 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back, everyone. We are wrapping up three days of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Gil Schneersen. He is the senior vice president at the X-Rail Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Gil. Thank you for having me. Good seeing you again, Gil. Yeah, good to see you again. I'm a theCUBE veteran. We're always happy to have repeat, repeat guys on the show. So talk to me about the X-Rail. It's a massive success story. What is the secret? What's the secret of your success? Well, it's a combination of a few things. First of all, it's an HCI appliance, hyper-converge appliance. And as you may know, and I'm sure it's been discussed before, we are seeing a massive transition from traditional architectures to HCI. And that's basically driven because the economics of HCI are so enticing that people really can resist, at least looking at them. And we know that 60% of them either have it or will have it soon. And within that HCI transition and within those economical benefits, we focus on VMware, which is a larger portion of the market. And we have a product that's solely focused on VMware and automates the deployment and lifecycle management of essentially a VCR cluster. So it's a very simple message. If you're a VMware customer, instead of going and changing every three years to your traditional three-tier architecture, what if we could give you the economical benefits of hyper-converge, which is start small, growing very small increments and never migrate data, but without ever leaving your VMware ecosystem? And so if I asked you as a VMware user, you would always say yes. And so because it's so focused on that user and so optimized to them, we're seeing a great success with the product these days. Before the cameras were rolling, you made a comment that you said, hyper-convergence is not really about the tech. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, that's an insight. It's actually very true. We can do things today that could not be done in a three-tier architecture. But there are many hyper-converged products and all of them are doing very well. In fact, even in our portfolio we have VxRail, we also have the Dell XE, which is a Nutanix-based technology. And so why are they all doing well is because when I buy hyper-converged, I can start small, which means that essentially I do not need to plan. And planning is dangerous because with traditional storage, you either buy too much or you buy too little. And even if you plan properly, you use only part of it until you migrate the data in. And then you use all of it. And then when you have the new one, you also use part of it until you finish it. And so you're never really using what you're buying. And so now you have this technology where you buy small, you don't have to plan at all. You can automatically increment and you don't have to migrate. And you know that migration is a very traumatic experience in large environments. And so those benefits are what's driving all of this. It's now enabled by technology, but it's not about that. And so, but what I also think that is happening is that we've combined the skill set that was or the technology for storage and server and we deploy it within a customer's network. So we've made it much simpler or much, but it's not ultimate simplicity. People have to remember that they still bought a data center solution. And so now troubleshooting a hyper-coverage solution means that you have to know storage principles and network principles and hyper-coverage principles. So let's, let's explode that out a little bit. Because this is really an exciting topic for me. When you take that load off of your customers, the planning, the pre-engineering, the test, the integration work, that frees up a lot of OPEX hours for customers to redirect their energies to do something else. Let's talk about those something else. What has, what's been the transformation within customers once they're freed up from that responsibility? I don't know. Look, if you look at hyper-converge while it's growing dramatically, it hasn't taken a massive share of the industry yet. We have to be humble at the same time. We see growth. And so I don't know that people free up a lot of time, but what they can do is they can focus on the higher level outcomes, which is ultimately what they want. People want a cloud experience. Either it's completely private or it's a hybrid cloud. They want the ability to deliver by self-service to their own internal users. They want a cloud outcome. And regardless of HCI, you still need to do that work. And so now they can forget about the infrastructure because it's mostly automated and focus at the next level of outcome. And as you know, within CPSD, we also do that. So if a customer wanted the full experience, we would actually put the infrastructure aside. We would talk about that hybrid cloud experience end to end. We would consult or deliver, but if they want to do it on their own, which many of them want, we would then provide them the infrastructure. But I think that's what they're going there. They're looking at the next level of outcomes beyond what infrastructure brings. But you also said, which is also an astute comment about how it is actually a traumatic experience for these customers to do the migration. And do you face a lot of resistance? I mean, how do you get the organizational buy-in to initiate this change? Yeah, what I said traumatic, I mean, that in a 3-tier architecture, that migration happens every three years. So I think people are pretty much willing to do it one last time. Because they know it's not going to happen again. And so migration into hyper-coverage is certainly not resistance. Where we see resistance is not even customers objecting, but some customers are unable. So for example, if my storage buying cycle and my network buying cycle and my server buying cycle are not aligned, I will always have some access capacity somewhere. So even though I could have a much better solution going forward, I can't afford it because I have capacity somewhere. For that reason, by the way, we introduced Cloud Flex. Because if you could buy VxRail or Dell XC with zero down payment and pay month by month on month and have no commitment, which means you can return all of it in 12 months, we are trying to break that cycle and allow people to get into it because they want to do this. Sometimes they simply can't. So day three of Dell EMC world, you've talked to, what, something like 30 customers. Give us a snapshot of the range of conversations. Is there a dominating theme or are customers just on, are all 30 customers on 30 different phases of this journey? So I talk to a lot of customers, but I also talk to a lot of partners. Partners are still figuring out how much they need to go into hyper-converged. Most of those conversations, both with customers and partners were about, not to acknowledge so much, but rather is it time to consolidate practices? Is it really still the time to keep a storage practice separate then? And that's both for the seller, us and the partners, and for the end users, right? Is it really true that you need to hold budgets for storage, budgets for network budget? And do you have the right people that know all of those disciplines that could, then you might need fewer of them because others would be focusing on other things. But those that support this and understand this must have brought a skill set that they had before. So most of the conversations were around that. People are interested whether hyper-converged is ready for prime time. They don't know if it's ready for mission critical. And I tell them that VxRail today is used for radiology and unified communication phone and email and SMS traffic between carriers and trading applications, believe it or not, already. And so I think as I said, because it's not so much about technology, because we assume that technology from any large vendor will work. And if it doesn't, any large vendor will make it work and stand by the customer. But the most economical benefits are driving everybody to go there very, very fast. So most of the conversations about can it be done, is it ready for it, should we do it right now, should we wait, I think those are the themes right now. And that's what we'll be talking about at next year's Dell EMC. I think by next year, we will talk less about hyper-converge because it's almost going to be. It'll be the reality. Yeah, table stakes. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be table stakes at that point. And I actually don't know what we're going to be talking about. Well, we will just have to wait and see. Yes. Gil, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you very much. That wraps it up for theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm Rebecca Knight, along with Keith Townsend. Thanks for joining us and we will see you next time.