 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE here at EMC World 2016, of course, in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Brian Graceley. Happy to have on a regular of our program, Chad Sackich, who is the president of VCE, which is now the EMC Converge Platinum Division, Chad. It's so cute the way that you're describing it, like we haven't been friends and colleagues for years. Does that break the, with the fourth wall, I'm like, hey, we're breaking the fourth wall here. Hey Chad, this is our interview. Oh, gosh. You know, you're not taking it over. But yeah, no, Chad, we go back a long time. Back, Brian and I have done stints through the EMC realms and you've been there for a while now, so. By the way, for the last few years, your fierce independence I can count on. Well, hey, that's great. So Chad, tell us, from a personal standpoint here, we've had many EMC worlds, but this one's a little different. It's going to be the last one, branded EMC world, but hey, next year we'll be back here in Vegas. Many of the same people, a lot going on. Give us the personal Chad view. So the blunt and honest feedback? Yeah, no filter. EMC is not watching. We might need to file this with the SEC based on what you said, but that's okay. So look, I love EMC. I love my job. I love my colleagues. I love partners and customers. And so EMC world for me every year is almost like a homecoming, right? At the same time, this is I think the eighth year where I've checked into a hotel room here in the Venetian and felt like I've been in a one year time warp. Like I've just been put into suspension and then like, you know, unfrozen and then, oh, it's the same room, the same. I'm, change is good, man. I'm excited. There's a lot of, there's a lot of latent opportunity in everything that's going on. And frankly, everyone I'm talking to, whether it's our field, our customers, it was literally I had one customer, an enormous company that has three letters in its name that if I said anything more specific, it would identify them, so I won't. It was interesting, you know, they said that they were skeptical. They're German, so by nature, they tend to be a little skeptical about the whole Dell EMC thing, but then after today seeing, you know, Joe, Michael Dell on stage, they describe themselves as optimistic and I'm optimistic. I think it's going to be cool. It's going to be different, which means we got to celebrate like it's 1999 here at the last EMC World. And hence the purple jacket. Hence the purple jacket. I'm just doing it for respect for my man Prince, you know, it was a sad day, but in case. So how's the new job? You got more responsibility, a broader responsibility. Is it, first off, is it what you thought it was going to be and what are you learning? It's great. It is awesome. There's no but or if. I'm learning hand over fist, which I don't know about you guys, but the fun of doing something that's new and causes you to, you know, grow and expand in different ways is intrinsically fun. So moving from being the leader of just pre-sales, which is an incredible responsibility in my nature, because I am a technologist and SC at my heart, which by the way, it's interesting, Joe was an SC, Jeremy was an SC. I mean, Michael Dell started the legendary story building computers in his dorm room. Moral of the story to everybody watching, nerds will win. But what I am learning is I'm learning some new non-nerd skills. So looking at the VC business, understanding the business, the P&L, it's causing its mind expansions. But what I will say is the business is going gangbusters. Like, did you guys see that IDC Q4 of 2015? Converge infrastructure, market share? Yeah, no, we saw, you guys were up about 40%. I think some of the other parts of the business, you know, the other parts of the market down about 15%, it's weird. It's parts growing and parts are shrinking. What does that mean? So what it means at its core is that customers are getting more clear, I would say smarter, in their own minds over what they do that's important and what they do that is not important. And building, racking, stacking, sustaining, engineering, supporting infrastructure is now something that we can do and we do to an unbelievably high degree of quality and more and more customers are choosing to consume rather than build infrastructure. Because like, you can see that the whole IT ecosystem is under huge pressure. There's no part of the IT ecosystem that is at a $3 billion a year run rate growing at 40% cagger. True? Well, there's one. Public cloud. Yeah, right. And what does public cloud represent? Consumption. It represents saying, I'm not going to do this anymore, I'm going to consume it. So both of those are the proof points, frankly, of people getting smarter about what business should they do and what should they have someone else do. So Chad, there's some really interesting transitions going in the marketplace, kind of understatement, right? It's interesting to see EMC because on the one hand, you've got some big businesses that we talked to one of the EMC people today talking about some metrics in mainframe and mainframe's not going away anytime soon and therefore that's doing well. But I hear the Scalio team talk about the TCO of eliminating the sand and I'm like brought to you by the leader in the sand marketplace. EMC, how do you guys balance that? How do you make sure you, last year we talked about overpivoting and making sure you're not there and cloud native, so how does that all fit in? Look, the short answer is that you have to perpetually overpivot. You perpetually have to basically look at what you think is the big disruptor or the big disruptors in front of you and you have to consciously and fearlessly say, I'm going to dive in full force. So I'll give you an example. The V-Block business is the vast majority of that $3 billion a year run rate, which is converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure is a disruptor to converged. So for a long time there were parts of VCE that resisted and would fight VX rack, VX rail and ultimately if you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will eat your lunch. So VMAX needs to be disrupted by Extreme I.O. Be disrupted by Scale I.O. And then disrupt itself and that's just a never ending story. I mean for anybody and I think that this is something culturally that EMC has at its core that I think Dell Technologies as a whole is going to have as we come together is a furious paranoia where you're more worried about not being disruptive enough to your core business and therefore missing the boat. Yeah, you mentioned AWS and a little bit of a comparison to VCE. AWS is essentially outsourced IT operations or hidden IT operations. How far, VCE goes a certain racket, they stack it, they help you with upgrades, like in the future how far can you see that going and how much do customers want that? So VCE is associated with stopping at the infrastructure layer of the stack which is a far cry from a turnkey outsourced cloud. It's a huge benefit and the customers are proving it with their dollars so it's not that it's bad but it only goes this high inside the IT domain. The next level up is turnkey IT as a service. And we've been at it now and this is actually part of the business that I'm responsible for with the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Stack which in the, at its core is a turnkey enterprise oriented IT as a service stack. Composited out of the best of breed technologies from VMware, leveraging Puppet, ServiceNow, whole slew of elements that don't get delivered as giblets but just like a V block are delivered as a turnkey outcome. Now, historically we've done that in a very, very handheld way for low hundreds of customers. It's my goal to take that idea of the curated IT as a service stack up and make it something that we do for tens of thousands of customers. Likewise, we currently do it for, well we're going to be doing it for cloud native app stacks. A very structured, and by the way, if you haven't read it, Brian Gracie over here, great paper on structured and unstructured paths which is now an idea that's like in and out of vogue to use those words but I thought his article was great. We're finding that people like the idea of a turnkey enterprise oriented IaaS but they also, many of them also want something that's very optimized for cloud native app stacks which means that you really start with the paths layer as the consumption model. So that's the next layer in that stack. We think that frankly the opportunity that is there in front of us is to leverage what we do really well which is to curate the offer, turn it into something that's turnkey, do it not just at infrastructure with VBlock, VX Rack and VX Rail but do it for these two cloud IaaS stacks. And who knows, maybe even as new co, Dell's got a lot going on with Microsoft Azure Stack. You could imagine that that might be a third on-premises cloud complement. You like to talk all the time about customer choice, blocks, racks and appliances. Beyond yourself, are customers getting all these choices? I mean choices are great to a point but they're also complicated. Like are people getting it? What do you have to do to explain it to them? Yeah, so right now our capabilities can be summarized as three different ways of building infrastructure, blocks, racks and appliances, two different cloud stacks that you put on them. One optimized for traditional IT, one optimized for new cloud native apps and then three different ways to pay for it or consume it. They run it, we run it or it's run as a managed service, right? So kind of an on-premise, they run public or managed. That matrix I think is as complicated as it can get because frankly the customers are saying that they want more and more simplicity and one thing that's fascinating, I mean if you think about this event, just David Goulden's keynote, like how many things did he announce? Like it's almost impossible for people to consume, right? And therefore I think that the biggest opportunity for us frankly is in simplification into blocks, racks and appliances, two cloud stacks, maybe a third with the Microsoft Azure offer and then just choose your consumption model. And there will be a huge number of people that want to consume all the great point technologies, the best of breed technologies that we're announcing this week. But more and more every day are going to go great. I'm glad you guys have got the ball. Give me your turnkey offering. And if we can do that, we are truly the counterpoint to the one way only that is the AWS way, but we have to make it that simple and that easy. And I think we're close. So Chad, talk about some of the customer environment you're going into, what we've been talking to customers about, they need to understand what's core to their business and then the things that is either the undifferentiated to heavy lifting, but the stuff that they suck at. I mean, we talked to, there's very few companies out there that know how to build a data center right. There's very few customers that up the stack, there's pieces up that they need to and not, our customers moving along, there's so much inertia kind of in the, I do this myself, I want to own it versus moving that over to the vendors. And we think that's a huge opportunity going forward. It's so funny because basically in our industry, the upside is that it's filled with people who are curious. It's filled with people who, when they were a child, their favorite toys would have been toys that were building toys. You know, like, did you guys play with Lego? Lego Stinker toys, absolutely. In other words, by our nature, our industry is filled with people who want to build and create things, and that is awesome. However, customers are starting to realize that they need to be very black and white over. What do I do that only I do? And for example, if you are a telco, you are not the only telco that deploys fiber. You are not the only telco that builds OSS, BSS systems to deal with call handling. If you're an enterprise data center, and you're, let's, I talked to a hospital earlier today, what's the most important app for a hospital? The EMR systems, the electronic medical record systems, along with their VDI that the doctors use to basically interact with those systems, right? Those two things is one hospital truly unique versus a different one based on how they design their VDI instance or their EPIC EMR deployment. No, they're exactly the same. And those are basically places where what I'm trying to highlight to customers is stop building the stuff that is boring. Let me do the stuff which doesn't differentiate you one bit because I have 500 engineers that all they do all day is build V blocks. So if you have anybody that's building a V block or a VX rack like thing, and I have three engineers that all they do all day is build a V sphere, V realize, IT operations, enterprise hybrid cloud, and then another group that deploys PCF on a cloud native stack. If it's exactly like what everyone else does, focus your energies to build in spaces that differentiate your business, which is if you're in a bank is how you interface with your clients. What services you produce, how you market in, how you engage with them. If you're a retailer, it's how you deliver a retail experience. It's how you figure out your own brand identity. It's how you engage with your customer. It's not in this enterprise data center stuff. I'll ask you one last question, how you're a busy guy. You've probably had a chance to sit down with Michael, talk a little bit of strategy around converge and some stuff. Have you been Chad's world, Elvis Chad, bobblehead Chad, eating donuts, heart attack Chad? What's the strategy for Chad at Chad's world or EMC world going forward? Is Michael going to let you be Chad? We've talked strategy, but that interestingly has never come up. So I'm hoping that Michael Dell has not seen the YouTube videos of me doing the Gangnam style thing or the 18 episodes of Chad's world. That would be awesome. So let's just keep that on the down low. That's right. Look, ultimately one thing that he believes and I believe too is this converged platform, opportunity for Dell technologies is an unbelievable opportunity. And I really feel strongly and all of the employees in EMC and in VC as part of EMC, we're like, we think we've got a window where we can be the centerpiece because we are the group that curates and industrializes infrastructure, IaaS and Paz. And ultimately, as you said, that's what customers want. Now, will anybody be able to stop me from being an idiot and making a fool out of myself because I'm excited and passionate about this stuff? Not a million years. So I'm sure that there will be crazy stunts to come. So Chad, I'll let you bring it back home. I seem to remember a picture of VCE on a shirtless Chad. So VCE has had a long journey from kind of Acadia to VCE. Now it's the division of EMC and now part of Dell. So what do we see going forward for your group? It is so bright. You got to wear shades. Like it is truly where, using a good hockey reference for my buddy Brian, sorry about Detroit. But look, I come from Toronto. Leafs are not something to be that proud of, but basically it's where the puck is going, right? Customers want to consume versus build. They're drawing more black and white lines. Together as Dell Technologies, we have access to supply chain, a portfolio that'll allow us to accelerate everything that we're doing and frankly, potentially changes some of the strategic posture that EMC would have historically had versus other partners like Microsoft and others. I think it's going to be face-meltingly awesome. All right, well Chad, the Bush League comments about Detroit sports aside, always great to catch up with you. This Chad Tackage with the EMC VCE Group. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. I love Detroit. All right, thanks for watching. You're watching theCUBE.