 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Thank you. Welcome back to VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. This is day two. Chad Sackich is here, he's the president of Dell EMC. Long time CUBE guest. CUBE alum, Chad, we were talking about eight years. Yeah, it's crazy. You're one of the first. It's been great. I was thinking about it. What I love is, it's always at great events where there's great things happening and you guys ask killer right to the point questions and I always try to give killer right to the point answers. All right, well, let's get into it. So, I mean, your ascendancy, you know, personally kind of coincided with VMware's explosion. I mean, you are down and dirty with the customers. So first of all, congratulations on that role and being a president of EMC, Dell EMC, awesome. I have a passion for it, Dave. The passion is the key, right? Okay, so we're all talking about cloud, right? Cloud first is something that you hear from customers all the time, I want to be cloud first. What does that mean to you, to Dell, EMC, VMware? I think the first thing is that to all of us, cloud is much more about an operating model than a place. And people have started to internalize that it's about changing the way that they operate their business, both for some of their traditional apps, as well as how they build cloud native apps. That's the first thing, operating model, not place. The second thing is, I think I'm seeing the customers in the market get a little more, I don't know how to say this without sounding pejorative, but a little more mature in their view that the answer is going to have to be a hybrid model based on data and data gravity, based on elasticity of workloads, based on governance factors that lead to hybrid being the answer. And if you think about what we've seen just in the last two days, VMware on AWS, Google partnering with VMware and Pivotal around Pivotal Container Services, those are all about hybridizing both traditional IT and how people build new cloud applications. So operating model, not place. Hybrid is the answer. And the third thing is that it's multi. I still occasionally encounter somebody that says it's all going to be one cloud. And I'm like, okay, just out of curiosity, does your definition of cloud include salesforce.com? Well, yeah, does it include Office 365? Well, yeah, does it include AWS? Well, yeah, does it include your own private cloud? Well, yeah, so what are you talking about? Where's the one? Where's the one, right? And I think that there's a thing start to matter once they move out of hyperbole and into pragmatism. Well, and when you paid attention, let's say four or five years ago, when you listened to Andy Jassy speak. I mean, the notion of hybrid cloud or hybrid IT or private cloud was not in his lexicon. And then yesterday we saw him up on stage with Pat Gelsinger. They were talking about hybrid and private cloud. So... Well, by the way, I don't want to throw the dart at Andy. I mean, I think if you talk to VMware or Dell EMC, you know, four or five years ago, public cloud wasn't in our... Absolutely. In our private cloud. Absolutely, so those worlds have come together with the customer reality that says, well, there isn't just one cloud and I can't just bring my business, reform my business for the cloud. So what do you make of the fact that we've evolved as an industry and as a vendor community? I think it's time to get onto the brass tacks of solving the problems for the customer's man. You know, and I see actually that happening in the industry more and more. People are solving problems that they can't solve in their private clouds using public clouds. They're figuring out that the best place to put a dollar is to rebuild their applications using cloud-native principles. But they're also realizing that sometimes that it's not even a legitimate choice or option. And they're trying to figure out also at the same time, how do I support some of those more traditional application stacks and make them more automated and cloud-like even if they're not going to be cloud-native maybe ever. So this gets to the promise that you've got to make and please jump in. Yeah, so, because in many respects, what we're really saying, let me test this with you Pat, is that ultimately it may be one cloud, but that one cloud is going to be defined by the business and not by a particular vendor. It's a higher order function. That's right. So what we like to say is we like to say, you're not going to take your business to the cloud, you're going to bring the cloud to your business. And your business attributes and your business characteristics, where you operate, how you operate, how you use data, who your customers are, how you're going to reach them, all those different things. You know, the physical realities, the legal realities, the IP realities, all that's going to shape the architectural choices that you make regarding cloud. And you have to have a strategy for that becoming consistent and coherent for your business. So a lot of piece parts, but it becomes your cloud. Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me. It means that it's an answer that involves a little more sophistication and nuance for the customer. Because they've got to think about what it means for them. And the answer is not the same for every single customer. However, there are common base elements in that formula. Number one, digital transformation always starts with applications that are written using cloud native. Principles often using data fabrics that are modern distributed data fabrics. That's one piece. There's a consistent piece that says, I'm going to leverage public and private cloud models. And the definition of which workload goes to one or another, like you said, is very much driven by data gravity. Compute tends to co-locate with the data against which it's computing. Governance rules, which is not security. Public and private clouds are equivalent. In some cases, one or the other is more secure than the other. But those are common elements. There's one other common element that I've learned over the last four years being on the journey myself with many of our customers, which is that the only way that the on-premises part of cloud stacks work is through radical simplification. And deploying their on-premises infrastructure using design and automation principles that look a lot more like the public cloud than they look like their most traditional IT. No, you're absolutely right. And I think that's a crucial point that ultimately the physics of all this, so I agree, cloud is not, we like to say that cloud is not a place, it's a time. Because at the end of the day, all this is defined by the realities of your data. And if your data can't, if you don't have time to move the data or it's too expensive to move the data, that's going to dictate where the process actually runs. And I like the way you've redefined, I'll say redefined data gravity. Most people think data gravity, oh, once you put data in place, it's going to create more gravity. And you're saying, no, that's not the way to think about it. It's going to create more function. 100% agreement. And I don't think a lot of people are talking about things that way. By the way, the linkage to physics, I don't know how many of the viewers basically were physics majors, but it's actually related to quantum physics and mechanics. Information inherently can't simultaneously be in two places at once. That's a law of physics, right? Keep going, keep going. It's any bit, any information, basically is connected between two points at the speed of light. That's not a function of vendor technology. Until someone, Well, let me get into quantum entanglement. I don't know. But I think where you are, where you're actually correct, is that ultimately that there is a cost to moving data. And we have to start, and what we think about digital transformation, our approach is the difference between a digital business and a business is a digital business treats data as an asset and builds strategic capabilities to treat data as an asset and apply data as an asset. And one of the beauties of what you were saying earlier is simplification is, for example, the idea that if I build around data, then I can use hyper-converged. I can use converged. I can use flash. I can use vSAN. I can use all these different things to treat my data differently. And do it as simple as possible. The thing that I think, I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with a customer that's in the, in the finance and insurance vertical, right? And they're pretty advanced down their use of both public and private clouds. They've got a software defined data center. And they're trying to basically redefine how they're using mobile apps and customer intelligence. They provide a ton of services. They're a great, great customer and a partner. But again, to highlight this, that cloud is a place or a time to use your vernacular. As they build their mobile app, sets of assets are running in a public cloud. The data was born in the public cloud. The compute is running in the public cloud. It's built around a cloud native app principle using PCF and Kubernetes. Great. When that person is using that application, there's a moment when they go in and do a transaction where literally it's hitting a mainframe, running DB2 in their core data center. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that pattern is universal, right? And so it highlights basically that, you've got to be a little practical about how you do this stuff. Okay, so the limited time we have remaining, give us the quick why Dell EMC, Dell EMC VMware, why you guys, maybe talk a little bit about the portfolio. So if you look at this week, one thing that jumps out, at least to me, I'm probably a little close to it, Dave, but I hope it jumps out to the viewers, right? Is while we maintain an open ecosystem, Dell EMC has its open ecosystem, VMware has its ecosystem, Pivotal has its ecosystem, we're becoming much more opinionated, right? And that matters because customers want clarity. So I'll give you clarity. Clarity that jumped out on stage and it came out of the mouth of Pat, not me, was the easiest way to deploy VSAN is on VxRail. The easiest way to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation is on VxRack SDDC, period, full stop. Now, why are we saying that so emphatically? It's because if you don't have a good foundation for an SDS and SDC or SDC, SDS and SDN, so Software Defined Networking Compute and Storage, in the case of VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRack SDDC, then your whole underpinning is just way too complex, right? So there's a very clear opinionated point of view that says hyperconverge infrastructure that's being built by the combined team is the way forward for customers who have standardized on V-Sphere. Well, and you nailed it earlier, if you're going to bring the cloud model to on-prem, to the data, it's got to be simple and- That's the cloud model. That is the cloud model, right? And without it, you can't fulfill that promise with it, you can. I'll give you a second example. For the last four years, we've been supporting our customers with the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. We've learned more about what does it take to lifecycle, manage, and deploy VRealize Suite on top of HCI, where we own the lifecycle, right? At the same time, VMware has been learning about what does it take to take VRealize and run it in the VMware Cloud on AWS? Not as software, but as a service. And that's all about simplification and lifecycle management. What we're doing between VMware and Dell EMC is taking that knowledge and saying, HCI is the foundation, and on top of that, here's how you build your IaaS for your traditional applications and the foundation for what's coming next. And then the last part that we saw today, loud and clear, is a strongly opinionated point of view that says PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is the best structured PaaS in the market, and a full embrace of Kubernetes. Pivotal Kubernetes services, Pivotal Container Services using Kubernetes is going to be the best way to build containers as a service. How do you deploy it best? On VRealize, how do you deploy it best? On top of VX Rack SDDC. It's pretty clear. Covering all the bases, we could go all day with you, but we're out of time. Chad, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE yet again. We really appreciate it. It's my pleasure, guys, thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE.