 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live and we are in Las Vegas along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Vince Afatati who's the global VP of Channel Presales at Dell EMC, Vince, good to see you sir. And Dan Serpico who's the CEO of Fusion Store. Dan, good to see you as well. Nice to see you. Thanks for joining us sir, we appreciate it. Especially late in the day. Absolutely, glad to be here. First off Dan, tell us a little bit about Fusion Store and we'll get into the channel partnership a little bit later. But first off a little bit more about what you do. Great, well Fusion Storm is a global solution provider. We are rapidly approaching a billion dollars in sales, probably hit a billion dollars in sales this year. And Dell Technologies is our principal partner. And then the partnership program if you would get it out a little bit, great success. Yeah, it's just absolutely. Again, how does working with Dan's company kind of personify what you do in the broader scale? Yeah, I mean Fusion Storm is a great partner. Part of what we want to talk about today is ReadyStack and how kind of this partnership and this program evolved based on kind of cross engineering and marketing that we do together. And how, you know, Dan's team is so much closer, they're very close to the business of our customers and they have a great understanding of what's needed in the marketplace. So they're able to design and engineer and support and service solutions that are really unique. They hit an industry vertical and they really leverage kind of the best of our technologies. So it's a great partnership. This it is. Yeah. Dan, maybe you could expand a little. You said that, you know, Dell's your primary partner. Why is that, you know, what kind of things do they do to enable you from a channel partner to meet what your customers need and, you know, make the money you need to run your business? Well, boy, we probably don't have enough time in this interview to talk about why Dell's our best partner. Look, all kidding aside, they are our largest partner. They have the broadest portfolio of technology solutions, bar none, compared to any of our other partners. They are number one in most of the technology stacks, which is really important. Our customers want leading-edge technology. Our customers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Square, Pandora. They want leading-edge technology as part of their play and Dell has really an incredible portfolio. Then frankly, from the business side, the tremendous partnership with the great channel program, which gives us a terrific opportunity to partner from a marketing perspective, back-end rebates and incentives are a critical part of our value-added, our profitability model, so they touch all of the important points that make us a viable business. Yeah, Vince, talk to Marius Haas a little bit this morning about how the Dell and the MC pieces came together. Of course, you know, long history of channel with both sides, but bring us inside some of those, you know, incentives and rebates and things that Dan was talking to, you know, how does Dell set up those programs and, you know, bring us inside a little bit? Yeah, so there's front-end rebates and there's back-end rebates. We're actually in our second year of rebate design, so we've done some things to kind of change it, but ultimately, there's a rebate paid on dollar one across our full stack. And then as you go in the metal tiers, the rebates kind of increase, right? So our top tier partners get a higher rebate amount. And then today, we announced a richer rebate for taking out competitive gear. So that's on the back-end and those are the traditional design. Now, on the front-end, we have storage rebates. We just, we announced about five months ago or so, which incentive you to basically sell our modern infrastructure on the storage side, include DPS into those designs and then take out competitive gear. We also have some incentives for proposal writing and demand generation as well. It's a pretty rich program. All right, so Dan, here's the question I have for you. Del, they've got a lot of offerings out there. Change is something that, the keynote this morning, they said, today, compared to the past, is the busiest you've ever been, but tomorrow, there's even going to be more change. So do they make it simple? I mean, that's something we're all looking for. You've got to run your business. You've got to listen to your customers. How is it easier working with Dell? Well, I think it's easier because they are leading the pack. Really, if you think about the world of technology and how it evolves constantly, everybody is leapfrogging everybody else every six months. So what you want is you want a partner who's going to be leading the technology play for the future. Honestly, our business 15 years ago sold, 99% of what we sold 15 years ago, we do not sell a nickel today. Not a nickel, because that partner couldn't keep up with the evolution that takes place in technology today. So really, I appreciate the question. It's really not about what's easy. It's what is both most advanced so that you can stay competitive. Yeah, absolutely. Vince was talking about incentives. He was talking about rebates, right? So from your side of that fence, how critical is it that you have those kinds of opportunities or you have that kind of incentive? I would think in competitive environment, it's fairly crucial, right? I mean, you've got to be able to offer to each other and then down the line that kind of value, right? It's tremendously important. We pride ourselves on our ability to help influence customers in their buy decisions around technology, okay? And so, look, we're not going to sell, regardless of what the incentives are, we aren't going to sell bad products and bad technologies because that's a good way to lose customers. But certainly, the financial rewards for our sellers, for our SES, and for us as a company, so we can continue to stay viable is critically important. And we absolutely take advantage of the programs that are in place with Dell and others too, by the way, but certainly with Dell and direct our customers to those things that make the most sense for them. Yeah, right. I mean, really simple, predictable, and profitable. We talk about it a lot, but that's ultimately where we're trying to go. We're not perfect, right? We've learned a lot, but strong partnerships like this make it clear that that's the right way to go about it. And it is more than just incentives. It's staffing, it's dedicating people to help make the business easier, doing boot camps and joint seminars, and selling together, and that works. Vince, the other thing, can you put into context for us to be in a ready stack? We've got everything from full stack, everything baked to some of the software platforms. What's in here and how does this fit in the overall? So ready stack is a way to address a market that we haven't gone after directly, which is the build systems. When you look at converged infrastructure, it's about a $6 billion market. We own about 49% of that, and the VX Block 1000 is a good example of those kind of integrated systems, right? But what we haven't really done a lot of, and we're really going into feet first, head first, is the idea that we want to help with customers who aren't ready to buy the full stack, but they want to do something that's engineered special, right? So ready stack is a way to work closely with, it's a partner exclusive program, work with the partners to make it easier for them to sell our tech into converged environments to help solve problems. I mean, it's something that you guys do every day already, but it's a program to help with the engineering and provide incentives to make that easier to do. Well, I think that's right. The converged infrastructure, which is what we call this, is probably outside of maybe cloud computing in that world, the single fastest growing part of the tech space today, right? It's what our customers need, it's what our customers want. I think that what's unique about the ready stack play here, the architecture, is that it's flexible, okay? It's flexible and leads with Dell and leads with certified architecture, as opposed to others who are just taking piece parts from different vendors, cobbling it together and calling it a certified converged play. This is a truly converged play that has flexibility. Flexibility could mean that someone's customer's storage needs go faster than their compute needs or vice versa. All right? So you're not locked in on a solution, but you're locked in on a framework that allows you to expand based on your unique needs. Then when you take their architecture and their engineering capabilities, in combination with ours, their blueprints, you have a really robust solution that we can align ourselves with and be consistent in terms of our delivery to the customers. So you talk about flexibility, I mean, that's kind of a buzzword, right? I mean, you want to get people the ability to customize, right? You've got to get, do people, I mean, your customers now, Dan, when you're out, do they really, I mean, do people know what they want? Or because they have new capabilities, they have new, their new avenues, they can go down new choices. I mean, how do you get them there? Well, our customers are very smart. Again, if you say, if you heard that partial list of customers that we have, they are very smart and they're looking at this- You mentioned a couple of big names there. We've recognized a few of those. But they are very smart. And access to Dell, a lot of them are here at Dell Technologies World. They read information on the internet. These are very smart people, of course. But let's not undermine our role or underestimate our role in helping them, whether it's through our labs to do bake-offs. We can run some of their workloads on our architecture or the Dell architecture versus others and they can see how this technology works or how their workloads work, what performs better for them for their unique specs. There is constantly discussion around whiteboarding, okay? The technology is moving all the time. And I don't think that can be underestimated either, right? If you look at a data center, if you picked up a thousand customers and looked at their data center, probably no three of them would be exactly alike because of the nature of technology. So what you need is you need an OEM like Dell Technology who's got a robust portfolio products and a good partner like FusionStorm who can offer that robust portfolio and help it be fully integratable with all these other technologies, right? Well, the truth of the matter is that we would love to rip out somebody else, but that has a depreciation life and CIOs have to live with something they bought last year for three years. So how is that compatibility going to exist? That's very important. So all those things are part of the education of our customers. Vince, I know there's a huge push at this show working with the channel partners, bringing them all together. But give us a little view past Dell Technologies World for this program, some of the road maps. What should we better watch the industry look for throughout the rest of the year and the channel partners? So you mean what's coming forward or what? Just walking away from here, your program. The road ahead, absolutely. So I'll tell you particularly, let me focus for a minute on ReadyStack and what we're going there. So as I said, the idea here is maximum flexibility. But we also want to provide guidance and compatibility and sizing. So what you'll see from us over the next year is a lot of engineering around this program and working on building different scenarios, common scenarios and scenarios that we're learning about, working with Fusion Swarm and our other partners around the world. So you'll see a lot of engineering going on around creating these design guides, the deployment guides and help with sizing. And that's really important. You'll also notice that this is going to be hypervisor agnostic. And so there'll be support for other hypervisors in this. We realized that other people do use other hypervisors besides VMware, which is kind of odd, but we know it exists, right? So a KVM, you'll see solutions that support KVM. We'll have solutions for Docker. You'll see Hyper-V in here as well. Again, it's a realization that there's more to this, do-it-yourself kind of options and we want to be there to support that. We do think great integration, great support, sizing is what you'll see more of as we kind of go through. It spreads us right back to flexibility, right? Give people what they want when they need it. Now we also say that our engineered systems, right, the X-Rail are hyperconverged and convert systems. We're not saying we're de-emphasizing that, we're not at all, but we're realizing that more and more, working with our partners, we're addressing a very large and growing part of the market space. Dan, Vince, thanks for being with us. Thank you very much. We appreciate the time. I enjoyed the rest of the show. I'm sure it's going well for you. It's wonderful. And we hope to see you down the road here on theCUBE. Thank you both. Thank you for joining us. Back with more, here on theCUBE, we are live in Las Vegas, the Dell Technologies World, 2018.