 flagship program where we go out to the events and start to signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're here with Stephen Foskett. We're back for our kind of broken segment, but we were in the middle of a killer discussion around the question of, you know, Dell getting, you know, eaten up at the high end by Apple. BYOD, right? Why it's such a- BYOD and Android and Windows 8 jump ball. It's like, who's going to win that game? And you were saying BYOD is a done deal. Shouldn't even be discussed. It's a must have. It's not even an issue. If anyone doesn't do it, they're debt, you know, they're never going to hire anyone, basically. No one will ever want to work there. Not only be a sucky work environment, basically what I think. But so continue and also expand on the fact that if Dell comes out with something tablet mobile, what can they do to differentiate besides just Windows 8? Is it a VDI, is it virtualization? What could they do at the edge of the network to take advantage of virtualization, to take advantage of cloud, to take advantage of convergent infrastructure? So you were on the BYOD piece when we were interrupted by the lights to continue. All right, well, let me just sum up my opinion on BYOD, which is that BYOD is a meaningless term because that's just how things are now. Anyone you want to hire wants to bring his own device. Certainly his phone, corporate owned phones, done deal. Tablets, I think, is the same deal. You know, people want their tablet. They want their iPad, frankly. And computers, I think it's the same way. I think that more successful companies are going to be able to say, we need to let people buy whatever computer they want, we need to support it. And that sucks for IT, but there you go. BYOD is a done deal. Now- And you were saying also, if they had a clean sheet of paper, they wouldn't have what they have now. So what are some of those changes to enable that? Because it opens up a can of worms, but people are selling services around. There's a lot of great growth in services. Dell's doing well, HP's doing well. People need help, right? So they got to get there. It's not the old stuff. It has to be kind of retooled. Yeah, absolutely. And that's going to be the challenge, is figuring out how to make this work in terms of corporate governance. And there goes the lights again. I bet they're switching us over to a different network. We're still live. Okay, we're still live. Ooh, I'm a ghost. Look at this. They're cube after dark. Yeah. Okay. Okay, let's keep going. So you're a little bit dark, but that's okay. You're shadow, the shadow man. Tech shadow. What do we got? Shadow knows. Look, this is what we're all about. Live, web TV, where it's at. This is reality, man. And the fact is, the teleprompter went down. Oh, we don't have a teleprompter. So continue. Well, I can't speak without a teleprompter. Is Clinton going to use a teleprompter today? I hope so. No, Clinton, he's better off the teleprompter. That guy is hilarious. I'm really looking forward to seeing Clinton here at the Dell world. So, yeah, so it's still an open question. How companies are going to be able to deal with the B-O-I-O-D world. Mobile device management is a huge, huge challenge. Unfortunately, too often mobile device management means giving IT the power to say no, instead of giving IT the power to say yes. I do a lot with Tech Field Day in the wireless space. We talk to a lot of mobility companies, access point, mobile device management companies, and their big challenge is basically that a lot of their customers just want to be able to shut this stuff down. And that's not a good approach. Explain that a little bit. You said to give IT the ability to say no and veto power, essentially. Which is not a good thing in your premise. And you know, I mean, so one of the biggest challenges for a lot of these mobile device companies is that corporate IT is not coming to them saying how can we work nicely with people with iPads. Corporate IT is saying how can we keep these iPads from screwing everything up. Of course, the big challenge here too is that Apple is not playing nice at this game. Apple doesn't seem to care about the corporate market. Apple is not enabling corporate features. They've been pretty good enabling protocols. So like their Exchange Active Sync protocol is fairly good. That enables a lot of management of the tablets. So they do have that stuff. They're wonderful with Wi-Fi protocols. Apple is absolutely way out of the cutting edge in terms of implementing roaming and high performance Wi-Fi and things like that. What they're not doing a good job of is giving corporations the tools to have sort of sandbox environments. One of the coolest things I've seen in practice recently was the VMware MVP, which is their hypervisor for Android. It allows you to run a virtual Android instance with corporate data and a virtual Android instance with your own data side by side on the same device. And in terms of acceptability of the corporation, I think they would love that. But it's just not happening yet. And Apple doesn't seem at all interested in enabling that. So VMware announced that over a year ago, right? It's just they're taking a while for them to ship it, is that right? Yeah, they're just not sure what to do with it. They have this technology now that they're not ready to, well, they need to find a place for it. And it's just like virtual desktop, VDI. The technology's been there for a long time. The challenge is getting customers to want the technology and getting customers to know what to do with the technology. So my final question is really, what can Dell do to differentiate on that front and beyond into the converged infrastructure? What are some of the things that you could take? Because they have to do something. And they'll have leadership on the device. That's going to be commoditized. It'll be table stakes, in my opinion, to have a solid edge device of some sort, tablet and mobile. And then the desktop will still do their thing for power workstations. But what can Dell do to differentiate? Because there's a real issue there. If Windows 8 craters and doesn't just go up, you can have Android coming in, other OSes. So what do you think they should do to differentiate? What's the opportunity? Well, I think Dell, if I was to give Dell any advice, I would say adopt a strategy of being the provider of totally client agnostic IT services and solutions. Basically Dell should offer, they should continue to charge forward on mobile device management, on virtual desktop. I've seen some fabulous, fabulous, ubiquitous desktop demos from Dell. They should basically say, we are not going to lock you into Windows. We are going to embrace Android. We're going to embrace iOS. And we're going to allow IT to move forward in this new, scary world of BYOD and of iOS and of Android. And frankly, that's going to require Dell to say, I'm sorry Microsoft, but we have to step back from you. We can't love you as much as we used to. And some of our research that we've done is around enterprise mobility, is that it has to be software driven because you have enterprise mobility requirements on a consumer device. So that has to be done in software, right? So you have to have that. And interesting, there was a story that broke this week that in support documents, it was leaked that Microsoft supporting iPad office on the iPad and mobile. Interesting, so we're seeing Microsoft recognizing that BYOD is happening and it's awesome. So, D-Foskete organizer of Field Day here with me and Dave Vellante on theCUBE. Good friend, SiliconANGLE contributor, doing great work, expert contacts D-Foskete at what's your URL for your website? Blog.Foskete.net and you can also find me at techfieldday.com. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your knowledge with the world and extracting the signal from the Dell world. We'll be right back with our next guest for this short break.