 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone, you are watching day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have Varun Chabra, who is the Vice President, Product Marketing Cloud Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE Varun and Mark Lohmeyer, SVP GM of Cloud Platform VMware. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, great to be here. So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking that it should be a rap song, VMC on Dell EMC. Tell us about the news this week. Yeah, sure, so maybe I can kick it off. So really excited this Monday to introduce VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. And as I sort of think back to when we first started our discussions together between the two companies, we really had this sort of design goal in mind, which was how do we bring the simplicity, the agility, and sort of the consumption economics of a public cloud model, right? But with the control, the security, the enterprise class capabilities, performance that customers expect in an on-prem environment. And how could VMware and Dell work together to really jointly engineer something that we think would be really special and achieve those goals, right? And based on feedback we got from customers, we're really pleased to sort of the reaction to this. And we think that's really going to hit the sweet spot of kind of best of those both worlds. So Varun, Dell EMC's been in the private cloud market for a bit. Actually it was somebody on the EMC side that, as far as I know, was credited with coming up with that terminology. So some of this isn't new. Give us what is new about this offering compared to what we've done in the past. Yeah, great questions too. So essentially what is really innovative about this is that this is taking the public cloud model to on-premises, as Mark said. It's a fully managed service where Dell Technologies and VMware are working together behind the scenes to provide that public cloud-like experience, the hands-off operations, the ability to provision resources using a cloud portal. And have it be installed for you and it's set up. Once it's set up, software patches, operating system updates, hardware updates, all of them are basically going to be managed for you. If there's any support issues, the VMware team will file a ticket for you. You don't even need to file a ticket. It will be managed, but managed for you. This issue will be resolved. We think that this will be a really transformative way for customers to consume cloud resources. And this is all about bringing the cloud model to the data center where there's so much data that customers already have. All right, so Mark, there were ripples in the industry a couple years ago when the VMware cloud on AWS was out. Some people may be like, hey, why wasn't it done on the Dell stuff first? But the thing I want to ask is, what have you learned from that AWS engagement and how did that impact what you're doing now on the Dell EMC? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think one thing, so we learn from our customers and the feedback they give us. And one of the things that they shared is, look, they really like the fact that we're taking all of that grunge work off the table for them. If you're an IT department and a customer, you're looking at for how you can deliver more value to the business, right? And patching our software, upgrading our software, being responsible for hardware issues, that's not adding value to the business, right? Ensuring they're delivering the application SLA, ensuring the application is secure, helping reduce cost. Those are all adding tremendous value to the business, right? So the fact that we're able to deliver to them a cloud service allows them to sort of elevate the value that they can offer. And so that was one key insight. We wanted to bring all of those benefits to VMware Cloud on Dell EMC on-prem. The second thing I would say is just technically, it's a very different model to ship a customer's software and hardware and say you manage it, right? You're responsible for the SLA versus delivering a true cloud service, right? It requires a very different way to run your engineering team. It requires this thing called service ownership, right? That you're accountable for the SLA of your code running and production. You need to build out a site reliability engineering team. And it really requires very close engineering relationship between everyone who's working together to deliver that integrated cloud solution, right? And so we're taking all of those learnings and insights that we got sort of from our experience in the public cloud and now applying them with Dell to bring those same benefits to customers in the private cloud. One of the things that we've talked a lot on theCUBE about, in particular this week, is just how close the Dell VMware relationship seems. You have said, Stu, and you really know your stuff that this is the tightest you've ever seen it. And here you are talking about this jointly designed and engineered. Can you describe a little bit about sort of the culture of this partnership and how these two tech giants work together? Yeah, I can take a stab at least, I mean, yeah. Look, this is not new to us. We have been working together for a long time. But I think, as you saw in the keynote stage with Jeff and Pat together, this is a new level of a relationship. In terms of having our engineering teams work together, figuring out how to deliver the best customer experience. We already see that when we made an announcement three weeks ago with VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundations, being able to manage the entire life cycle right from the workload all the way down to the physical infrastructure using VMware Cloud Foundations. This is a natural extension of that model for us. We're taking some of the same engineering work, the tight integration, and then adding on another benefit of managing this for the customer and making things simple for them. And we think this is just the start. We think there's so much more goodness we can uncover for our customers as part of this journey. Yeah, I think it's great. The only thing I would add is the analogy I like to use is sort of like weightlifting, right? So this is a muscle that we've been building between VMware and Dell for many years now, right? And delivering a full cloud service on top of Dell hardware, that's like bench pressing 200 pounds, right? So if you just like had never worked out before and someone gave you 200 pounds of bench press, you probably wouldn't be successful. Now the good news is we've been working together for a number of years now. We've been building that muscle together between the two companies, right? VMware on VxRail, VMware Cloud on VxRail. And so now we're taking this next step forward. Hey, maybe we're going from benching 150 to benching 200. We have the ability to get there, right? And so in many ways our ability to be successful at this is based on the fact that we have been working together so well for a number of years now and building on that. Okay, so Veroon, we look at these different solutions in the marketplace in this space and sometimes it's a little tough to differentiate them because you look underneath the covers and you've got a lot of hardware geeks, you know? I'm one of them, I'm opened up the back of the cabinet and show me, I'm like, oh, I recognize that box and I do this, but like, say for example, if I go talk to Microsoft and I look at Azure Stack, they're like, don't really think about the Dell server underneath there and the partner thing I have. This is Azure. So when you think about the operating model, when you think about the consumption model, when you think about the applications, this is Azure. What I've had a little bit of trouble and trouble and I'm hoping you can help explain is, I think it's a similar type of story, but there is no Dell EMC public cloud. There's VMware in a couple of environments. So is that the right model to be thinking of? I mean, this is as a service, it's a consumption model, but are the applications similar to what I had if I've built a stack with Dell and VMware or give me the compare and contrast as to what I've done before and if some of the other options out there. Great question and I think it's something a lot of customers ask us as well. Look, I think this is a very unique offer compared to what we've seen in the market recently for a variety of reasons, but the first thing I'll start with saying is that customers today are already using VMware and Dell EMC for their existing workloads, right? This is essentially the same platform, right? So the tools that they use today, vSphere, HCX to migrate workloads, you know, NSX, vSAN, they are going to be able to carry forward all the work they've done there on this platform, right? So it's no different from that perspective. So the learnings they have, the processes, the automation, the ecosystem of backup disaster recovery that they use today, they're going to be able to use later as well with this as well. So this is less disruptive for them. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'd say is, you know, we think we have a unique advantage because we have a long heritage of working with customers in their data centers, whether it's VMware or Dell EMC or us combined together, being able to manage the complexity, the thousands of variables in a data center that a customer has where the things are not just homogenous, everything is not standardized. It's a very, very different problem from talking about a homogenous cloud data center where everything is standardized, everything is built for automation. We think we have a unique capability to be able to do that, and not only from a day zero or D one perspective, also from a support perspective. You know, this is a fully managed service, which means if things are, you know, if something breaks, we may have to go down and actually go to the customer side and actually fix that. We have a support organization across VMware and Dell EMC already built today. For scale, every single country, wherever people's data centers are. Again, a different support model, we think this will be a journey for folks who don't have that built out. And then finally, you know, I think I'm biased, but I think infrastructure matters. If you're going to take a bet on this platform for your edge locations, your retail locations, your thousands of retail locations, sure it's a fully managed service, but you need to have the peace of mind that this is going to continue to work for you. Even in a fully managed scenario, it is disruptive if there's hardware failures. So VxRail is a platform that customers all around the world bet on. There's more than 4,000 customers that VMware and Dell EMC have jointly driven success with. So we think these are going to be unique factors that will create value for customers. Okay, so for the support model, I understand, the question we've been talking about, the various solutions in the portfolio is, their Nirvana is that cloud operating model that I don't need to worry about what version it's running, whether the latest security patch is in there, because that's been taking care of me. Are we close to that? Are we at that? How do we, how's that look? I mean, that's exactly the idea. That's exactly what we're going to deliver, right? And you know, that's powerful for the reasons you articulated, but even more than that, I would say, you know, it's an amazing vehicle for us to deliver value and innovation to our customers, right? You know, traditional model, hey, VMware develops software, it takes a year or two to develop, we deliver it to the customer, they take another six months to a year to upgrade it. You know, it's two to three years' latency between when an engineer has a good idea or a customer asks for something before they can reason we get to take advantage of it in production. With this new cloud delivery model that we're building together, that latency shrinks down to potentially just weeks, right? Because we are upgrading that service on a continuous basis. We can push those new innovations to our customers much more rapidly and they can immediately begin consuming them. Like literally those new features just show up in the service just like on your iPhone or you know, whatever other service you might be using. Same model can now apply to the data center. So it's an incredibly powerful thing for our joint customers. It's also really exciting for our joint engineering teams, right? You think about an engineer, they take pride in seeing the value of their work being used by customers and we can take that from two to three years to two to three weeks. That's a tremendous thing. Real instant gratification which makes for a happier employee, which makes for less turnover and all of that. Yeah, you got it, yeah. Great. Well Mark and Maroon, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great having you. Great thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of the Cube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.