 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jim Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager, Windows Server, Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. Thank you very much. And Bob Ward, the Principal Architect at Microsoft. Thank you both for so much for coming on theCUBE. Glad to be here. Pleasure, yeah? Honored to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. Well, did you do? Oh, was that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big milestone. Congratulations. Thank you very much. I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. Like, what is it saying? Yes, so. So, it is now been a couple of days since Satya Nadella stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth. And in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well. And we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling it's the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware. I am using my Office 365. I'm interested in doing more. And now they're both co-located. I could do everything I need together. Yeah, it was pretty interesting for me. Because, you know, VMware and Microsoft had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. You know, the operating system standpoint and everything. But especially like in the end user computing space. Well, Microsoft and VMware weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums up there talking about that. You know, really, you know, had most of us sit up and take notice. So congratulations. And for me being in the SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know, in virtualization. So everybody's coming up to me saying, when can I start running SQL server in this environment? Right, so we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. Yeah, well, you know, customers that they've lived in a heterogeneous environment, multi-cloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, you know, my cloud and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use, right? This is about meeting our customers where they are giving them the ability to do everything they need to do and make our customers just super productive. Absolutely. All right, so, Jeff, there's, you know, some of the news specifically can give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people, definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But the key part of this is for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well-known, well-easy to use Azure infrastructure and Azure portal. But when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your networks, and you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to cook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy as well through integration in the Porter. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long roadmap together. I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value. That's what I do on the SQL guy. Yeah, so tell us, tell us what's new. Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer, you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL server and get access to everything in your corporate environment. Now, we realize you're not just going to have SQL server now in your environment, you're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually build a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of a radical stuff for the normal database people, right? It's fascinating times. We know it used to be like, I have one database and now when I talk to customers, no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and that's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy, are there some challenges there. How are customers getting their arms around this? Yeah, I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called T-SQL. It's a programming language and they don't want to lose it. They want to learn like 10 other languages, but they have to access data sources. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL server. No problem, just use SQL with your T-SQL language to query that data, get the results and join it with your structured data in SQL server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. And what it helps, what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. That's right. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about, you know, I've had servers for, and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like, like it's like baggage, it's luggage. I'm like, no, no, no, that's, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take it better advantage of it with this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. And how ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other things? You know, it's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers like data scientists now that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL server. So it's actually starting to become a really big deal for a lot of our community. All right, so Jeff, we had the cube of Microsoft Ignite's first time last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned our 10th year here. Yes. What used to be EMC World. It was interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, you know, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about, you know, how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff there. But very clearly at the show, Azure stack is an extension of Azure. And therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that, you know, extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure stack, always interested in the cloud, you know, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of portfolio. So the Azure stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we had, we launched with Azure stack, which is again to give you that cloud consistency so you can literally write applications that you can run on-premises, so you can move to the cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said, this is really awesome. But we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And in fact here at Dell EMC technology world here, we actually have Azure stack HCI solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here at the show as well. And I was just demoing one to somebody who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyperconverged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up an easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell technology world. So there's a lot that we're doing together on-premises as well. Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell, is that one of their what they call ready nodes or something in the VX Flex family? Yes. That's the standpoint because the HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out is it made sense that really the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. One of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally there are some apps that people say, hey I'm obviously going to move this up to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on-prem. So for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Absolutely. Some people want to run SQL up in the cloud because they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people say, I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever going to the cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. And so I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So these new Dell solutions that have Intel, Optane, DC persistent memory have lots of cores. I'm excited about that stuff, man. Oh my gosh, yes. Optane persistent memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern but it's also secure because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, 10 years old. Those don't have things like TPM, secure boot, Ufie. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on a new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. A persistent memory is pretty exciting stuff. Yes. Actually Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL server to take advantage of that technology. SQL you took can be kind of an IO bound application. You got to have data in storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access persistent memory, bypass the IO part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVME drive. It's a great example of just using a new technology but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can persistent memory be for your application. I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell-Microsoft relationship partnership. Because these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers in their 30s and 40s. They're not the startups. Been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences? Sure. Well, first of all, we've been doing it, like you said, we've been doing this for a while. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. And now what we're doing is we're upping our cloud game, essentially what we're doing is we're saying, there's an area here in cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run in Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell. But lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell, about taking RML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack. But even in addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell company? So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great. It's all about solutions. And I've started to see that conversation happen a lot lately. And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important because customers don't come to even say, Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, no, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre-configured, pre-validated, pre-certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably I'm going to get the question, can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows Server, but then we go above and beyond. We actually run a whole bunch of burn-in tests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security. So it's ready to go, Dell EMC can ship it to you, and you're up and running versus, hey, I'm trying to configure, make all this thing work, and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume cloud very quickly, connect right up, and boom, you got hybrid in the house. Exactly. Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.