 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back, I am John Walls along with Paul Gillen here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. Joined by a couple of gentlemen now. It's a pleasure to welcome Ted Bardaz on the show. Ted, good to see you. Good to see you. Senior Director of Product Management for Native Hybrid Cloud and the Analytica Insights Module. That's correct. Do you have a business card long enough to hold all that on there? Usually I say hybrid cloud platforms and that sort of thing. Love it. Craig Steele is with us as well. Craig on the far right. GM of Strategic Alliance is pivotal. Craig, thank you for being with us. Let's talk about native hybrid cloud first. First off, how do you define that? I mean, we hear a lot about hybrid cloud and now you throw native into the mix so go ahead and give us an idea for how that sits with you. Well, I think the two key words really are cloud native and then to develop cloud native applications, there's a whole set of characteristics that really come along with that. One of them is elasticity, micro services design, software fault tolerance, right? So there's a set of characteristics when people think about cloud native applications that are different than enterprise, typical enterprise applications like those container-based stateless services coming together to support cloud native applications. And then the two of you being together, I mean, obviously, Pivotal playing a key role in this. If you want to take a little bit to shed some light on your relationship. Sure. So our relationship is actually two-fold. We co-develop solutions to bring to market together with Dell Technologies and their family of companies. And then Pivotal also supports internal initiatives that are cloud native applications being built within Dell and EMC IT. From our business perspective, when we think about cloud native, it's really an engagement model within user customers. And I think our initial success has really been thinking about the outcome, the business outcome in advance and approaching the solution from that perspective. So I'll give you one quick example. I was watching television last night trying to knock myself out after a hard day and a commercial came on. It was a Wells Fargo commercial. And a guy left the house to take the dog for a walk, his dog for a walk. And remembered his mobile device but didn't bring his wallet. Wells Fargo has an app, a cloud native application, where you can generate a one-time pin to pull cash out of an ATM. Those are the kind of applications that are engagement models driven that we focus on with Pivotal. And then as we tie it together with Dell EMC, we bring that same philosophy where customers we see today are really focused on a multi-cloud strategy. So our position with Dell Technologies is that they can build a cloud native platform on-premises, leveraging a prepackaged solution that includes, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, vSphere as an IaaS as an example, and then hyper-converged infrastructure from Dell Technologies. We can wheel this in, have it up and running in two days. And it's as effective and efficient and in many ways cost-effective as a public cloud offering that a customer would use to do the same thing. That's how we partner together. There's a lot of platforms of service options out there now. Oracle has got its thing and Microsoft and AWS. What is the value proposition that draws customers to Cloud Foundry? I think it's pretty simple. There are a lot of technologies that you can go out and learn on a public cloud provider that may take several steps to deliver what Pivotal Cloud Foundry does as a package solution. And the idea that Pivotal is portable. So we have partnerships with Google Cloud Platform, with Microsoft Azure. We're actually moving up the stack rank list there in terms of ISV partnerships for Azure. We're also on Amazon Web Services and then, you know, on-prem vSphere. So I think that the fact that it's so portable and developers just have to learn sort of one thing and they can build their app anywhere is very appealing to most enterprises. Where NHC comes in around that, as we think about, you know, developer-ready infrastructure, right, as Craig was saying, to be able to wheel in an environment where someone on-prem can take advantage of a cloud-native platform, we wrap additional services around that to really give a full, comprehensive experience. Monitoring and reporting. Disaster recovery. Availability zones. An object store. So what we do is we take Pivotal Cloud Foundry. We do all of the testing. We bring it on a hyper-converged infrastructure, working with, across VX Rail, VX Rack Flex, soon VX Rack SDDC, and integrate it also with NSX, because that's such a key component of some of the virtualized networking segmentation that you want. We bring all of that together so that for an on-prem customer that's looking at building cloud-native apps, we can get that deployed in just a couple of days and give them a very rich experience over just typical Paz players, maybe, in the market that are out there that aren't really focused on that end-to-end workflow of cloud-native app development and really focused on how fast we can help companies deliver business value cloud-native application development. We've been talking a lot about the Azure Stack offering from Dell this afternoon. Does Pivotal figure into that product from Dell? Yeah, so we are co-building that solution with Dell Technologies to be part of the Azure Stack story. We are, I think, the biggest consumer of Azure. DCF is the biggest consumer of Azure to date. In the world? We have the highest levels of consumption, I believe, in Azure Stack with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. A lot of applications being written in Pivotal Cloud Foundry that are now going on Azure. This idea that you will have that same functionality and experience on-premises in an Azure Stack and in addition to that, I don't want to understate the value of what the NAC solution brings to that because having the ability to include data protection, monitoring, metering, charge back, show back, reporting features that we don't offer as part of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, having that built into a turnkey stack on-prem, including with Azure Stack when that goes GA, is something that customers are going to find really valuable. I'll give you some insight from my personal experience about selling Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Dell IT as an example. Last year, one of the first sort of larger rounds that they decided to go ahead and implement for Pivotal Cloud Foundry was for a couple of different apps that we were going to migrate over. It took us, I want to say, much longer than we wanted to get simple vSphere clusters stood up and plugged into the network before we could do our first deployment to Dell IT. So the idea that we can expedite that whole process is very meaningful to customers and to us as well. How important is it to your customers that you are an open-source solution? I think it's extremely important because it's almost a non-starter with some of the customers we talk to. I think they all want, at the end of the day, when they see the features and functionality that you get in an enterprise solution like Pivotal's version of Cloud Foundry becomes super sticky and important to them and customers are willing to pay for that and it's supported as well, right? But the fact that, you know, if they wanted to make a change, it is an open system. There are a lot of people contributing, a lot of different entities contributing to the ecosystem. So new features, new functionality is continuously coming on as something that customers are looking for. So I think the ecosystem is super important to them and the openness of it is super important to customers. Ted, I would hazard, I guess, not a lot of people would think of Dell EMC as being a cloud platform provider. What myth would you most like to explode? I'm sorry, I didn't... What myth? So I think that the myth, I'd like to... two parts of it, really. I think one of them, just from our personal anecdote, is from, you know, the startup community and I targeted EMC at the time because I really felt that the assets that EMC at the time had in order to really drive a lot of digital transformation and be a partner of choice for the market made a lot of sense coming together between storage, virtualization, pivotal security. So I was looking for an opportunity to really affect the move toward companies looking at IT moving from a cost center to really being part of the business and effectively in a digital age. I think the second thing, so when Dell acquired us and added the whole server business and gateways and IoT, then, you know, it was just an incredibly lucky move right in my career that I felt to get there. So one myth is, you know, I think if you take a look at the assets that are out there and if you compare us to any other cost companies out there, I think there's few, probably less than half the fingers on one hand that compare with us in terms of the assets we bring. I think Dell Technologies, and if you listen to Michael Dell being committed to leveraging technology to change the way people live in the world, the way companies compete in the world, the services, the products that they can deliver by leveraging the assets we have, that's a commitment at a cultural level that I think is very different. Your question is spot on when we talked with, and Alissa, we talked with customers, sometimes we get the response, we wouldn't have expected that from Dell. We wouldn't have expected that from Dell EMC. Probably equally is when we get done explaining the relationship between cloud-native application development, bringing on analytic insights module which allows people to build insight-driven applications. We've had response when we've done it, we said, oh my gosh, this really changes you from being an infrastructure provider to being a digital transformation partner that happened twice to me where I dropped the mic moments like, okay, you're realizing the assets coming together, you're realizing the vision and the commitment to being a digital transformation partner for the economy and for the world and then you're realizing that those coming together and how we're putting those together to really be singularly focused on helping companies deliver business value to do that is really coming through. And I think that's going to be a challenge for us. People are going to knock on the door and people aren't going to be thinking, cloud-native, analytics, IOT, how do you drive digital business? But it's a challenge we're investing in and we're willing to take on and I think we'll be able to do a really fine job at it. And good luck with it. A new challenge for you, but you've been the right guy at the right place at the right time, nothing new for you it sounds like, so good luck with that. Thank you both for being with us here on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure. Back with more from Las Vegas, we are live at Dell EMC World 2017 from the Venetian.