 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. And we're back here at Dell EMC World Las Vegas, Nevada. This is Paul Gillan, and this is theCUBE. And we have with us the three musketeers of Hybrid Cloud. Joining me immediately is my right, Mark Norris, the Group VP of Hybrid Cloud at Atos International, big technical consulting and systems integrator firm. Next to him is Paul Galgen. Did I get that right, Galgen? That's right. Who is a senior director of Microsoft Hybrid Cloud at Dell. And finally, Mike Schutz, who is a general manager of Cloud Platforms, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Division. So, I mean, it's been all about the, everyone's waiting for Azure Stack. This is the big, the big hot thing. How close are we to having a real shipping product? Who wants to take that? I, you know, I am so excited. Last Thursday, we announced the Dell EMC Azure Stack Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack. We're coming out, we've been hard at work. We are ready to announce the details of our offering that will be coming out in the second half of this year. And we think that it's going to be, it is going to be a transformational offering for customers and we'll bring along with Microsoft our unprecedented portfolio of technology offerings to enhance and delight the customers that choose to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy using Microsoft Azure Stack. Now, Mike, this Azure Stack was actually delayed about a year, I believe, from its original announcement. So, in order to get some of the technical details right, are you, and I might be wrong about the timeframe, but there was a delay there. How much anticipation is there in your customer base for this offering? Well, I think in general, and then certainly here at the event, there's a lot of excitement about it. We've talked about it quite a bit here at the event. We've talked to a lot of customers. It's really interesting the use cases that come up. A lot of organizations are trying to think about what digital transformation means for them personally. Cloud obviously plays a big role in that. Converged systems and hyper-converged systems live a big part in how they're transforming their IT. And hybrid cloud kind of sits at the intersection of those two really big trends around hyper-convergence and public cloud. And what we're doing is bringing our global scale cloud platform of Microsoft Azure, serving millions of developers and IT pros every single day, and we're taking that same technology and bringing it to our customers to be able to run on Dell EMC hardware in their data centers, thereby really expanding the reach of cloud to meet our customers where they are. And so it's a pretty exciting offering for us. We're kind of at the final throws of product validation and finishing out some of the features and the partnership with Dell EMC really has been amazing in this regard. Yeah, throws perhaps an appropriate term when you're bringing a new product to market. Mark, I've been in a lot of our viewers in the US haven't heard about those. You're a European based company. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do? Well, we are European based, but we are growing very fast. It's 100,000 people company in the meantime. It's about a billion revenue. So it's quite a big company. So we are very excited about the Azure Stack delivery because it's an add-on in our portfolio in the hybrid cloud area. So what we do with customer is a digital journey of the applications. So we are looking to the legacy environments of customers and we are looking to all the applications. And some applications can't move to a central data center or to the public cloud. And their Azure Stack is a great solution that you have the public criteria. You have them on premises. So when we do in some kind of a decision factory where we are moving applications towards Azure Stack or to other important, I think a lot of our applications will move to Azure Stack in the future. So we are really looking forward to the announcement and to the launch of this Azure Stack. Well, you have a lot of big data center legacy environments over there that you're dealing with. Absolutely. Azure Stack fit vis-a-vis those legacy environments. Is this a whole new infrastructure that customers are putting in place? Well, a lot of customers has a few big data centers but they have a lot of onsite applications. And there are a lot of reasons why applications can't move from to a central data center. So you have reasons like latency of the applications, factories who cannot be stopped, the network depending. You have all kinds of compliance, the FDA reasons why we can't move applications or data to the public cloud or to a central data center. So that's why this offering, it puts really the cloud native, the cloud size of solutions that you also can run it onsite. So this is a big, big change. Mike, can you talk about what this means for Azure customers of your public cloud version? What will be the synergies that they'll see between public cloud and their on-premise stack? The whole notion of this is to help customers on that application modernization journey that they're on and do it with cloud native technologies. And so these are capabilities that we've built in the public cloud and battle tested in the public cloud and now customers can run them on Dell, EMC hardware and their own environment. What that means is that we're basically extending the edge of Azure to run in our customer's data centers and bring the cloud to them. And so from an Azure customer perspective, the customer would buy Azure from Microsoft and consume Azure from Microsoft and be able to run their applications in any location. And so we've even gone so far as making the business model, the licensing model, a consumption based model. And so you only pay for the software that you use and the virtual machine hours or the websites that you use in the public cloud or on-premise is a very same consumption based economic model is translating down here to an on-premises world as well, which is great because as more and more customers look toward an OpEx model and they're starting to understand in the cloud world how consumption economics work, they're looking to do that with other software and our on-premises system as well. And so we're also working with Dell and how that might work on the hardware side as well. I want to ask about that. I mean, Pay as you go, we're very familiar with in the cloud. How does that translate to hardware? At some point will customers be able to pay only for the hardware that they use? Absolutely. We are one of the great things about the joining of Dell and EMC together is the breadth of the offerings around our financial services. So we already have some very creative consumption models for the hardware itself and we'll be looking to extend that to a meter consumption as well. Very similar to how customers would be able to consume from the public cloud. And by doing that, what we're hoping to do is take out the kind of the extraneous detritus of the decision process of whether a workload goes into public or private cloud and really auguring in on what is the right fit for that particular workload and where it belongs. Mark, give us an idea of the demand that exists in your market right now for this offering. Let me give a very big customer of us in the healthcare market. He has 200 locations all across the world. And in those locations, there are a lot of very critical applications. So we can do it very cost effective that we do an application transformation that we look at the whole landscape of the customer, how the business processes are working, how the applications are connected to each other. And the way we are doing that, that we have a methodology designed where we can see what is the best fit, the most efficient way to put an application on an infrastructure. And as a stack, probably can take 40% out of the whole landscape, but it can be some customers, we can make everything cloud native, but cloud native is not the full solution. A lot of customers have a lot of legacy applications. So it's really helpful to broaden the portfolio and in this case. So I'm very happy with it. Just very quickly, Dell is unique. Why should someone do business with a hyper cloud business with Dell as opposed to anybody else? That's a great question. So with Dell EMC, we have a very extensive experience, both with the integrated systems. We created the integrated system converge platform market with VC eight years ago. We have a very long history of layering clouds on top of our integrated systems, both with Microsoft and with other partners. And so we'll be bringing those learnings to our Microsoft Azure Stack offering. We're just scratching the surface here. A lot to talk about, but we are out of time. I want to thank all three of my musketeers, Mark Norris, Paul Galgen, Mike Schutz for joining us today. Best of luck with your rollout. You seem very excited about what's coming down the pipe. We're thrilled. Thank you very much. We'll be right back from Las Vegas. This is theCUBE.