 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE, here at EMC World 2016. Here with Brian Gracely, I'm Stu Miniman. We're with Wikibon and also co-host of theCUBE. Have it have on the program, actually somebody we've managed to corral in here, Alan Atkinson, who's vice president and general manager of Dell Storage at Dell World. It was right after the announcement was made. Alan couldn't make it on the program, but happy to have you back on the program and always good to catch up with you, Alan. Stu, Brian, always good to be here. It wasn't personal, I promise. That was a pretty crazy week in Austin. As you might guess, a lot of unplanned events, one of the unplanned events was I didn't make theCUBE. So, here I am. Yeah, so Alan, I mean, you've got a long relationship with EMC and you're at Dell, so step back for a second. Give us your viewpoint about what's going on here and what this means to the storage industry. Well, I'll start with what it means just in general to me, which is, I told Joe Tucci, and it's a bit like coming home, right? So, I do have a long relationship with EMC. My first EMC deal was in the 1980s, doing a memory deal back when their main business was memory, and really carried through as a customer and did a lot of work with the early team there through the 90s, and then actually worked there when they acquired wisdom software, which the company I started in was CEO of in 2008. So, know a lot of folks, have a lot of friends there, and it's after seven years of being away from EMC, where it's great to be back here and see so many folks. You know, for the storage industry, Stu, I mean, I'll tell you the way I look at this, and I was saying this even before the acquisition, so I'm sure you can find that on record somewhere. I really believe that computing storage are coming together. I think you can see this with some of what's happening in hyperconverged, some of which happened in Converged, some of which happened in software defined storage. I'll point to NVME and a number of other things that are going on. And so when you think about bringing Dell's server franchise together with the combined storage portfolio about Dell and what EMC brings to the table, it's just really a formidable, formidable combination. And I'm really excited about it because there aren't very many, if any, companies that have that set of tools to go to where the ball's going to be. Yeah, we always joke, you know, we put out some very bullish forecast first on Converged and then hyperconverged and we said, that didn't mean the whole industry needs to come together, but you know, a little bit of a joke, but it also comes as to, you know, how important is kind of the, you know, that coming together of compute and storage into specific products as the portfolio of the two companies? Well, I'll tell you, it's one of, if not the biggest trend we see going on today. If you look at how most cloud service providers are architecting, how managed service providers are architecting, and then just go down the entire list of software-defined storage companies, what's going on in the hyperconverged space, and it all kind of comes down to compute and storage coming closer together. And, you know, at the end of the day, and this shouldn't shock anyone, right? We really go and look at what a storage company is for the most part, it's much software developers. And they're generally writing x86 codes. So, this isn't a night and day departure, but it is a different way of thinking about the problem. And I think as you start to wind forward and look at where technology is going, there is a need to get closer to compute because latency is becoming more and more of an issue as we solve more and more of the IOPS problem, as we move more and more to solid state and flash, it gets more and more important that we get closer to compute. All right, so Alan Dell and EMC had a long, you know, partnership. Where Dell sold EMC storage, then Dell acquired a couple of, you know, big companies in the storage space. What can you talk about kind of the, you know, how much overlap is there, you know, is, you know, Dell's just going to come in and roll over all the EMC product, right? You know? If I could tell you how many times I could ask that questions too. You know, look, we've made pretty public statements about the products going forward. You know, I'm not going to repeat them, but no, we're not going to roll over anything. You know, I think you're going to find that remarkably between the two companies, there's actually not a lot of overlap, you know, and it's a whole lot better. I think when you look at things, you know, we think we are going to have a very complete portfolio. It's going to be well rationalized. And, you know, we have a long, long history of standing by our customers and making sure they have safe passage to anything. And in this case, there's really nothing to worry about here. I think we're excited about all the products going forward and, you know, people to think otherwise, I think you're going to be pretty surprised. Yeah, you guys obviously have a lot of history recently of this converged space, you know, bringing compute and storage together. EMC, very much an array-based company. For the most part, they're evolving towards it. What sort of learnings do you think you can pass along from the existing Dell customers that the EMC customers are going to start to realize, value-wise, deployability-wise? How does that paradigm change for them? You know, I'll speak mostly from the Dell side, because that's the side I have the most recent experience with, obviously. You know, we've certainly learned a lot through the position we've established with Hyperconverged. And I think as we've watched that trend accelerate through not only Hyperconverged, but some of the software-defined platforms. And EMC's got a lot of experience, too, on the BCE side, right? So there's kind of a nice coming together there. But I'll tell you that, you know, we see a fair amount of the customer base that wants to do business this way. And, you know, there isn't ease of use, time to value part of the equation that's much louder than it's ever been before. And I think, you know, Dell's got the experience to be able to kind of lubricate that motion quite a lot. So, you know, again, I think this is another one of those natural synergies as we bring together our expertise in Hyperconverged and Compute into EMC's massive storage expertise. Do you think that desire to get the technology faster? Is that mostly because the technologies make sense coming together? Or is that being driven by, you know, sort of public cloud experience? I want stuff right now. What's driving that to a certain extent? Well, it's a little bit of both, right? So there's the factor that I refer to as data center envy, right? So there's quite a few folks that you talk to that either believe they should be on the cloud because their CFO told them so. They read an article somewhere or they just look at Silicon Valley and say, look, I want to look like, you know, Facebook, Google, those type of data centers. Now, the reality of that is it's a very gross over simplification and it's not nearly as simple. I mean, not that I want to drill into that today, but you know, I really believe in the long run hybrid cloud wins. And I think when you look at the economics of public cloud, it's not going to be nearly as compelling as people think over the long term. So I'll just caveat it with that. But the other side of it, just to finish your question, right? Isn't just, hey, it's cool and sexy. There's a real time to value. So for a lot of companies, I'd say most these days, IT is going from an enabler to really a key part of the business. And part of that is, they don't want to take weeks to provision, to deliver, to integrate things. They want it to come off the truck, power it up and go. And you know, the whole converged, hyper-converged infrastructure has that time to value thing down in space. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Alan, you were the executive sponsor for the Dell OEM of Nutanix. I was. So talk about, you know, that time to value, you know, what that really means. You know, Stuart, one of the things that happened there is, you know, we spotted a trend, you know, in this hyper-converged space a couple years ago, when I think it was still sort of flying under the radar. And I don't think most people knew who the vendors were in this space and not Nutanix, not any of them. And, you know, we saw this coming and we went out and we wanted to get a partnership with a strong partner in this space. It's exactly what we did. And, you know, through a combination of our go-to-market and hardware expertise, I think we established a leadership position in hyper-converged, which, you know, we're very happy about. Yeah, so the thing that surprised me about it is, you know, I've been watching kind of the hyper-converged since the early days. And for me, it was kind of the next generation of compute. So when Dell made the news and said, I want to do a lot of these, well, of course, you want to win all of those x86 pieces. Coming from the storage side, it was kind of interesting. What, you know, why did you kind of take that position and drive that forward? Well, contrary to popular beliefs, Stu, I'm not exclusively a storage guy. Oh, yeah. So, you know, this was a trend that we really saw coming and I'm not going to take personal credit for it. But, you know, our team is we talk to customers and that's really one of the key things we talk to a lot of customers. We saw this starting to bubble up and emerge and we wanted to get in front of it. So, you know, we're pretty happy we did. Not all your educated guesses turn out right. This is one that did. And now you're seeing that whole space just mature in a big way. And, you know, we're excited to have the position we've got. Yeah. Where are we with applications on hyper-converged? I mean, early on it was a lot of low-end virtualization, some VDI. How much of the portfolio do you see customers getting comfortable putting on hyper-converged? So, Brian, if you look at today, right, and this isn't a future prediction, so I'm talking about right now. Okay. You know, we certainly see that VDI use case, but I've got to tell you that if I could count the number of companies that told us that they were going to get rich on VDI, right? You know, I think I'd run out of fingers and then some, right? I mean, the fact is you've got to get beyond that in order to really turn into the kind of sector that's going to change the industry. And what we're seeing quite a lot of now is sort of what I'll call general-purpose compute farms. So, mostly test and dev, these environments where people want to provision and deprovision a very dynamic compute environment very quickly, right? And I think because of the simplicity, I can just add a node and I have more capacity, I have more compute, and I can slice and dice it up in whatever way I deem appropriate. That's a very practical model when I don't really have a deterministic workload because those test dev environments could be for a very compute-centric environment. They could be for a very storage-intensive environment. It really is almost randomly general-purpose. So, we're seeing more and more of that because of the flexibility, right? Yeah, yeah. So, Alan, you live through the privatization of Dell. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of viewpoint. You know, what changed inside? You know, did a light switch flip, and you know, all of a sudden those 90-day shot clocks went off? You know, what really happened inside to be able to change the inside? Well, your rights do. I did go through that. Now, I'll say from my perspective, it's one of the most positive things that I've seen since I've been at Dell. Maybe one of the most positive things I've seen in my career. I mean, it's amazing how getting rid of that shot clock changes focus, and it did happen almost overnight, right? So, it's funny if you read the press and you listen to the pundits, you hear lots of people speculating about all kinds of, you know, plans that have everything to do with everything but what's really happening. The fact is that you can make strategic decisions. You can go out in a down environment and say, we're going to make investments to gain share, and we've done that. You can do things like change focus and gain share and client 13 quarters in a row, as Michael pointed out today, right? Those are the type of things that are hard to do if they're not bearing meaningful results on a 90 day time frame, you know, and I think you can make decisions like deciding we're going to get together with EMC. That, you know, really you have a lot of flexibility to do the right thing for the company and honestly for the customers. I mean, I don't think I could name a single customer who wouldn't say that they were delighted with the move to go private. It really gives us a unique position in the market and it gives us a really unique focus on the customer and it's nice to have a very clear hierarchy, right? There's no issue of, hey, I was a hostile activist board member. There's no outside agitation. People really don't know what strategic moves you're making unless you want them to know. That's pretty nice, yeah. Michael was a lot of pep in his step this morning. He was talking 15 years out, 20 years out. I mean, how exciting are you guys about him kind of getting reinvigorated, talking about these huge visions and having greater resources to go try and fulfill that? Well, from my perspective, Michael's been invigorated. You know, really, you know, since the go private, I think he's just been awesome with sort of his drive and determination and I think you can see that with this coming together, right? And you can see it on stage today with the excitement and the enthusiasm that he's driving and rightfully so. And I think it's contagious. I think you'll see that sort of pour down into the staff and we're excited. We think we've got a winning hand here. All right, so Alan, I want to give you the final word. What are you looking for this week? What's exciting you these days? Well, from a selfish perspective, Stu, I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and that's really what I've been doing for the past 24 hours. But a lot of this is kind of just doing a survey. It's been a while since I've been in the midst of EMC. It's good to see what they've got, how they're thinking about things. The hallway conversations are fabulous. The introductions for people I didn't know before are fabulous and it's really all of that. It's a bit of drinking from the fire hose in a very intense window, but it's been a lot of fun so far and looking forward to the rest of the week. Yeah, absolutely. EMC World's always drinking from the fire hose. 72 hours of nonstop activity. So Alan Atkinson, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I look forward to seeing you at some of the other events we'll be at later this year. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. It's always...