 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. We're at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in the hang space at VMworld. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Keith Townsend. Our next guest is Bob Wambach, who's the vice president of marketing of EMC's Converged Platforms and Solutions Division. Tongue twister, but that's essentially where all the action is on the Converged stuff. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Great to be back here. Always love coming on. So, Michael Dell tweeted this morning, so it's now official news that September 7th is going to be the day with this amazing transaction, biggest in tech history between EMC and Dell, come together as one under Dell Technologies. And I think it's going to be Dell EMC Dell. What's the name? It's going to be... So the company is Dell Technologies. So think of it at the top. The umbrella company is Dell Technologies. Dell Technology will be comprised of strategically aligned businesses. So VMware, Virtustream, Pivotal. Dell EMC is the enterprise version. That's the big combination. So that's EMC. So think of that as EMC under David Goulden and that's where we belong. That's our home. So I'm incredibly pumped about it. And it's going to be business as usual for EMC, right? I mean, I know you can't talk about specifics, but I mean, obviously it's under Dell technology. So structurally it's different. But as we know EMC product-wise, it's going to be the same old goodness from EMC plus a new opportunity to create synergies within Dell, right? That's kind of what you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, clearly Dell's been a close partner of ours, particularly in the Converged platforms and Solutions Division. They've OEM'd our VxRail, VxRack product. So we've worked with them. We're in their portfolio. We've gotten to know their portfolio. And there is a lot of synergy between the two companies as VCE for the past six plus years. We've really focused on rather than you doing all of the planning for the roadmap and the integration and the testing and then the versioning of adopting new technology upstates and patches. That's really what we've said. We can do that, right? You wouldn't build a car from pieces and then want to put your kids in the backseat and drive around. So that's what we do with infrastructure. So we very much a buy. Use our standards. You buy it. And you get a much more agile, robust infrastructure. Dell is, they're more along the lines. Home Depot used to have this slogan, you can do it, we can help. And Dell just has amazing technology to help people build their own infrastructures and make things easier. So it's been great getting to know that. You mentioned VxRail, got a nice shout out from Yen being on her keynote this morning. Spend a minute, Bob, to talk with the folks about just kind of refresher, kind of 101, where your group fits into the VMware play. As you mentioned VxRail, where's the big sweet spot with the EMC VMware relationship? Which products? Where's the tech? What's the key points? It's really up and down the portfolio. There's a lot of attention on VxRail and rightfully so. It's really gone out, it's taken off like a rocket ship. Our challenge there has really been supply and demand. It's there's so much demand for the product is just keep ratcheting up our ability to meet that demand. The reason is most customers depend upon VMware. This is a huge show here. The reason is just about everybody uses VMware. And VxRail is the simplest way to deploy and operate a VMware environment. And it's the right size for many customers and particularly even some of the largest customers are deploying them all over in their remote distributed data centers or for particular workloads. What's unique about it is we co-engineered it with VMware. So there's clearly 100% alignment and synergy there. But as you even go up the stack and look at cloud foundations, we've really, if you look at what cloud foundations is with vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, we've been packaging those together and doing the curation of it and being able to reliably produce and evolve those over time on infrastructure that's what we've been doing for years. So our value to VMware in some cases is if you want to adopt VMware technology really quickly, deploy it, use it, get value out of it, we're a very fast way to do that. So our enterprise hybrid cloud is really a manifestation of the full software stack when you want to get a lot out of vRealize automation. It's how do I monitor, control, self-service portal, all these things that have to do with owning and operating this automation over time when you want to implement a full cloud? That's really what we do. So it's been a great partnership that's continuing to grow. Easy deployment, easy operation, simple deploy. Sounds a little bit like cloud. Are you guys having conversations outside of the infrastructure groups with the developers and the application owners directly? I think it's a good point that if you look at our traditional VBlock, VXBlock business, that probably half of it went to what I would call the application or business owners line of business owners and then there were portions the rest going to IT operations and people trying to do either it's project based or it is associated with I want to run a better data center. With cloud, it tends to be much more aligned at the business. You're selling much further up the stack and it really is, it's about agility and it's about how is IT connected to the business. So I definitely think that there's a stronger correlation with the business owners for our cloud sales than with the traditional mission critical applications. On the cloud thing, Chad was talking about earlier Chad Sackin, president of VCE, basically, Converge, that there's different roles for the cloud. So the cloud, he was cool with it. He basically said, hey, you know, the customer wants to choose a cloud, they're going to have that cloud choice. Right. How do you guys talk about that cloud? Take us one step further relative to the Converge message because the on-prem clearly is going to be the conversation that's in place. Some workloads going to move to the cloud, some will not. What's the ideal boilerplate or architecture that customers should be thinking about right now as they look at this VM world and say, hmm, this cross-cloud is interesting? Yeah, I think the first question that they have to ask is, why am I interested in cloud? Why are we having this conversation about cloud? And it usually comes down to agility. It's operating at the speed of business and there is this notion of I need to run a very efficient IT, I can't have my people spending all their time trying to keep the lights on. And therefore cloud is this, I want IT, it's there. I have resources that are on-demand, scalable, and that sounds like a good thing. And then they have to ask, what am I trying to do with it? What do I have in my IT? Do I want to use and leverage my IT? For most customers, that's absolutely. So VMware is typically playing a part of that conversation as the way people operate IT today. So that's where many customers start with a private cloud. Any customer today needs to be thinking about public cloud, right, and historically there is a lot of it, is it an either or? Do I want to build it or do I want to use public? And the answer is irreversible trend to it's going to be both and where do you want to use them and what are the roles? So then you need to start thinking about things like what VMware is talking about with cross-cloud services where I really want, pick my control point for how I'm going to move things around and then I want to pick my various destinations for various workloads. So great conversation on where to why cloud, where do customers start? Is it with that physical underlay that you guys do a great job of providing or is it at that higher end conversation where do customers begin practically? Well, many customers frankly have already begun in public cloud, right? If you look at large enterprises they are, they're using software as a service, either, you know, whether it's salesforce.com for, I mean, they're using it. They're using Amazon AWS for something. So the challenge is where do most of my work loads run and how do I get that to a cloud? And our belief is that if you want to run, if you want to have a well run cloud that has to be run on converged infrastructure because if your infrastructure foundation isn't solid, if it isn't well balanced, if it isn't scalable, if you can't version that over time and reliably patch and upgrade it, then you're not going to be able to run a good cloud on top of it. So from a thought process, you start up at the cloud, what am I trying to do with my cloud? But in reality, it's predicated upon a robust converged or hyper-converged infrastructure underneath it. And then ideally, what's the glue that ties that cloud path to my underlying infrastructure, so the converged infrastructure? What glues all that together? Well, for us, you know, the two big choices are, I have my infrastructure and I have my own standards and I build my cloud. I take all of these software offerings from whichever vendor I use. So with VMware, I'm going to deploy using NSX. I'm going to use vSphere environment. I'm going to have, I may have vSAN in there and I'm building on top of that with a vRealize suite. There's a lot of work involved and a lot of complexity in the deployment and then when you want to evolve that over time, there's a lot of complexity. So that is a path that many customers choose. Our strong opinion is that that has very little to do with your business. It's an enabler of your business, but it isn't actually operating your business. We encourage customers to focus on engaging with your business, understanding their demands, what services do they need. If you know those requirements, bring those to us. We know how to do this. We're doing it for a lot of other customers. Our enterprise hybrid cloud businesses is up, I think over 170% year over year this year. So it's really mainstream right now. And people want Turnkey, right? I mean, it's the growth of Turnkey. Turnkey is the, it's like, why do you want to do this? Even if you could do this as a customer, is this what you want your best people doing? There's a better way. There's other fish to fry, so to speak. Absolutely, yeah. Because we buy a nice modular, self-built, converged system, Turnkey, and focus on the apps. Right, and it's, we're becoming much more, I mean, we've always at VCE, as VCE, we've had a very strong opinion. Buy our stuff, good. Build it all yourself from scratch, maintain it, bad. And part of that is because we really didn't focus here. I think, you know, going forward, there is a, you know, recognizing how can we help each of these past, but there's absolutely going to be a strong opinion. I mean, VCE is a standalone number on a revenue basis, is a unicorn public company flying by itself. And you guys proved the naysayers wrong, that purpose-built hardware, which by the way, when you guys started VCE, I remember clearly you've been through its gyrations, but there was a real debt backlash against purpose-built stuff. Yeah. And so Vblock was a great innovation. You know, I think it was, you know, VCE, and it's interesting you bring it up, because VCE, it was a new way of thinking about it, new way of doing it, and at the time, the VCE brand was strong, it was important to us, the Vblock was very important, and we really felt we were changing IT. I frequently guess, you know, are you surprised? You're a multi-billion dollar enterprise now, and it's like, no, we thought we were going to do this. We really did. We thought it was the right way, and our next phase of growth has been, we've got this great tailwind of coming into EMC a year ago, and as we've done this, it's the brand promise has really been transferred to our portfolio. It's Vblock and VXBlock, it's VXRack, it's VXRail, and VCE is, you know, it's the associative. That's really, what we really were about is this customer experience and changing the world. EMC, becoming part of EMC and, you know, going forward Dell EMC, it means we've got tens of thousands more people that are worried about, you know, how do I solve the customer problems using this thing that we innovated? We've got the scale of the world-class support organizations, world-class supply chain. So for us, it's been a great journey, and the VCE kind of fades in as we've become. It's an easy set. You don't really have a mutually exclusive situation. If people want purpose, bill, turn, key, and you want to do it yourself in the cloud, no problem, it's just that they can coexist together. Right, right. Great stuff. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Good to see you again. My pleasure, as always. I'll give you the last word. I want you to just share with the folks out there watching what's your big takeaway from VMworld this year? What's the big key points that you're going to bring back to home to your colleagues? I think the cloud has gone from more of the future to this is what the early adopters are doing to, it's clearly mainstream. It's all over the show. We obviously have an opinion on the best way to deploy and run that, and it's all been good for us, but my two takeaways I'm bringing back home are just a lot of the energy about cloud that was here. The second thing would be that Michael Dell on the keynote stage mentioned one product, and it was VxRail, and that was pretty cool. VxRail's getting a lot of love here at VMworld. Of course, it's theCUBE bringing you all the action live here in the hang space, the Mandalay Bay for VMworld 27. I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend. You're watching theCUBE.