 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, student minimum. Dave Vellante, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two sets called theCUBE Canon. We've got the Canon of content. Interviews all day long, out at night with the analysts, briefings, meetups, receptions. Talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies, VMware, and across the industry, Stu Dave. Today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nutella. Surprise visit on stage, unveiling new Azure VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announces the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of a virtual stream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud, if you want to call it, single cloud of glass of Dave, single pane of glass with a variety of other things, unified workspaces of a variety of things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end to end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. And we'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, C-O-V-M, where Dave, were you impressed? Are you shocked? Were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the product start coming online here? What's your analysis? Yesterday John was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out tech for good, and then the linchpin of Dell strategy, which of course is VMware for cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nutella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person, didn't come in from the big screen, so I thought that was pretty impressive. He had the three power players up on stage. Today, of course, it was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Still, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the life cycle going. You had like 10 announcements today. I can go through them real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops, to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect, which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data managed portfolio, an area where Dell, EMC, has been behind. So, lots of announcements. Another mega-launch tradition, and again, a lot of incremental, but important tactical improvements to the product line. Dave, last year, what we heard from Jeff Clark is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was, oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings, and the stated goal is to simplify that, and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that power branding. I kind of said there's that marketing behind the, if you know what that product is because it's the power brand, they put it out there. So, PowerMax has been there as their tier storage. They had a good update to Unity, to Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet, so maybe there's still some dry powder left. In the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this because these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they've tested it out, so going to new generations, making that change, does take time, but we're seeing that progress, the tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. Stu, what's your analysis of the product so far? I mean, again, like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? Yeah, so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure, if you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is, oh wait, there's this managed service stack and it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait, I've taken the appliance and I put VCF, oh, that's VxRail, and then I've got this other, it's like, I see three or four solutions and I'm like, is it all just VxRail with a VMware stack on top of it? But how do I package it? What applications live on it? How is it consumed? Managed service, OPEX, CAPEX? So they've got that, a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is just dirt simple and really there. So they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment. So I expect you'll still, at the Nutanix show, John, you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you're talking to Dheeraj. Yes, they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix. Just like Microsoft, heck, I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week. And they're like, oh, well VMware and Red Hat, Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put OpenShift on top of their stack, they can do that. So hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is, you know, Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this, you know, SDDC will be rebuilding blocks for the future. I said, kudos to them. They've got it on AWS. They've got it announced with Azure. They, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. It's, VMware's a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multi-cloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management. So how much of that will there? Or do I get on Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware? And I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything. So in the future, you know, are they containerware? You know, that's the competition kind of posted that. They are VMware at their core. VMware's central to the strategy. And there's still some work as to go, but they're making some good progress. I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed. But the role of VMware, Dave, is to what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance. Many times, obviously, VMware, Dave, you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies. But what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? I mean, I've said many times that this company, and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and some becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoint, certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember the class V transaction that took Dell Public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said, okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multi-cloud strategy, the underpinning of that multi-cloud strategy is VMware. And what strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change, you had Dell, you had EMC, they said, oh yeah, the companies are compatible. But they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures. And really in a very short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean, they are basically saying, VMware and Dell, boom, that's how we're going to market. And Pat Wilson, Pat's coming on later today, but I'm sure he'll say, hey, we love NetApp, we love HPE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talk of synergies and you were, oh, where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal, you talked to Michael quite a bit. He's out there, we talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now, on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today, in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured, so VMware's sure they'll still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move and you said, Dave. John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? Well, I think HPE is a great example of a culture, that split. Meg Whitman's uncharged that we know what happened there and I think they're hurting. I think they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's had and because he told us years ago, a few guys remember on here on the record, also privately, that I'm going to take this off the table of EMC, we're going to do all these things, we're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ethos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, do point it out, portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this was a theme Dave last night at the analyst reception as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board, both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better. The business performance discipline, we're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon, he called this three years ago when we talked about the integration, that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those, they stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC back companies, you're thinking about getting rid of founders, never let a founder leave a company, they bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies that pull talent in because they're executing, they pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fightoms and the politics kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HPE lost their founders, obviously, and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, going back to their roots, we'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again, we don't have a lot of visibility to what HPE's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model and you're missing key value activities of a end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's going to be hard to be performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell's showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry and any vertical. Yeah, and Dave, if I can, just on the cultural piece, because it's really interesting, when you talked about EMC, East Coast, hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company, while they're working together, a lot of it, I talked to VMware people and they're like, oh, it's great, the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm not having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the VSAN, NSX, the management software suite, and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go in a market that they just really line up well together. And Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. Well, again, staying on culture for a moment, what I've discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkins, the narrative early on was, oh, Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart when you talk to people today, they said, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said, okay, you're going to be accountable, really an accountability culture, but now that they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clark came in and sort of forced this alignment. That's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who, you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meet he's going to have, what's expected, and they're prepared. And it seems to be taking hold. I mean, a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues and profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it. And I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the hashtag Dell Tech World on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They got an Alienware, Esports Gaming Studio, which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC worlds before or Dell worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not a, it feels good. That's my takeaway. Well, the big theme is hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. John Rose said as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multi-cloud. Thanks to everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is, the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now, I will make an observation and the customers that I talk to. Multi-cloud has not thus far been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multi-vendor, shadow IT, lines of business. And I think the corner office is saying, hold on, we need to rein this in. We need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is. Build a platform that is hybrid and sure multi-cloud to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts. And that's what's happening. It is early days. It's a long way to go. Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece. And I called up Chuck, I'm like, hey, Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on. He's like, yeah, yeah, new marketing branding. And I wrote a piece exactly what you said, Dave, on wikibon.com. Hybrid and multi-cloud were a bunch of pieces. It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products developed really fast. When we talk about VMware cloud on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard, if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts. And I said, is there a diagram? They said, no, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like, hold on, I need to hear about this, outposts in production. But that strategy, as you said, hybrid and multi-cloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Fleurer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybrid cloud taxonomy. We're spending a lot of time on the research side. Really, what does the industry need to do? How should customers think about all of the layers, you know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces, but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. Well, an ironic follow-up on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was called the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity. And now, multi-cloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane. So, interesting juxtaposition. We'll see, Amazon Outposts. Guys, go to siliconangle.com, wikibond.com, great hybrid cloud, multi-cloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technology makes VMware the lynchpin of hybrid cloud, data centers of service and user strategies from ZDNet. E-week, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously, great analysis, guys. Right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John-Harrie Davey with the Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage. Day two after the short break.