 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE continue our live coverage here of Dell EMC 2017 along with Paul Gillin. I'm John Wall, it's good to have you with us. Mike Arteberry now joins us now. He is the Vice President of Technology Alliances at Dell EMC, and Mike, good to see you here, sir. Good to see you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So Technology Alliances, walk us through the title first. What all does that encompass? Well, so I have a team of people, and globally, we manage our key relationships with both our strategically aligned businesses. That was formerly known as the EMC Federation, but our technology companies that are owned by Dell Technologies, so VMware, Pivotal, Virtustream, Secureworks, RSA, that family of companies, we're the integration, my team's the integration point, to bring their technology into the Dell EMC family and we create solutions out of that. So make that practical, make that real for me from a customer perspective. Sure. How would you make life easier for a customer? So the way we would make life easier for a customer is instead of just taking, for instance, VMware vSAM, and certifying that on a Dell server and shipping them a naked server, we facilitate the hard testing and configuration work that's done by our solutions teams to make sure that we can size those outcomes for our customers, they can determine what business outcomes they want and we can size that infrastructure and performance standard directly for the business outcome that they desire. So would the customer deal with you directly or you sales support? I am sales support. Okay, great. So talk about the strategically aligned businesses. When Dell merged with the EMC, there have been a lot of questions about whether Dell would really know what to do with these businesses despite the fact that one of them, VMware is enormous. What kind of questions do you get from the field about how these businesses are being aligned with each other? Well, so we get questions about how do we consume the technology? So Pivotal is one of the hottest growing technology platforms. Platform is a service in the marketplace. Our customers and our field want to know how they can consume that technology and deliver it to their end users. So we do a lot of facilitation between the Pivotal team and the Dell field to make sure that they know how to engage the technical experts directly in opportunities as we encounter them with our customers. What have been some of the challenges of that? Because you've got a very big partner network and you've got a field sales force who have been out there selling hardware, selling boxes for years and now you've got all this very sophisticated software. What kind of education have you had to do for those people? We do a lot of enablement. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We just announced last week at Red Hat Summit a new collaboration on their JetStream product. We created a differentiated software called Jetpack which basically shrinks the enablement time or the deployment time of OpenStack deployments, private cloud deployments that have historically been pretty notorious in their implementation. Our new co-development with Red Hat shrinks that deployment time from days to two to three hours now. So our collaborations with our software partners create meaningful value for our end users. So that would be a pre-configured system then, right? Pre-configured system with configuration software that we not only co-developed with Red Hat but it's open source. So we deliver that back to the open source community as the open source community would consume all open source technologies. Sorry, and you've talked about partnerships. I think we kind of cut you off in midstream a little bit. You've got the internal. I've got the internal partnerships and externally as well. So just hit on that a little bit to clarify that. Sure, so if you will, Del, historically, since its inception has been an infrastructure company, whether it was PCs or data center infrastructure, we provide hardware, principally. What we don't do is provide the workloads that that hardware runs. We partner for that. And to partner in a way that develops and delivers desired customer outcomes, we have to partner very tightly and very capably with those companies that deliver those tier one workloads. So companies like SAP, Microsoft, that are delivering business applications, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Splunk, that are delivering big data applications, we partner very tightly with them to address very rapidly growing segments of the market with a very tight design concept that we can deliver to end users to shrink their implementation time and deliver their end customer value as quickly as possible. Go ahead, Doug. When you're working with these partners, I mean, you now bring this whole portfolio of new capability to them. What are they, I guess, what kind of new possibilities are you seeing to integrate the strategically aligned businesses with the existing partnerships? Sure, so we do multi-tier combinations, if you will. So we have made big bets with VMware, one of the family companies, to deliver vSAN ready nodes, to deliver VxRail, to deliver VxRack, to deliver Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and native Hybrid Cloud platforms. Those are all infrastructure platforms with operating systems on them. But what we want to do is deliver those in a way that meaningfully addresses the workload considerations that our customers have. They don't just run an operating system, they run a use case, they run a business application on each one of those pieces of infrastructure. Our job is to make sure that those pieces of infrastructure run those workloads as efficiently, effectively, deploy as seamlessly as possible for those end user outcomes. You know, the fact that you've got these relationships internally and externally, if I'm the customer at the end of the day, what does that mean to me? I mean, what kind of comfort or what kind of security or peace of mind do I get from knowing how you're coordinating or integrating these efforts? Absolutely, so first of all, you get to play in a relationship with the number one infrastructure provider on Earth. We're number one in servers, we're number one in storage, we're number one in data protection, we're number one in converge and hyperconverge. We have a lot of capability in those platform arenas. The reason we're so nimble and capable in those platforms and the reason that we've earned that number one status is because we deliver those workloads and those business outcomes to customers in a way that gets them to their money quickly and to their business outcomes quickly. How are you harmonizing some of the existing relationships Dell had with companies that now are competitive with some of your strategically aligned businesses? I'm thinking, for example, Microsoft and VMware, VMware and Citrix, these are companies that Dell had relationships with who now have competitive products in the portfolio. How are you making that work? Very carefully, but Michael started this company founded on the principle of customer choice. Customers get to define what their outcomes are and we help them do that. So we partner very carefully to make sure that any overlap in the portfolio is addressed, but at the end of the day it's really about the customer. What does the customer need to operate their business in the most capable way possible? And we're here with the infrastructure and the partnerships to make that happen. And what have you heard this week out of all the new announcements? What have you heard that kind of plays to that in your mind that you're most excited about? Sure. It's been a pretty busy two days. A melee of announcements, absolutely. I'll stick with one very principally. We just announced our Azure Stack platform with Microsoft. So one that you might perceive as competitive for two reasons. One, it's competitive to our VMware portfolio principally. And two, it helps burst to the public cloud, right? Public cloud versus on-premise is seemingly in conflict. However, we think there's a huge opportunity. One, because the on-premises opportunity for us, which is the bread and butter for this company, running data centers on-premises for our customers, is central to the stack offer. So they will build a product in collaboration with us that sits on the customer's site and they manage that in their own site. And it's got burst out capability to the Microsoft public cloud for which some of that infrastructure sits on Dell EMC equipment as well. So we have the infrastructure on both sides of that equation. So it really works for us. And I would say it's going to resonate with customers quite meaningfully. Big news and congratulations on that. I know you've got a release coming up later on the year. Get things done, but people can test drive a little bit in the meantime, right? You've got it, absolutely. Early adopters. Yeah, be a lot of fun. Yes. Hit the market hard. Thanks again, Mike, for being with us. My pleasure. I appreciate the time and wish you continued success. Thanks for having me. Mike Harderberry from Dell EMC, joining us live here on theCUBE, back with more from Las Vegas, right after this.