 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. This is our second day of covering VMworld 2018. A huge event, lots of buzz. Very excited to be joined by my co-host, John Troyer, the one and only. And John and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Devon Reed, Product Management at Dell EMC. Devon, it's great to have you join us. Thank you, it's a pleasure being here. So, lots of news in the last couple of days. Never a dull moment, right? Dell EMC Technologies World was just four months ago and it seems like it was yesterday. So let's talk about one of the announcements that came out today that Dell EMC just announced that's going to enable customers to successfully, not embrace multi-cloud, but deliver it and extract values from it. Yes, absolutely. So ever since the beginning of Unity, we had a virtual storage appliance essentially a software-defined version of Unity. And just recently, we just announced today that we extended that functionality. We qualified it on VSan and it now runs on VMware Cloud. It's called the Unity VSA Cloud Edition. So customers can get the same look and feel as their Unity that they have today and they can provide file services within the VMware Cloud, as well as disaster recovery and backup capabilities for their Unity environment with all of the same look and feel. They can also combine that technology with what we call our Cloud Dehearing Appliance so they can archive files off from either on-prem or from their VMware Cloud environments to another S3-enabled Cloud device. So we're very excited about this announcement, especially at VMworld here today. That's super nice, right? A lot of momentum for VMware Cloud, some really interesting announcements this week. And I think it's really interesting, maybe let's pull back a second and talk about the Unity systems in general. Mid-range storage, right? Mid-range is still pretty capable. Mid-range these days, you can do a lot of stuff on. And so the whole idea is I might have some mid-range storage either in-house or at a colo or at another partner site and then now I'm adding VMware Cloud to that. Can you talk a little, maybe a little bit about what some of the verticals are or what some of the use cases are for Unity and then maybe some of the other offerings in the EMC. Absolutely, so I get this question a lot and it's really difficult to answer because in the mid-range space, it's so diverse. The price points vary from, say, $10,000 up to multi-million dollar deals, very different verticals that we sell into, very different use cases. So the systems have to be very, very flexible. So it's very difficult to pin down exactly what a mid-range storage device really satisfies in the market. But at the end of the day, we sell into the majority of VMware environments. So 80% of our hosts are actually VMware-based hosts for transactional environments. Well, that's nice. And then of course, we're still at a point where lots of people are choosing All Flash or you might have needs that require All Flash but then also there's still hybrid arrays that are still have more capacity, super valuable. Anything in there about what Unity is bringing to the table and about the hybrid versus All Flash and kind of that capability? Yeah, so when we introduced Unity, we introduced a hybrid line as well as an All Flash line and there's four versions of each. And the adoption of Flash was more rapid than we ever expected. So the All Flash momentum took off extremely fast and it's on the order, it's a little over 50% of our system sales today in All Flash. And when we talk to customers, customers want to go to All Flash. They absolutely want to go to All Flash all the time. Only in the cases where they can't afford to go to All Flash was where they back off to any hybrid use cases. So your product management? Yes. A big part of your job is talking with customers. Customers want choice. We've had, this morning during the Sanjay's general session, I think there were five customers on stage with it. Do I always really gravitate towards, because that's the validation, right, that your, the vendors always bias. Talk to us about the opportunity for choice that you're giving customers who probably need guidance, or we've got what an average of eight clouds. We have data of varying degrees, applications of varying criticality. What is that conversation or those conversations that you have in product management with customers to get their feedback and help, for example, not just advice them on All Flash versus hybrid, in terms of their actual money-making strategy, talk to us about some of those conversations and help customers help influence what Dell EMC is doing. Yeah, absolutely. So when we're having those conversations clearly with a diverse portfolio that we have in the mid-range, we have the Unity product, both All Flash, as well as the hybrid, as well as SC, and we have SC versions of Flash as well. And then an entry line with the Power Vault, we clearly have a magnitude of different use cases that we can really serve for the customers. And those conversations are extremely important to us to get the feedback and really drive not only what our customers get, but our product development as well. Definitely. Well, and so in terms of the data services that you guys offer in the mid-range, now that you're also likely to be able to offer them up in the VMware Cloud, I mean, what are people, what are your customers looking for in terms of data storage, right? I mean, we can put the bits down, right? That's good. But what else do customers need now here in this wide range of use cases in terms of protection and compression and de-dupe and things like that? What should people expect to be looking for? Yeah, so it runs the gamut. So if you basically start at the underlying infrastructure with Flash, and then all of the data services with compression and de-duplication, those are becoming standard, and then all of the data protection scheme, local snapshots, disaster recovery, both synchronous and asynchronous capabilities, backup, not only backup locally, but now to the cloud. So a lot of customers are coming to us and telling us that they want a cloud, a multi-cloud strategy, as you were saying. So those are becoming very important data services for our customers. Where are customers in terms of embracing the superpowers, machine learning, AI, as an integral component of their business strategies? Yeah, I think it's becoming such, and we have a bunch of things in R&D right now where we're exploring different technologies with AI and machine learning to really place the customer's data at the right place at the right time to meet their performance goals, their targets, their SLAs, their business objectives. Nice. So Devin, we were talking before we turned the camera on and I know you're kind of new in the product management role here now, but Unity has a huge footprint, right? And all the mid-range systems, right? Mass market, huge footprint. You have the power now to impact a lot of IT, right? And as you and your engineering team. And I didn't ask this ahead of time, but I'm kind of curious, you personally, in this role, kind of what would you like to see happen now in the mid-range and with your product line out in the world in the next couple of years? Yeah, so what I'd like to say first is from a footprint perspective, when we launched Unity in May of 2016, we've reached over $2 billion within that first two years. We have over 30,000 active customers there. So a huge footprint. And then if you add that with the SC, we have a huge footprint. And one of our goals has really been to drive more and more commonality between the platforms. There are unique use cases between SC and Unity, but there is a lot of similarities in the use cases. So we're trying to drive a little bit more commonality, a lot more family, and that's some of the enhancements we made to SC over the past year. So in the SC Storage Center, formerly compelling product line, we did an all new HTML5 GUI. We rebranded it to Unisphere, same look and feel as the Unisphere from Unity. So we're trying to bring those products together. And that really helps with training and competencies, right? So your staff can have some of the same UIs, right? No matter what the systems you have. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we recently have support for SC on CloudIQ. CloudIQ, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's our SaaS-based analytics and monitoring platform. So not only is it supported on Unity, but it's supported on SC. Now where we're trying to take the product long term is definitely more solutions-based, more business-oriented, what are we trying to do for our customers? Multi-Cloud strategy, trying to be able to not only place the data at the right place at the right time within the storage systems, but within the data center and across the hybrid clouds. So making that seamless as possible for our customers. So last question, Devin, as we wrap up here. You mentioned a big percentage of your customers are VMware install based on, did you say about 60%? About 80 to 85% of our hosts are VMware attached to us. 80 to 85. So in terms of some of the announcements that have come out yesterday, today, what excites you at digging your feet deeper into this product management role with Dell EMC? What excites you about some of the things that you've heard from your partner VMware? Yeah, the things that really get me excited are the things that are close to the storage systems. So it's the things like with the VMware cloud on AWS, the investments that VMware is making along those lines, the investments they're making in virtual volumes and being able to manage VM level capabilities on the storage system. So, and all of the ecosystem that's close to the array is what gets me excited. And I have a lot of conversations this week with VMware product managers to really understand where should we be taking our product line in conjunction with VMware? Because when you look at 80, 85% of our hosts attached, VMware is an extremely important partner for us and hope to continue to build on that relationship and that development. Well, Devon, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for talking to you. It was a pleasure, thank you. For Lisa Martin, that's me. For John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from VMworld in Las Vegas on day two. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.