 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back on theCUBE here at Dell EMC World 2017, along with Paul Gill and I'm John Walls. Good to have you here with us on the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. We're joined by Peter Cutts, who is the Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Dell EMC, and joins us after just spending five deadly moments in the beanbag chairs. Peter, you should know better than that. I want a bad move, but I did drink a nice soda with caffeine in it right before, so I'm good. We're actually in a cool area, it's called the village. They have a little augmented reality thing going on, a little virtual reality. We're like the cool kids. But the beanbag chairs are the best. They've got about a hundred of them over there, giant things, people just hang out in them all day. Don't go to sessions, don't go to keynotes. Well, I've been back to back since the beginning, so I had like five minutes and I'm like, geez, maybe I should sit down. No, that's not a good idea. But there's so much energy around here and so much energy at the show that you just revive right back up. Yeah, give me your take on it so far. We've been here about a day and a half or so. I mean, what's happening? What do you see happening, particularly in your world, hybrid cloud? Yeah, so I mean, I see a lot of previous shows where we come in and we kind of say, yeah, you kind of need to think about these cloud operating models. Cloud's not a destination. Cloud is a way of doing business and changing the way you provide services to your customers, et cetera. Go to your line of businesses. You can change the way you do things, et cetera. I think that the conversation is shifted to we know that and we have to do something, how can you help us? And that's exactly what my team, hybrid cloud platforms, have been focused on is really the evolution of HCI and CI, but taking that to be the full cloud platform. So really great experience. We're seeing customers understand that and want to basically to make it perfectly, perfectly clear, take the complex and make it simple. So why do they need you? I mean, why do I need a hybrid strategy if I've got private and I've got public? So the key piece that we try to provide is these turnkey platforms with lifecycle management because that's one of the things in a cloud. You got to make sure that when you're doing these iterations and updates, think about this. PCF will update every quarter. And how are you going to make sure you update that, the infrastructure, the components, the supporting things? You don't want to have to mess with all those things. Much like CI and HCI do for the infrastructure. We're now doing that for the cloud operating systems and the components that actually make up the service. And so we as Dell EMC have a group that develops software and actually life cycles all that for you. And again, that way you're focused on, above the value line, you're focused on your business, you're focused on your customer interaction, your app and transforming your business as opposed to focusing on making this stuff underneath work. Let us take that for you and make it really simple. And of course, add speed to it. And remember, we can help a lot of our customers deliver services to their business 65% faster than they try to do on their own. So those are the things. And again, the hybrid model is key, making sure that you consume both private and public. Well now, how do you define hybrid cloud? So from a standpoint of the way you think about it as a customer or any entity that wants to make sure they have a hybrid nature, means that they can provision, control, protect, geo-fence, give all of the needs that they have to their business. But they can give that resources when required on-premises. So if it were best fitting, if that's the right performance characteristic or that's the right kind of what I would call locational requirement, data sovereignty requirement, all that they can do. But then also broker and control all of the relationships out to the public cloud. So they're using both and they're putting the right workload in the right place to get the right result for the business, best costs for the right workload. Because again, it's going to be sometimes public, sometimes private. And again, that balances what customers really need. Well, we know where you sit in the data center. Where do you sit in that membrane between the private and the public cloud? I think it's the kind of what I would call connectors and the services underneath. So as I mentioned, when you look at how we tie in our technologies, like our data protection suite, doing things like complex multi-site deployments, looking at how we actually tie into the telemetry of our P3 application and giving a console for people to be able to understand the health of their cloud native app, whether it's on-premises or off, all of those things are how we help build that relationship to on-premises, off-premises. And again, when it comes to analytics, we can source data from pretty much anywhere, give it data scientists a workspace in about 15 minutes where they can sample, analyze, and then republish that results with security, sovereignty, et cetera. So when you tie all these services together and make it simple, you can offer basically the automation of what you would call traditional applications to make it simple, deliver them, give self-service, then do cloud native. Developer gets exactly what they need when they need it with all the services, whether it's private or hybrid or public. And then from there, of course, the analytics piece to really be able to, what I would call, get insight into your data. So not just like having a big data repository with a whole bunch of things in it, but being able to have insight into it and be able to publish workspaces and get actionable insights from it. So it's a big difference from just kind of a bunch of piece parts and pulling them together. So there are certain tasks you put in public, certain tasks you put in private. I mean, how do you, in our ability there, how do you get them to make sure that you're provisioning the right connections, the right opportunities, and then making sure that other things don't happen? Yes. The problems that that can create. Again, so go back to, it depends on the workload, so in a traditional landscape or a traditional three-tiered app, you're going to be in a situation where things like data sovereignty, encryption, other things, so those encryption as a service, data sovereignty, data protection pieces are all integrated in as automated services. And as you provision onto other cloud targets, whether it be public, you want to make sure your security models are carried and your sovereignty requirements are met, that's part of the offer, right? So you can do that. The other piece though, when you go into a cloud native experience, again, you have this capability using Pivotal Cloud Foundry and some of the work we've done in native hypercloud, you can literally push your app to any one of them, but still understand its health and make sure that you can get that visibility across where that app may live. So again, from a standpoint of across the board, just being able to offer the services that's right for the application and the workload. And then when you look at our recent announcement this week or the Azure Stack, one of the things that that offers you is you're really looking at taking Azure on-premises with all of the learnings that we've had over the past three years building hybrid cloud platforms across the board. We're now able to take that learning, invest into the Microsoft Azure Stack and help bring those same data sovereignty, data protection, multi-site and turnkey packages and lifecycle and one contact support experience across that. And that's unique in that it provides the same API much like the Pivotal Cloud Foundry story, whether I develop an application there, the same API is the same kind of connectors, whether it's on-premises or off. So now you've kind of got this world where it's really a blended model. And again, these are the new models that are helping customers really bridge the gap between private and public. Oh, we'll get to Azure Stack in just a moment. I would do want to ask you, a lot of the piece parts you're talking about here, we're part of the EMC Federation prior to the merger. What has Dell brought to the equation? So I think Dell has brought the industry, start with the industry leading server, right? Having that as a foundation for our hyper-converged and our cloud-based foundation is incredible. So being able to offer that to our customers in a turnkey nature, that life cycles itself. So when you think about that, Dell's just brought a huge capability in that space. Second piece brought to the table is the supply chain and the go-to-market pieces. I mean, it is incredible to be able to offer these things pretty much globally, almost instantaneously after we release them. And those are just the magnets, it's like a very different feeling from, you know, just the legacy EMC or just the Dell piece. And then from the EMC pieces, I think you tie some of the IP and the software pieces all together into those servers and that's the differentiation that allows us to provide these services on these cloud platforms, really taking it to the next level and integrating that IP. So it's combined, it's better together for sure. You mentioned Azure, ready to go, right? I mean, is it up and running? If I'm a customer, when can I dig in? Yeah, so we're at Tech Preview 3 right now. Our plan is for full release in the second half of the year. But a customer today, if you want to get started, we have a single node developer edition. It goes up to four nodes and you can buy it today and you can actually start, obviously, you know, leveraging it, using it, understanding it, do some development on it, get the experience. And again, you can get started today. It's always fun to dabble, right? So why would a customer come to Dell EMC to configure an Azure stack instead of doing it themselves or going to Microsoft? Well, so the approach on Azure stack on-premises is really going to be partner-led. So in the beginning, it's going to be, you know, a few key partners that Microsoft will part, will actually take to market. And for the beginning, they're also not focusing on like reference architectures. Like when you think about when they did Azure Pack, they were kind of saying, hey, you guys can build it yourself and we'll make it work. In this particular kind of deployment, they're really looking to take that Azure experience on-premises. And so with a partner with Dell EMC and why would a customer come to us, we've got three years experience in this world building with what you called the Federation. I now call Dell Technologies offerings, pulling that together into a turnkey, life-cycled, automated, single contact support platform for not only VMware-based environments, but also Pivotal Cloud Foundry-based environments. Now we're actually adding into that the ability to take all that IP and learnings and kind of plug it into the Azure stack and drive number one server platform in Dell PowerEdge, drive our number one data protection suite into that for backup and data protection, the encryption and data sovereignty capabilities. Like these are things that will help Dell EMC really differentiate in this space. And again, our partnership with Microsoft helps us, you know, we have a long history. We were actually the first one to release a hybrid cloud solution with them in 2015. So we've got a great deep history. It's more about now we're delivering the platform turnkey and we're doing this as a great partnership. Well, Peter, thank you for the time. There's a beanbag chair with your name on it, by the way. I wish, that was my five minutes for the day. So close, so close. It was good, but thank you very much for having me. It's great. Dell EMC. Back with more from Las Vegas right after this, you're watching the key.