 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. And we are back here on theCUBE, along with Paul Gill and I'm John Walls. Thanks for joining us here at Dell EMC World 2017. Continue now, day two of our coverage here of the show, going on at the Sands Expo. Glad to have you along and also glad to have Alan Atkinson with us. He is the SVP of XC Appliances at Dell EMC. Alan, good to see you, sir. Good to see you, John. All right, so, show wise for you, like to kind of get your take, we're about two days deep into it. What's your read on what's happening here? That's been a really busy show, right? I think one of the things that lots of people were asking is, okay, first year as a combined company, big show, what are we going to see? Is the innovation slowing down? I think we answered that one pretty clearly. The pace of announcements has been just huge, right? And I think you've seen some really exciting announcements, certainly the feedback I'm getting from customers and partners as well. Well, you talk about pace of innovation, pace of announcements. You can't afford not to have that pace, right? I mean, certainly in the hyper-converged environment, like the game is on. The game is on. And you're very much a player at it, obviously. You have a bigger player than we've ever been, I think. And the pace has just continues to accelerate, which is great, it makes it more and more exciting, right? Sure, you bet. What about what's new in your area? You're the XC Appliances, what's new there? Now, we continue to see great growth. I was thinking about it today, Paul. This is what, we just completed our 10th quarter of selling XC Appliances. And we were one of the first to market in the hyper-converged space. And so I think we probably have more experience than almost anybody here at understanding how this business grows. And I just continue to be amazed at the growth rates that we're seeing, not only in XC Appliances, but in our entire hyper-converged portfolio. I mean, you know, double digits, but not like 10%, right? Like just huge shifts. And you can see the customer base just rapidly adopting hyper-converged solutions for their data center and not trivial workloads. We're talking big mainstream customers with all sorts of workloads. I can't really characterize the single one. People used to say VDI. And we certainly do a lot of VDI, but by no means is that the majority of the workloads these days. What are you doing now about, with the integration with EMC, you brought all of these new hyper-converged appliances into the portfolio, how are you distinguishing, dealing with any customer confusion about what belongs where? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question, Paul. And I get it a lot, right? So when you think about a space that's as important as hyper-converged is, because it's definitely a threat to traditional IT infrastructure, it's a space we're committed to winning in. And when you think about our portfolio, it's pretty amazing, right? I mean, we have not only the XC appliances, but we've also got VxRail, we've also got VxRack SDBC, we've got VxRack Flex. I don't know of any other company that offers that breadth of solutions. And you may ask why to your point about confusion. And I think it comes down to, we want to have the right answer for the customer, right? So, you know, VxRail is our solution for customers that are VMware and standardized on vSphere, co-engineered with VMware. XC is our solution for customers that have multiple hypervisors or Hyper-V or KVM customers. And then we've got our Rackscale, which most companies don't offer in any form, right? Where we include networking in the package, fully integrated for Rackscale. You know, with that portfolio, in my mind, there's no reason a customer needs to go anywhere else. Yeah, you talk about the customer experience, and you want to provide value, and, but that's what your competitors say too, right? So what makes you, you know, where is your edge? Or where do you see you providing that superior value proposition that would make me say, yeah, okay, Allen, let's do business. Yeah, and I think that's another flavor of the question, right, that you get is, okay, so what is the differentiation? And I would say the breadth of the portfolio is a huge advantage because we've got the right solution for the customer. We announced this week 14G infrastructure, so I think we're really the only company that I'm aware of that has that sort of portfolio entirely on tier one infrastructure, latest, greatest, as you just heard, it's going to be friendly to things like NVMe technologies and other low-latency technologies that are coming out. It's really ready for the future. And then lastly, you know, maybe the announcement I'm most excited about this week, and it's kind of hard to pick, but maybe the one I'm most excited about was our Cloud Flex announcement, where we basically said, you know, you can buy the hyper-converged portfolio on a monthly-based consumption model and just return it if you decide you don't want it any longer, not at least a monthly, very attractive kind of terms where you can get into a very pricey solution if you were buying it for really a very minimal monthly payment, and I don't know if any other company is offering that either. So we make it easy to get into, we have the widest breadth of solutions, and most of our solutions are exclusive, right? I mean, there's no other place to go get something like what we have. So what does that mean for a customer than that kind of flexibility or that kind of latitude to kind of test drive a little bit, if you will, to see if this fits their needs? Well, you know, when I walk into a customer, if I don't know anything about them, there's two questions I usually throw out because I usually know I'm going to get an answer. The first one is, what's your HCI strategy? And the second one is, what's your Cloud strategy? Because almost everybody's either got one or they're thinking about one. What's really attractive about Cloud Flex with our portfolio is, it doesn't necessarily have to be on a buying cycle. If they still have traditional IT assets on the floor that have got depreciation left to go and they're sitting on their balance sheet and they can't necessarily afford a big refresh, well, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month to start playing with HCI, and I use the word playing with loosely, but to start getting a pilot going, seeing how it works, see how they would use it, is actually a much easier conversation. It's a lower risk, lower investment, if you will, and we're encouraging it, right? We're both with our partners that are fully enabled on this program and with our reps. I mean, it's a model that we want to encourage people to use to get into the paradigm of HCI. Now, Hewlett-Backard Enterprise actually came out with a pay-as-you-go option for their data center, for their data center infrastructure last year. Is the Cloud Flex essentially a way to answer that question when you get it from customers? It's not a response to what anybody else is doing. It's more of a way to meet the desire of customers to go to a consumption-based model. I mean, honestly, Paul, and not to get into specifics of any competitors' programs, but every single program that I've seen like this before has been some flavor of a lease. It's been, you know, at the end of the day, I've got to sign up for pick-your-terms, three years, five years. At the end of the day, you own the asset, which fundamentally means it's capex for the customer. I mean, yes, easier payment turns, but the asset actually sits on their balance sheet. This isn't that. This is pure apex, you said. This is pure apex. And if you want to return it, you ship it back and you stop paying us. That's pretty flexible. I don't know of anybody else doing that. What kind of, do you get any demand from customers or any interest in bridging the different HCI appliances that you have so they can mix and match them with each other, or is that just not an issue? You know, for really large customers, it is an issue. And, you know, I think a lot of times it's more aspirational than what they actually do. But, you know, there's cases where customers have desire for different solutions in branch offices or they want a rack scale architecture in their primary data center, but they want an appliance model at the edge. Or maybe they have, you know, I'm making this up, but 80% of their environment is exclusively VMware and they absolutely want a tightly integrated VMware solution there. But they've got Hyper-V over here and they want something different. And we're happy to have all those conversations. You said exciting week, so congratulations on that. And continue success down the road. I have a feeling you don't need that, but it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you for the time. No, absolutely. Thank you, John. Good to see you, sir. Thank you, Paul. Working on the XC appliances at Dell EMC. Back with more from Dell EMC World 2017 here on theCUBE right after this.