 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to VMworld. This is theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Warren. This is our first day of coverage. This is VMware's 20th anniversary. So lots of great information coming up. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Suresh Safya Murthy, the VP of Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions Marketing at Dell EMC. Great to have you back. Great to be here again. So here we are in Vegas under the bright lights. Some news this morning, a new cloud strategy. Talk to us about kind of unpack what Dell EMC is announcing with this new cloud strategy. So we did announce our new strategy and also launched a new cloud marketplace to take our strategy to market. So the reason behind us coming up with a new strategy is that the needs of our customers have changed. I used to be in public cloud business in the late 2000s when cloud was still in its infancy. And cloud, the definition of it, would be access to computing resources over the internet. And over time, people realized not everything is ideal for public cloud. There are some that could be kept in private cloud and hybrid cloud came into being. And over the last 12 to 18 months, the adoption that we have seen is more multi-cloud. Almost all our customers have on an average four and a half clouds that they deal with, right? So in this new multi-cloud world, we want to offer customers with our new strategy and be able to take them to it. So essentially what we are trying to do here is if you have the reason behind customers wanting to go with multi-cloud is workload flexibility. Each workload has a different cloud that is ideally suited for it. And you have to be able to choose it. And what we want to offer is technologies that help customers be more flexible in the choice of clouds that they choose. And also for workload and data mobility. And that's really our intention behind announcing this new strategy. Right, so that's the strategy. And then you have this marketplace, which is a way for you actually take that out to market for something that people go there to buy that. So could you tell us a little bit more about what's available in the marketplace? Awesome, awesome. So it's really four components that we offer to our customers. The first is cloud platforms, which is essentially turnkey cloud platforms that they can use right away and deploy their infrastructure as a service and platform as a service offerings that we bring to the table. It could be on premise or in a public cloud of their choice. The second is cloud-enabled infrastructure. So we are leaders in the industry and infrastructure across servers, storage, networking, and data protection. So we want to provide those technologies that we have in the market today with the ability to leverage the cloud of the customer's choice. The third is cloud consumption choices. There are reasons customers boot to the cloud. One of the reasons is how you can consume it. You pay as you go, you pay as you use, you pay as you shrink, and we want the capabilities to be given to our customers as well. So we provide consumption choices. And in a complex world of multi-cloud where you are dealing with an average of four and a half clouds, we also want to offer consulting services, technology services that allows the customer to build a multi-cloud strategy that has consistent set of operations, look and feel, helps their current technologies work with multiple clouds, and we offer consulting services to go with it as well. The cloud marketplace is the one place you go to to learn about our cloud technologies. You can also take you to the Dell EMC store where you can buy some of those services and technologies, as well as have an interaction with our click-to-chat capability to interact with our cloud experts and learn more about the technologies and buy them as well. All right, so give us some background on how you came to develop what went into the marketplace. Because it sounds like this is very much customer driven and that you're reacting to what customers are saying this is what we're trying to do, help us to do this. So what are some of the examples that you've taken from customers that informed how you built out the cloud marketplace? Right, so there are two things that we initially, the initial customer feedback was this, they have an average of three to 5,000 applications, none of the applications reside in the same place. Right, there are some applications that reside in the edge, some in the core data center, some in multiple clouds, some where the application itself resides in one place, but the data is backed up to a cloud or works with data sources in multiple clouds. And every time they bet on a technology they're using one user interface for that particular technology to go deal with it. And what we wanted to offer them is, and the challenge obviously that comes with it is you have to familiarize yourself with multiple UIs, you have to learn different technologies and it's an overload on IT, we want to make it easy for them. So our principle is offer the cloud management tools with the help from our friends in VMware and Pivotal and an API driven infrastructure that can be used as a cloud platform. And we also package it for them and offer it as a VX rack SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundation, or VxRail with VMware validated design, which are turnkey platforms that they could start right away and start using right away. Right, and it does sound that we were hearing that in the keynote from Pat this morning and that there was a lot of talk about customers having choice. So they want to have multi-cloud, they want to be able to run things onsite, they want to be able to have their choice of infrastructure and vendor partners to run it on. And they've already got substantial investments in things that they've made. So making all of these things work together well with what was it, 3,000, 4,000 applications in each one. That's quite a big challenge. So there's plenty of customers who want that help. So it's good to see that vendors are responding to that. Let me just add to that multi-cloud statement that Pat made this morning. So we are talking about VMware cloud management tools and Pivotal cloud management tools on Dell EMC infrastructure. But to truly be multi-cloud, it's not just that we offer. Those are well integrated and the turnkey platforms that we recommend to our customers. But let's say a customer wants to go with Azure, then we offer them Dell EMC cloud on Azure that works on-premise and also with Azure services in the cloud. They want to go with Pivotal and leverage container as a service and platform as a service. We offer Pivotal ready architecture also runs on Dell EMC infrastructure. We also offer virtual stream cloud storage. So when we say flexibility and choice, we allow the customer to choose between VMware cloud on AWS, choose between Azure stack, choose Pivotal. And more recently, we also announced Icelon data services with works with Google cloud platform. So for us, each of these clouds are computing resources that customers can use and we want to provide them with the technology to use them seamlessly through one interface with our cloud management tools. So that's our design principle behind it. Choice, flexibility, customers have been wanting that for a long time. They want, everybody wants seamless in our everyday lives, right? So those are terms that are ubiquitously used at every event. Give us an example of a customer who, three to 5,000 applications, four and a half clouds on average. Give us an example of an enterprise organization that grew through acquisition that's got probably way more than four and a half clouds. It'd be upwards of eight, eight and a half, 11 and a half. How are you helping them to really actually be able to operate seamlessly, but have their cloud strategy, not just function, but enable them to open up new business opportunities when there's so much complexity under the hood? Yeah, so this is one of our large banks that we work with, I can't show their name, but let us say that you have 4,000 applications on an average. I don't recall on top of my mind how many applications they have, but you can classify those into two types of applications. You have legacy and traditional applications and you have cloud native applications. Each requires a different platform of operation and a means to operate it. So we, with the VMware cloud management technologies that offer service management, orchestration, automation, on top of our platforms like VxRack SDDC, packaged, bundled and tested together, are now offering you a platform that you can use for your legacy applications as well as your cloud native applications. So you use one interface to deploy self-service and provision those applications. You work with one seamless set of technologies that you're already used to with the VMware management tools that you are. 85% of the market uses VMware technology, so they're familiar with it and use it. And the Dell EMC infrastructure that you already have, which we are market leaders in the infrastructure solutions, you're able to leverage that because they are API-driven infrastructure that connects with the cloud management tools and the software that VMware provides for you to be able to use it. So the customers like that approach because you aren't going in and telling them, hey, you need to move everything to a public cloud or you aren't telling them, oh, you got to rip your entire infrastructure and rebuild it from scratch, right? This helps them with the path to migrate to the cloud of their choice, choose multiple clouds, use existing investments that they've already made and leverage those for the benefit of these two different types of application paradigms that we have with traditional and legacy applications. Yeah, I like to call them heritage applications rather than legacy because it's legacy sort of implies that they should be killed or gotten rid of, but these are applications that the business has been built on. They work well. Most of the bugs have been worked out over a period of many, many years and they're not going away. And I think a lot of organizations have realized that. Yeah, different needs too, right? So for example, a mission critical database, latency is very important. You might not want to be working with public cloud on those scenarios like that, right? But if you're a cloud native app and you want a mobile phone app for a conference like this, then you're looking at clouds that can scale and deploying it. So a particular customer will have multiple clouds by design that's the world we are moving into. Yeah, and 80% of writing software is putting bugs in and the other 80% is taking them out again. So that's not something that a lot of enterprise organizations want to sign up for. So having the choice and the flexibility to be able to run heritage applications and also take advantage of the new one. So they do want to be able to do both of those things. I think there's this misunderstanding that some organizations will make a choice of one or the other. In this case, you can have both. Yeah, and we, our underlying reason behind coming up with this strategy is we aren't looking at competitors to decide on a strategy. We ask our customers, hey, tell us what is it that you think we can bring to the table that's going to make your life easier? And we came up with this strategy and then we also had multiple third party sources and analysts coming up and saying, hey, this is the right approach to go to. For example, Gartner just said that if for in 2018, the biggest challenge that companies have is to build a multi-cloud strategy. Now IDC came up with another survey for their cloud and AI survey where they mentioned that almost 83%, if I remember right, of customers had multi-cloud infrastructure. And they were actually repatriating, 85% of them were repatriating from public cloud to private cloud. That is not to say public cloud isn't growing, but public cloud is more meant for these cloud native apps and where it is still continues to grow at a rapid pace. But there is also more mature apps there which need not have the scalability requirements that you get out of public cloud and could be more cost efficient and radio shadow IT by bringing it on premise. So we know, we now know that customers want to have applications in different clouds. Just let's help them with the technologies to do that through these cloud platforms and cloud enabled infrastructure offerings. Last question Suresh, we just have a few seconds left. I'd love to understand how are you seeing customers really respond to AI has got to be an integral part of our foundation, our infrastructure. So in my last conversation with you guys, I talked about data continuum where AI is essentially part of a data continuum where we started with data storage, expanded to use of analytics and now just the type of applications has changed. The data used to come from traditional applications. Now it's coming from traditional applications, IoT devices, cloud native applications and there is data used to be stored for compliance and regulatory reasons. Now it is stored for the purposes of insights to make business decisions. So I think a natural transition to any future application development is to think about it from a perspective of how you can gain insights. One of our cloud marketplace announcements is a product called cloud IQ. It's a free software as a service application that can be accessed through your mobile phone that we are giving to your customers that will help manage your IT infrastructure through your mobile phone. Right? And it has predictive analytics built in and uses machine learning to identify anomalies and notify the provider. So I think every application that you develop going forward, AI is going to be an inherent component in it. And a majority of our customers today have AI, they are having their fingerprints on some workload of AI right now as we talk. I think about 93% of them. Wow, I wish we had more times to rush but we want to thank you so much for stopping by, sharing what's new at the cloud marketplace and we look forward to talking with you at Dell Technologies World next year. Awesome, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. My pleasure, our pleasure. For Justin Moore and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.