 Cube, I'm Dave Vellante at HP Discover in Barcelona. This is day three for theCUBE. We've done a number of CUBE events at HP Discover. We've done several in Las Vegas. We did last year, we were in Frankfurt. And this year is, there's a third time actually in Europe with HP. We did a smaller event in Barcelona in 2010. We did Frankfurt last year. And this is by far the most exciting, most energetic discover that we've been involved in. So we're going to talk, we've been talking all week about converged infrastructure. And we've touched on virtualization and VMware a little bit, but we're going to go deeper now. Jeff Carlitis here, he's with HP's Converged Systems Group and Brent Sullivan's with VMware. VMware and HP have an epic partnership. I think HP sells more VMware licenses than anybody. So gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks. It's great to be here again. Yeah, it's good to see you guys. So let's start off with Discover. What are your reactions? Hey, you know, from an HP perspective, this is kind of our coming out party for Converged Systems as a business unit. So we're rolling out a total new portfolio. It is the next click addressing the next wave of IT complexity and that's called Converged Systems. So I see us everywhere, even though it's day three. Man, there's a lot of energy floating around here and we got some great things going on. So I'm stoked. Yeah, Brent, I mean, VMware has just been an amazing journey and you guys use that term a lot and we've documented it. It's been astounding. I remember when Paul Moritz stood up at a financial analyst meeting and said, we are going to build what he called at the time a software mainframe. And then Rick Jackson was a CMO at the time. He said, don't know if I use that term again. But we all, you know, us old mainframe guys knew what he meant. That was, and I remember talking to Moritz about this saying, that's an incredibly challenging vision that you've put forth. And he said, yeah, it is. And in effect, it meant any workload, any application, anywhere with no performance degradation, no downtime. And that's essentially what VMware has achieved in an amazingly short period of time. So, you know, you must be really proud of that. Well, we certainly are. We couldn't do it without partners. You know, in order to do the pooling, the abstracting, the automating that we do that our customers value so highly, we need partners to make sure that it works seamlessly. It works reliably. And they're able to move as many workloads of whatever size as they want to into a virtual environment. We work together with HP around virtual HANA. That's a great proof point that there's really no workload that together we can't address. You know, but at the time I said, specifically to that point about partners, I said to Paul, that's going to be even harder because you've got to herd cats. You've got to get all these partners working together and make all this stuff work, not just within a mainframe, which is controlled within a stack, but you have to do it within an entire industry. What has changed in the last 20, 30 years in this industry such that that is actually feasible today? Is it an industry standards? Is it application development tools? What's your observation there? Well, a tight working relationship has been the key to it. And we've had that for over 13 years now with HP and converge systems take advantage of all the integration work that we've done historically, put it in a package so that customers get predictable, repeatable results. Yeah, I think from an HP standpoint, convergence and our converged infrastructure strategy that we set forth about five years ago has really evolved and it's really taken root. I mean, take for example, years ago we would deliver technologies maybe only specific like ILO or integrated lights out ASIC on our servers. Now that propagates not only through the servers, but in the storage. Take our commonality of components and infrastructure that stretch now into networking. Our sea of sensors technology, again, born and bred out of our leading proline servers now extends into our network and organization. So by converging the underlying infrastructure, now we have it's easier for us internally to bring these together, to be able to deliver and partner with VMware virtually any application, any tier one, any application of any size. That's a Jeff, so earlier, so this week we've sort of done, this is our third drill down on Converged, we sort of looked at the channel piece, which was really interesting. I mean, the channel wants to participate in this and make margin. And so we talked a little bit about that. We had Tom Joyce on yesterday, kind of a big picture of business. We had some fun around competition and so forth. So let's talk about Converged infrastructure. You guys are taking it to another level now. That's right, that's right. Just give us a quick update on this. Yeah, yeah, it's Converged systems. So what we're doing is we're delivering, we call it sharks. I mean, we built sharks. Sharks are amazingly efficient. They're purpose built for velocity and speed. And we're doing the exact same thing from an infrastructure and application standpoint. We're bringing together the best of our compute storage networking expertise, and we're bringing it together into a package that'll be able to allow companies to easily roll out virtual machines, whether it be smaller number, mid-market, with something that got a Converged system 300, heavily targeted towards branch offices, mid-sized businesses, maybe 50 to 300 virtual machines. And then we've got a bigger brother of that, that the Converged system 700, which really innovates around Platsan and other core technologies for more enterprise and demanding. So these are, the system itself is roughly half, roughly half of the total value proposition. It's performance, it's like a shark, it's efficient. But there's also a total experience around it that comes with it on the way a company or a partner can procure it and get it in installation. So Brent, it became blatantly obvious when people started to virtualize the compute layer that we were creating other problems, in particular things like storage and certainly now networking became problematic. It became choke points in the virtualized infrastructure. So could you talk a little bit about, and then you guys have sort of responded with the industry, notably, with integration points, trying to make the infrastructure not the problem, make it invisible, I would say. Could you talk about why VMware cares about Converged infrastructure? Yeah, so you're exactly right. The choke points kind of is like squeezing a balloon, right? You squeeze one and the other part just pops out. And it takes multiple hands on the balloon so that one other part doesn't squeeze out. And that's what we've had in the relationship with HP. We've been able to address each of the different facets within a Converged system so that the performance is balanced so that there's not any of those hot spots, any of those bottlenecks in the performance of those systems. And really, it's the partnership that's helped us avoid those kinds of difficulties that others might experience. And that's, you know, I'll add to that. Customers I talk to day in and day out, you know, they want to get out of the cobbling together the solution business. They want to go drive their precious resources and doing more value added things for their companies. Same thing with our partners. They'd rather be selling and focusing on their value added services than piecing together these solutions, the artesians of these systems. Well, that is what we are doing together. After we get the recipe right, we can now cookie cutter out and deliver these systems that span, you know, virtually all workloads. Right, I mean, you talk to guys in the hotel business, they say, we're in a hotel management business. We're not in the infrastructure business. You talk to guys in financial services. We're in the money business, not infrastructure business. That's right. And even, you know, we have the ability around this to configure and quote, in 15 to 20 minutes versus typically days. We have the ability of delivering these systems and implement them into the customer's environment in as little as 20 days. Now, okay, what does that mean? If I'm a channel part of, well, you can call on more customers, more turns, faster time to revenue. We can react quickly. We can upgrade a customer with a flexible module in as little as five days. So we've got great opportunities to really increase the velocity of our partners and our sellers. And our customers. You mentioned the journey earlier and the overwhelming mass of our customers where they're at in the journey is aggressively driving tier one applications into business production. They need ways to quickly turn on large amounts of compute storage and networking. And I've said the words before, I'll say them again to do them reliably, repeatedly and to have the kind of scale that they need. Converge systems, the right answer for customers. We're trying to do just that. Push more applications into business production. Yeah, so Jeff, we were talking, I think it was, so you say now that the end to end cycle between order to delivery is like 20 days. So obviously the channel is going to love that. And I was trying to figure out what it was before and I think you've cut it in half or maybe even a third, right? Well, our competitors is roughly 45 days. And that's where our target market is there. So we believe that is a core part of the experience and the value that isn't just built in the technology. It's built in our HP's global supply chain, our ability of using the breadth and might of what HP can do as a supply chain. So Brad, you see VMware created this need, right? Or the problem need, whatever the need for it. Because VMware and Amazon, right? They spin up a virtual machine like that in minutes. So, oh wow, I don't have the rest of the infrastructure to take care of that, so. Exactly, I mean we used to talk about, you know, gee, you can spin up a VM in a few minutes. So what? You've got a VM, it's not doing any useful work. If it's a business application like I was just talking about, we've got a provision security storage networking. There's a lot of other components that have to be brought into play. And this is another place where we talk about software defined data center and we're deeply engaged with HP in areas like software defined networking. We've announced a number of initiatives with HP that are beyond what we're doing with any other partners in that space. And these are all the kinds of things that pay off big when a customer buys HP Converged Systems, they get the benefit of all that work. Okay, so I got to ask you. You got a lot of initiatives internally at VMware. VSAN, you made the NYSERA acquisition. How should customers think about those in the context of what they should do? What their strategy and roadmap should be? What's the right fit? Yeah, they should think about the choice that this offers up to them, right? None of our customers are the same. We talk about target markets because they share some general circumstances but when it all comes down to it, we together build the key pieces. Our channel partners are the ones who really help customers make the choices. So they can make those determinations of which are the pieces that we're offering up to them that are the best fit for them and tune it to exactly what they need and this is not new really in our business. I mean, it used to be the server OS or whatever, even the desktop OS. Microsoft always had some level of function, whether it was networking or storage or compute in the OS. Now you got the data center OS essentially. You've got to have some base level function and then, Jeff, your job is to add value on top of that. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit from a customer perspective. What do you get? If a customer says, well, I'm just going to get it from VMware. What are you saying? I think really what they're not looking for just something from VMware or something from Microsoft, they're looking for faster delivery of IT services. They're looking for applications quicker. You need to come to someone that can actually do this all at once. That's why we, in our partnership, we've got engineers in dark, dingy rooms carving out the next generation of integration together. We got management integration that spans these systems that allow a seamless, a great view of managing these systems through vCenter. And we've got, so we've got joint roadmaps. We've got, we're building this together. HP can then deliver it, use our professional services. We can provide single point of accountability to the customers. This is all important stuff for our customers rather than the finger-pointings that they can often get with the competition. Well, the integration piece is critical. As we were talking off the air, Wikibon for years now has done sort of lined up integration points in VMware because we thought it was just so important. And VMware's, I think, very smart about it because VMware didn't have the resources to do all the integration yourself and you probably would have screwed it up if you tried to do it yourself. So you leveraged, I know, fans, but you leveraged the industry expertise to do that. Now, at the same time, the industry had to have an incentive. This is why Todd Nielsen, friend of the Cube, he would come on and he would always give us that metric for every dollar spent on VMware licenses. I think you said 15 spent in the ecosystem, so that's spent on you guys and some of your competitors and throughout. So that was a brilliant move to create value as an ecosystem, but still amazing that you pulled that off. Are you shocked, surprised, pleased, all of the above? Well, happy to look back, but happier to look forward. You talked about setting a baseline and a great example of that is with things like recovery time, VMware can do a snapshot, but HP's snapshots using hardware much faster, gives customers better recovery time, recovery point objectives for that. So it's a great place where we may set a foundation or a baseline, but we partner with HP so that we can exceed that baseline because that's what customers want us to do. So when you look back to things like that, we can also look forward to within things like management. HP was the first to integrate management with vCenter. We're driving that forward. We're driving forward across management layers as well as all of the various capabilities that HP brings to bear with Converged Systems. So talking about specifically, I mean essentially a Converged System specific for VMware, right? That's one of the offerings that it is. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. What's that mean for the customer? Yeah, well it means rapid delivery of a system that is purpose built for virtualization. It'll provide a customer the fastest path to virtualization and delivering those applications. It means a integrated proactive care support experience wrapped around that. It means that management integration that we've talked through is a core part of this. It is the ability of rolling out infrastructure quickly and allowing it to grow with simple modular building blocks as they grow in the future. So what does it mean? It means lower risk. It means less time spent cobbling these systems together and it less money spent across all of these, both CAPEX and OPEX. And the OPEX is a huge area that we focus on with management. I think it's a huge area that Converged System addresses uniquely well because when I was a pup, I worked at a company called Compact and a competitor where people who still built their own servers, nobody builds their own servers anymore. And the same dynamics are at play here on a broader stage with Converged Systems. There's going to come a day in the very near future, Jeff, when working together, folks aren't going to build their own data center environment, so they're going to buy them in a modular format, HP Converged Systems the way they'll do that. And what about, so that sounds like a sort of general purpose virtualization engine, what about specific workloads? Is that something that you guys envision? We're actually, we're rolling out something we call app maps, which is providing guidance and frameworks to use our solutions expertise again between the companies on how best to drop applications on that. While not all automated at this point in time, it's more guidance and prescription, we see a future where today we may have cloud maps to roll out cloud and orchestrate cloud workloads, app maps would roll out and deliver application workloads on top of our Converged Systems for virtualization. Yeah, absolutely. And they'll be using those in areas, we talked about SAP and virtualized HANA a moment ago. We're also engaged very well in areas like healthcare and federal government education. These are areas where people can take advantage not only of the Converged Systems, but also of these app maps, so that they get the hardware pieces, packaged components, repeatable, predictable, and then also the tuned software layer to add on top of that for a complete success. Excellent, all right gentlemen, we're out of time. Really appreciate your time here today. $112 billion plus company, but you can't do it alone. You got to have partners and partnerships alive and well, congratulations on your success and thanks again for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there everybody. I'll be back with John Furrier with our next guest. We're live from HP Discover Barcelona. We'll be right back after this message. All right.