 We're back, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Dell Storage Forum. We're here live in Boston, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. And Stu, we've seen a lot of, today is really day zero of the Dell Storage Forum. Dell's got a number of announcements, I guess, coming this evening after the close. At 4.30, we're going to hear about redacted and redacted. Great, yes. There's been some buzz about convergence and some of the other things going on. A big keynote is tonight, right? And then we've got Darren Thomas tomorrow morning and then he's going to be in the Cube. But we've heard a lot about end-to-end and there's a lot of hints about converged infrastructure. I suspect that some of the announcements are going to be around that, but what do you make of the day? Yeah. Good day. Some good guests digging into really explaining, as we've talked about, the transformation to Dell. So Dell's not only made a lot of acquisitions, but as you pointed out, Dave, they're doing a good job of integrating. And it's not just about having the building blocks, but all the things we've been looking at where the market needs to go. So specifically talking about workload-aware storage, so not just making something that works for a virtual machine, but something that really understands that application can automate, get data to the right place, have the right I-O profile, as David Fleuer always says on the Wikibon site, we need to have an I-O-centric model, not just something that moves from one tier to the other. So we really need to understand that. Strong messaging on virtualization with VMware and Microsoft. And Dell's not just a Texas company anymore. They've got the big group in Minnesota. Dario came on and talked about where they're growing in Silicon Valley. So they're right in the heart of the networking and innovation groups there. Cloud, convergence, networking, kind of pulling it all together. And so the man who really runs that whole initiative, Brad Anderson is speaking tonight. I believe it's at 430 East Coast time. We will be broadcasting that tonight. So he's essentially, Dave Donatelli's counterpart for Dell, right? One server storage and networking and has essentially responsibility for that whole converged strategy. So we've got that. We also have a replay of last year, one of our best guests was Phil Soren, the CEO of Compellent. We're going to be showing you that from the Dell Storage Forum 2011 with John MacArthur and Kelly Lewis. So an interesting thing even, we talk about flash. Bob Fine at the end kind of showed a little leg telling about that that RNA networks acquisition. That can help be the underlying piece to help get Dell to that all flash array when they really feel that that's necessary. Well, it was interesting to me to have, we just had Commvault on. Now, Commvault is a company that I've been sort of passively tracking for years. They do a lot in backup and archive and they've got a very rich set of capabilities. And what's happening stew is, as I said, the moves in the chess board are to me quite interesting. You have a company in EMC that owns a lot of its own software destiny. You know, used to work there. You know how EMC sells hardware and then sells software and sell services behind it. They sell stores like bananas. They sell things in bunches. And that's a playbook that's really worked well for the company. And I think you're seeing others now finally come around to do that. Certainly HP and IBM. Yeah. And what I heard from Dario today, you know, John Furrier's in the valley watching these venture companies. I didn't know that Dell had a Dell Ventures group there and they've got that whole group in Silicon Valley there. Yeah, relatively new initiative. Spreading some money out there. These guys have to do it. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, the enterprise business has become an oligopoly. And you've got five or six or seven companies that really own the chess board. I mean, it's, you know, good name. It's IBM. It's HP. It's Dell is certainly in there, Microsoft, Cisco. And I would put EMC in there because of VMware. They're like the little of the bigs. And they're clearly on a growth trajectory to do that. So any move that any, an oracle, if I didn't say them, any move that any one of these vendors makes, ripples through and affects the others. I mean, imagine, so you saw what happened when Dell made an offer for 3-par. HP had to come out and counter. It's like, Stu, you're a football fan. It's like in the draft when somebody picks a left guard and there's not a lot of left guards left, boom, there's a run on left guard. You saw that with the storage virtualization companies. The question we have is, will you see that with flash? Will the extreme IO acquisition, you know, create a spate, a ripple effect, the domino effect, and a spate of acquisitions around flash, I think it will. Obviously Dell has made some moves there with RNA. But I think there's more to come. Absolutely. Yeah, so we're here. This is the cube. And we're here live at the Dell Storage Forum. We're hearing about the transformation of Dell. Five, six, seven years ago, Dell essentially put together other people's parts. You know, they still do that, obviously, for their desktop and laptop business, reselling largely Microsoft and Intel technologies. But they've really been on a tear lately to acquire companies with significant IP. In particular, storage has been a major area of focus. We heard that from one of our guests that it used to be storage was, you know, the last thing they talk about, they talk about storage if they had time, right? And now storage is the first thing that they talk about at the meetings with Michael Dell. You know, VDI is big. We've got why is now part of the portfolio. You've got the scallant piece. You've got Boomi on the cloud side. So just, you know, more and more acquisitions, you know, the last four years, Dell's done that. And we pointed out at the beginning of the show, Dave, you know, Dell's still got, you know, a sizable war chest that they've built up over the years from their server and desktop business. They've got more money than IBM has in the bank. They've got more money than EMC or NetApp. So, you know, not just a storage company, we're here talking about storage, but broad portfolio across the entire infrastructure and starting to build some of the software pieces to make them more strategic. So Stu, big day today, obviously, you know, gearing up for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. That's always an event that people look forward to because basically Tim Cook and Apple are going to, you know, show, you mentioned show some leg, they're going to show some leg, talk about new operating systems, new devices, you know, hint at the, well, they probably won't hint at it, but, you know, new iPhone coming, I guess, December timeframe. But today, evidently, Apple is adding features back into Siri that the app had before Apple acquired the company. Mark Hopkins tells me that he was party to a personal demo from Siri prior to the acquisition that had a new movie functionality in it. That was about a year before the acquisition. Siri buttons are now becoming available in high-end cars like BMWs. And we're also hearing of a massive upgrade to the MacBook Pro, which was announced earlier this hour. And along with that, as you expected, a massive price hike. So, Apple focusing still on margins. Let's see, MVP ships today, iOS 6 update is coming soon as well. So I'm excited about Siri, Mark. I'm hoping that Siri actually can get some utility in it, you know, remember, Mark, we were at Oracle Open World and I was really questioning, you know, the whole voice activation. You said you had some early demos of it. This is Mark Hopkins of Silicon Angle. You were quite impressed with it at the time. Unfortunately, Apple didn't deliver on what impressed you, because, you know, Siri is, as we all know, anybody who uses an iPhone 4S is quite useless. I guess unless you're a famous actor and you want to do a TV commercial and have somebody to talk to. If you're really lonely, Siri's good. Have a companion to talk to, otherwise it's really not that useful. And the other big show with Apple, you know, the forgotten company from technology is Microsoft. So, you know, expect to see a lot from Microsoft on the cloud aspect. So, you know, where is Azure these days? We've got Scott Lowe on the ground hoping to bring him into our broadcast. At TechEd. At TechEd, thank you. Yeah, so I'm excited about that. And again, I'm personally very excited about Siri gaining some utility, because that technology, that voice activation technology, to the extent that you can talk to computers like Spock did, you know, on Star Trek, you know, which is going to happen because everything on Star Trek actually eventually happens. So, okay, so we are live here at the Dell Storage Forum. We've got a good lineup tomorrow, Stu. I mean, you know, Darren Thomas is a great guest. He's the Vice President General Manager of the Dell Storage Group. He's going to give a keynote tomorrow morning. As I said, we've got the big keynote tonight from Brad Anderson. I think he's pretty much doing a drive-by. Michael Dell is not at this event. He was at last year's inaugural Dell Storage Forum. But I think, you know, hey, he's a busy guy. He's doing a lot of things, and I think the storage group is now sort of solidified. He wanted to show his presence last year. And the other thing we've got a lot of Dell executives on today. We're going to have some customers. So we've got real end users. We've also got some influencers, a lot of them that are very familiar in using the Dell technology for many years. Some of them channel partners. Some of them also end users. So two more days, lots of good guests. You know, it's interesting. I just got another note from Mark Hopkins saying that Apple announced a Google Docs-like function synced with iCloud. Now here we have a situation where David Gerrard left Google. He was the head of their enterprise apps group. We, you know, obviously Stu, you know we use Google apps extensively. There's good, there's bad, and there's ugly. But essentially now you have Apple and Google and Microsoft now all competing with each other for the enterprise. And I, for one, welcome it. I think it's made Microsoft better. I think Microsoft has actually done a very good job of maintaining its franchise and responding to the cloud. Nobody's really still been able to unseat Microsoft, even though a lot of people predicted it, you know, with the web, with the cloud, you know, Microsoft is still top dog. So now maybe with Apple and Google, maybe that will foster some new competition and, you know, put some pressure on Microsoft who always has responded, you know, back since Netscape in days. So we're here live, Dell Storage Forum, 2012. Talking about the transformation, Stu, we're on the summer tour. We have a lot going on this week. We're here at Dell. We'll be at Intel Forecast tomorrow as part of the Cloud Expo. And then the big event toward the end of the week is the Hadoop Summit, which is sponsored by Hortonworks. The Cube will be there. We've got a big team going out there. It's big data. It's all the action out in San Jose. But we're here at the Dell Storage Forum talking about the transformation of Dell. Dell bringing in its own IP. We heard from Dell earlier today saying, hey, it's not about us expanding our margins. It's really about, you know, driving the customer need. Yeah, that's probably true, but it's also about expanding the margins. I mean, I think there's no question about it. The Dell, the viability of Dell depended upon the company going on this acquisition spree and increasing the intellectual property that it owns. And as overseen by Michael Dell, he got very much heavily back involved in the business. And very impressive. We saw, Stu, in the old days, back in the day you saw a company like Data General who had a bunch of cash and a bunch of real estate assets. Data General didn't know what to do. It just didn't know how to buy the companies or invent things. It just didn't know how to pivot. Michael Dell has orchestrated a massive, giant $60 billion pivot for Dell. Will it work? Well, I mean, Dell is relevant. Dell is in the conversation. Dell is making moves that are really keeping it relevant, in my opinion. What's your thoughts, particularly on the networking side? Yeah, no, Dave, you know, as we talked, they've made a lot of moves. It's a lot of hard work to become relevant. You know, networking, they're hitting things at the right time. So virtualization changed a lot on the storage side and that gave the opportunity for the equilogists and compelants to kind of come in there and gain market share. In networking, we're also at a pivot point. The combination of virtualization and big data are going to have massive scale-out architectures which have different requirements than what we had in the past. And as we talked about actually with the Broadcom guests today, those actually intersect. So while on the storage side, I need a different architecture for something like Hadoop than I did traditionally for VMware. Networking, it's that flattening of the network as we've talked about. Lots of east-west traffic, low latency, high bandwidth scale-out architectures. And that's where Force 10 fits well into that piece. So Dell still, as Dario said, a lot of white space and there's probably going to be some more acquisitions to help flash out the portfolio. They need to partner with a lot of companies to have a full security environment too in the layer four through seven. They're starting to go out with their Sonic wall acquisition but there's still lots of pieces. Dell doesn't have nearly as broad of a portfolio as an IBM or an HP when it comes to the full stack but they've got the major pieces here. They've got the buildings blocks. They've got a solid start to their convergence strategy and looking forward to seeing some of the announcements this week that we think are going to push the ball forward a little. You know, I meant to ask Dario when he's on. We ran out of time but maybe I'll ask you. So if you look at the networking business Cisco's got a dominant share of networking. If you look at the Gartner and Magic Quadrant for networking, you know, there's really Cisco and HP. You're really the only two in the upper right. So it's amazing that in networking, Cisco has been able to garner such a dominant share and storage that doesn't happen. I mean, you used to work with EMC. I don't know what EMC's worldwide share is probably 30%, right, maybe 35. But so you haven't seen that type of domination in other markets, servers, same thing. You know, it's a very fragmented market. Why is it in networking that Cisco was able to garnish so high a share and is that sustainable with guys like Dell coming in and IBM, you know, with the BNT acquisition and others? Yeah, so great question, Dave. And you know, Cisco really rode that wave of Ethernet. So, you know, standards are great and we want to have everything interoperate. But at the end of the day, it's a lot easier if I have a single network and I manage things up. Cisco helped build an army of Cisco certified engineers and network designers that basically became their sales force. So, strong channel presence, built a whole economy of new jobs around their products. We've seen that in the VMware environments. VMware has, you know, the VMware user groups and they have VMware certified people. They have evangelists. Heck, you know, I'm a VMware vExpert and I, you know, love virtualization. So, building that whole ecosystem from the channel, from the customer and building jobs around this, you know, the job of the future isn't just, you know, a storage administrator that provisions loans. You know, a VMware virtualization administrator has to be cross-functional and do a lot of things. And nobody has had that next generation networking job to displace Cisco yet, even though we think with SDN coming in software to find networks, there might be that opportunity. That opening, yeah. Now, Cisco's recently done a spin out called NCME that's expected to be their play for software to find networks. But, you know, it's early and those spin outs take two or three years to kind of come to fruition. And in the meantime, there's a little bit of space for the other networking guys to try to get there. But, you know, it's tough to, you know, beat the 800 pound gorilla, you know, Intel's still dominant on the chip set. Despite there being lots of server vendors, you know, storage is very fragmented and, you know, Cisco, you know, they've still got some likes to stand on. You know, Stu, the other thing we've been hearing a lot about is integration. And actually, Dell doesn't make a huge deal out of it. It's just an observation that I made and we've been making is that it seems like Dell prioritizes integration of its acquisitions more so than some of the companies. I mean, you used to work at EMC, a very acquisitive company. And I always felt like EMC was more concerned about the performance of the asset than they were integrating that asset. Now, that may be changing a little bit, but with Dell, it seems to be a very intense focus on integration. I wonder if I could get your take on both Dell's, you know, integration and my statements about the EMC. No, no, absolutely, Dave. And something really interesting to look at, because if you look, there are some pieces that you want to fold in and hold tight. From an EMC standpoint, if you look at some of the bigger acquisitions, like RSA or like VMware, there needs to be integration, but they wanted to let those businesses run on their own. And I think, you know, we talked about VMware being just one of the best acquisitions of all time, and one of the best things that EMC did is they kept their own buildings, they kept their own people, and they really stayed at arm length and eventually spun out as an IPO. RSA in a lot of ways is still that independent, excuse me, security company, you know, so people don't think of it's an EMC company, it's RSA, they have a great ecosystem built around them. Dell's a smaller company, these are smaller acquisitions and they're more core to their intellectual properties. It's not a smaller company though, it's three times the size. Okay, from a storage standpoint, you know, if I think on EMC's standpoint, There's a clean sheet of paper. Yeah, a clean sheet of paper from storage. If you look at EMC, you know, an Avamar and a data domain, you know, EMC has their backup and recovery group and they kind of bundle all those together. From Dell, they're taking the Exynet piece and the Ocarina technology and they're spreading that through the Power Vault, the Equalogic and the Compellant technology. So it's... And maybe times have changed, well now, so first of all, I should clarify. So EMC's obviously done a great job of integrating with VMware. And has probably had a leadership position there. So it's done that very well, but in terms of taking assets that it acquires and integrating now. Well, for instance... You know, an example, just to give you a counterpoint on that, EMC bought the Kosh acquisition. It was an Israeli based CDP, CRR, and that's RecoverPoint, which is heavily integrated into the replication product for the VNX platform and it also supports the VMAX now. So, you know, there's pieces, but EMC's done a lot. Yeah, but I could argue, Stu, that that has opportunity to be integrated into its BRS portfolio in a bigger way. So that's what I'm saying. For me, it's mixed, whereas... And maybe it's just my perception, but with Dell, I see a very intense focus on integration and we asked one of our guests that might have been Travis Vigil, you know, why is that? And he said that basically the small and mid-sized customers actually need it more because they don't have the resources to do integration on their own. Now, so I wonder as well, if the times they are changing in that regard too, with open APIs and open source and, you know, new software methodologies if integration is somewhat easier today than it has been the last 10 or 15 years, but that seems to me to be something that is bears watching here. I mean, look at NetApp. You know, the NetApp integration of Spinnaker has taken a long, long time. You know, we're still seeing that labor of love play itself out. It's unclear to me what's going on with Bycast. I think that's an asset there. I want to hear more next week at the NetApp Analyst event. So, and I think NetApp's learning how to do that. My sense is that Dell was very, very aggressive about doing that. Now, maybe it's acquired certain assets that are easier to integrate, but I don't think so. I think it's the most the acquisitions you're talking about from Dell are software components that become features inside of the story. What about compelling and equal logic? I mean, you know. Well, they're two separate product lines. Sure, that's true. And I guess Exynet is the sort of glue that's holding those guys together. And that is taking a while in fairness. So, but it just seems to be an emphasis on it. Whereas, I think a lot of other companies are defensive about integration. Oh, we'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. As opposed to Dell, that is our main thrust of our investment in R&D strategy. Now, maybe that's because they don't have, they're not inventing a lot of stuff in Dell labs, right? Right. Like HP labs or IBM research centers. Although EMCs, they do a lot of R&D, but a lot of their internal R&D is on new product features. So, it's something that was worth watching. It may be just a misperception on my part, but I see Dell as more aggressive on integration than some of its counterparts. Okay, so we're here at Dell Storage Forum. We're live. This is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, any closing thoughts? So, excited for the 430 announcement. We have some more stuff we're going to be able to talk about tomorrow. Good buzz, nice to be here at the hometown in Boston after so many weeks in Vegas. So, yeah. Well, it is great to be in Boston. And of course, we couldn't be here without the generous support of Dell. We really appreciate Dell bringing us here. And of course, legal seafood. My favorite hangout. I mean, I know you like legals. Yeah, absolutely. Mark, Mike, and I went to legal test kitchen last night and had a great meal, so. Yeah, so, yeah, right across the street, the new harbor side, you should check it out. Legals, we got some great gifts here for some of our guests. And a lot of people don't know Stu. Legals, they ship anywhere in the U.S., right? You go to shop.legalseefood.com. They got great clam bakes and they ship all over the United States. So, definitely check that out. When I go to Legals, I have to get a grilled piece of fish over salad. That's what I get. Yeah, I had a nice piece of salmon last night. All right, so check that out. Thank you to Legal Seafoods. All right, so keep it right there. We've got some segments coming up. Phil Soren actually is coming up with a segment that we did last year at the Dell Storage Forum, so watch for that. Keep it right there and we will be back with more coverage from the Dell Storage Forum. This is theCUBE. We'll be back.