 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier coming to you live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our third day of coverage from two Cube sets. What do you call it, John? Cube Canon. Cube Canon of content. I guess who's back? One of our alumni, Shannon Champion. Director of Product Marketing, Dell EMC. Shannon, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure as always. Day three, you're still had a big smile on your face. I do, I do. It has been exhilarating. I'm completely exhausted, but I'm thrilled to be here talking with you. You don't look exhausted, it worked out to have you. So, everything started talking about cannons. Michael came out on Monday morning with all the gang, lots of news, lots of information that we've heard throughout the last three days. People are very excited about this. Excited about the deeper collaboration within the Dell Technologies companies, but something that you guys announced that we want to kind of really break through is Dell Technologies Cloud, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Can you help me, as a non-technologist, understand those two differences, consumption model? Absolutely, yes. So, it's all in a name, really. Dell Technologies Cloud is the unification of the strategies between Dell EMC Cloud and VMware Cloud, one unified cloud strategy called Dell Technologies Cloud. Under that, there are offers. So, there's two categories of offers. One is the data center as a service, the fully managed on-prem infrastructure where VxRail is the foundation. People know this as Project Dimension, announced last year. It now has a formal name, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. So, it's an offer underneath the category of Dell Technologies Cloud. And the VxRail component, explain it with VxRail for a minute. I think that's super important. It seems to be everywhere a key part of the architecture. It is, yeah. So, if you are here at the show, you've seen that VxRail is everywhere. It's on stage in lots of demos, and it is the core foundation of our Dell Technologies Cloud offers. The collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware to bring VxRail to market kind of showcases the power of what this partnership can do. So, it makes sense that this tightly integrated enterprise-grade hyperconductor verge platform is the foundation of these Dell Tech Cloud offers. Some of the use cases that was really driving the project, obviously multiple clouds was a key message here, but what were some of the specific use cases you guys were really attacking? Sure. So, when you look at the data center as a service offer, it's the fully managed capability. So, customers are going to public cloud for the simplicity, the agility that cloud-like operations. But, you know, we started to see customers slowing down the adoption of that to some extent because they needed the security and the control of having infrastructure on-premises, and that's what we do with data center as a service, basically deliver the benefits of both in a monthly subscription type model where they have all the infrastructure on-premise, but they get the benefit of a public cloud-like experience. And that's in beta. The announcement on the news was that project dimension now. Data center as a service, which I love the name by the way, I think it's going to be great, but it's in beta. What does that mean, beta? It's a lot of customers preview. What's the... Yeah, it's in beta phase. We have a couple of customers that are running it today. So, we were looking for customers to help shape the future, help us prioritize, you know, what are the key use cases that they're seeing, a need for this technology. So, we're looking for a few good companies still. So, if anyone's out there interested, hit up our reps. Yeah, it'll be available in the market in the second half of this year, but currently in beta. It seems to be great for the edge. Shipping a data center is almost like, okay, with all this new technology, the bundling's literally nice. You guys did a good job on that. Shipping a data center is almost what was a dream years ago. We're like, oh, we should just ship a data center to the edge. That seems to be the big use case that people are talking about. The edge of the network should have more capabilities. Moving late data around is not the answer because it'll late in season. As Pat Gelsinger would say, laws of physics, this is what identifies a big sweet spot. Michael Dell commented the edge in the next 10 years in the explosive. Is that pretty much the core kind of direction? It's interesting. It's called data center as a service and edge is a key use case for data center as a service, but also the core data centers. When we are polling our customers, they're actually telling us they have a need for this in both locations. So both are key use cases. The edge, obviously, for the reasons you pointed out to. So talk to us about the customer's involvement in the manifestation of project dimension. We've been hearing a lot the last three days and we really even felt it on stage from day one. Collaboration not just within the Dell Technologies companies, we saw Microsoft, but where are the customers in terms of influencing project dimension now becoming a reality? Sure, yeah, I mean this has been a collaboration with customers but also between Dell EMC and VMware jointly with our joint customers going out to talk to them about the possibility and the promise and the capabilities that are being delivered. So certainly a joint effort from both companies along with our customers to give us feedback in terms of where they see this as a key use case for them. Customers just looking for tighter integration, tighter collaboration. What are some of the business imperatives where your customers are saying, hey guys, this is really the right to go here and here's why? Yeah, I mean I touched on it a little bit in terms of like the transparency, the security, the control, the data latency, improvements of having infrastructure on-premises while still wanting sort of that agility and simplicity of a public cloud like operating model and that's essentially what's driving this new category of infrastructure consumption data center as a service. And we have a whole other side of Dell Tech Cloud which is the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and we deliver that through VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail. So as I mentioned, VxRail is kind of everywhere. That offer is available today for customers on-premises and with VxRail, it's really the only VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure offering that has full stack integration. We're calling it full stack integration because there's a set of software capabilities for VxRail that tie together what VMware does with the SDDC manager automation together with the infrastructure management with VxRail through RESTful APIs, through software that integrates the two. So for customers, they have a complete seamless all-in-one management experience with Cloud Foundation on VxRail. So we're really excited about that and it's only been shipping for two weeks and already customers are willing to be reference, reference customers for us talking about the potential, the promise, wanting to work with us on what this could mean for their organization. It's going to ask you about their reaction. She has some feedback on the customer. I'd love to hear what they're saying. Obviously demand. What's the main euphoria around it? Yeah, so Hybrid Cloud is part of every customer's strategy and really understanding how they can best get there. What's the simplest and the fastest way for them has been what they're considering. And if you look at what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, we have a fast and simple way that they have backed by the promise of both Dell EMC and VMware working together to bring these two technologies in a unified way that's a seamless experience. So the power of Hyperconverged is to let businesses get out of the maintaining the infrastructure so they can focus on business outcomes. The same is true for other use cases like Hybrid Cloud. So that's what customers are excited about there. Yeah, Pat Kessler says, don't look down, look up. Meaning if you can automate, take advantage of the modernizations of Hyperconverged, which you guys have been doing for a while, the packaging is more consumable and you bolt on the VMware piece. So then you got the consistent cloud operations but then you can focus in on the software. This is the dream of Software Defined Data Center. This is what people had hoped for I think two years ago, but it's kind of coming now. This is reality. This is reality for sure. So it sounds like you've got nearly what 5,000 VxRail customers. It's over a billion dollar run rate. Are customers looking at VxRail as a foundational component of really accelerating their modernization of their IT and their data center? Yeah, that's been the core of what VxRail has delivered since the start. So it's three years old. As you mentioned, nearly 5,000 customers today. It's the fastest growing HCI system thanks to that strong customer adoption but really it's been a catalyst for data center modernization to date and what we're talking about this week is how it's really going beyond an HCI appliance. So it's the foundation for Hybrid Cloud, for the Dell Tech Cloud offers and we're also offering up additional deployment options. So people think of VxRail as an appliance but now they can get it as a fully integrated rack with or without networking and if they choose Dell EMC networking they get the power of smart fabric services integration for hyper-converged networking can be a pain point. Now it's fully automated. Deployment, life cycle management as part of the full stack. So lots of options. Talk about the software innovation because we've been hearing and this has been happening that there's been a software transition. Everyone's the more software engineers than hardware engineers these days. You guys have the system software and some analytical software. How does that play in on the HCI side? And where does that sit on the VxRail side? Is it on the stack? So where is your software piece? Yeah, thanks. So there's really great software innovation from the PowerEdge side, from the VMware vSAN side but we also have additional software innovation specifically for VxRail that kind of ties those things together and that now includes VMware Cloud Foundation. So there's things like the RESTful APIs that I talked about that enable VMware Cloud Foundation full stack integration that also have downstream connectors that allow networking automation but now we're introducing another piece of software innovation that we're calling VxRail ACE. Analytical consulting engine. So it's a marketing term but what does this do? It's intelligent analytics to further simplify operations. We like to call it infrastructure machine learning for VxRail, so we're excited. We have a data lake, it has an analytics engine, a historical date of how customers have been using VxRail to date. Now we're able to have enough data to apply machine learning to that and offer up customers insights into how to best optimize their configurations, forecast consumptions. I was just talking with some customers in a session before about how a few years back they would try and project their resource consumption over a five year period and now they can't even look six months ahead. So a tool like this can help them forecast at what point in time am I going to need to add more drives or add more nodes based on my current usage rates and that's pretty powerful technology. And with the consumption model changing too to the subscription, this gives them more agility on both sides, proactive planning and also understanding kind of what's going on and not look back six months to a year, like well we should have bought it over provisioning. The old days, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's a good point. So what's the future hold? Tell us about where this is going to go next. Obviously it's selling like hot cakes. Congratulations. Thanks. What's next? Where's the next innovation coming? What's going on? Yeah, I mean, like I said, we're seeing VxRail as more than just a catalyst for data center modernization. A lot of customers are going to keep choosing it for that turnkey simplicity but we're now enabling fast and simple hybrid cloud and as edge use cases start to emerge, VxRail as a hyper-converged infrastructure has a lot of promise there too. So we really see it as an opportunity and a foundation for a wide range of use cases with our customers. So a lot of customers, as we mentioned, any favorite stories that really showcase how VxRail is a foundation for hybrid cloud customers, cloud strategies, how it's really enabling them to unlock the data capitalists has been talking about here as obviously data has so much potential, but if you can't find it and you can't harness the insights, any customer stories that really, in your opinion, speak to, this is really unlocking customers' data so that they can make better decisions, identify new revenue streams and ultimately deliver an awesome customer experience. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have over 25 VxRail customers here at the show telling their stories throughout. It's hard for me to pick a single one. What's interesting is when we just had a session, we had two customers there and we asked them, what are the business drivers that VxRail is enabling for you? They both completely different industries. One is an insurance industry and one was a financial services industry and they both came back to the same premise of I need to deliver IT services faster to my customer base and I can't spend time being in the business of maintaining the infrastructure. I just need automation that enables me to let my teams accelerate the pace of innovation and stay competitive. So that's the role that it's playing. And in any industry, because as we know, every company these days, if they're not technology companies already, they need to be. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, we were just talking about IT as a business, how IT leaders really need to work hand in hand with the CEOs, understand the business strategy and then create their own IT strategy and really drive a culture around a business plan specifically for IT and technology, which is a really interesting way to think about it. I was going to ask you about cultural change as we all know that's very challenging to do. These two customers that you mentioned, did they talk about that at all? Like how it's actually enabling cultural change that drives the business forward? Yeah, they did actually and the core there is that people is harder to change than technology and tools and processes. Some of the tips that they had were really insightful, one of which is a lot of people fear change, but if you can inspire them to fear obsolescence more than fearing change, then you can motivate them around that, but also creating a vision for them around what their role will be when they're not maintaining infrastructure will also help kind of inspire them to do things differently. So that was pretty cool to hear directly from customers around how they're innovating, inspiring their people. Competition real quick. Obviously, HCI has been very competitive. New other vendors are out there. We know who they are. How do you guys fit in versus the competition? Obviously the differentiators, the multiple piece parts of Dell Technologies. So what's the real innovation and competitive advantage that you guys are putting out there? Yeah, from a VxRail perspective it's easy. There's no deeper integration with VMware. All customers pretty much are VMware customers, a majority of them, right? And being jointly engineered with VMware gives us inherent advantages and an experience that customers come to us and tell us is superior to others that they're able to find. So we always go back to that and we get validation from our customers on that too. Okay, Shannon, as we wrap up here in the last few seconds, what are some of the things you're personally going to be taking away as you hop on that red eye tonight? Personally, I think Dell Technologies World is like the culmination of so much hard work of a ton of people. So I'm going to send a ton of thank you notes to all the people that made this happen, but really reflect on how exciting a time it is in technology and what we're doing in hyperconverged that plays a role in everything that we've heard this week and just be proud of what we're doing. Awesome, you should be proud. Well, Shannon, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE again this afternoon. We appreciate your time. Thank you. You'll get some rest. I will. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching.