 Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world we're doing, still doing remote interviews. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly, conversations continue. We've got two great guests here. John Siegel, SVP, ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies and Dave McGraw, VP of Office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you. Moving forward with Dell Technologies and VMware. Great partnership, thanks for coming on. Great to be back. Yeah, hi John, thanks for having us. You know, the world's coming back to kind of real-life Omnicron virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud-native cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware. Both have been working together for a long time now. VMware is a separate company. We'll get to that in a second. But let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of from our customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways, our joint relationship has never been stronger. We put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, joint good market over the last several years. And we've really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality. And we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, cloud-native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years. A great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of, whether it's in multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tanzu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we've made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place, by the way, that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. Yeah, and Dave, just... Go ahead, John. No, go ahead, go ahead. I was gonna say, just to build on that, as you said, I mean, really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware's always been an open ecosystem partner, right, with, it's OEM vendors out there. And it's, I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned the X-Rail, which is a fantastic example where we, at Dell, we've invested our own investment in our own IP, you know, HCI system software. That's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that seamless experience. You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's been that long, both EMC world and Dell world, back in the day, it was our first events, we went through, we've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end-to-end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it. But this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale, is with cloud resources are being part of the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud-native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud, I mean it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision as you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood, meaning everything's going to be scaling and the rise of super clouds or new edge technologies which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? That's right, John. You remember VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey and this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, data processing units, also known as smartNICS. Essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like making it more efficient, more performant depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. Yeah, yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems that Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NVME over TCP is another, if you will, key ingredient to how customers going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there at most recent VM world where we announced the ability to essentially automate the integration of NVME over TCP with a Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well. I think there's countless. Yeah, I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X where they've integrated vSphere, ASXI into a storage array. And that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. What's interesting about what you guys are talking about is remember the old DevOps movement infrastructure as code? Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's a big part of Tanzu and security. Now it's all about Devs, right? So now Devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things that we pointed out in the queue recently is that VMware has owned the IT operations world in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure and front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys are working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? Yeah, so I would say one area in particular that we're really coming together is around Apex from an as a service perspective. I think what Apex is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud-native development, if you will, and modern app development. And we together are partnered to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new Apex cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations like frankly the X-Rail at the bottom of that as Dave said earlier. So for customers that are looking to get out of managing infrastructure all together, which we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the Apex cloud services with VMware cloud, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell but gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private cloud. Yeah, I think because the Apex cloud services designed with VMware cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to reskill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are economically, performance, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what do you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new, and how to make that all work together to again satisfy the developer because the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this is, is this the as a service focus? Is that what's happening? Yes, absolutely. The as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how we're going to really simplify this. We've, we've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services we have, we've had Apex hybrid cloud, Apex private cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now. And this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. VMware cloud and super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of super cloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other, other clouds too. So your customers can operate on any cloud. Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on premises with a, you know, Apex service to be able to be operating in a colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tanzu earlier, John, you know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with Apex is they've set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SaaS offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. You know, I just love the term super cloud. Actually, I call it sub-clouds but Dave Vellante called it super clouds. But the idea is that you can have all the superpower and the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? You have edge, you've got the core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place and was just distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. We, again, we've talked about in the queue many times. So let's discuss this whole core to edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the edge? Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift, as you mentioned, to data being generated at the edge. I think Michael Dell has actually gone in records talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IoT, right, almost any endpoint now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an edge now and we're expecting to see as IDC has already gone out there on record of saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources typically at the edge. There's typically a scaling issue, how do you manage all those distributed end points and do so succinctly and how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like edge and we, again, common theme here about VxRail, which is a leading joint ACI offer in the market, is the foundation of many of our edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago extends VxRail's value proposition to the edge using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources and it still has cyber resilience built right in. And John, you just follow up on that real quick before David chimes in. On the edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now. Any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other edge power, power edge, sound familiar? We need some more power at the edge. So what's new there? Well, first of all, we had new power edge platforms, of course, come out in this past year and we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail has, of course, leveraged that power of power edge. Lots of good naming here, I guess, right? Power edge. But it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP like streaming data platform, which enables streaming video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or power edge platform. We're doing the same thing with, in the manufacturing side, we're working with partners that have IoT edge platforms and running those on VxRail and power edge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right, with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with power edge and VxRail, but working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. Dave, what's your take on the Dell edge with VMware? Because automation is a big theme, not moving data across the internet. That's obviously huge. You got to have that operational stability there. Absolutely. And to your point, being able to do the processing at the edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a tiger team approach around the use cases, manufacturing and retail, being two of the real key focuses, healthcare and other one, where we're understanding customer requirements both today and where they want to go. And so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in SD-WAN and SASE that become part of that solution as well with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and edge native application environments working with Dell going forward. That's great stuff. The next, next ending question is what's next? I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave. And this is key supply chain on both hardware and software and about security. So when you, when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next? I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, we're looking at security, compliance and privacy every day. We're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end-to-end encryption of data. So for virtualized environments or containerized environments being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and de-duplication capabilities for customers efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in zero trust. Being able to develop zero trust infrastructure across edge to core to co-load to cloud and making sure that we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices to be able to drive zero trust environments. John, what you're thinking is security is huge and you guys have literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the edge too whether the traffic stays with the edge or goes across the network. That's right. I mean, security is like you said it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you ask what's next I think, you know, the sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? And I think at the end of the day, you know we've got, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterey obviously our integration with Tanzu and a number of solutions we have there around Apex, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities you mentioned, you know, areas, you know like, you know, supply chain areas like security, you know and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we've built, you know over these last several years, you know around these collaborative cultures working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customers biggest challenges whatever those may be, you know and so at the end of the day behind us we have the greatest supply chains, you know services, support and innovation engines. But I think in the, you know I think that the passion and our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great, great CUBE conversation. We're talking encryption, we're talking about edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thank you so much. Okay, this is a CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE. 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