 Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Austin everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here live at Dell World 2014, our good friend, Sam Greenblatt is here. He is the Vice President of Dell Engineering Solutions, CTO, Extraordinaire, and- And whatever else, tail, you want to get me? And also I want to thank you personally for helping us get here this year because- No problem. We had you on at VMworld, we had a great conversation, you said you guys are coming to Dell World this year, so appreciate that. Thanks for having us. No, not an issue. So the big buzz is Dell is a private company. Does it affect the technical wonks like you? Oh, 100%. You know, if you look at the appliances that Michael's been on stage touting, if I would have gone to the street with Michael and told him we were going to use Spark, which was an open source replacement for MapReduce, and we were going to use Cloud Era, which is a partner, and we were going to take MapReduce from seconds down to milliseconds. The street would immediately devalue that as technology because they would say, okay, how much are you going to raise on that? What's amazing is we're already getting returns on doing stuff like that faster than we ever thought. You're saying the street wouldn't have understood the plan, I mean, wouldn't part of the street say, wow, that's great, you're going to reduce latency and it's going to be a great- It depends who on the street you're talking to. I'm not knocking the street, they have great analysts, but the, you know, you guys were just at a strata and you're talking to visionaries and I was talking to them up at the conference and we all say, you know, they buy the buzz, but they don't really buy the solution. And if you tell them it's great, they think it's fantastic. It's hard when you're doing these type of appliances to enable customers in different ways. The customers get it, but a lot of the, all the analysts out there are still looking at, why aren't we doing it the way we used to do it? Well, it's very hard to predict what the street's reaction is. Remember IBM had the big miss this year, earlier, missed in the quarterly earnings? Just Splunk, Tableau, ServiceNow, they all got tagged. What does that have to do with Splunk, Tableau and ServiceNow? And ServiceNow has a blowout quarter and all of a sudden it's up 10 points. I mean, it's very strange, but ultimately though, right, as capitalists, don't markets ultimately figure it out? Over time they do, but it takes, you know, Gartner has that curve of disillusionment. Yeah, the hype cycle thing. The hype cycle. And we actually go through that. I always thought they were crazy with it, but in the beginning, everybody's hyping it, then we go into the twelfth of disillusionment and then we start going into reality where people are actually using it. So they eventually get it. And then what happens is, when you disrupt, what happens is the initial disruption isn't always understood. When you neutralize, they get that right away. And what's even more important is if you look at the next thing, which is differentiate, they get that too. And productivity, they understand better than anything else. So you're going to kill me on this question, but I'll throw my neck out there anyway. Are you guys the disruptor? Are you the fast follower? Are you the commoditizer? Are you the innovator? Which of those are you? I don't answer those questions. I knew what you were going to say. Dave, that's a great question to ask. Michael's going to be here tomorrow. Why don't you ask Michael? And you'll get a better answer. I know what he's going to say. We're the customer company, right? That's, and so, okay. So he likes to talk about that a lot. How much of that is sort of marketing? How much of that is real? It's 100% real. When we went out to start the appliances, you know, one of our appliances is the bill appliance for databases that we did with the NalSandisk used to be FusionIO. That came from customers saying, we need to speed up Cassandra. We need to speed up Mongo. We need to have a better solution, more in-memory databases for non-SQL. The customers get what they need, and they come to us and ask us about it, and that's how we build it. And we build it quick enough to get it in the market and test it. The Oracle one, which is a R12C appliance, it is for the mid-market, and I got to say that very, very directly, we're able to give three times the performance at a significant price reduction, but that's all customer driven. We didn't go out there and say, how do we beat an exadata or anything else? Customers came and said, here are my requirements, how can you help me? Well, I was commenting earlier that you guys actually make an interesting partner for companies like Oracle, who sort of exited the low end of the X86 server business. You don't own a database. Let's call it the large institutions at the low end, for the preferred accounts. Yeah, right, right. But they're not trying to crush you the same way they are IBM, they HP and they are having this urinary Olympics and they're fighting and they won't talk to each other, but it all makes a good partner there. What does it mean from a technical standpoint to partner? You guys, where's the focus? Is it on integration? I'll give you an example with Oracle. We work with Dave Schreen and we work with Will Nguyen Co-Hertz that are Larry's now CTO staff before they worked with Larry when he was CEO. They look at enabling us because they do not have the reaching range and they'll tell you that to go into the market below the global 500. They do not have the sales force and there's a term that the great marketeers use called permission. Do you have permission to go into the, as you call it, the SMB, I will not call a small, medium business because that's not an appropriate term at a conference. We call it the up-and-coming institutions and what happens is they trust Dell, they work with us. We've been with them for 30 years, we've been in business. So it's really good to get into that market. So Sam, talking about the appliances, you and I both spoke at a WebSpeak event. It was hosted by Nutanix earlier this year. At the show today, Dell announced the XC WebScale conversion appliance that's powered by Nutanix. Can you talk a little bit about what are the conversations you're having with customers about WebScale? Why is it not just a marketing term? How are they really embracing some of the technologies that big guys are using? That's a very, very good question. I met with the Nutanix people yesterday. I had their head of development and I talked to D Raj more than I sometimes talk to anybody else and one of the things D Raj says is once they get it in, once they run it and they see the benefits of what it does to the IO configuration underneath, people get it. And you know, Salesforce has, he has the same problem. You go out and you whiteboard how a Nutanix works. The customer will basically leave you as fast as you can. You show them the business benefits of the box, you win. So what we do with our XC, XC system is we actually go in, we put it in with even an EVO rack. We put it in with some of our FXs. It will absolutely do the right job. The term hyperconverged is almost like cloud. It depends who uses it to believe it one way or the other. But what's important is what do you get at the back end of it? And that's what we do with the XC. All right, so cloud. I actually want to shift gears on you. You were one of the first guests that I interviewed that really helped articulate the value of Docker back at Red Hat Summit towards the beginning of this year. I still love Docker. Yeah, so can you explain for our audience how Docker fits into the Dell Cloud marketplace and the announcements that you have this week? Actually, you should see here on the floor that we have some Docker. I believe it made it to the conference. You got to remember, I see everything before it comes out. And I'm not pre-announcing anything. It's not going to affect our stop, by the way. So what's going to happen is we see Docker as a way to move applications between different cloud platforms without a lot of hard work. We have our Dell Cloud Manager that talks to Docker containers and moves it. It's really the pass layer and the sash layer brought into a container. And what we like about it is it's the same way that if you took a, let's say iOS was a cloud phone. When you bring something from the app store, everything you need to run and instantiate itself is in the app. Everything is in Docker. As you know that Microsoft and TechEd announced they have a relationship with Docker now. Red Hat is announced they have a relationship with Docker and VMware is announced that they're going to support Docker and what you're seeing is it's a new form of compute. And it's not a new style, but it's a new form of compute. And I shouldn't have said new style. But it's a new form of compute where you're containerizing everything you need to deploy. So you were very excited about the Evo RAIL announcement at VMworld. What excites you about Evo RAIL? I can't tell you the customers. We've sold some government customers that you would be surprised at. The, what is exciting about it is it's deployable very quickly in 12 and a half minutes. Mornay who's running around from VMware who is the creator who has his 12 year old son able to do it. He does it in 10. I don't know how he does it in 12 and a half. But what's happening is when a customer wants to deploy a VMware environment in an environment that is not in a data center the RAIL is the best thing to use. And I'm saying we still like Vertex for campus computing. This is not campus computing. I would call this middle between the data center and the campus where you see these things deployed. Where they're being deployed and we're still waiting for the final release of Horizon which is the VMware VDI. Steve Lala who's here to show will tell you that people who are buying it like Oakland schools when I talk to you are buying it for VDI because they don't need a professional staff to get this up and running in three or four days. They get it up and less in an hour. That's amazing to me with all the simplification we're doing in the businesses. The services business still continues to be large. It's 45% of the Hadoop's end is on services. It's the VAR community, the reseller community still adding value and services. It's a very labor intensive business that we're in. Oh, absolutely. Is that going to change or are we just going to find new ways to deploy that labor? My favorite analogy we started out by talking about clicking clock and the news about clock may rest in peace. The one thing about a card today when you get your Tesla and I know you have a Tesla. No, but I will one day. Okay, Stu has one, I'm sure. But you don't go under the hood to play with it anymore. I have a new BMW. When I open the hood, there's a big sign. Do not lift this barrier. You tune it through the console and a service that used to take half a day now takes an hour. You're going to see that same type of mentality moving down into our business. Now, that service that used to take half a day would cost a couple grand. Does it still cost a couple grand? BMW, if you buy and I'm not doing commercial, they embed all the service in the price of the car now. So, of course, you can get a service as much as you want, Dave. So, I have an old BMW in my garage that I have to refurb and I could actually go in there and mess with the carburetor and the spark plugs. Not anymore. The way they gap a spark plug right now is they go into the underboard computer and they gap it until done electronically. And when you get your I-8, you'll know all about it. So, are you thinking that the actual service component of our industry will start to attenuate? Not that it's growing fast, it's not, but it's so large. It'll be so focused in different areas. So, more higher up the stack, adding value, applications, orientation. You heard Michael today talk about ProSafor Plus, one of my favorite products. Why is that so valuable to them? It's because it's remote diagnostic, remote repair within 24 hours. And customers love it because they don't have to worry about it. Anything that a customer doesn't have to worry about, they love it. We had this product right by us called ASM, which is a heterogeneous provisioning and management tool. Why do customers love it? They're not even using things like UCS Manager in their box, they're using us because it's simpler. Simple is always the winner in our industry from the very beginning. I want to ask your opinion, because you've got a lot of them on what's happening. We started the conversation with talking about private versus public. There's all these tensions on public companies now. That's why IBM sold the 686 business. That's why HP's splitting up. Elliott Management has Joe Tucci in a headlock, but by the way I've said it's not going to happen. They're not going to spin out VMware. But there's all these pressures and tensions. What's going on, in your opinion? I'll tell you from talking to technicians, because I can't really be a procrastinator for agnosticator of future financial results for obvious reasons. Yeah, what's happened if I just detect the underlying technology? What's it telling you, the crystal ball? If you really look at the way a corporation is set up. It is set up once it gets products out there to sustain it. It's basically business as usual. If I would draw a quadrant and I've talked to Jeff Moore about this quite a bit. This isn't a chasm, this is a diagram. What you're going to see is a majority of the people are sitting up here maintaining the day-to-day, servicing it, selling it. And then underneath that, you have a group that's trying to get productivity out of it, get the dollars out, get the activists, shareholders, feeling good about the investment in the company. But on the other side of the equation, you have people who are creating differentiation products through disruption. And people who have to go fast and quickly, because there's no slow once you start to go in the market to neutralize or disrupt. And what's happening is, you saw Ghostbusters. This is a stream and this is a stream. The moment you- Don't cross the streams. Cross those streams, the state buff, Narshmallow, man, I'll show up. And what you're seeing is by taking it and other companies have done this successfully, you can't let the culture of the business as usual impact the disruption. And what you're seeing in the disaggregation is people are recognizing that and where we once thought conglomerations of products or basically, and I put you the word, large companies, I don't really see large companies being the answer. Look, I was at HP while Mark was consolidating everything. And it's a great, great concept, but in today's market with the speed that you need to get to market, with the change of pace and technology, you have to have both these camps. And what you're going to do is when you need a spin-out to create something and get it out of the culture, you see a lot of these large companies doing it. So what does that mean for Dell, which is a huge conglomerate? That's the proper word, conglomerate. Dell actually treats both sides. Almost they work together. You don't cross the streams and when it becomes really part of the mainstream, it moves up into the business as usual. Most public companies can't do that because the investment to do that requires something that most of the market doesn't understand today. So we're pretty good at that. Treat it as a life cycle. Yep. They're going to go through the life cycle of all the quadrants. I mean, that may be making any sense. Oh, that can make sense. I mean, you got the patients to do that, whereas if you're a public company. You don't have the patients. And that's what Michael has brought us, the ability to have the patients to actually, you know, Michael's idea of appliances and Mary's idea of getting these done. I can't see this being done in too many companies. We'll have to ask, Stu, we'll have to ask Michael if he's a patient man tomorrow when he's on. No, no, no. It comes to getting it into the market. Remember I said speed. That speed means have out some revenue with it too. Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, they don't seem to be patient men to me. Yeah. Well, Larry actually is a patient man when he likes the technology. Look at fusion. Look at times 10. His in memory database. I'm not going to go to fusion. By the way, I love Oracle, a great partner, not saying anything about their technology strategy. Yeah. So Sam, before we let you go, I needed to get your update on OpenStack, since OpenStack Paris is going on this week. Saw you when we were at Atlanta. I was supposed to be there. Yeah, why are you and I not in Paris? You know, I know my wife had her bags packed. When Michael gave me an opportunity to be in Austin over Paris, I jumped at Austin. No, why we're not at the OpenStack Summit is OpenStack's going through a very interesting change over time. A lot of large companies are investing, a lot of customers. But what we're seeing is the Red Hat, as you know, we work with Comear and Red Hat. In commercializing it, you've got to do it in such a way where there are parts of OpenStack that sometimes has issues. I'm not going to go into which ones they are and what we're doing with... We'll talk to Tom Bird about Neutron in the next segment. I'm not talking about Neutron. I never heard of the product in my life. But... So what's happening with OpenStack? We're going from infancy like we did with Linux 2.0. And then if you remember, we went right to 4.0 and it started to grow. We're just going into the 4.0 stage of OpenStack. I still love the product. So when I look at the cloud marketplace, do you expect to have OpenStack Clouds as part of the marketplace? Of course. Yeah. But Dell's not planning to stand up their own OpenStack-powered cloud. I'd rather you ask somebody else that instead of me. But I will tell you, the cloud broker or cloud market strategy is brilliant. You basically give the customer a choice of what he wants you on or she wants to run on. So you guys obviously are pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud. You're actually supporting moving data to and from AWS, Google. Absolutely. Wherever you want, Mr. Customer, Ms. Customer, we'll put your data, help you. Your view, I believe, of the world is that it's similar to many enterprise companies which is the opposite of Andy Jassy's who believes that there will be very few companies that will own their own data centers in the future and those that do will be very small data centers. And where are you going to your next conference? So, and we're going to AWS. So my question to you is, and I know when you talk to customers, it's very clear they don't want to put all their data into the public cloud. But here's my question. At the scale economies that Google and Amazon can achieve, why don't they eventually overwhelm from a cost standpoint in this race to zero, the economics of data center infrastructure? Well, you're going to be talking down very shortly. Yes. The advantage is storage. The fact we can put a petabytes in maybe three to four U is amazing. And the ability to disaggregate the compute which Ashley talked about makes the private cloud much more attractive than it did four years ago when AWS hit its cycle. I think 80, I'm an AWS user. I still like the product, but if I'm going to put mission critical out there, it's not going to be in my AWS account. It's going to be something I totally control. So from a practitioner's perspective, why is that? Is it because it's transparency, is it security, communications? But they focus on security, but it's not the security that you want. Is that right? Security is one of those amorphous concepts. And we got better people at Dell to talk about security than I. I always love when secure works gives us a yearly update on security. Yeah. And you realize how vulnerable you are. Every year you feel less secure, right? Look, there's no privacy and there's no real overall security unless you do it yourself. So no matter how many shredders I have, I always wake up in the middle of the night thinking somebody's piecing together my tax return at the dump. What's happened is what we know now versus we knew then is very different. Azure is a great platform also. You saw CPS out on the floor or what we called Project San Diego that we announced with Microsoft. The reason people want that is because they want it on their premise where they can control it. And the MSPs want it so they can get standard up quickly. But what's surprising as the majority swing is customers who want to put it together. All right, Sam, well, listen, thanks very much for coming by the Cube as always a pleasure. Oh, I enjoyed talking to you guys. And John, it's a shame I didn't get to see your lovely face. Yeah, we miss Furrier here, but we'll see him next week. He's in Paris, right? Yeah, he wishes he's in Paris. Okay. All right, hey. Thanks very much for coming on. So, always a pleasure. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this. This is the Cube, we're live at Dell World 2014. Right back.