 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see you. Great to see you guys as well, good to see you again. All right, so I feel like one of the CNBC guys, it's like Tom, I remember back when Force 10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on in Convergent Infrastructure. But of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. That's correct. So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC. And then recently I picked up what we called Convergent Infrastructure business, or the VX Block, V-Scale business. And I continue to also manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically anytime our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth, we support them with Dell EMC certified parts. And then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, jumele, big switch, things like that, riverbed, silver peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio, we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. Yeah, well, luckily there's no change in any of those environments. Networking's been static for decades. I mean, they threw a product line that, I mean, last I checked was somewhere in the three to $4 billion range with the VX Block under what you're talking there. It's a so, maybe you could talk, what does this mean? Because I think of you, you're a networking guy. Keith and I are networking guys by background. Obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to get to this stuff. Well, I think when you talk about all these solutions, cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VX Block and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. And so that's probably the reason, primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division because that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side and see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to kind of this, not your do-it-yourself, but kind of do-it-for-me environment. All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence and there's other parts of the group that have hyperconvergence. How do you kind of square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyperconverge, converge, or do-it-yourself. You build your own block, so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack. They want it pretested. They want it certified. They want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are, in essence, looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor, but might be a different IP, as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking some four and a half years ago. And now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends, it's scale. Right. How do customers really help scale these environments? Exactly, exactly. What happens a lot around the customer environment? What kind of skill sets do they have? Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process? Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases, but we kind of have this buying conundrum of bill versus buy. I think my old friend Chad Sackett used to say there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build themselves or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in the networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software and in some cases even disaggregated software, putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center rather than buying a full proprietary stack. But we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the open source community. I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the open source relationship or the relationship that Dell networking has with the open source community? Absolutely. We first made our venture in open source actually with Microsoft in their sonic work. So they're creating their own network operating software and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface or side. So that was put into the open compute project probably around three and a half, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base or what's known in the Linux foundation is OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware creates this switch abstraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon and bringing it to a control plane which allows APIs to be connected for all your northbound applications or your general noses that you want to use or a disaggregated noses that are made what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of kind of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and open source software. So we really think that this trend is moving and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. So there was an awful lot of provider talk. You cover both the provider space and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. The provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plugins for disaggregated networking and then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? Well, I think it's this move towards software defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clark, the whole world is moving to software defined. It's no longer if it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage of moving from traditional software defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software defined, they can look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. And in a manner in which they can kind of continue to manage the old world but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software defined with the same infrastructure. You know, it's not well known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases and the customer environment. So traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from like traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. Tom, I wondered if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell in this show, I mean, there's a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which we'll be opening a little bit. But on the networking side, we've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe give us kind of the update on the overview of the ecosystem, where Dell wins. Yeah, I mean, if you think about 30 something years ago and Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about? It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and X86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies, in the networking area, whether it's Dell EMC or VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market, virtualization, layer two, layer three, disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of VeloCloud by VMware. We're really helping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP Infusion, and Pleribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area, while we lead with VeloCloud, we have Silver Peak, and we also have Versa Technologies, which is getting a lot of uppicking in the area, both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity in their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they grow through their IT transformation. So Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software defined. Couple of Dell EMC worlds ago, big announcement, Chad talked about SkellIO and abstracting and giving away basically SkellIO, the basic solution for free. Then you guys pull it back and you say, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a package solution. So we're talking on one end, total disk aggregation, another end. You know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want package solutions. Can you talk to the importance of software defined and package solutions? Right, it's kind of the theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our VSAN operating, you know, our VSAN Ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, we tested it, we certified it. Most importantly, we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are, again, in my building it myself, or do I want to buy a stack? If I'm somewhere in the middle, maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a rail type of a solution where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio can help them at any point of the venture or any point of the solution. So, you know, I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You know, you've got those that want everything from a single point and you've got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an OPEC standpoint, are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock them into a single solution. It doesn't get them into that kind of long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. Yeah, sometimes we have the tendency to get down the weeds on these products, especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was the whole SDN wave didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story, what you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples, I'd love you to hear. Yeah, no, so I think networking plays the critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage. The networking component was kind of the laggard, it was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again of disaggregation of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well and it's really starting to see an uptick and the customer experience is as follows. One is open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CAPEX standpoint. But because they move towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux or even our own OS 10 that's now based in Linux, look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute and the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CAPEX, they're saving anywhere between 40% and 50% on their CAPEX. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean, that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having these decisions of sending a network engineer to a Plaza to do CLI, down into the dirt, as you would say, and reconfigure the switch. A lot of that now is being extracted to a software lever and giving the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric or to segregate it using NSX micro-segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So just an incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN, let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CAPEX. Cheaper hardware, cheaper A6, et cetera. It's all about OPEX. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. So we all have this Nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking, add to that a software layer, this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically, whether it's in a server provider perspective or in an enterprise? What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? Well, obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware, so you have V-Realize and VROps and so forth. And in fact, in the new VX Block 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearing a lot of our development towards the V-Realize suite. So that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even from the storage participation like CEP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000 foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers? Do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment and can those be brought down to the entire stack? All right, well, Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think you're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technologies Networking. All right, Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell AMC. I'm Stu Miniman. This is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE.