 Hi, this is Stu Miniman at the Wikibon World Headquarters in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Having a cube conversation talking about the increase of software-led infrastructure, changing the way IT is consuming what they're doing. Joining me for this segment is Suresh Jaster Saria from the Dell Product Management Team. Suresh, good to see you again. Thank you, Stuart. All right, so Suresh, two weeks ago we were at Dell World, a lot going on. Michael Dell on stage talking about how the company is now private and all the things that it's going to allow Dell to innovate on. And one of the things that's catching, I know a lot of people's interest, is that Dell, of course, has acquired quite a few companies over the past five plus years and done a lot of it to own IP, but it's really stepped up a lot of it to partnerships. And the one that I know we're gonna dig in today is the Dell Nutanix relationship. You're with the Dell XC web scale appliance solution. So tell us a little bit, how is the buzz at the show? What feedback have you had in the last couple of weeks since that is now a GA solution? Thank you, Stuart. The interest in the XC series is very high. The field is buzzing with a lot of excitement about the product. Of course, we have booked a few orders and the pipeline is very healthy. We have pipeline across all the geographies and in multiple industries and in many use cases. So what are you hearing about the product? Yeah, so first of all, I mean, we know we've been tracking Nutanix for the last couple of years. They've had a lot of growth. And good to hear what Dell is adding to it for the first piece is the breadth and reach of the Dell Salesforce and the channel. So good to hear that there's activity across the GEOs. I'm curious, what use cases are kind of bubbling to the top? What's the top things that you're hearing about what people want to use this new type of architecture for? Well, this architecture has had a lot of interest in many use cases, but the one use case where it has been very prevalent has been the VDI. And you know, high availability, lower cost, high performance, high capacity. All these things are nowadays prerequisites for getting an entry into the enterprise data center. However, one thing that this architecture provides that other architectures lack is incremental scalability and flexibility to move from a very low entry point into a very high scale. And that is what is very important for this use case, I think. And we have seen a lot of interest in VDI. You recently did some studies on VDI. What have you found? Yes, sir, I should write up some good points that I want to touch on. So first of all, when you think about the enterprise and you think about the reliability and I want to trust this architecture, that was typically something we built in almost a monolithic fashion. Every single component needed to be hardened and then we put the pieces together and had to integrate them. And while each solution might have been secure in HA and everything, putting together all the pieces was onerous and we have IT staff spending all their time making a bespoke architecture that they have to constantly tweak. And what Wikibon's been talking about for the last few years has been we need new architectures that are really built at a solution standpoint. Converged infrastructure has been a big driver for that. And I'm going to have them pull up actually a first slide from the research that you mentioned. And this is what we call really the new stack, which is it's not just about putting pieces together of server and storage, but really the further up the stack we can go, there's exponentially more value that we have. So VDI was really ripe for disruption because before we had to take a whole lot of pieces, put it together, operationally, we need to make a lot of changes. So really this new architecture fit really well as an early adoption for something like the Nutanix-based solutions. Yeah, right, Stu. Dell has been paying a special attention to application solutions. And in this product, XCC's product, we have released five specific appliances to address different applications, including VDI, private cloud, server virtualization, big data, as well as other database solutions. And this is where we want to educate our customers that once you have requirements for agility and incremental growth, this architecture is a very good fit for your needs. Yeah, Stu, I should bring up some good points because it is a different way of buying the architecture now. Customers want agility. They look at things like the public cloud and say, I want to only buy for what I'm using, be able to use it in incremental fashions. The old way of doing it was much more monolithic. I would buy a big block when I get outside of that. I need to buy another big block. I have to build on top of that. I had to tune it and everything on that. And we think there's huge opportunities for not only from a capital expense, but from an operational expense to make some big savings. It's one of those big challenges you've heard for years and years, everybody talking about, we, of course, you have to fight for what the budget dollars are, but then from an operational expense, IT spends so much of their budget on just making it work and keeping the lights on. It's usually 70 to 80% and looking for architectures that can really help that environment. So in your research, Stu, are there any specific findings that you had that talks about operational benefits or benefits for getting the environment up and running specifically in solutions-oriented deployment? Yeah, absolutely, Suresh. So we'll pull up one of the graphics that we have. The full research is available on wikibond.org. But we wanted to do something a little bit different here because it would be easy for us to say, take your, not to bash on sand too much, but take your sand that you would have bought five years ago and put that against what I could do with this new architecture. And it would be an easy win. It's going to be cheaper to buy. It's going to be faster to deploy. But one of the big things we've been hearing is, well, why don't I just go to all white box architecture? Won't that be cheaper? I'll take all of the standard IP out. That's what we hear the Googles and Amazons of the world do. So we actually took a white box deployment and stack that up against the Dell plus Nutanix VDI solution. And what we actually found is if you look over a three-year timeframe, it's actually more than 25% savings on just the capex itself, which is a little bit counterintuitive. And it's really because you can just buy it all as a single skew. You know exactly what you're buying. You don't overbuy, you don't underbuy. It's designed for your environment. And from an operational standpoint, it's six times faster. I mean, this is where we can just have huge savings. We can have our IT staff focused on places where their ad value get up and running so much faster. Look at the agility it comes back to, Suresh. You know, from the users they're saying, I really don't want to have to think about my infrastructure so more. I want to worry about my business. I want to deploy to my users. I don't want to, I want to have much faster time from buying it, to deploying it, from going from pilot to going into production, from going to pilot to scaling it out. And we were even saying just the increments that I can buy, the speed that I can do it is really going to help customers in that time to value is one of those new measurements that we look at. Those are great findings, Stu. 25% less expensive per desktop in six times faster to deploy. How could you argue with such a solution? Yeah, so I mean, you know, Dell has a lot of solutions. How, talk about a little bit, kind of the training you guys are doing with the field and the channel. I mean, there's got to be that shift. You know, how fast are they kind of, you know, getting the idea of this technology? Well, as I said earlier, you know, the interest in this architecture is very large. We have been training our field teams around the world. I personally have trained almost 600, 700 folks in face-to-face training. And that is a huge interest. There's a huge interest in this architecture. Yeah, it's interesting. We did a study at the meeting this year, put out the market definition and the forecast for what we call server sand. Some people call it hyper-convergence, really fits under the umbrella that we put. And it's interesting because at the end of the day, this is really the death of the storage array as a separate silo. So it is a big change. It is going to take years for this to move, but starting to see, you know, we're past some of the early adopters, starting to see a growing use case. People will say, well, it doesn't work for everything. Well, you know, that's the definition of the disruptive technology is it comes in, you know, cheaper into niche environments and grows from there. So, you know, really exciting to watch. I want to give you a sort of kind of last words. You know, what do you expect to see from this solution set over the next kind of six, 12 months that we should be looking back and seeing in the future? Well, we hope that this architecture finds a place in the data center with very agile workloads like VDI and private cloud and server virtualization. And from there, I think this technology has the potential to take over major portions of the enterprise data centers. That's what we are expecting. So, great, Suresh, really appreciate you coming here to the Wikibon office. Dell, of course, has locations around the world. It's good to have you here local. I'm sure we'll hear back from you more as this solution grows. And this is Stu Miniman with Cube Conversations talking about the disruption as software is continuing to eat the world, cloud, big data, and software-led infrastructure. Thank you for joining us and look for many more research and videos from wikibon and siliconangle.tv.