 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2015. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're here live at Red Hat Summit and good friend Jim Contier is here. He's now the VP of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. You know, Jim, it pains me to say this, but I love to say it. You're the number two guest of all time. You said that slide today were all the number ones. You are the number two guest. Who's number one? All the time. Pat Gelsinger is the number one. Oh, okay, well, I got to say. It's hard to compete with Pat. It's hard to compete with Pat. But really, welcome back to theCUBE. It's awesome to see you. My pleasure. I love talking to you folks because not only do you guys get it, but you help separate the noise and actually get the real messages out there. So I thought you gave a great keynote today. Typical Jim Contier energy. Did you know, Segment, I love, did you know Dell number one, I'm going to miss some, but number one in Linux and SAP HANA, Hyperscale, OpenStack, X86, I'm probably missing a couple. I was watching online, so they didn't flash it up, but so how are you feeling? Great, I'm having a ball. I mean, because you probably saw from the keynote, if you've come down to the booth, you can see the energy, the passion, the innovation that we're doing on behalf of customers at Dell. We're having a ball and the most important thing is, we're putting really good numbers up on the wall and frankly, doing what we do best, taking that flexible, open, modular partnership ecosystem and advancing things downstream. So we've talked to Michael quite a number of times. He's been on theCUBE. He's got a spring and a step last year at Dell World. He's really happy as a private company. He beat the great icon, which is not a lot of people beat Carl Icahn. Michael Dell one tells you a little bit about something, about what Michael Dell's like. But so talk about your role now at Dell. Let's sort of clarify the scope of the conversation here and then we'll get into it. Yeah, sure. So very simply, I have the pleasure and privilege of leading both our engineered solutions and our pandel cloud initiatives. And I want to double underline the pandel cloud piece. Point number one, engineered solutions. Engineered solutions very simply are precision tuned platforms that exist to drive the best possible outcome from a workload and actually deliver on that outcome that customers are trying to do. So think of us and you saw some examples today. Us working with Red Hat on delivering not only the best performing, the easiest to use and to some extent just open stack and some open shift platforms. That's the engineered solutions piece. The other part is the pandel cloud components. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy doing because we have decided that not only is cloud a strategic initiative for Dell, but more importantly, it's a pandel initiative. And the reason why that's important is that's what's going to separate Dell from everybody else. Yes, everybody will talk about public, private, managed, but there's a couple of things that we're going to do and do better than anybody. And as a matter of fact, as you well know, I like to use words like best, only, first. By the end of this year, we're going to be the only true heterogeneous team delivering cloud around the world. And what I mean by that is unlike our competition, we're not going to put you into one particular form factor with a particular type of switch at the top. We're not going to give you one particular type of bladed architecture with a particular type of fabric. We actually believe in making sure that helping people get to cloud their way is important. But the other thing that's going to separate us from everybody else is the fact of by the end of this year we'll truly be the only end-to-end provider. Michael had a great line at Dell World, which was, it's kind of hard to be an end-to-end solution provider when you don't have both ends. We'll have client, we'll have data center, and we'll have cloud. And that's why Dell is doing as well as we are now. So what does that mean from a customer perspective? And what advantages does that bring to a customer? So it means a couple of things. The first one is that if you look at the types of innovations that we can truly do across the life cycle or across the deliverables, the bottom line is the fact that we've got really great security. And let's talk about some of the impediments to cloud. Security is one that you'll sometimes hear. Another one you'll sometimes hear is trying to choose what are the appropriate workloads. Pick on security. The fact that we've got trusted platform solutions on our end-user compute side, the fact that we can also control what goes on on the server, data center, storage, networking components, and the fact that we have all of these wonderful assets in terms of case in point, some of our security assets, some of the things that we put in place with SecureWorks. The bottom line is when customers are looking for either the best, either the best TCO, or in some cases the most secure, the most mobile, the most agile, we can do that end-to-end because we have all of that IP in-house. And frankly, what we don't have in-house, as you've heard us talk about today, we have no compunction about partnering. We were born as an open, heterogeneous team. It started with Michael in his dorm room. And frankly, that continues to this day and you're going to see us accelerate that. Yeah, I mean your agenda is to build the best infrastructure possible and let the customers run it in any way they want to run it. So funny you should say that. It's not about our agenda, it's what we're doing for customers. We wake up every day focused on our customer's biggest pain points and we turn those into targets of opportunity, targets of innovation. I mean, that's what my team and I wake up thinking about. Thank you for that clarification. But my point was that I wanted to tie it into the relationship with Red Hat because there's a similar sort of ethos here. We were just talking about, how does Red Hat define cloud? And the answer, my interpretation was, however the customer wants to define cloud. We're not trying to say this is cloud and if you're outside that box, you're not cloud. You want to call that thing cloud? Great, here's some services to help you do that. It's similar to segmentation, right? I mean, the way that some companies segment customers is probably not the way that customers see them. So the way that we define cloud is very simple. When we think of cloud, our strategy, and basically the way that we're executing this, is that we fundamentally believe the world is going to go hybrid cloud. It's not a question of if, it's just a question of when. So once that you've taken that tactic, and by the way the reason why I highlight that is because that's what our engineers, that's what our marketing folks, that's what our sales people wake up thinking about every day. Once you believe that we're going to go down a hybrid cloud path, then you can have the conversation of, all right, is it public, private, managed, or do I just basic need consultancy services? The answer is all of the above. So the net is, with the world going to hybrid cloud, now let's talk about what that means with Red Hat. Yes, you're absolutely correct. We share the same ethos. We believe that the data center of the future, because again, our strategy is future ready. It's got to be open. It's got to be flexible. It's got to be modular. It's got to be built with partners. If you think that you can stand everything up on your own, if you think that you can control the community, good luck with that. I've not seen that in my 20-some-odd years in the industry, so we're finding like-minded folks, call it a coalition of the willing, who want to go help make sure that when you do stand up a cloud, it's easy, it's seamless, and it's something that mere mortals can do, and you don't require an army of admins to pull it off. So Jim, in your keynote, you talked about the open modular and flexible, and we talked about how the enterprises are in transition. The thing I think we're a little worried about is you're going to end up with silos. A bimodal world is, I've got one silo that's trying to optimize on costs, and another silo that's trying to be agile. How do we bridge that gap? How do we make sure that we don't have kind of two separate roles and build that future? Great question, Sue. So two ways. The first one is, we don't believe in the or statement. Matter of fact, I'll make you guys laugh. I sometimes still get the question of, hey Jim, should we do public or private cloud? And the answer that we have is, we should send you our report on repatriation, where from a financial perspective, folks are finding that they may have been born in the cloud, but as they grew up and became more of an SMB in an enterprise, they just can't afford that bill anymore. So they're repatriating and moving people back onto private. The way you do that is through this open community. The bottom line and the fact that we're truly heterogeneous, we're going to avoid lock-in. I made the joke earlier this morning of we want to keep the open in open source, and the way we're going to do that is to find like-minded folks who, because it's all of us bringing together, having a common agenda, it's not going to be the, I guess Jim Whitehurst phrased it, here's an open stack deliverable, and by the way, it's from one vendor. That's just oxymoronic. Yeah, it's interesting. I think back to when I first got into IT, open source, some people thought it was free. And he said, yeah, you got to be careful, free could be like a box of puppies. You know, correct? So the other thing that's been changing in IT is people talk about kind of standardized, commoditized, I don't like to use. The term I've heard Dell use in some others is that bright box term. Okay, can we kind of walk through that? It's the idea of I can get a piece of hardware that should be less expensive, have some flexibility on it, walk us through what you're seeing and where is customer adoption of this new technology? Great question. So again, great strategies and good execution start with a very clear articulation of strategy. We fundamentally believe that the world needs to have future ready enterprise. IT that works today and IT that works tomorrow. One of those is this whole theory of software defined and software defined can be storage, can be networking. So the bright box concept is something that Dell started and was the first to deliver. Bright box basically means that we'll have the capability of giving you an industry standard box. We help start some of the industry standard approaches to the industry in general. So we're embracing it as opposed to walking away from it or pushing it aside or now repudiating it. We'll give you an industry standard box. We can use our economics, we can use our global reach, but now it's up to the customer again. So the customer can choose what OS. You want big switch on there? Great, you want cumulus on there? We'll put that on there for you. You want to add additional capabilities later on. We give you the capability of deciding how you want to do networking your way. We'll do the same thing with storage and we absolutely will do that with cloud. I'm curious, I've seen some people talking about doing a similar model, but not calling the bright box as storage. Is that something you'll see to be able to use the same technology? We're already kind of starting to do that and I'll tell you guys a funny story. So you know of my partners and peers at Dell and we were sitting in a business review in Singapore and it was really hilarious in that the gentleman who runs servers, which is Ashley, he was showing what we refer to as the family portrait. So it was all of our, and I'm going to use the word compute, not servers, all of our compute offerings on one slide and really hilariously the head of networking leans over to me and he goes, aren't those some damn good looking switches? Now in that joke, or as we say in French, behind every good joke is a hint of truth, what he was really signaling was the larger move of which we're accelerating to, it really is about not just, hey, here's your traditional silos of infrastructure which was your original point. Here's a compute platform. Depending what OS I lay on there, I can either turn it into a switch, I can turn it into a networking device, or I can turn it into a few other things. That's the ethos that we're sharing with a lot of people here and frankly, that's why we love the partnership with Red Hat and a few others we've talked about like Intel and SAP. Well, and I saw Alan Atkinson down in Miami a few weeks ago. He was there. He was down there at the Nutanix event. Yep, which I think was a great event. He helped catalyze and so there's another example of a partnership that Dell has. I mean, you've got products in your portfolio that, you know, if you look on paper, oh, that's a networking product, or that's a server product, or that's a storage product. Well, Dell's open to, like you said, helping customers win. So when you think about the culture of Dell, I want you to talk about that a little bit. What's it like, you know, Michael, we've had on theCUBE a number of times, he's such a gentleman. He is. But underneath all that gentlemanly demeanor is tough guy. A guy who likes to win and so does every member of the leadership team underneath him. What's the culture like? Actually, it's really a blast. So a couple of things. First of all, one of the really nice things besides being very nice is Michael publicly says, look, now that we're a private company, now that we can invest long-term, so what that means in terms of the culture is, we're absolutely focused on our customers first. Matter of fact, you can call it do the right thing. Focusing on our customers, the outcomes they're trying to drive, and making sure that, you know, we use our economies of scale, our simplicity, our agility, and everything else under the future-ready enterprise, that's the first thing we're doing. The second thing is, it's amazing how fast we can make a decision, operationalize something, and go after it. I'll give you a perfect example. My very first presentation with him was really fun. We went through the cloud strategy and basically went through everything that we thought we wanted to go do. Here was the high-level recommendations, and at the very end, I had an ask. And what he wound up doing is, he literally paused, leaned back in his chair, leaned back forward and said, I have convened the board. We have discussed this, you were approved. Just go and go fast. And in classic Mario style, he slammed his hand on the table and said, the board has approved. That said, can you imagine what that would have been like in any other boardroom? You'd have to get all these people together, you'd have to probably do the pitch two or three times. The speed at which we can go do things and operationalize, that's something that's also dramatically, and frankly, it's the comodery and the other things that I'm having a blast with. The fact that we're a private company, publicly stated, probably gives our senior leadership maybe 15 to 20 days of their life back per quarter, they're spending it with us. They're spending it working on strategy, they're spending work on an execution, they're spending it on actually hitting the road and talking to customers, partners, and systems integrators with us, and that's why you see all this great momentum and frankly, that's why you see us doing as well as we are. So summarize the big bets that Dell's making generally, but specifically in your group. Okay, so a couple of things. The first biggest bet is we're firmly entrenching everything around this concept of future ready enterprise. The ability to stand something up that works both today and tomorrow, definitely there. Now having said that, it's also an output of the kind of conversations we have in our EBC or Executive Briefing Center. A lot of folks still have basic virtualization and you know what, for them that's great. But there are a lot of other folks who are going after some of the big disruptors, big disruptors like software defined X, storage or networking or some of the futures. Other folks are asking us and it's happening at a very accelerated pace. I know I got to go do cloud, help me understand how to go do that. And then last but not least, some of the things we're doing around big data. So the bottom line is future ready is the way that we're going to not only wake up every day, do our IP and go do that on behalf of customers. That's one of the huge bets we're doing. And then as you alluded to, underneath that larger strategy, what are we doing from a software defined world? What are we doing from a cloud perspective? What are we doing from a big data perspective? And you'll probably hear some sub themes in terms of us working across the Dell portfolio. Because again, by the end of this year, we're going to have a portfolio that's second to none or best bar none. How do we make sure that all of that collective IP when bought to bear within our own portfolio or with our partner's portfolio really help deliver the business outcomes that customers and others are trying to do. We got a good portfolio. So many in the crowd chats that I like Dell's new focus strengthening their partnerships, focusing on the thing that they do well, which is manufacturing solid hardware. They're coming with solutions that are best in class from a software and hardware perspective. I think that summarizes it. I mean, you guys, your portfolio is pretty substantial. You got, I said that Dell was, walk around the show, you guys have one of everything, you know? Pretty much. And are you buying, are you selling? What's going on in that portfolio? Actually, jokingly, I wouldn't say about the buying or the selling, but for multiple reasons. Sorry, won't get us there. But kidding aside, what you're starting to see in that portfolio is not just the breadth of the portfolio, but the differentiation underneath. And let me give you a real world example, right? So let's take the future-ready hybrid cloud end state. If you believe the world is going to end state of hybrid, and we believe that deep down in our bones, and that's what our engineers are focused on, then you also have to believe that eventually it's going to get to a multi-cloud. So one of those differentiated aspects we have is something called Dell Cloud Manager. Dell Cloud Manager allows you to now go back to the other theme we're hearing. Yes, you can have part of your assets be on a public cloud. You can have part of your assets be on multiple public clouds. It could be on Azure, it could be on vCloud Air, it could be on AWS, but you want to be able to treat all of those assets as a unified whole. You want to be able to treat your private, your managed, and your public assets as one unified piece, and do the things that you're supposed to be able to do with cloud. Take those resources, utilize them, drive an outcome, and then when you're done, release them back in. Dell Cloud Manager follows that trend of, we're the only team who has it, we're going to probably be the first ones to operationalize it, and frankly, that's going to give our customers the best possible experience. So a simpleton like me might say, okay, then the other big bet you're making is that that world will remain hybrid, that the business isn't going to get all sucked into Amazon and or, if it does, you're going to sell to Amazon, which is not a likely bet. So I presume the former is the bet you're making. The world will be this sort of mix of crowds and mix of hypervisors and mix of vendors. Yeah, and not only a bet we're making, a bet that's actually coming true. So I won't tell you who it is, but let's just say a member of our advisory council who does a lot of transportation work, I had the pleasure of going to dinner with him in New York, and his basic comment was, look, Jim, we were born in the cloud. We started out as something that was 100% cloud-based. When we started to look at what the board was looking at from a growth perspective, also from a revenue perspective, I did the bill versus buy. There was no way in blank I could afford that upcoming bill. So this whole concept of you have to be able to choose the right cloud for the right costs with the right security levels at the right governance. We want to go help not only make that very real, which we're doing every day, but we also want to make it easy for customers to choose, stand them up and not just stand them up, manage, maintain, and then release them back into the resource pool. That's what we're doing with that large portfolio, whether it's our direct assets and NIP, or whether it's great partnerships, Red Hat, SAP, Intel. As a matter of fact, we're demoing with Intel today. Back to the one customer's problem is basically a patent opportunity for us or an innovation opportunity. One of the things I've heard loud and clear as I travel around the world is, hey, you know what, in order for OpenStack to really take off, you got to make this thing more stable, you got to make it more high availability. So what did we do? We picked up the phone, had a conversation with Red Hat, got our best and brightest in the room, had a conversation with Intel. Right now, if you go downstairs to booth 207, you can actually see a tech preview, that's code for, I'm not going to tell you what the launch date is yet, a tech preview of how we've already started to put high availability into an OpenStack cloud environment, and now when you see any of your VMs, and I'll use the, and one of my engineers phrase I thought was funny, get wobbly, you can actually safely migrate that workload, you can do whatever maintenance you need to do, and then safely put those assets back. Those are the kind of things that we're doing every day in Round Rock, Bangalore, and all of our other test and dev centers, that, you know, frankly, that's why you see the smile on my face. So Jim, that's a great example of working with the open source community. At this show, one of the tag lines is, you know, experience open source. You know, when we think of Dell, how critical is open source into everything you do? I think of, you know, we just had the announcement about OCP on the container side this week, then there's the OCP on the hardware side for open compute, you know, should we expect to see Dell more visible in those spaces? Absolutely, so a couple of things. One is, let's talk about, and I don't know if you saw the one slide we had, there are still people who focus primarily if you look at the continuum of cloud and open source. There are some folks who are still focusing just on the virtualization piece. There are others who are focusing on what we, you know, internally calling cloud IT. Those are the ones who have gotten the virtualization in some level of orchestration and automation. And then there are those who, yeah, sure, we should talk about the OSs, we should talk about the container piece, we should talk about the orchestration automation. Nobody's done that student body right just yet. We actually believe like hybrid cloud, folks will end up choosing depending on what they want to do. So again, what we're going to go focus on is, how do we collectively as a community make that simple? How do we make it easy? How do we make it accessible? Because if we look at who's deploying today, it typically happens to be the high-end enterprise customers, folks who have, I won't use the word armies of admins, but let's just say a lot of admins go make it happen. We want to bring that down. We want to take that to the mere mortals, and we want to have folks have the capability of all of the goodness of open source be available without having to require armies of people in order to stand it up, run it, test it, maintain it, and keep it operational, especially if we're taking it to enterprise. So open source Docker is taking the world by storm containers. We saw the open container project, we're in a core OS and Docker kind of came together. What do you make of all this sort of interesting stuff that's going on? Open source dev ops, containers, what's it all mean to Dell? Another great opportunity, and it's another great opportunity in that if we look at where this is going to go in the future, that whole theme of how can we take some of the best components? How do we make sure that it stays in an industry standard format? How do we make it simple, easy, and to some extent accessible? So do we have some folks that are starting to utilize it? Absolutely. And here's the beauty that we sometimes don't talk about. We all know who the folks utilizing containers are. We all know who are the folks utilizing the orchestration scenarios like Kubernetes. The good news is, we power a lot of them. The better news is, we're involved in a lot of those conversations on how this does remain open, how this does remain something that the community can contribute to collectively. So the fact that we understand what those end users are doing and we're powering them, the fact that we're now also in the middle of the conversations as how do we bring this to bear from a tool and a kit and a go-to-market perspective? That gives us a unique position. And frankly, we're looking forward to delivering on a lot of those. What's interesting to say about, you power a lot of them. We've had this conversation with Michael on theCUBE a couple of years ago. We said, Michael, isn't that the domain of the ODMs? Can you actually compete with them? And he goes, oh, yes, we can compete with them. And oh, no, it's not just the domain of the ODMs. And you've gained share there, I mean, from the numbers that I've seen. We've not only gained share, and this is not to be mentioned. I think you're number one. Yeah, we're number one in multiple of those. So number one in the hyperscale space, number one in terms of servers from a North America and APJ and a LADAM perspective. We're number one in terms of storage. When we look at exabytes shipped, the interesting part, though, is that they're not in the traditional arrays. It's number one in exabytes shipped, but it's a combination of what sits on the front end of a compute node and the traditional storage array. So in our traditional fashion, Michael started out in his dorm room as a disruptor. That trend's going to continue, and you're going to start to see us not only continue that trend, but actually pick a few places where we're going to go target and fundamentally change the economics of those areas. Big supply chain helps you do that and turn that economic. And end to end supply chain. The only as of November. Correct. All right, Jim Gontier, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Always a pleasure. No, no, I love chatting with you guys, and thanks for having us on. We'll see you later. Good deal. Talk to you soon. Same here. Okay, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from Boston. This is theCUBE. This is Red Hat Summit. We'll be right back.