 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hey, welcome back to VMworld 2017. You are watching theCUBE. We have had a very exciting day one. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Dave Vellante. And we'd like to welcome our next two guests, Tim Breeden, senior director of data management software at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. Nice to be here, thank you. And Sal Demasi, director of data protection solutions from TechnoCore. Hello. We're excited to have you guys here. I think we've all discussed, we all had about the similar amount of caffeine today, so this is good. So, Tim, first question to you. So some big announcements today on day one. Data protection suite for apps. What is that, what was announced and how does it differentiate Dell EMC? Yeah, very exciting. So, if I fall into saying DPS for apps, you'll have to forgive me. It's kind of the vernacular. But what that does is it's the culmination of a lot of hard work, in particular with VMware products, providing some differentiation, certainly around backup performance and further automation across the entire VMware stack itself. So, a huge differentiator for what we're selling now against traditional sort of deployments is an automation end-to-end in the stack from your control to your data path right through to the back-end storage. And then, of course, today we announced that with AWS Cloud, Dell EMC and VMware Cloud has partnered, Dell EMC being the first partner with AWS in that regard. So, data by its very nature is quite distributed. So, I want to hear, you know, you can basically protect anything, anywhere. I get excited. So, is that the underpinning of the philosophy? And I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about that. Yes, we want to be able to protect anything, anywhere. We also want to be able to find anything, anywhere. So, if you put our product into your environment and you say, hey, I have a lot of stuff, it's just sort of pointing us in the right direction. We'll go and find it and we can automate protecting it so that it's not, again, I kind of pull it back to the previous way, the traditional way, that deployments have happened in data protection. If a new VM, the new VMware VM pops up, we can simply discover it, add it to a protected group and your data protection is there. So, again, comes back to the automation. So, find it everywhere, protect it everywhere. How far do you take that, you know, today and even in your vision, in terms of, I mean, you see cloud, SaaS clouds popping up everywhere. I sometimes get concerned in our own organization about how we're protecting the data in this application versus this application of what if something goes wrong? What if we want to switch SaaS providers? Can you help me with that problem? Yeah, and that's part of the evolution of the DPS for apps. Right now, as some folks know, kind of a start with there's a cloud tier in Data Domain itself that we can exploit. But, you know, right now, if you think of the applications, the application governance, the VMware support, the self-service model that we have, it's the natural next extension into the cloud, not only protecting to the cloud, but those cloud native applications that we protect as well. Sally, I wonder if you could talk about your organization as a Dell EMC partner, a longtime EMC partner. What's happening with your company and your customer base? Sure, thanks. So, Technicor is just about 10 years old. We've always only been, well, most recently Dell EMC partner, but traditionally EMC only partner. And it's been a very good relationship thus far. Our company started off with a healthcare only practice where we specialize in the meta tech space, but we've grown into all verticals of the market. So, you know, commercial, higher ed utility companies, pretty much wherever customers find a need, we're there for them to help them through it. You guys have some great use cases on your website. I was particularly interested in the one with the Royal Victoria Regional Health Center, knowing HIPAA in the States, there's obviously other requirements in Canada, and patient data being so sensitive. Tell us a little bit about some of the business outcomes that RVH is leveraging, using the Dell EMC technology provided by Technicor. Sure, so Royal Victoria Hospital, they're a fantastic customer. Prior to Technicor being engaged with them, they were, they're running a lot of old antiquated hardware and software, which, you know, up until the last couple of years was doing well for them, but, you know, now in these days, IT and the business, they're their best friends, right? IT's been enabling businesses to generate revenue, to provide better patient care, better expectations. So, we helped them pretty much transform their whole data center into a modernized data center where we used data protection suite for VMware to dramatically improve their backup speeds. Being a Meditech integrated certified integrator, we were able to transform a lot of their Meditech workloads onto modernized, flash-based technologies and really change the way they offer care to their patients through faster x-rays, faster backups of VMs that developers could use for R&D and, you know, just an overall, much more better experience, not only for the business, but for the customer, the which are the patients. Excellent. Tim, how do you look at your portfolio from an engineering standpoint? You got a vast portfolio, you know, EMC and now Dell EMC, what's the strategy from an engineering standpoint to bring all those pieces together? Yeah, there's definitely a best of both worlds, there's synergy in combining all of these things, right? I mean, you've got EMC with a heritage, you know, from storage and the data protection very established over time. Dell brings to the mix a few things, but one is there's strong hardware, server, you know, technology there as well where the next exploration of, you know, how does the data protection software necessarily fit with that? How do we put these things together? One thing is for sure from an engineering standpoint, it takes a little bit of time to figure it out, there's always that excitement sort of sitting out there that you want to jump into, but I think overall, we've got continued opportunity with that to go right to what Sal's talking about here. The RDA sounded like a customer in desperate need of that SDDC software-defined data center, right? And so we placed that bet on things some years ago and now we're seeing it all come to fruition, you know, with the more implicit scaling capability and the performance scalability. So I think the goodness of that Dell presence and wanting to be number one in everything combining with this EMC skill set and technology-improven team that, you know, between that hardware and the software at Dell EMC, it's a fantastic opportunity. One of the things that we've talked about before is that data protection is not just an IT problem, it's a business problem. How do you guys work with, and maybe you both could answer this question, not being a customer facing, how do you work with IT and the business to align to really, with RVH as an example, really show the business the impact that multiple copies and proliferation are making? How does that alignment help, how do you help with that? Well, the largest challenge customers face not only in the healthcare space, but in every other vertical is the ever-growing number of virtual machines in an environment. Every time there's a virtual machine, it's of some importance, it needs to be protected. The business expects everything to be protected, they expect everything to be retained for extraordinary amounts of time. And the way we found a way to provide a solid message to customers is to show customers the value of the cost to serve model that data protection solutions by Dell EMC offer them. So, lowest cost per terabyte for storage, fastest times for recovery, the ability to manage the data through a life cycle, move it to different places, different ways, offering the business flexibility and peace of mind out of value in terms of cost is what they react to the most. How about the whole channel dynamic? When Dell announced that it was acquiring EMC, you guys announced the deal, as always, the channel freaked out a little bit and then there was some concern, some friction. So I think just last week, Michael Dell was in the cover of CRN with some real kudos as to how that was figured out. I wonder, Sal, if you could take us through sort of what your experience was. Sure. So, in all honesty, it's been a pretty seamless, a seamless move over, we're really impressed. There's always the slight hiccup here and there with that kind of transition. But overall, it's been a good experience, at least for Technicorps it has. We, you know, a lot of us being familiar with the not only internal EMC processes, but Dell processes before they became one, helped us become a little bit more adapting to the situation, but we've not only feel that it's better, it's overall a much more positive experience because of what Dell brings to the table now with the merger. And the disruption to your processes has not been an issue whatsoever. The mindset of Dell is, you know, huge volume, EMC, very high touch, even though you're a massive company, but you haven't seen any effects of that. No, I think Dell, which is now Dell EMC, they've done a really good job at understanding the legacy EMC experience and making sure they didn't deviate far from that when they became one company. So they strategically made sure that these people from this organization are still going to be involved, they're still going to be the ones you go to, and then as time moves along, they're finding different ways to improve processes and overall partner experience. Excellent, well congratulations on your continued partnership with Dell EMC. Tim, congratulations on the data protection suite for apps, the differentiation there. We thank you both for spending time with us on theCUBE today. Thank you, you're welcome, thanks. And for my co-host, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day one of VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back.