Rebecca, we don't have the baggage of legacy and so if you look at how we're really approaching the software define space, you're exactly right; we're approaching it like an entrepreneur, very much in a start up mode. We're able to innovate from the ground up, which is exactly what we're doing. We're able to step back and look at it holistically from a standpoint of customer problems today. So there is no longer a, "Let's see if we can wedge in this other multi-million dollar business here, because that could then generate more revenue stream." It's really more around organically thinking through what customer problems are, applying a first principles-based approach, and then investing in it. So, from that standpoint, it is very exciting to be in an environment where you can truly operate in a start-up mode while you have the benefit of the very large sales teams that you alluded to, and the ability to invest in it as well. >> What is some of the managerial practices that enable that? I mean, one of the things that Rod was talking about in the very beginning, was there's no arrogance at Lenovo and that it really is part of the culture. Can you describe a little bit about how you do get customer feedback and how you do work with customers to solve these problems? >> Absolutely. So, I think a big part of it is the ability to listen. Humility starts with paying attention to your customers, paying attention to the stakeholders around you, so we definitely do a lot of that. The other thing I'll point to as well is there is a very distinct emphasis around agility. It's around the need to move quickly. As Stu and I were talking about prior to this session, this industry is going through a massive disruption. There's transformation happening everyday, as we speak, and therefore, it is very important to be tuned in to what is going on around you and to be able to deliver on what customers are truly seeking. So, yeah, I would stay humility is a big aspect of it. It's the agility, it's the hunger, the desire, to succeed as well. >> Radhika, specifically, what customers are asking for, I'm curious what you're hearing around hybrid cloud. I look at solutions that you're offering including, you've got the new Tenex solution, you've got the Microsoft Azure stack coming soon. What are you hearin' from customers? What do they look for in a hybrid cloud solution and how are you looking to deliver on that? >> Yeah, so that's a very interesting question, Stu, because over the years, many vendors in this space have talked about hybrid cloud but it's never really come of age, so to speak. And I think a large part of it is because there hasn't been enough of an understanding around how customers truly consume hybrid. One of the things we've done, in partnership with Microsoft, is to really profile how customers really want to consume this notion of hybrid. There are environments where you have a disconnected set of data centers, you have the edge and you have the central data center, and they need to be able to keep those two synchronized and aligned, and so on. There are use cases where ... You know, you truly want a hybrid nature. You want data sitting at both ends and you want to be able to execute test dev in your cloud environment and a primary workload running into your on-prem data center. And so, Microsoft Azure stack, in particular, I would point to as one hybrid cloud offering that we do have in the marketplace. A good partnering, very closely around, which truly addresses the problems that customers, or the desires that customers have in this space. >> When you're thinking about your customers, what keeps you up at night? You just were describing how customers aren't even sure themselves how hybrid they want to be and how they will use the cloud. What are your biggest concerns when you think about your customers and how they use Lenovo's offerings? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think at the core of it, you want to enable them to succeed. It's not so much about the IT infrastructure underneath, it's really about enabling them to drive their business as quickly as they can, to drive productivity, and so on. So, for us, it's very important that we stay aligned with their business objectives and eliminate the worry and concern that they typically have with IT infrastructure under their hood. Honestly, as we all in the industry tend to say, IT is a means to an end. And we truly want to enable that. We truly want to make this a non-issue for our customers. That's really what keeps us up at night, is ensuring that we have the right framework, the right portfolio, the right set of offerings, and more importantly, the right set of services to allow them to do that. >> Radhika, we all know that IT is typically spending way too much time with some of the basic blocking and tackling. The number I've heard the last 15 years is somewhere between 75% and 90% of your budget is spent on kind of keeping the lights on. What's holding us back? How are we actually moving the needle forward with some of these new solutions? >> I think a lot of it, interestingly, comes down to software define. I mean, if you think about it, software define enables a level of agility, simplicity, and cost economics as well that we weren't able to previously get from the more legacy hardware-centric offerings. So, I think your logic standard comes down to being able to deliver on the automation, the deep integration across hardware and software, which is really where we at Lenovo think we can add the most value because we've got the platforms, as we just talked about. So, we're really very keen on innovating on the software layer above it, such that customers can expect to get these highly verticalized offerings that they can then deploy for their workloads and various other business use cases. >> Alright, Radhika, we can't let you get out of here without talking about some of the networking pieces, with your background. Kirk talked about it a little bit, but, can you give us a little insight, what's Lenovo doing with the networking piece, some of the integrations that you're helping to deliver? >> Yeah, Stu, that's an area I feel incredibly proud of. I'll say that as I've spent the last couple of decades in the IT industry, it's becoming very evident there is simplicity that is continuing to grow. Obviously, we've come out with hyper converge, it solved the storage problem, it's made it a lot simpler to consume. Networking is really the next frontier. It's the frontier that hasn't been attacked yet. We're still talking about technologies that are in world that are like four decades old. And so this is ripe for a disruption. That's exactly what we're doing. As we go talk to our customers about deploying cloud data centers, scale out data centers, you know, they're telling us network traffic is flowing east, west and the equipment that they have has been architected for traffic that predominantly flows north, south. So, we're really helping simplify that challenge for them. We're coming out with tools, and we're announcing a couple of these today, we're coming out with tools that provide much better visibility with telemetry capabilities. We're providing them tools that allow them to apply policies, so, even as they deploy different types of workloads, they can specify quality of service and have that carried over to the network traffic as well. So, we're incredibly excited about what we're doing here in networking. >> So, what's the end for networking, in the sense of, as you said, it is an industry that is ripe for disruption. Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now, in terms of networking and in terms of visibility? >> Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I think networking has to evolve to where it is much, much, much more simplified. You don't need to have certifications that you have to gain over multiple years in order to qualify you to work in the data center. 'Cause it's, ultimately this is plumber, and as we go to scale out data centers, it's going to be incredibly important that nodes are able to talk to each other and data is fluid and is able to move around very quickly and networking is what enables it. So, the ultimate vision for networking is really making it invisible. Make it invisible to the point that you don't have to worry about it. >> Radhika, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you on. >> Thank you, it's been my pleasure as well, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more of the CUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform after this. (energetic music)

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