 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Sin City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We have Chad Saccatch. He is the SVP-PKS and Dell Tech Alliance at Pivotal. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. Rebecca, it is my pleasure. Stu, as always, this is a big anniversary actually. This is indeed, I'm glad you brought it up. This is Mark's 10 years of theCUBE at Dell Technologies World. You're a CUBE MVP, I want to hear you break it down for us, but let's reflect on this milestone. When you guys started doing this, I'm not sure whether anyone knew whether there was going to be a season two, but I think at these events, distilling down what's happening, bringing in people with diverse points of view, you guys have always made it real, shared the perspective of the ecosystem, challenged us to keep it a no spin zone, which I think is a great formula. Yeah, Chad, thank you so much. First of all, one of the things, we do come in opinionated, but one of the things we want is we want to guess with opinions, and luckily, you've always brought it. We love having you on the program, and boy, have things changed a lot in the last 10 years. So, I want to get your view on the keynote. So, I mean, Chad, you and I go back way. We were colleagues back at EMC. I remember when you were acquired into the company, we worked on like iSCSI stuff, which nobody even talks anymore about. Go iSCSI. You know, storage networking, the dark art of that stuff, but VMware was something that really was a lifter for both of our careers, I think. It was really interesting to see how central VMware is to the strategy that we saw, how it fits into multicloud. I just got a note from Dave Vellante, he said, you know, Pat Gelsinger up on there talking about multicloud, and you know, let's not think that Microsoft obviates the need for AWS, AWS is the first primary, the big cloud, and absolutely VMware's working with them. So, I'd love to get your take on, you know, VMware and the multicloud, and VMware with Dell as opposed to VMware with EMC. There's a lot to unpack in that. Yeah, we got like an hour. So, the first thing that I think is interesting is that history and context gives perspective. But, ditch context and ditch history, and if you think of the now, and the market, the customer no longer wants servers, network, storage, they don't want virtualization. They don't even want things like RDS and EC2, and they still want the emotion, right, Chad? You know, the reality is that with every customer that I see, they're looking for things that only the giants in increasingly vertically integrated stacks can do. So, think about the whole keynote through that context, right? Basically, you saw Dell EMC and VMware more aligned than ever. And again, you and I have the history and the context of years of EMC, VMware. I remember the first time I did a VMotion, the first time I played with ESX 3.0 and Virtual Center 1.0 and 2.0, and going, this is going to change the universe. But fast forward to now, people are like, I want an easy button for the whole stack. Dell EMC says this is the common building block. VxRail, my former baby, is now grown up and it's the standardized way to deploy the VMware stack on-prem. Project dimension has moved out of a hypothetical into a beta, management of that life cycle as a cloud service. And you'll notice that Michael started it in the keynote, Kubernetes is central to that vision. Our efforts between Pivotal and VMware in the Kubernetes universe is singular. The objective is to make that whole stack simple to deploy, consume, grow, et cetera, et cetera. Now. Chad, I needed a comment on one thing. So I seem to remember back another project you worked on that was going to start as a managed service. And that turned into Acadia, which turned into VCE, which turned into a product because the customer gave very clear feedback that most of them didn't want it. So is it different now? What's different now? What's changed in a decade? The customer wants the outcome in the historical, that's a way back machine, right? So circa 2010, the way you built a private cloud was an assemblage of server network compute, virtualization, and separate components. Delivering that as an outcome, as a managed service, even for VCE, CPSD, et cetera, et cetera. We did it amazingly for about 3,000 customers, but it was held together with services and humans, not software. What's adapted is that the software defined data center is now much more mature, and it's possible for us to literally roll in a rack of VX rails, manage it via dimension, do full life cycle updates, not via an RCM, but via a button click in a window. That is necessary for that degree of simplification. Now, if we had stopped there in the keynote, we'd be missing the mark. Because basically the customers have said I want a common, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud operating model with consistent control, consistent infrastructure, consistent Kubernetes, consistent developer abstractions. And I thought it was a pretty big deal to see Microsoft join what VMware's been doing with AWS. And we were there at the Google announcement at Google Next just a couple of weeks back. So I think that we're moving into a phase to be a little opinionated here, where customers wanting an outcome are going to look at Dell Tech, Microsoft, Amazon, sometimes Google, and go tell us how we bring ourselves to the digital future. It's interesting because that means things that people don't like, which is vertically integrated stacks. They don't like industry consolidation. They don't like optionality being reduced. But if you want an outcome, frankly, increasingly, what's happening is consolidation at this layer and a blossoming ecosystem above it. So where will that bring us? I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you started talking about how we're sort of putting aside history and perspective, but now let's bring it back into the conversation. What does that mean? I think that for human beings watching, the era of doing cool things, assembling things that run VMs, even things that run Kubernetes in containers is increasingly turning into a realm where you have to let go so that you can do things that matter. Increasingly, the ecosystems are hyper-standardizing those stacks and delivering them as a service in a public cloud and on premises. Our objective, and I think it's something that only Dell Tech really is in a position to do, is to do that in a way which is open, multi-cloud, and yet also deeply integrated. And what I would say is, again, to anybody watching is, if your deep passion is in building cool things, build cool things, but on top of that stuff. So Chad, great setup for the question I have. Kubernetes, I've argued for a number of years, is something that the average customer shouldn't need to worry about. It's something that should be baked into the platform. All the public clouds have it. VMware has it. Your babies, PKS today. Help us reconcile the statement you were just making and what PKS because I know it's really cool tech and there's lots of pieces and lots of smart people work on it, but how does that fit? So, Stu, again, you and I go back a ways. Do you remember the state of virtualization circa 2006? Sure. You'd show up to the VM world and it would be filled with people deeply passionate. At the time it was like three, 4,000 people. We're going to change the world with virtualization. All of them were doing weird science projects. Very few of them could say, and I'm running this in production to do blah. And I'm making the hospital run better, right? But they'd be like, look at how cool this is. The technology matured a lot and if you look at the timeframe, 2010, which was vSphere 4 if my timing is right, it was the first year where it was like kind of for reals. And people started to talk about, hey, I can do cool stuff. Kubernetes is currently in the 2006 of virtualization. So I've been doing this now for a year. We as Dell Tech are now the number two contributor to Kubernetes right after Google. More than Red Hat. More than Red Hat. Is that combining all the pieces? We have basically drove in so hard towards this point because we think it's essential. Now. You've got the Heptio team as part of that. That is a big part of the strategy, right? How do we make contributions to the native upstream community and lead that charge? Be a good citizen of that ecosystem. One, two, we will make PKS, enterprise PKS and essential PKS the best, simplest, curated way to make this work. That said, Kubernetes has a major release every three months. PKS 1.4 using 1.13.5 came out last week. 1.5 with beta support for Windows is just arriving and we did a beta last week. Three months from now there's gonna be another major release. I'm doing a session that basically says, and I'm a cheerleader. I'm like a super fan. This is currently like juggling flaming chainsaws, right? It's like people are like, what? And I'm like, yeah. So the CNCF, which is the ecosystem around Kubernetes, Kubernetes on its own is just like a base component. You need to have this and this and this and this has 647 things on the landscape landing page. That means if you take five minutes per, you would spend a week without sleep, without eating, like the Game of Thrones watching last night, no food, no sleeping, no bathroom breaks. Not today, Chad. Five minutes each, not today. And you would get a chance to learn all of those. But to really deeply understand what they do, you can't do that in five minutes. That's six months of work. People need that market to consolidate, mature, industrialize, and we're doing it. Having been part of the VxRail and VSAN ramp, being part of the NSX ramp, the vSphere ramp, the converge infrastructure ramp, what's happening with Kubernetes and with PKS exceeds the ramp curves for all of those. So if you're a customer and you're thinking about, do I need this Kubernetes thing? The answer is yes. We have 50 of the Fortune 500 customers now using PKS. People are doing it for real, but it's still early days. Now, some people may go, that's scary, and I'm going to take a time out. I wouldn't do that. I would say that just like virtualization 2006, those people who were there at VMworld got a ton of value, leverage, and learning, and now it's like an industry standard. We are going to make Kubernetes part of the VMware software defined data center, and you heard Pat and Michael talk about it. So it sounds like it's going in the direction that you believe. Thumbs up, thumbs up from Chad Sackatch. You heard it here first. Thumbs up, it's been a really exciting year, and this year we are going to take that momentum and accelerate it to the moon and beyond. Well, we can't wait for it to have you back at this table this time next year. For season 11. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. Rebecca, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more from theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit.