 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin. We're in Vegas. I'm with Keith Townsend. And we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day two. We've got Chad Dunn, a CUBE alumni, VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Herreras. Senior Director of Product Marketing at VMware. Welcome. Thanks for having us. So guys, lots of news coming out today. Saw in the press release, Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyperconverged infrastructure announcements to VxRail, VxRack, SDDC. What's new? Obviously there's a lot new. I'm really happy with the market share and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyperconverged portfolio VxRail, VxRack, SDDC. On VxRail, we added new capabilities like 25 gig ethernet and VME drives, new security capabilities, new graphical processor unit, high density memory. On the VxRack side, we're now on Dell 14G servers. In fact, that hardware is basically VxRail inside VxRack SDDC. So you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap. We also announced a VMware validated design on VxRail. Again, we're starting to sort of merge the visions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology. So Matt, help paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical VMware vSphere. We abstracted away the hardware, so the hardware no longer matters, right? Yeah, well that's a great analogy actually. So I'm a long time VMware employee and one of the things that's about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure. So what Cloud Foundation is really doing, it's like the next iteration of vSphere. It's bringing together the storage, compute, network, and management layers that make up our entire SDDC solution and delivering that as a automated and day two operated system that customers get the maximum value out of that. And when we partner up with somebody like Dell who's able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities in Cloud Foundation, we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace. And hardware always matters. You should have a t-shirt. Absolutely, we're literally nothing without it. So Chad, first Dell Technologies World, in the name change and indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies. What, we'll say power, are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware? Well, I think the obvious thing that everybody sees as the power of the portfolio that we now have, me as a product owner of a hyper-converged platform, I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server. I didn't go out to ODMs to get servers to build our product. But now I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market, right here under the same roof. And now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock and we're integrated with those teams. So having the power both internally and power for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio, VMware, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, I mean, it's a really amazing IT portfolio. And the great thing about coming to a show like this is I'm seeing a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years. I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them re-energized about the technology. So Matt, let's ask you a similar question. Pre-merger, one of the things that on the customer side, you know, I had an EMC rep, I had a VM world rep. Generally speaking, we've never met together. Can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with Dell EMC versus the previous EMC, where the portfolio was limited to mainly storage products? Yeah, well, so the reality is VMware's always had a great relationship with obviously EMC, owned us, but also with Dell. I mean, if I think about my years in the field with customers, Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together. They had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved. It was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with a Dell rep. That's only gotten easier. And because my product that I'm responsible for, Clash Foundation, is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dell's solutions, that just makes that conversation more meaningful. Yeah, and it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to leverage some of the IP that we created for VxRail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VxRack SDDC. So, you know, I think our group, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with VMware in more places than anybody else in Dell EMC. We've had a long standing collaboration on VxRail and now with Cloud Foundation it gets even better. And what's the business value that you're seeing from VCF in the customer space in light of this strong new collaboration? That's a great question. So, you know, virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way data centers actually exist today. What's not just private and public cloud, the dimensions of the data center expanding all over the place. Edge systems are important as well as public and private cloud. And what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous, consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those. Streamless operations, it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workloads consistently across all of those different platforms. And you know, if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center. I mean, a great example of this is the kind of work that we're doing around IoT with Dell. And that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of Cloud Foundation. Now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions. So, I can take VXRL, VXRAG, stand up a POC of open source software-defined data center. I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it. Talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say, you know what? We tried this. This is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations. Where are the pain points that VCF on top of VXRAG is solving? Well, start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as a customer don't have to. There are between nine and 12 different programmable firmware devices inside a PowerEdge server. Do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers? No, of course not, right? You want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers, how to upgrade that firmware, connect it to the right bits in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're going to get peak performance. So, we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you. When people try to do it themselves, they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier. So, that's on the hardware side, on the software side? Yeah, so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence. Hybrid Cloud, for example, is not doable unless you can really remove, make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration has really done and that's a critical pain point that customers have always derived benefit from NSX, V-SAN and V-SIR but to have these things all integrated into one product with Cloud Foundation, that was a game changer for bringing these solutions together for life-cycle management. Day two operations, as I mentioned, that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing an ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies. So, the theme of the event, make it real. If you look at a financial services institution, for example, together, what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation? What is that reality that you're helping them achieve? Yeah, well, so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user, to any mobile device or desktop device, that's a real capability that we're delivering. For example, Cloud Foundation can instantiate through this concept called Workload Domain, both traditional infrastructure for the service applications and VDI, the virtual desktops. So, this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together. Yeah, just not with one this morning, and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week onto their VX Rack SDDC infrastructure, and I believe they just crossed the 5,500 VM mark, and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project. So, that's real. And from a business outcomes perspective, what does that allow that customer to achieve? That allows them to transition from where they are today, which is about 60% virtualized to 95% virtualized when they reach the end of this journey. And because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware, managing the software, and all of those lifecycle things, and the automation that comes from the Cloud Management Platform, you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business, right? Instead of worrying about all the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure. So, what's next? What's on the horizon for the relationship? What are customers asking for? 200 meetings this week, I'm sure there's been requests from customers. Tons of requests. They want to see more automated lifecycle management. They want to see VX Rail releases and VMware releases get closer together in time. They want us to be simultaneously shipping, which is something that we're working on. They want latest and greatest. Everybody wants to talk about NVMe. Now we have NVMe, faster connectivity for the devices. So, the platform roadmap will continue. But I think what Matt and I, what we talk about quite frequently, and you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy, is we have VX Rail and we have VX Rack SDDC. We have Cloud Foundation. Does it need to be two? How do these come together? Is this consumption model, is this just a different consumption model for the same technology? So we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products to build a better portfolio for the VMware hyper-converged use case? Yeah, and I would say for our part, we looked at continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of, you know, VX Rail and NVX Rack having, you know, the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together. I'll also say that looking at it in the future, I mentioned multiple workload profiles. Data analytics, IoT, NFV, in addition to traditional IaaS, it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack from an automated perspective? Can we automate the underlined application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile? And that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by, talking about what's new, how you're enabling customers to really facilitate the IT transformation, enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that. Thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at day two or finishing day two, I should say of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching, we'll see you tomorrow.