 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live covering VMworld 2017, day two of coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We've had a great morning, the main stage, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Google, et cetera. We're excited to be joined by Dr. Sudhir. Sudhir Srinivasan, the CTO of Dell EMC storage. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. We're excited to have you here. So, you're an EMC guy, we talked about that. When people think of Dell, they think of, well, maybe used to PCs when they think of EMC, they think of storage arrays. Talk to us about one year post combination almost. How has your customer's perception changed? What have you heard in the last year? Sure, yeah. No, it's been a pretty dramatic change, I would say. In the sense of about a year ago or actually two years ago when the deal was first announced that it would be happening, there was a lot of skepticism in the customer base, obviously, around, hey, what does this mean? How's it going to come together? I think a year into it, people started to see some initial signs of better together, and now a year later, we're seeing dramatic, dramatic positive energy and feedback from customer base on how, when they're actually seeing the products and solutions coming together in a combined solution, I think that's, I mean, we used to joke in the old days where our products, EMC's got our portfolio and our products would only come together on the PO, that was the common joke inside. And I think that perception is changing quite a lot now. Sid, bring us into the storage group, because it was one that, if you look, there were lots of places where there were no overlaps. Storage, there was a long partnership between Dell and EMC, then Dell had acquired a couple of companies. EMC, as you said, already had a very large portfolio, so bring us inside a little bit, especially kind of with your, you know, your CTO, your technologist. You know, what are those lenses you look through and where are we into, you know, things coming together? So. I think it's a great question, you know, and thank you because one of the things that people miss is that the portfolio strategy is a conscious strategy, right? It is really hard to cover the entire spectrum of workloads, use cases, with a single widget, if you will. And a lot of our competitors will try to convince customers of that, and they're finding that out themselves, that it's really hard to cover that gamut. So I think fundamentally, first and foremost, the portfolio strategy is very important. Now that said, it is acknowledged, and I'll admit that there is perhaps more in the portfolio right now than perhaps is needed. And so that, in fact, is one of our first, one of our big priorities for this year is to simplify the portfolio because it's confusing for our customers. And so we're definitely working towards that. You'll see that roll out starting next year, and then over the next few years. So on that front, sort of maybe weeding things out to simplify, from an innovation perspective, Michael Dell also talked on Main Stage this morning about the importance of customer innovation, but I'd love to understand how, if you can take us kind of more through that, how is Dell EMC innovating internally so that you can be leaders in innovation? Yeah, that's a great question. It's a great question because, you know, when you have a multi-billion dollar business, everybody assumes it's really, really hard to innovate, and it is, right? There's no question because you've got a big business to sustain. Now, but I completely agree with Michael what he said on stage and what he said to us privately, which is, in fact, Dick Egan used to say the same thing. Founder of EMC was that if there's one thing that you should be comfortable with is change, because this industry is changing like crazy, and I've been in the industry now for what, coming up on 20 years, seen a lot, you know, from FDDI to where we are today, and I'm still constantly amazed by how much change is going on even now. So we do believe in change, we believe in actually innovating constantly, and Jeff Woodrow, my manager, he's a big believer in change as well, and we're working on a number of innovations, internally, organic innovations, big innovations. I can't tell you much about that today, but we'll hopefully, as we get closer to next year, we'll be able to talk more about it. That said, we're innovating on our existing products as well, we've refreshed our entire portfolio at Dell EMC World earlier this year. At VMworld just now, we announced our availability of our X2 platform, which is the next generation of the Xtreme IO platform. So we're constantly innovating, and as a result, it's more of a rolling thunder, as opposed to like a big bang, right? So, Sudhir, I kind of look at it there. There's kind of two ways that things are changing a lot in storage. Number one, there's kind of the underneath pieces. So you talked about going from FDDI, you know, when we saw from disk to flash, where EMC was, you know, early on, that kind of reemerged the flash after a couple of decades of it being, you know, not used for a while. We've got things like NVMe and NVMe over fabric coming out. So we're going to start there. Maybe when I want to talk after it, there's kind of the operating model on how we change things, because we went converged in cloud and all those. But on some of those underlying pieces, which I know keep the storage people kind of really engaged, you know, where are we today with some of those transitions? What are some of the things that you're looking at over the next kind of 12, 24, 36 months? I mean, I see actually three vectors of change impacting the storage business, impacting us. One is the media, like you said, there's NVMe and we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's actually a whole bunch of stuff beyond NVMe, like storage class memory, persistent memory coming out. Second set of things is consumption models, what we call consumption model around, whether it's a cloud consumption model, where if you think of cloud actually more as a consumption model as opposed to a destination. And software defined is a big thing. I think that's going to dramatically change the game, especially when you combine it with things like persistent memory. And then the third thing, I think, is the new wave of applications as well. That's generating a whole new class of data that has a whole new set of requirements. For example, real time streaming analytics, right? That changes the, you can't deal with block and file and object in those worlds, you're dealing with new semantics. So those are some of the vectors we're looking at in terms of time. So let's start with kind of the low level, the media and some of those things, right? What is data, what is memory? All those things blurring, where, I hear there seems to be so many people, NVMe, NVM over Fabric seems to be. Hey look, let me hit that off right in front. So it was 10 years ago that Dell and EMC independently before obviously we were in one company actually co-founded the consortium that invented NVMe. So we saw the need of this technology, of the limitations of SAS and SATA 10 years ago. We saw this coming. We helped drive the standards, including the NVMe over Fabric standard. And that's like well before some of these companies that are claiming NVMe today were actually even born. So NVMe to me is a journey, right? There's the bus, changing from the SAS bus to the NVMe bus, that's one part. Then there's the media that stands behind them, the NVMe transport. Things like 3D crosspoint that are starting to come out. And then even beyond that, you get to really persistent memory type of applications. So we see this as a journey. We're going to be rolling out NVMe and all our products across the entire portfolio, starting this year, later this year. For first today, Scale.io already supports NVMe devices in 14G, so you're going to see that. Yeah, I guess my follow-up just to dig in a little deeper because when we got the CTO, you got to dig down. There were some when Flash came out, they were like oh yeah whatever, I'm going to throw a couple or percentage in. Well, we saw Flash greatly changed architectures, it changed some of those application considerations, especially Wikibon's David Foyer has been beating on, let's really look at databases, let's do this. NVMe, is it extension and kind of evolution or will this be a similar revolution to what we saw with Flash? I think it's a similar revolution. It's a similar but perhaps less of a quantum leap, I would say. And the reason is because you're going from tens of milliseconds or milliseconds of latency that's spinning media to sub-millisecond with Flash. Now you're going from sub-millisecond to sub-sub-millisecond but it's getting diminishing. I think where you're going to see a lot of dramatic is as it's more on the latency as the applications get closer and closer to the servers, right? So I think you're going to see a lot of pretty dramatic change in that space. Speaking of change and revolution, the three vectors that you talked about, media, consumption models, this new wave of applications, how as CTO are you seeing the buyer's journey change as a result of these vectors? So that's actually part two of the question that Stu was just asking is, while I agree that it's going to be a revolution, what I've also seen in 20 years is that these things don't happen instantly. Yes, Flash was a big change but even today, over 40, 50% of our revenue still come from hybrid systems, mixed-flashing. So these things take time, right? So customers are taking leaps, I would say. I'm seeing a spread off the early adopters and we're probably in the big medium and the big bell curve right now and then there's some laggards as well. They're still buying pure HDD-only systems. Do you see a difference there, sorry, with respect to industries, maybe healthcare or financial services that are early adopters? Definitely, I think there's industries and there's also a size of customer, right? The bigger the customer, the more eager we see they are in doing this digital transformation. So we're seeing a lot of them going all in on software-defined, right? So we're definitely seeing that shift from buying purpose-built arrays to software-defined. Now it's not going to be instantaneous again, it's going to be over many years. Similarly, in the mid-range and below, we're seeing a shift from modular systems to hyper-converged systems as well. So we're seeing that as well. We're seeing a lot of shift from purely on-prem to a hybrid solution of on-prem plus cloud. So all of our products are now attaching to the cloud as well. So we're definitely seeing all of these transitions. Yeah, when it comes to the cloud-native piece, there are some that have said, well, it's going to be kind of a completely different way of doing things, really focused on the developers, and won't that just live in the public cloud or will SaaS applications be where a lot of those live? So what do you say to the you've improved media, you've improved consumption models, but maybe they're just, it's easier for me not to own some of these pieces. The company, small companies, I don't want to deal with infrastructure at all. Let me just get out of that piece of it. That's another great question. What we are seeing, I would say, is definitely some of that, especially as you said in the smaller companies, it's easy for them to get started, right? With minimal initial expenses, they can get started in the public cloud, so we definitely see that. But as you get larger, what we're seeing is the economics of running everything in the cloud on a sustained basis just don't work out. It's much more cost-effective to run things on-prem. So I think for cost reasons, when you're running over sustained operations, as well as for security reasons, we're still seeing a lot of hesitation and especially as you get to the higher end of the market, people are concerned, especially with all the breaches and things like that, that they're concerned about where their assets are. So we actually at Dell Technologies, I would say, and Dell EMC in particular, we're seeing a pretty significant opportunity propping up where customers want to run on-prem data centers just like the cloud. That's where things like software-defined storage become really important because, hey, the public clouds are running all the software-defined. That's one of the secrets to their agility and speed. Why can't we have that on-prem? And we actually absolutely see that. In fact, today's announcement of PKS is right on the money for that. So we're here at VMworld, with respect to that, seeing more customers want to bring things on-prem, maybe kind of the true private cloud that Wikibon's been talking about. What are you guys doing now with VMware 2.0 line up? We've heard a number of things about yesterday with AWS. You mentioned Pivotal today, Google. What's going on today with Dell EMC and VMware to help customers really build a solid on-prem solution? Yeah, so I think Pivotal is certainly a key piece of that, Pivotal VMware. So the whole VMware cloud foundation, cloud suite is a key piece of that. The integration with PCF is, I think, going to be very key because what customers need, especially the traditional customers, if you will, who don't quite have the expertise yet to build cloud-native applications, they need a platform, not just a infrastructure. So I think that's why Pivotal is very important. And we're working very closely with, and as Dell EMC, we're working closely with both of those partners in delivering those solutions. VxRail is a good example of that. VxRail, VxRack are good examples of the two technologies coming together. And so those are the kinds of things. I think that's where software-defined storage, you'll see a lot more integration between Dell EMC's software-defined portfolio with the VMware and Pivotal ecosystems. So the storage group, you've talked about, you have a lot of options. We've been talking about software-defined storage, how that is driving a lot of the change there, it gives a lot of flexibility there. How does the storage team look at things like Vmax and ExtremeIO compared to the software-defined storage these days? I presume everybody's seen the famous chart where there's the traditional infrastructure and then there's the cloud native, the new world, and that's a transition that's going to happen and we think it's going to be a very long transition, right? Mainframes are not dead, right? So they're still alive and there's a reason because people are running their absolute mission critical applications on those infrastructures. So we think there's definitely going to be a place for both and it isn't all or nothing. And that's, I think, going back to innovation, the question about it, where is Dell EMC innovating? We're the only company that's actually embracing these changes, this transition to software-defined, right? With products like ECS and ScaleIO and so on and so forth. So we see that the transitions will happen slowly but there's going to be a lot of opportunity for highly reliable, you know, six, seven, nine's reliable infrastructure based on purpose-built infrastructure as well. It definitely matches a lot of, as you said, the true private cloud report that we have on Wikibon. Well, thank you so much, Sudia, for joining us on theCUBE. We now bring you into the CUBE alumni, the illustrious CUBE alumni category. Glad to be here. And thank you for sharing your insights as CTO on what you're doing with customers and innovation. Thank you very much. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin from My Co-host to a Minimum and we are live covering day two of VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. Stick around, we will be right back.