 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Vellante, my co-host here at this segment of Stu Miniman. John Siegel is here as the Vice President of Product Marketing, CUBE alum from Dell EMC. Good to see you again, John. Great to be back as always, guys. I love it, you brought a customer, Suzanne Pickett. That's what I do, by the way. You realize that? That's my new thing. Suzanne is the VP and Director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. Thank you for having me. Welcome. One of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. Thank you. So, great to have you guys. Let's start with a customer, if that's okay. Absolutely. Tell us about your role. You got CI in your title. That's interesting. I do. I really do sort of trend. Explain that. Absolutely. So, I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. And so, you guys have been working together for a while, if I understand it, John, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show. Maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. Absolutely. A lot going on, as you saw today, in the Dell Tech Cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really, VxRail in particular was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech Cloud, both as the on-prem managed version, as well as, as you heard, the data center as a service. So, really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve in its use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So, a lot of excitement announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, a converged infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multi-year agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this converged infrastructure space. And with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock, as well as HCI, is really built to be an on-prem foundation for the cloud. Yeah, so this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of converged infrastructure. Yeah, there were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of led that trend. And so, when you go back to that, you know, years ago, a lot of times, storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey, had to put all that together, you know, heard some cats, and what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more agile and more DevOps, more software defined. We're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well, so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure, but security, developers, networking as well, and really being able to deliver that infrastructure service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. Suzanne, I love that story, because I remember talking to, when this started, you talked to the storage group and they'd say, oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job. I'm like, you know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. You know, these are the types of jobs that we want you to do. So I heard you talk about like agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, you know, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now? Well, the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team, and people looked at us like, we're a little crazy to do that, and we pull those highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer, and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, and vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and HyperConverge, VX Flex, we're now reducing that down to about three days. And we anticipate with a lot of our sprints and iterations that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. So John Furrier says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure. So are you guys, are you building essentially out an infrastructure as a service platform? What people used to call a private cloud? I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. So how's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? So we had a business critical application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers. And now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, network security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market. And so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said by using our automation with Kubernetes on HyperConverge, VX Flex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win. But the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story. And it's a good one. John, I'd love to hear from what Suzanne was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We always used to ask in the earlier days, it was like, all right, how much was I just, you know, eliminating some silos, but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before, or have I really gone through some transformation? You know, I'll tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. I mean, you look at now as you see with US banks when they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? And so that's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler. So we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is, let's make infrastructure as simple as possible, infrastructure service, make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? All right, Suzanne, I got to ask the question. John probably doesn't want me to ask it, but so you're trying to simplify because you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business. You want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive? Or why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? It's a good question. And I think that eventually we will have a multi-cloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a date of reach. And that's the real answer. But also because we want to again lay that foundation for an on-premise solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs and the business, we can then drive that product taxonomy and they know they get a good solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud. So as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal wall. I suspect there will be. But again, we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation delay for that. You want to have total control over certainly your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe you put some stuff up and sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well, why Dell EMC? I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams, we get it back from our product teams. It's not always perfect and there are competitors out there. But at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell technology's family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that in standardize. So we've heard this morning from a lot of folks. I mean, Michael Dell talked about it, Jeff Clark talked about it, that companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers. Throw in SAFs, forget it. So many apps now, but are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers? Or do you still have, in certain cases, we really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed for some niche app? Or do you want to consolidate suppliers? So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed. And so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell technologies today. VxFax being one of them and converged infrastructure being another. There are use cases for a multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. Okay, John, that was a totally loaded question. So can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed? And if so, how so? Well, I think, well, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like hyper-converge that converge, great example of that. And I think what we're seeing that US Bank is that portfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all their challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzanne's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now, we've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also I would say that we're really focused on ultimately a portfolio with a purpose, meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talked to Drew Schulke together with our HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say, VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for an HCI environment, or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking, but that's because we're best of breed and portfolio at the same time. So I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here. And I want to understand this because, as independent observers, you get company A says this, company B says that, but the customer is ultimately the arbiter. So how do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed? What is best of breed to you? I look at the technology that's going to make me look good, and that's going to make my teams look good. And that's not just day one, that's day two. And I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us, stuff breaks, right? It's your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the data center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is a key differentiator. And we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. So I'm hearing the breadth, the portfolio, the, we haven't talked about services, but I know that's a key part of it. So Suzanne, I hear you talking about day two. CI helps simplify that day one, and then as it matured, it worked more on the day two. And HCI, even more. When you talk about the cloud solution from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model, when you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that spectrum, I guess, of from the, okay, I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates to, I don't even think about it anymore. Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it. I care, I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years. And I think that every year it gets better. And as we start extending to that multi-cloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. So I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. What is something that you'd like to see John do to make your life better? Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. Right, cut prices. Every year you cut prices. Let's talk about that deal. You know, I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the product team, helping us be strategic, and also be very tactical, you know. And while I have this one last opportunity because I don't know where we are time-wise, I just want to shout out to my team, right? So it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table. It's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. So we just keep sharing, we keep collaborating and we keep iterating. Yeah, John, one of the things, talk about collaboration. My understanding is Suzanne's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. We always talk about it at these shows. Maybe you can share that. Yeah, so Suzanne is actually a new board member for our Converge user group, which has been around for several years now. And she just joined it just a few months ago. And I think, you know, we were talking a lot about collaboration and feedback. I mean, Suzanne is representing not just her own team. She's representing teams around IT and around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well and best practices and tips and tricks. So yeah, we have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock and it's, I think a couple big executives might be there as well. So it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock, I think it's at least our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think, exemplifies much as we've been talking about, because that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VX blocks. Now it's about CI. It's about HCI. It's about VX block. It's about Dell Tech Cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC. So I think you see the user group as evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. And it's a community. It's a mechanism for people to say, how did you do that? Or how should I do this? Or how do I get my team motivated? Or how do I collaborate with security? These are tough questions. And so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. The problem solving is sharing ideas. So you've been a converged infrastructure client customer for a number of years. You've seen pre-acquisition. And how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? I think in the last year or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen. And I think now it's found its feet. We're starting to see some announcements in both the converged and the VX Flex space. And it's really starting to come together. And I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together. Where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there's a little bit of unknown there. And so we're just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious, but keep doing what we're doing, using that best degree, the best practices that we have on the floor. All right, awesome. Dan, John, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. Appreciate it. All right, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one. We've got wall-to-wall coverage tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We've got Pat Gelsinger on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage. Check out thecube.net. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching.