 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Okay, we're back in Las Vegas. This is VMworld 2017, and this is theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burson. This is the second segment with Chad Sackett. She's the president of Dell EMC. We're going to dig into what the cloud looks like in the next decade, you know, 20, 22 timeframe. Chad, again, welcome back. Thanks for spending time. It's great to be back. No one's got a crystal ball a decade out, but I think we've got a pretty good idea of what we think the next five years look like. Well, you know, we do like at Wikibon to look further out and say, okay, what are your assumptions about how the business is going to evolve, knowing that any kind of 10-year forecast is going to be wrong, but it does shape your thinking and your assumptions. So, what's your vision, what's Dell EMC's vision for how the cloud is going to evolve and shape and look like in the next five years? So, I think the following things are a near certainty, and they're driving our strategy, right? Basically, customers will consume platforms. They will pick the best platform on a temporal basis and on a space basis. So, time and space, right? So, I'll give you an example. Today, if you said, what is the best place and time to do AI and machine learning for work that is against data that is not in-house? The answer would be Google Cloud Platform and a heartbeat. Their core capabilities as a platform around AI and machine learning are head and shoulders above everything else, right? That's a platform that people consume, right? Likewise, if you said, okay, what's the platform that I use for my applications that basically need a little more traditional kind of care and feeding around them, that's going to be an evolution of the VMware stack that the customers are using today. It powers 80% of what they do today. It's the platform that runs the core of their business today, and that platform, as you can see this week, is expanding and expanding and expanding. Now, what'll happen over the next decade is that that platform will be independent of place. So, if you imagine what we're going to do with that capability now, it's not an announcement, it's a platform that customers can buy around VMware Cloud on AWS. You can see that we just broke the, is something on or off is now not the question. The question is, what's the right platform and services to use for a given set of workloads? I want to build on that for a second, Chad, if I can. So, the vision that I think you're articulating, the kind of that core experience is, look, that what you love about the cloud is you love the get in small, grow fast, or grow according to the workload needs. Don't lock in a whole bunch of financial assets, lower assets, specificity, be able to apply to a lot of different things. You love that, but the problem is physical, legal, and IP realities of your business dictate that you're not going to put it all in there. So, the common experience is, get that dependent upon the workload and have it all run simply in a straightforward manner that serves the business. Bingo, so the word platform is independent of space. Right. The other thing that I think we'll see over the next decade is that any technologies that bind multiple platforms together are incredibly compelling. And you can actually see this driving both the R&D strategy and the M&A strategy of the leaders, right? So, let me give you an example of things that bind together platforms and themselves are platforms. Cloud Foundry is one of the best binders and spanners that exists because people use Cloud Foundry on Azure, on AWS, on their own private cloud all day long. In fact, it was won the award for, basically at Microsoft Ignite for the most popular used thing on Azure outside Microsoft's own core services, right? So, it's a binder. It gives customers mobility and flexibility across these different platforms. Another example where we're going all in on Kubernetes. We think that Kubernetes as the container abstraction that spans these different clouds is in essence game over of chaos and game beginning of standardization and movement forward. I'll give you another example. I think that 10 years from now the debates that we're having around SDN today will be so over and everyone will go, of course, you're going to have a software-defined network that abstracts because networking is something that needs to span platforms, right? So, core idea number one, people will make platform choices and there will be multiple platforms. Those platforms will be independent of on, off-prem, independent of CAPEX, OPEX choices. Those platforms will exist in all of those modes. But be tied to the characteristics, the benefits that they provide to workloads. Bingo. The library of connectors of things that span and bind these platforms will grow in value and importance to the customers. I'll give you another example of a binding thing that links together multiple platforms and you can see it's success even today. ServiceNow is the thing that binds and connects at the ITSM layer, all of these different topologies. So it's not just things that are all just in our family, right? But you can see these ideas continuing to march forward. The thing that I think you'll also see is the explosion of the edge is going to create this whole world that is the opposite pendulum swing of centralization. That you can already kind of see happening, right? The number of edge devices that will exist, the amount of data that they're going to need to process locally, and the amount of data that they're going to need to process that's centralized in one of these platforms is going to be immense. So the edge, does the edge create a new cloud? Yes, people are already talking about that like it's the fog or whatever. Again, buzzwords can sometimes make people underestimate very important things that are actually happening in the industry right now. The last thing I'll say is, and this is a dream and an aspiration, and a vision, but a dream and an aspiration, there are amazing problems to crack in the domain of security. And that itself needs to become a core platform element that transits all of these other platforms. That's a key binder. It's a binding element that has to transit all these different platforms that people consume. And I think you can see the edges of the industry, us tackling these problems in new ways. And I'm very hopeful about that actually. So the infrastructure requirements of that new cloud, customers have to make bets. We were talking about that earlier. There's new stack choices that are emerging. What's your point of view there? And how does it all relate to bring it back to how you get from point A to point B? There's a great risk in saying stuff on camera, Dave. Right? But take the risk, Chad. But to hell with it. See, you're on the cube first. So look, I think that we're entering into an era of stack wars. And that sounds too militaristic. That's not what I mean. What's called stack competition? I think that what is happening is that the need for customers to choose platforms and make platform level bets in exchange for simplification and speed is basically forcing them, and it's forcing the market and everyone in it, including us, to think what is our opinionated stack? That doesn't mean closed, right? However, even though there's open connections all over the place, increasingly you're seeing people like take the Lego components and go chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, this works with this, which works with this, which works with this, and they're built all together. And the thing that I'm finding, and I don't know whether you guys see this in your customer conversation, it's weird. People are schizophrenic. They are really worried about what that means for them on-premises because they're used to hand assembling everything under the sun and then are frustrated it doesn't all work together easily. And yet they have no issue at all about saying I'm putting everything in in Office 365. And I was talking with a customer with their procurement person, right? And you can imagine the procurement person's reaction when I say I think that the world is moving towards vertically integrated stacks. And there is decidedly an open ecosystem but also an opinionated, pivotal VMware Dell EMC stack, a Dell technology stack. The procurement guy lost his mind. He did not like to hear that from me and he started to get angry, right? Well, would he rather have what occurred with the dupe? Well, what he wants is he is being told you got to take five points off of every transaction. And he wants to see all these transactions be distinct. And what you're saying, Chad, is that we're moving where the transactions start to accrete value, accrete strategic importance, and accrete risk. And the procurement guy's looking at that saying, ah, but it requires hardcore realistic vendor management that's well-defined and treated by the business as an asset. I think that we're entering into an era of consolidation. Customers are going to have to make platform bets that are business bets. For themselves. That's right. So, bring it back to a topic that is more 2017, hyper-converged infrastructure. Is that the model for the future cloud or does it need to go beyond that and beyond the virtual machine parlance that we tend to talk about? So, we have years of experience working with customers trying to build clouds out of traditional infrastructure stacks. And we're there as their partner to make it work. It is freaking hard, frankly, nearly impossible. And again, they talk to vendor after vendor who's like, buy our new cloud management platform and we'll be able to automate all of your, you know, Crapola. Buy our hammer and we'll fix all your cloud nails. And the reality of it is that every layer that you build one of these stacks on, the more variation that you have at this layer, it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And then the more variation you have at this layer, the more it complicates the life cycle management at this layer. And that's what I mean about the stack-ification where the stacks are starting to bolt together. Driven not by vendor, but driven by customer need for simplification and speed. And workload. Just not consciously making the connection yet that says it's time for me to make strategic choices, right? So hyper-converge infrastructure has proven an ability. It's no longer in weirdo VDI only use cases. It is now proving itself to be a material simplification at the bottom layer of the stack. And it's not rocket science. It is basically the same lesson that hyperscalers and SaaS startups have realized, which is that you need to have something which is much more industry standard, much more software defined, much more rigid in a sense about how it's constructed so you can actually life cycle it and make the next stack up simpler. All right, so we got a wrap. Let me summarize what I heard and maybe you guys can fill in any gaps. So platforms essentially beat products is what I heard. Those are my words, not yours. But then platforms will be place independent. And the key value creator, a key value creator, will be this binding platforms together, which is going to become very, very compelling. You gave the example of Cloud Foundry, Kubo, Kubernetes. I'll give you one more, Boomi. Boomi and even SDN, which is basically a fate to complete, is essentially what you're saying. An explosion at the edge will create a new cloud. The infrastructure requirements are going to evolve to support that cloud and security is going to be a core platform element, a key binder, as you said. Anything I missed? And then, you know, literally customers have to be as simple as they can and what they need to accept and make choices. I'm not forcing them down a path with us or whomever. They need to accept that simplicity and speed means choosing platforms and platform partners. So here's what I'd add. Because I think you're right, Chad. I would add just a couple of refinements that the quality of the platform is going to be a function of how well it binds. Yep. And that security becomes a crucial binder. And the other thing that I'd say is that the edge, it's not so much a new cloud. I hate the term fog. Because if there's anywhere our business is going to need clarity, it's going to be at the edge. I totally agree. That's a vendor way of looking at things. The customer way is, I need clarity here, the guys don't talk to me about cloud. In fact, we like to say that when Andreessen said software's going to eat the world, the right way of saying it's software's going to eat the edge. That the edge is going to make a lot more of these choices clear. And just, I know we got to go, but this always sounds like hyperbole. The amount of stuff that we're doing around trying to make the edge clear, like basically the Edge X foundry, which is basically trying to standardize this mess of proprietary protocols and devices, that stuff is happening like now. The pulse IoT stuff that we talked about, that's happening now. But those are just in early, early days. If you look out over a few years, that stuff will be a new platform. That's absolutely right. And Dell hasn't fully played its edge card, I suspect, we'll see more there. All right, and if Chad, first of all, awesome content, Peter, thank you very much. Virtual Geek is Chad's blog. If you're into this stuff, go subscribe to that. It's a fantastic resource. So thanks again. My pleasure, guys. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld, 2017 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.