 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the Advanced Extracted System from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this segment, Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.org. And our next guest is Nariman Timorian from Dell. He's director of Converged Infrastructures in Dell, former entrepreneur, CEO, and now at Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, family. Stu, I want to get your take first before we go into the questions. We've heard a lot about Converged Infrastructures. So let's set the table. Absolutely. So what do you think Converged Infrastructure means today? Today's definition within the VMworld announcements this morning. Yeah, so John, if we talk about it being in a software-defined or software-led world, it's easy to talk about the speeds and themes and the pieces that put together. You've got compute, you've got networking, and you've got storage in some of those pieces. But really one of the big changes that needs to happen is how we management and manage it, how it's all orchestrated. That's why we're glad to have this segment to really focus on some of the management pieces. Dell had made the acquisition of Gale last year. Remember, there was a big rush on the companies that were buying companies that were building next-generation solutions. So VMware made the dynamics off acquisition. Cisco's been on a rash of acquisitions in this space. So definitely there's always that next-generation hardware, but it's the software and the management. It's one of the four pieces of the stool and the one that really pulls it all together. Here, I got to ask you so, obviously Dell, we're very close to Dell. We just talked to Michael Dell just this week on the HP earnings, and he talks candidly in private, shares some things, not too much, but the big vote on the 12th is coming, going private. I don't really want to go there, but what that means is Michael Dell's rebooting Dell, recasting the product strategy to get some leverage, get a modern era, and you were speculating earlier with HP on the cube here, that the PC era of old might be dead, but people still going to have personal devices, either wearing them, connected to them. So you guys have been thinking about this, and this is something that's not new to the playbook of enabling apps and enabling next-generation of IT. Whether the devices are free or paid for, that'll be determined by the devices themselves, but one, you agree with that vision of the future, and two, what are some of the things that can converge in the future that's changing where the wind is at the back for you guys that you can point to? Well thank you for having me. Michael likes to say that we are the world's biggest startup, and it's very true. I think we have a vision for changing the way our company works and operates. We are beginning to focus on the enterprise, but the enterprise has a number of different pieces, and there are different things that the enterprises need. We have customers of ours who start working with Dell by buying laptops and desktops, so very quickly they begin to look at the overall solution that Dell provides in compute storage and networking, and now with conversion infrastructure, we have made about $12 billion worth of acquisition over the last few years, acquiring companies. We have a now software division that has acquired a number of different companies from Quest, Appashore, Bumi, and a number of different. So we have a perspective on the market that is really designed to give our customers a holistic solution, an end to end solution, whether or not it starts from bringing your own device or it ends up being inside the data center where you are having a plethora of Dell compute storage and networking, or even third-party storage and networking that might be there, that we are having a very strong point of view in supporting and ensuring that we can live there. Conversion infrastructure for us is a brand new area that we have begun to look at for the last two years, and the company that I was a former CEO of Dell Technology really specialized in creating a system management solution for the conversion infrastructure. So we're here today as part of the acquisition, as part of the management solution for active systems. So the conversion infrastructure, Marius Haas, is he involved in that, is that his group? I report into Marius Haas's organization through the acquisition process. He's actually HP, did the three-com acquisition at HP. We've been following his career. Great executive, good to have him there. But you know, you see some changes at HP. Dave Donatelli was running the enterprise group. Now he's been sidelined, I guess, or a new project, what do you want to call it? Dell's been gaining share when HP's been losing. So how do you guys talk about that in terms of high-fiving each other? I mean, it's still, the world's changing. So one, you've got shipments are up, shares getting there. What's the take internally for Dell? So I think one of the fundamental things that Dell has always had has been the fact that our customers have a significant brand loyalty to us. And our customers like Dell to be successful. They do invest with Dell. They like to see us moving in a direction that allows them to provide a significantly comprehensive solution for them. We have done a great job on our 13G compute. We are shares on the storage side with compelling and ecological are up. Our forced-in acquisition has delivered a significant amount of value to us. Customers are not seeing us as a laptop or a desktop provider. They see us as a enterprise partner that can deliver best-in-class storage, compute, and networking. And now they're beginning to see us deliver the software aspect of this. The key for us is bringing these things together. TVR did a report on us, Gartner did an analysis on us. And what you're beginning to see when you hear about these things, you begin to see that the customers are saying, we're beginning to see Dell come to us and not ask us what is it that you want to buy? But Dell comes to us and said, what are the issues and solutions that you're facing with today in your enterprise? And here are points of view on how you can solve that problem. I think that has a lot to do with the way that we're getting shares. So I'm looking at some IDC stats here. In North America, Dell maintained number one rank with record share of 35%. This is IDC numbers. You have to be published from a tipster. Better servers, better efficiency, embedded management, storage is up. Number one in terabytes of storage system ship globally, which is surprising to me. Stu, you can count on this if you have different opinion. Networking moved from number 12 to number three in the past three years. Is it all accurate? They are very accurate. I'd like to know where you got that information so we can... But they are very accurate, they are very... Yes, yes, I get it. So I got some stats there from a source. Those assume to be IDC numbers, but there's always been a debate about market share. Age people claim they're off. But again, how you're measuring share these days may change in the future, especially with virtualization. So what's your take on that? How do you... I mean, obviously it's great to have some stats and be on the leaderboard, but the future is not about market shares, it's about solutions. That's exactly right. And I think one of the fundamental things that we hear from our customers is that we have some real issues, business issues that needs to be solved. And if you're a vendor that comes to us, you better come to us with very, very specific solutions. These things have to reduce the total cost of ownership. They have to be easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to manage, easy to support. These things are characteristics and criterias that our customers are asking us to do. What we do at Dell today is to ensure that the first thing, the number one thing is to listen to our customers, ask them exactly what the problems are, understand what those problems are and go back to them with the solution. So conversion infrastructure is a response to what our customers are asking for. They're asking us to put compute network and storage together, have a single management solution that runs and brings these things together, be heterogeneous, do not force us to buy things that we may not necessarily need to buy, but if we want to buy compute from Dell, but we're not ready to change our storage vendor or our networking vendor, give us a solution that works with the third party vendors and more importantly ensure that when this solution arrives, it works completely right out of the box. So conversion infrastructure for Dell is designed to do that. It's designed to come in in a way that immediately gets out and delivers value. We call it zero to 60 in a few seconds. And so we're hoping to be able to deliver that as quickly as possible. So yeah, if we look at this space, especially being here at VMworld, who owns the management and who do people go to? There's a lot of discussion about, does just vCenter rule the world? I mean, that's the software defined data center. VMworld would say there's VMworld administrators when we start talking about breaking down the silos, a VM admin makes a lot of sense. So Dell has sold products into the enterprise for years. They've got solutions. I'm not as familiar with their history on kind of the management side. Obviously they made your piece in. So why does Dell have a place at the table and how do you fit in with the rest of the ecosystem of the BMCs, the CAs, and the VMwares of the world? So we have a tight partnership, very close partnership with VMware. We are in the process of integrating our active system manager solution very much, very closely interlink with the vSphere, vCOP, SDDC, and vCAC, the platforms that VMware has. And you're absolutely right. A virtualization administrator most likely will go to vSphere. It's a world where they begin to manage their virtual machines. But there is a significant amount of information that needs to come from the infrastructure. You still need to know a lot more about your storage computer networking. You still need to be able to provision these VMs, make sure that they're appropriately provisioned, where they lay, how they need to be organized, where they can move. vMotion is a great product, but we have customers of ours who say, look, the physical infrastructure still matters a great deal. So what we're trying to do is to give our customers a very cohesive understanding of what the infrastructure looks like. And on top of that, for them, they can rely on vSphere so that they can manage the virtual world. And so the closer that our management solution on the infrastructure side comes to be interlinked and integrated with the VMware solutions, the easier it's going to be for our customers to be able to consume virtualization and the infrastructure that relies. So, great. Just a follow-up on that. One of the early wins that you can have with convergent infrastructure, of course, how fast I can put it in. And virtualization in general has helped with that agility and how fast I deploy something. But if we look at IT expenses, it's that operations. It's maintaining it. Everybody talks about how much can I spend on innovation? How much can I keep on doing it? What does your converged infrastructure from Dell and the management solution help to address that life cycle solution of a deployment? Yeah, so the Active System Manager, which is the Galeforce product that we created and then sold as part of our acquisition, was really designed to do a number of different things. So, operational focus of the product was key. The administrator still has the problem of provisioning the servers, provisioning storage, provisioning networking. So, Active System Manager being embedded within the converged infrastructure solution has a very distinct relationship with the element manager and therefore makes it very easy for you to be able to provision storage, networking, and that. But beyond that, you are going to need to add a lot more. So, if you may have one Active System Manager that manages a thousand servers, but you're going to add another thousand servers, you're going to be adding another storage device, you're going to be adding another networking device. So, we continue to do that because we have the single management solution is so embedded well with the element manager that the additional and expansion scale out capabilities is there. It also scales up, you know, with our integration with vSphere and others, as well as the acquisitions we've made, for example, with Foglight, which is a part of the Quest acquisition, with Bumi and App Assure, we have the capability of giving more, a granular capability of managing the application layer. And the single management solution is the one that the customer can land in, a single pane of glass to manage that environment. So, we've got to get some time, you've got to wrap up, but I want to get one final question in on the company. Obviously, September 12th's coming. What's it like there right now, Employee Morale? Give us a taste and a feel or a sense of what's going on inside Dell. Michael Dell's going to own three quarters of the company. Silver Lake Park is going to own a quarter. It's going to be basically owner operated, small business, biggest startup, biggest shareholder. I'm sure Michael will spread some of that wealth to the employees, generously, and then in the new turn around. But I mean, people nervous, getting their stock, buy back. So, what's the vibe? So, I've been with Dell for nine months, and so I'm not a long-term Dell employee, but I can tell you that it is reviving a sense of entrepreneurship, a kind of a startup mentality that brought people like me to Dell. People are excited about the fact that Michael has taken over a lot more. They're excited about the opportunities that are going to exist. Look, you know, the street re-haves in a certain way towards us about the decisions that we make. As a private company, Michael has a significant amount of latitude to do the things that he wants to do. We are very excited about it. He's like a kid in a candy store. It would be, and for us as employees, we are going to have a significant, we are going to have a lot more latitude to do the things that we want to do. We are beginning to look at a lot of the areas within our company where efficiency needs to be there, and we are beginning to see that efficiency can be gained in a lot of different areas. So I think, overall, it's a very positive, yeah, is it, do we all know the details of the deal? No, not everyone knows that, but a lot of the employees, their communication that comes from the group that manages the private deal has been excellent. And so a lot of the companies are out. I got to say that. I've always said that even on theCUBE publicly that Michael Dell's been handcuffed by being such a public company, and there's so much history now, and so much history, you know, trajectory over the years. And he's got that twinkle in his eye, and I know he wants to, it's no comeback. He's like still young. He's still, he's only 47, he's only 47. Hell, he's going to have a field day. But those companies that are the most successful are founder led. And look at HP, even they're trying to get back to those founder roots, even though their founders have passed away. So I think that's the secret formula. That's why it's cited, and I would agree with you that my experience at Dell World last year was, you know, a little bit of the troops are confused, but for the most part, leadership is I in the prize. I think Michael and his team are very, very focused, and as an entrepreneur who came to Dell as part of the acquisition, I commend him for doing it, and he has my 100% support in my team. So final word, I'll get you the final word in this segment, and talk about what's happening at VMworld this week and VMware for the folks out there. Just share them quickly, your quick sound bite on what's happening for VMware and for here at VMworld. So I think you guys all heard the announcements there about the conversion infrastructure, the stuff that VMware is doing. It's an exciting time to come to VMware. They're very good partners of ours. We're very excited to be here on a regular basis with them. We do have a lot of private conversation with VMware about their strategy, about our strategy, but all in all, I think you could see the large number of representation by the partners, which is pretty impressive. I think everyone knows that working with VMware is a critical element, but I think from our perspective, we see them as a very, very critical partner, and I think their commitment to conversion infrastructure from my perspective is very, very important, and it gives me and my team the opportunity to deliver our product in conjunction and partnership with them. So that's an exciting thing for me. Nariman, Tim, Orian, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Really appreciate it from Dell. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest of the show. Stay with us, wall-to-wall coverage. This is theCUBE. This is day one of VMworld. We have two more days, wall-to-wall every day, all great guests, executives, entrepreneurs, founders, VCs tomorrow, we have a great day tomorrow. So stay with us for the rest of the day. We've got two more interviews and we'll be right back.