 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMCworld 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation of Dell EMCworld 2017. I'm John Furrier, this is theCUBE. This is the first Dell EMCworld, formerly EMCworld, which this is our eighth consecutive year covering EMCworld now, Dell EMCworld. And I'm joined on our kickoff of day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with Keith Townsend, analyst at CTO Advisor, and David Floyer, CTO at Wikibon, breaking down what happened yesterday, what's happening this morning on the keynotes. Guys, welcome to our kickoff of day two of Dell EMCworld 2017. Good to be here again. Keith and David, David, you were in all the sessions yesterday, the analyst briefings, working the hallways, talking to sources, you have meetings one-on-ones, you're really getting the data on what is the product story, the bigger picture story and impact. I'm going to go to you first and get your summary of what's being announced here, specifically around the Dell EMCworld products, what's the positioning, what's stake in the ground they're putting, and what's the impact to customers? So, the general theme is better together. That came out very, very strongly, all the way through all of the conversations. The way that they're working together between Dell, between VMware, between the various parts of Dell EMC as well, I thought was exemplary. And they put together a very strong strategy in the time that they've, eight months that they've been together. To me, the highlights were the real focus on hyper-converged. They have gone really strongly for this. They've got VX rail, they've got VX rack, they've got DX block, all hyper-converged infrastructure taking out the cost from the end users, from the IT shops, taking that out and replacing it with services, integration of both the hardware, the processes, the network and the storage all together with the management framework out of it. So that to me was one very big highlight. Hyper-converged. Hyper-converged. The second is they are going very strongly into hybrid cloud and they have the mechanism of doing it, which is VMware. And one of the key things that you need in a number of research pieces around this is that you need commonality between the cloud and on-premise and in the future to a large extent for IoT on the edge as well. And that commonality is provided here with VMware and is provided with the file systems that they have. So vSAN, for example, or a scale IO. Give that commonality between the cloud and the on-premise. This is, they can truly deliver hybrid cloud. If you look at AWS, you've got their cloud is one cloud, just AWS. And they don't have anything they can push out to the edge. In any way. You say VMware's got the glue. Yes, the glue which holds it together, VMware glue. And from a Dell perspective, they can choose between Azure or VMware. They can also go with the Azure stack and then have hardware with the Azure stack and the Azure cloud. So fitting into two parts of hybrid cloud. So that was the second area. Great. And for the folks watching, you can check out David Flory's Reachers on wikibon.com. There's some free content there, but also subscription required. Go to youtube.com slash SiliconANGLES. Get all the videos from this session. And I want to take a minute to thank our sponsors. Dell EMC, Cisco, Datos, Toshiba, Nutanix, Druva, Bruchastream and VMware without their support. The CUBE coverage would not be possible. All those great content. Thank you very much to the sponsors and give them a shout out on Twitter. Bring in two cubes here at Dell EMC World. Thanks to the sponsors. Keith, I want to go to you and get the reaction from you on day one and now the keynote for Pat Gelsing and also commentary and reaction from David Flory's comments around the keys that they're putting out there. Impact to customers. Because at the end of the day, we heard Michael Dell yesterday say, we want to be your preferred supplier. They want to reduce the number of suppliers, not all suppliers, but they got the end to end story. So there's a land grab going on for sure. No doubt about it. How real is that trust equation with Dell EMC? Obviously, it's their event. They're peacocking big time here, but I get that. How real is it from your perspective? So let's talk about, let's take away the glue. Without VMware, Dell EMC is a very tough company to figure out. So yesterday, I think they did a really great job of taking what was core to Dell EMC, going together packages. They talked about data protection, taking the 14G platform, throwing some EMC technologies behind that and bringing that together. But without VMware, it's a really tough story to sell two C-sweets on transformation. It's just a bunch of infrastructure, a bunch of parts that really, by themselves, don't add value. I think, and if you look at the competitive landscape, that's probably why you see the breakup of their largest competitor, because it was really, they didn't have that glue. You mean HPE? HPE, it's just, you came to the C-sweets. They became unglued, literally. They became unglued, they didn't have anything to tell a cohesive story. So I think Dell EMC started out today talking about how the combined companies, the core businesses of storage, compute, networking, packaged that together. This morning was about putting that glue on top and how, you know, you throw on top of that the cloud, the pivotal cloud foundry, and the PAS and cloud and hybrid cloud makes it, I think, a compelling story. I think Dell EMC overall, Dell Technologies, has some work to do in the board room at the C-suite level to gain, I think, a deep level of trust that they can basically get it done. I think they have the capability, it's about getting it done. Well, we heard it yesterday from David Goulden. David, before you weren't here, but waiting for you both, Michael Dell. Who didn't really address it? Who's more on the high-level messaging? But David Goulden addressed it specifically, and he said, hey, you know, where the big EMC shops come in, we bring Dell. Where there's Dell, we bring in EMC storage. So the synergies, they're seeing some synergies immediately. Just on the winds that they're getting, with the glue of VMware, you're seeing some specific traction there, obviously with multi-cloud. So two questions for you is, where's the challenges, and this keeps you, if you can weigh in on this too, be great, what are the challenges for Dell EMC? What's the white space they got to fill in quickly? Where's the challenges, weaknesses, opportunities? And two, can they really pull that story together and go to the customers and be that trusted advisor? So let's talk about the challenge area. Pivotal is doing well where it's deployed. But as a strategy, if you look at our research, what we've found is that Paz is actually mainly in the areas of the SaaS vendors, like ServiceNow, for example, or in vendors like Salesforce. They are the ones that are providing the Paz platforms. And the other part of Paz is AWS, for example, the added services, Azure, the added services. So the Paz marketplace is really fragmented in two. And what's remaining is really quite a small marketplace for individual customers. And Cloud Foundry is a great product, et cetera. But I don't see that sustaining a huge revenue stream. So... But it can it be glue or not? It's there, it's useful, but I believe there are the more powerful SaaS platforms. The other area which is they need to do more work on is in IoT, in particular because IoT is at the edge and huge amount of the IoT is on ARM processes. So they need to more strongly embrace ARM processes, really understand not just the IT part of it, but the OT part of it. I didn't see much evidence today. They really understood what OT was about, operational technology. Keith, I want to get your reaction to comments. I heard in the hallways, but I'll put it here. Startups are always the canary in the coal mine. Certainly on the bigger whales, like the Dell EMC's in the Oracle and HPE's. You can see the funding climate is usually a prediction of a five year window of what's out there. There's not a lot of infrastructure starters. You mentioned hyperconverge. It looks like Dell's winning that. And other big players have some good products there and the integration. It's really hard to crack. So you're seeing a lot of drying up of funding for companies who come in and say, I'm going to be a storage solution. I'm going to scale up storage, straight up hardcore storage. However, you're seeing, you know, Cohesity, Rubrics, data protection is hot area. Like, I mean, so like these little nuance areas that were once kind of like, I won't say throw away, but big businesses were kind of point solutions to the bigger picture, kind of speak to the value of the cloud and IoT. Comments on the funding the startups are getting and what that means to the bigger players from a customer standpoint, as they look at the landscape, should they be evaluating startups? Is it a canary in the coal mine in the sense of the tell sign for the trend? So I think Cohesity just recently announced what was it like a $90 million round. So it is something that we pay attention to as a customer perspective. You know, data domain is a great example of a solution that pioneered the area. It was extremely trusted. It gets to the point that it's like VMware. It's a tax VMware vSphere. It's a tax on the infrastructure. Data is growing at insane amounts. If you look at edge and the amount of data that's being generated by IoT devices and the need to capture that data, back it up or even move it for analysis offsite to some type of data lake, critical, critical piece of it. So, you know, Dell, EMC announced that they're repackaging data domain into an appliance and trying to capture a little of that thunder and a bottle a little bit. But you know what is, I don't know if it's a little bit me too, seems a little bit me too, but I think from a customer perspective, it is a extremely- Well, valuations are always an indicator of the hype cycle. And we're seeing, you know, cohesion of rubrics, massive value, which over most a billion dollars on the last round of funding. But you've got Datrium and other companies out there that speak to the unmet needs of the customer. David, you've been in the storage business for you've been seeing in movies, the zillion cycles of innovation, ups and downs. What's real, what's not real? Relatives of unmet customer needs, these are these startups and the big guys trying to fill the white space. Well, one of the key areas that they've really doubled down on now is flash. So all of the announcements had flash or flash arrays and that is where the growth is at this particular time. But longer term, the key trends are not just flash itself, but flash plus NVMe and even more important, flash plus NVMe over fabric. This is going to provide the ability to connect a thousand systems together, have one pool of data and really realize the dream of transformation, digital transformation, which is access to any data at any time, whatever the application needs. Now that architecture is just coming up and that architecture is, in my view, is the game changer, which is going to bring all of this together. And Dell has a very good shot, being a major player in this area. And your research is to say wikibon.com, if you want to check it out, great stuff from the whole team over at Wikibon. Some VMware comments area I want to get your reaction to, I'll see Pat Gelsinger doing the keynote speech here. Day two, headlining is going to be on the Cube at one o'clock. But a couple of notable things, the Google partnership with Workspace One and Chromebooks. Okay, I get that. IoT management is a big announcement with the Pulse IoT Center and I'll see the AirWatch Dell Client Command Center that speaks to multiple endpoints relative to these new network architecture you're kind of teasing out there. So the question is, and we heard the VDI is kind of with VX Rails there. So when I heard the sort of VDI thing, I was kind of like, how much is it old checkboxes? Finally, it crosses the finish line. VDI crosses the finish line with some sort of coherency. Question for you guys is, what's old and what's the new areas? So some stuff old's got to be checked off and either abstracted away, automated, but delivered, so AirWatch, I get the VDI. And how much is going to be new growth opportunities for VMware? So I'm a big fan of growth at the edge. Data expansion at the edge is a serious problem for customers that they're addressing now. This IoT revolution that we think is coming has already came and gone. It's here and the need to store data and process that data at the edge is a serious problem. So when you talk about HCI at the edge and then intelligence, whether it's a pass and Cloud Foundry or some type of serverless compute to do a near line processing of that data on the edge and send that aggregate data to your central data center is a great, I think opportunity for VMware, Dell EMC. That's where I'm seeing the growth potential for VMware, especially in the announcements as of the past couple of days. I don't know if Pulse will be that gateway that VMware will want it to be, but I think focus thing on that. It's directly correct. I mean, they're automating out, trying to make some simplicity around it. David, I asked Michael Dell specific question. I want to get your thoughts on. I said, Michael, I get the strategy, mature market data center. It's mature, it's big numbers, trillions of dollars in IT spend. You're going for the number one player in that mature market. You can argue the growth, maybe negative or single digits, whatever. I get that consolidation strategy. But where's the growth coming from? You mentioned VMware. Dell EMC, where is the growth area? IoT obviously is the work, you're doing a lot of work area on it. Is that the growth area? What's the growth area? The growth area is, in my view, in two areas. SAS, the growth of SAS ISVs, that's an area that Dell and EMC need to find a way to provide services directly to those people. Either on VMware itself or on their own hardware. So that's really a very big growth area. Private Cloud obviously is a growth area. That's a key growth area. And the other growth area is not the traditional SAN appliances, the SAN controllers, but the software-led infrastructure. So it's the VSAN, it's the ScaleIO, which in my opinion, they are in a good position to pull, push, very hard, as long as they don't get themselves in the way by sort of putting all the resources into the traditional- ScaleIO is talking to the VP of Engineering yesterday. He told me, he told me, didn't say off the record, but I'll say it, 40 terabytes, petabytes in production. Yes, yes, this is actually for a VDI application. This is for a city- So it's for financial services. That's pretty significant. Yes, that's very significant. And that is, though, however, it's VDI. VDI is okay, but that's a very good application of much cheaper technology to solve a problem than traditional way of doing it. We talk a lot about Hybrid Cloud and you mentioned the file system, the potential of a VSAN and ScaleIO, Chad Sackett, we had him on theCUBE yesterday, an excitable guy, when he bought ScaleIO, he did a demo of ScaleIO in AWS, where I think he got something like a million IOPS in AWS. So while futuristic at the time, it makes sense, consistency across environments. What I have in my private data center is the same thing that I have in Google Compute, which is the same thing that I have in AWS. I understand how to manage it. I understand how to deliver it. I understand how to support it. It makes a big deal. So you're basically saying this is an operational efficiency game for them. They have to really make it easy and not having to hire people to operate the data centers or clouds. Is that right? And Hybrid Cloud has to have this commonality between the cloud and the edge. Okay, final question. What is the multi-cloud reality? Obviously, Hybrid Cloud, no debate from me. I love it. I think that's very relevant end to end more with the code-based operational simplicity across the different platforms. I get that. It's a fantasy, David. Come on, I mean, multi-cloud, you've got latency issues. I mean, is multi-cloud realistic right now? Or how far out is that? I mean, let's debate this real quick. Latency is, to me, the key issue. And why these new architectures all about latency, getting latency down to 50 microseconds, not 50 milliseconds. This level of latency is going to allow a fantastic new set of applications. And they're going to be at the edge. Whatever the edge is, it's the IoT edge, it's the consumer edge, it's the local data center. And multi-cloud real? So, multi-cloud, though, if you think about SaaS and the number of SaaS clouds that you've got, you're going to have lots and lots of those different clouds. And they're going to integrate to other clouds. So, you will have a multi-cloud. They are when, when will they integrate? Well, they have to. I mean, no one's really doing multi-cloud today. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is. Absolutely, they are or they aren't? They are not doing it. There is very little migration, except for simple migration between the different clouds. You have to have the same architecture, you have to have the same fundamental building blocks to be able to do that. Now, will they all congeal around one particular set of services? Maybe, but is it going to be a multi-cloud environment? Absolutely. There is so much space out there for individual solutions. Keith, you agree? Yeah, I think today there's a multi-cloud reality in the sense that most customers have multiple IS providers, multiple past providers. But when you're talking about coherent, interactive applications that span multiple clouds, bit of a dream, kind of like the hybrid cloud on-premises, off-premises, data center cloud, that probably one pane to control them all we're far from that. It's fantasy land right now, but directionally correct, I would agree that hybrid cloud is the gateway to multi-cloud, and certainly for sure. Multi-cloud just being that I need a lot of different services in different places. And that might be application-specific, still a lot of stuff to be written in that narrative. Yes. Coming, of course, we'll be covering it on theCUBE with the experts, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs here. We're at Dell EMC World, the scenes buzzing. Got two cubes, 24 interviews a day for three days, three days of coverage, okay, breaking it down for you. Day two kickoff with the experts here from theCUBE. More coverage, stay with us with theCUBE coverage here at Dell EMC. We'll be back with more after this short break.