 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today for a CUBE Conversation with some of our friends from VMware, big announcement today. And we're excited to have Kit Colbert come on. He is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform Business Unit. Kit, great to see you again. Hello, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Absolutely, so big announcement. It's the second generation of the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Now you guys just brought this to market barely a year ago. Tell us about the new announcement and some of the excitement around the changes that you guys put in place. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so this has been a project that's been in the making for a few years now. We first announced the product version of this in April of last year, and then we announced the general availability of it in August at our VMworld conference. And so as we've been engaging with customers since we went GA, what we've seen and heard from them was that, you know, they're looking for more data center style options. Traditionally, when we first started this project, you may remember it was called Project Dimension before it became the product of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Back when it was Project Dimension, we had more of an edge computing focus. We were focused on how can we get compute in our VMware infrastructure out to factories and retail settings and so on and so forth. And so we designed the system for those types of environments, half rack configuration, smaller number of servers, things like power supply and UPS built in. But as we heard back from customers, what they said was, hey, this is great, but we have a lot of needs in our data center today. And so the idea there was, let's rethink this offering for the data center and actually produce the types of rack architectures and server types that customers are looking for. Just goes to show you, try to give them ying and they want yang, right? It's a very different kind of challenge than going into the data center environment. And, you know, one of the promises of cloud is obviously provisioning, right? And spinning things up. So that's a really important piece of the puzzle. How are you guys addressing, you know, letting people add capacity and kind of change this configuration if it's actually, you know, in my data center? Yeah. Yeah, so you've seen a number of different things that we're doing here, really enhancing the maturity across the board of this offering. So it's important to realize that this is a cloud service. That yes, even though the physical servers and the rack reside on-premises for a customer, again in their data center, at a retail location, it is a cloud service. And that we are running this and managing this like cloud service. And so like any good cloud service, a customer should have to interact with any human being, right? They can just call an API. And indeed, that's the way it works. Either through an API or through our UI workflow, today a customer can come on and order a new SDDC rack for their environment. And that initial provisioning, you know, we fully automated that we had a Dell service technician coming out to figure the hardware on-site. But then after that, we didn't have many options for customers. Let's say that they started out with maybe four nodes on-site, but then they realized, oh, I actually need six or eight nodes, right? They're getting more applications on there, greater usage, and they just need more capacity. And so what we support now is this ability to actually, again, use an API using the UI, request additional servers for their existing racks. And this is, again, something very simple to do in just a few weeks that those things will arrive. The service technician will be there to install them and get that customer up and running. Right. So I was going to say, you know, typically it's order and then you got to put the stuff in and deploy it, right? And then support it. So you just touched a little bit on the deployment. Did you basically take that order and then just with your existing process, get into the data center and light up that additional hardware? Yeah, so we've done a lot to really automate this whole process. The really powerful thing here is that, you know, this partnership that we have between VMware and Dell runs really deep. So we've actually engaged and integrated into their manufacturing process so that as we get that order through the API, through the UI from a user, we can ship that over to Dell, tell them the specifics of what that customer ordered and Dell can get started manufacturing that. We actually, again, as part of that manufacturing process integration, we can get the latest version of our cloud software onto those servers. We can install unique cryptographic keys on those servers so we can identify them. And then we work with the Dell shipping and the Dell service technician to actually meet those physical servers when they arrive and properly set them up and configure them. So for the customer, it's a completely hands-off experience. And I think that's really powerful. They're not in, you know, they don't need to get in the nitty gritty of hardware configuration and installing our software and managing the life cycle of it. It's much, much simpler than that. And so, you know, I think we've really taken that and extended it here, both with the additional rack types, and we have for a full rack now for the data center, the new host types, a new host type that's much beefier, better for data center workloads. And finally, for that, expanded capacity that we just talked about as well. Right. And then on the support side, I assume, you know, even though it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC, that probably the first line of support is still VMware. It's still the software on the top of the infrastructure. Yeah. And that's a good question. Yeah, you're right. It is. It's a VMware run, VMware operated service, and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support. So it's not one of these situations where you've got two different vendors pointing the finger at each other and the customer has to figure all that out. Now it's on VMware and we need to figure it out. We obviously work with Dell on the backend. We've also integrated with their telemetry systems so we can pull all the different sort of hardware, telemetry, monitoring data that they're getting so we can understand the health of those servers that are running. And when we detect a problem, is that something that we can fix remotely by just accessing it with our engineers or do we need a service technician to actually go out there and fix a physical issue? Right, right. So it's just interesting guys, launch this really thinking more edge and you're getting drawn into more of a data center. So why are you getting drawn in? What are some of the advantages, you know, that the CIOs and the CTOs are seeing with this type of a deployment? Yeah. So the data center part is really interesting. And again, surprise, we thought there wouldn't be more needed the edge initially just because, hey, these edge environments are really difficult to manage and they're kind of distributed and people don't have IT staff there. But what we're surprised to hear about is the very urgent need that customers have in their data centers. Now again, they have servers in the data centers that they're running these things today. But what they find is that it just doesn't work that well and that they're spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping the lights on. And it's, you know, these things don't differentiate them as a business. You know, one of the things I talked to customers a lot about is that no customer has ever differentiated itself by how well they run VMware infrastructure. And that might sound kind of crazy at first, right? But, you know, it's true. Now that can differentiate themselves negatively by how poorly they run an infrastructure and then, you know, their apps don't work very well. But to some degree having working VMware infrastructure is just table sticks. And then what they do at an app level is what differentiates them. And so this idea that we can come in with VMware Cloud and Dell EMC, just take care of all of that operational overhead is really, really powerful. And so as you see folks and customers and companies going through these digital transformation cycles, modernizing their applications, they're like, oh man, I need to actually modernize my infrastructure as well. And so that's a compelling event that we say it's like, oh, there's something to rethink this. And it's a rethinking that they're like, well, why am I doing all this work in the first place? Let's actually rethink the whole thing and take a better, fundamentally better approach, i.e. a cloud approach. And so that's where VMware Cloud and Dell EMC comes in. And again, I think that's why we're seeing so much interest from customers. And again, where CIOs and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits. Right. And I'm just curious you're taking from kind of a product development and product release point of view, right? Is this kind of a typical VMware, kind of speed and pacing, or is this really getting to the second gen and the shift kind of in your go-to market as really more of a response to the market? Because again, as I was preparing and looking up on the initial launch was, it really wasn't that long ago. So to kind of pivot and call it second gen and include features and functions that are coming back from the market. Would you say that's kind of typical or are you guys getting a little bit more agile in your own kind of product development cycle and getting away from those massive PRDs and MRDs and actually trying to respond more quickly to the pace of the marketplace? Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, you're right. We are going through our own digital transformation here at VMware as well, right? We are shifting from a company that primarily sold shrink-wrapped software to a company that sells cloud services. And so, as you look at that, it actually changes a lot of what we can do. We can respond much more quickly, much quicker to the sort of customer feedback. We can ship new updates much more frequently. And so, if you look at our traditional vSphere release cycles, those were what, every 12 months, 18 months, maybe at most. But what we can do now with our cloud releases is actually update and do major updates every three months. And so we call this kind of the second major advance of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, but in reality, it's our third, our fourth actual release of our underlying software. And so we're actually doing these underlying releases much, much quicker. I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch, in particular, is because of the fact that, again, customers have been asking for this data center level of support and really optimizing this solution for the data center. And so now we've gone and done that. And again, I think we're going to see a lot more interest from the customers on the data center side because of it. Great. Well, Kit, thanks for giving us the quick update. Congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it, listen to those customers and they'll tell you what they want. Definitely, yeah, we're excited to. Thank you. All right, Kit, thanks again. He's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.