 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back, happy to have on the program a longtime friend of theCUBE, Jim Gontier, who is the Vice President and General Manager of Engineered Systems, HPC and Cloud from Dell. Jim, thanks for joining us. Oh no, my pleasure, I love talking to you guys because you helped separate the signal from the noise and frankly asked some great questions. Well, thank you so much. So you've been literally flying all over the world, doing a bunch of stuff, so in case you didn't remember because you were just on the keynote stage, we're here at Red Hat Summit, talking with your friends at Red Hat, it's Tuesday, right, must be? What city am I in again? Exactly, so why don't you give our audience kind of the thumbnail of the Red Hat partnership and why it's so important that Dell's here at the show. Oh no, for us this is great because Red Hat has been a partner for a long time. Matter of fact, it's actually approaching multi-decades. Most folks don't realize that Dell was the first tier one OEM to actually join the community. More importantly, we were the first ones to actually ship Linux on a desktop. So what we're talking about here today, as I fast forward, is a couple of great announcements. One, as you well know, we fundamentally believe the end state is hybrid cloud. Working with Red Hat, how we're going to go do that in an open stack scenario, we launched our most recent version five of the Red Hat Dell open stack platform. Today we've done two extensions. The first one is what we're doing with both the capabilities of putting in container assets, and then equally as important, what we're also doing in from a performance perspective. The second piece is partnering with Red Hat, what we're doing with Ceph. That partnership manifests itself on everything from our DSS7000 to how we're helping customers now make storage readily and easily available. And then the third piece is it's great to stand up infrastructure. How do you make sure that infrastructure stays both effective and efficient? And the wonderful work that we're doing again in partnership with Red Hat and some other great partners like Intel. What are we doing in terms of the whole spec cloud benchmark? So that's pretty much the big news of the day. So Jim, it's interesting being here at Red Hat Summit and to talk about what the ecosystem in open source creates some interesting partnerships. I mean, Microsoft's got a big booth. Microsoft loves open source. People sometimes look at hybrid cloud and they're trying to figure out, okay, but Dell, Dell has servers. Dell wants to sell a full Dell stack. But wait, I think you were telling me I can go into the Dell catalog and I can purchase Azure. You've got relationships with Amazon. The other, what does it mean to be a cloud broker? What services, how does Dell look at the whole cloud picture and the options and what do you want to offer? Great questions, Stu. For us, it's really simple. We fundamentally believe the end state is a hybrid cloud and that hybrid cloud means a combination of private, public, and in some cases, even managed cloud services. Now, having said that, people have multiple hypervisors they use. Some folks use Microsoft. Some folks use VMware. Some folks use OpenStack. But when it comes to the public cloud pieces, everybody believes that everything has to be a single monolithic locked in, you know, walled garden type approach. That's not the Dell approach. I mean, jokingly, I'd love for everybody to buy 100% Dell server storage and networking. But last time I checked with Mr. Eastwood and some other friends from Boston, somebody else has more networking, somebody else has more storage. All of that one is actually going to become really good. So our model has always been about heterogeneity. It really has been about customer choice. And one of the things we've done and one of the things that separates Dell from everybody else is we're the only team that can truly have an end-to-end conversation. Client, data center, cloud services, support, and DFS. So to answer your point, yes, if you want to just buy a private cloud, we're happy to sell that to you. And whether it's a Microsoft variant, a VMware variant, an OpenStack, good to go. If you just want to buy public cloud, guess what? You can do that today at Dell. You can go to the Dell.com website and actually order Azure backup services, actually order Azure recovery services, and you can buy that from us today. So again, end of the day, customer choice, heterogeneity. How do we give people the agility, the flexibility, and the cost-effectiveness of cloud without doing it in the way that some of our competitors do, walled, locked in, and to some extent, almost handcuffed as they go through. Yeah, you were talking about OpenStack. We were just down in your neck of the woods a few weeks ago for OpenStack Summit. Had a very different feel this year. Felt like it was kind of back on the upswing, 7,500 people. What are you seeing with OpenStack? And then you talked about making it easier to set up, making it easier to manage. What are those building blocks that are now, I don't know, getting easier, making it simpler? I'd say there's probably two to three of them. The first one is, yes, there definitely is a energy. There definitely is a buzz around OpenStack as one of the cloud capabilities. What's been the impediment in the past is that people had to take their own components, assemble, test, validate, iterate, run the benchmark, not like it, reiterate again. The fact that we're now coming up with a flexible reference architecture that'll speed the time of deployment, that gives people the comfort and capability of standing it up, that's definitely helping. The fact that you're starting to see more partnerships, more folks signing up for everything ranging from industry consortia to some extent making sure that things are interoperable, that's also helping. And then, frankly, there's what I refer to as innovation on the back end. A lot of the new automation tools, a lot of the new orchestration tools, they're taking the drudgery of having to buy individual components and now making it something that is easy to stand up, easy to deploy, and frankly allows them to focus on things like innovation and time to value as opposed to focusing on infrastructure. You talked about Hybrid Cloud. Who's making the decision about Hybrid Cloud? Who's driving the architecture? I mean, you've got a lot of choices. You talked about Azure AWS opens. I mean, all these choices. Who's making that choice to say, which one do we pick? Who do we buy it from? How do we operate it? What are you seeing those conversations about? So here's the interesting part. We like to say that, first of all, a cloud journey is a continuum. And the interesting part is everybody is on a different click stop of that cloud journey. There are some folks who basically say, you know what, this shadow IT thing, I got to figure out a way where I can make it just as easy on-prem as I can, you know, somebody who can do what I call credit card infrastructure. That's one particular customer. We have others who say, you know what, we actually also believe that a Hybrid Cloud is the best way to do this. I want to have some capability on-prem, but I also want to have the agility, the flexibility, and the elasticity of having the ability to flex when it comes to a Hybrid Cloud. And then there's the third model, which is the managed services piece. When I say managed services, I don't mean the old school model of your mess for less. I mean the capability of having your assets reside in a Hybrid Cloud, but in a safe and secure way. So to answer your point, it actually depends on the enterprise, and then enterprise can be SMB all the way to full Fortune 10 company. But most of them have a common construct. What are some of their standards? What do they believe is the end state? The type of data that they're trying to do, the cost associated, and then what I'll refer to as other externals. Other externals ranging from security parameters all the way up to data sovereignty, which we run into a lot in Europe. And the good news is we're solving a lot of those issues. So you don't see it as sort of a winner-take-all in terms of architectural principles, yes, one technology, no, it's going to be a lot of different things that could be a Hybrid Cloud. It has to be. As a matter of fact, we make the joke one size fits none. And the reason for that is as soon as you say that I have the ultimate answer that's going to work for everybody, someone's going to come along and say, you know what, that's really nice, but, and as soon as that conversation starts, you're out. So ultimately, we think and we're executing to, the right answer is what is the customer trying to do? Where are they trying to go? If they buy into today's Hybrid Cloud vision, how do we give them advisory capabilities? How do we give them pre-validated systems, whether reference architectures or engineered solutions? And by the way, let's not forget the life cycle. How do you service? How do you support? How do you patch, provision, update? And in some cases, and we have some innovation like Dell Cloud FlexPay, how do you even finance it? I mean, I can tell you the number of conversations I've had where somebody goes, hey, Stu, love the strategy. Wow, that's a big CapEx bill. So the ability to figure out how to make CapEx work with OPEX or actually match, put all of that together. And that's why we're doing really well when it comes to the Dell success around Hybrid Cloud. So one of the challenges of the OpenStack has been simplifying that environment. We actually had the chance, one of the big customers you talked about was Verizon. And Verizon's a really cool use case, helping drive their NFV solutions, but why it took a few partners working together. They had to choose some glass to be able to get that to work. And most enterprises out there aren't of Verizon. So can you talk to how the solution's been touring, how we get this, the kind of the simplicity that Cloud's supposed to have? Absolutely. And again, like most product segmentation, Verizon I would put in the top 50. But we've been able to do that even for folks all the way down into small and medium business. A perfect example of that, and I'll do the OpenStack variant, is what we've done with Manash University. So for those that don't know, Manash University is a leading research university in Australia. Yes, they're kind of HPC, but here's the fun part. By utilizing OpenStack to NSF, by the way, to help them on their storage piece, researchers don't have to wait to get access to their data. Researchers don't have to wait to get access to the infrastructure. We've not only been able to speed up the access time that they need, by the way, speeding up access time means we're speeding up time to discovery, time to breakthrough, but we were also able to help them dramatically reduce the cost. So the good news is, we can take a lot of the innovations, a lot of the components and the differentiation we put in place and do recombinatorials to address the highest in enterprise and even some of the medium-sized SMBs. And if you want to talk about some of the great stuff we've done with Microsoft, the Dell Hybrid Cloud System, which you saw at Dell World and was announced by Michael himself, along with Sacha, doing really, really well. And frankly, because of the price point that we're focused there, lots of SMBs, lots of MSPs, basically adopting it and being successful in a hybrid cloud scenario. Follow up, you talked about kind of the HPC model and under your umbrella, I wonder how you see the lines blurring between the HPC market and what's happening on the engineering systems and cloud, I mean, eventually, they're all under your purview, but is it just infrastructure and cloud kind of all fall under that eventually? Yeah, so here's the fun part, having just gotten back from ISC, not my opinion, now clearly industry opinion. A lot of folks don't realize this, but let's take IDC data again. Between now and 2019, one out of four of the traditional compute platforms that we know will be HPC-like. That's the interesting news, but it's gotten to the point where things such as big data have so permeated the HPC environment. Heck, we even have a category and a name now, it's called HPDA, High Performance Data Analytics, and then equally as important cloud. It's great to stand up A, and we just did this for the Texas Advanced Computing Center, AKA TAC, stood up Stampede 2. We think it's going to be one of the top, well, right now it's the top 12 fastest supercomputer in the world, but the ability to take cloud and stand that up as a flexible, agile, adjunct-like scenario for people who want to stand up in HPC, it's not just a great thought. We actually demoed it with cycle computing. We showed the capability of how one particular researcher, I won't cite the pharmaceutical company that he was working at, needed to get access to an HPC cluster, couldn't get to it. By working with cycle, we were able to give them not only access via cloud to the right type of compute, the right kind of fabric, the right kind of storage, and the right kind of cluster management, but he was able to move from a eight-week wait time to actually being able to get his entire job run in less than two weeks. So, to answer your point succinctly, cloud, big data, HPC, formerly seen as three siloed objects, like everything else in our industry, it's starting to come together, and frankly, that puts Dell in a really great position. Yeah, you've been talking, we were talking earlier off camera, you've been flying around the world the last few weeks, you obviously do that regularly. What do you see in other parts of the world, sometimes we get jaded by or biased by the US, what are you seeing other parts of the world that maybe aren't following the same trends? So, let's actually do it with two sets of optics, and by the way, around the world, Africa, London, Switzerland, Germany, back to London, Boston home for Austin, but yes, let's actually break it up into two scenarios. One is what we're seeing in APJ. Adoption of cloud and APJ, especially for SMBs, much further, much faster than what you're seeing here in the States. Here in the States, we tend to talk about the magnificent seven and the really large ones. Over there, we're seeing a lot of great adoption, especially in Southeast Asia. On the APJ side again, especially in Australia, New Zealand, great, great success in terms of what we're seeing in terms of HPC. In greater Western Europe, things like SAP, things like big data, absolutely categorically taking off. When I say taking off at an asymptopic rate, since we're a private company, let's just say that I can't cite the number, but it's basically three digits in terms of how the teams are performing. And then, frankly, in Latin America, starting to see some things coming back, mostly in the big data, and to some extent, I'll refer to it as the SAP space. All right, so Jim, I want to give you the last word. Looking forward to the partnership, things you've got at the show. What takeaways would you want people to have about Dell? So for Dell, a couple of things. One, the capability of having true end-to-end, and when I say end-to-end, we're the only ones who can now say that in terms of any of the tier ones. Our ability to do client data center, cloud services support, DFS, truly differentiator. Our ability to do that in a heterogeneous fashion, back to the joke of, I'd love for everything to be 100%. Reality is probably not there yet. We're going to focus on making sure that customers can do it. Heterogeneity was something that was born 32 years ago in our founder's dorm room. That tradition proudly continues up to now. And so the net is our ability to bring together, like this crew, great partnerships, great capabilities, and more importantly, making things more streamlined, more simple so folks can focus on innovation as opposed to focusing on infrastructure. That's why we're pretty excited. And as you can also probably imagine, in a couple of months, we're going to have a lot of other great things that are going to be joining the Dell family. And as somebody who builds solutions, we're really looking forward to that on behalf of our customers. All right, well, Jim Gonti from Dell, really appreciate you joining us for this segment. And I'm sure we'll be seeing you at another show quite soon. Stay tuned, we'll be here with lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2016. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks so much, guys.