 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Hey, welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV where our colleague, John Furrier, likes to say we extract the signal from the noise. That's what we're doing here at Dell EMC World 2017. Live in Las Vegas, along with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls, and we're joined now by Trey Layton, who is the SVP and CTO of the Converged Platforms and Software at Dell EMC. Hi guys, how are you? Good to see you. Thanks for being with us. First off, let's just talk about the show in general. Bigger, better than ever. More attendees, a lot of, I'd say excitement, a lot of good vibe, I think. But from your side of the fence, what are you feeling so far? I could not be more excited about the combination of the companies coming under the umbrella of Dell Technologies because we're finally able to be a true infrastructure company that can address the entire breadth of challenges, problems, infrastructure needs that customers have. I'm a geek at heart, and I love the client side of things. And then we've been doing rough and tough hardcore data center stuff for a long time. And a lot of the things that we're building are having the client in mind in different overarching transformation strategies. And so I'm excited about what we can do from an enterprise side. I'm really excited about tying that into the client side, I think as well. You said breadth and that you think about all the items you got in your toolbox these days. And there is not one slice of the pie that you can't cover. You know, it is very true. And I love the strategy that we have as a company that VMware is a part of the family and virtualization is a very competitive landscape. There's other software stacks out there. There's a partnership with Microsoft. There's a partnership with Red Hat. So we're able to be a very agile company and have broad partnerships that individual businesses may compete from market share. But collaboratively, we as a company in Dell Technologies are able to partner and pursue market share opportunities in a wide landscape of the industry. And really pursuing that as Gartner and IDC report $1.7 trillion of potential spend out there in IT. And we're excited to go after it. It makes our eyes light up, doesn't it? Right. So as we talk digital transformation, a lot of talk about digital transformation about not doing, we had chat on earlier about not doing the things that don't add value. Leave that to the experts. Which brings us to Converged. Can you give us a high level overview of Converged CI versus Hyper, HCI? Hyper Converged? Yeah, absolutely. So Converged infrastructure has been around for quite some time. And you think about in the early days when you would buy components and you would stitch those components together to provide a function and operational outcome for your business and the applications that you're running if you're operating from a customer perspective. Well, there was a lot of complexity and still is today in integrating an array to a compute platform optimized for virtualization with networking and sand fabrics, transporting those communications in a reliable scalable form. CI was a mechanism to abstract the complexity associated with that integration and provide an ongoing operational lifecycle experience in limiting the complexity of managing that outcome. So CI is about productizing the integrations of components that are built by different engineering teams. HCI is really a lot of software development standardized on a Dell compute platform where engineering teams are engineering and codifying the integration on the outset. Instead of building individual components and stitching them together, we're building a product that's designed to function and operate in one way. In the CI space, we used to try, try, try to convince customers ruthless standardization. The more standardization you have, the more repeatability, the lower cost of ownership. We use a number for ratio of spend. Average IT shop spends about 70% of their ongoing IT budget, keeping the lights on. 20% on new software acquisitions, 10% on equipment. I get in trouble for saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. We could give the equipment away and it wouldn't have an impact on the budget. If we can transform the way that you operate the infrastructure and materially impact that 70% side of the ledger, you get to transform the way the business operates and make IT agile for you. So CI gets us on that journey. ACI builds it in. They coexist. It's not one versus the other. They operate in partnership to operate of the workloads that are necessary for your environment. Some applications need the data services of a storage array. Some applications need the simple ease cookie cutter nature of building virtual machines in a very simplistic manner and scaling out the architecture in point and click operations. So let's talk about integration between the two. Is there a use case where a customer would have both CI and HCI within their same data center? Absolutely, it's happening today. So in data center footprint, then you talk edge. So in the data center footprint, there are applications out there, your cash register applications, the applications that run the economy of the business. They require data services that are resident in decades of innovation at EMC and building capabilities to ensure consistent ongoing operation data protection. The Oracle apps, the large red letter business apps that you run in your environment. A lot of them gravitate to needing the features of a storage array. There are applications that you have in your data center that are homegrown to run in an encapsulated virtual machine. HCI is converged infrastructure, packaged in software and hardware combination, optimized from the born in virtualization. And so being able to build virtual machines very easily and scale that infrastructure out are things that customers also need. So utilizing those two infrastructure strategies to support all applications in your data center is vital to, I think, any infrastructure strategy. So let's talk about the edge a little bit. One of the, I think, big concerns of CIOs, CTOs is data growth at the edge as we bring in IoT, big data. How does HCI-CI relate to those challenges? So in our HCI products, we embed cloud storage native to it. So you can actually pick your cloud provider and we'll replicate data sets to that environment for really data protection, data recovery. There are also methodologies in our architecture where you may want to centralize some of the replicated information in a central sense. So if an edge location goes offline, you can very easily replace that piece of infrastructure and replicate it back and get it up and running. You can still do that in the CI landscape as well. We have those architectures. We've been selling edge CR solutions for a long time. We find that in a more traditional manufacturing plant where they have, again, an application that may require a bare metal operating system, not maybe 100% virtualized, needs features, the data services of a storage array, that's where at the edge we would deploy a CI platform. But I would say it's more like 99% of the time HCI, 1% of the time you find a CI requirement. It really depends on the customization required by the app and the data services needed by the app in that deployment at the edge. So let's talk about value to the organization. Where is the value in HCI? Is it only in the cost savings associated with the engineering? What about operations? Oh my gosh, so from an operations perspective, imagine buying a product that's designed to function software and hardware from the ground up in every aspect of how it's engineered. There are operations tools that we put inside of the product to manage how it works and report its health status back to operators. Performing software updates are literally a point and click operation. A lot of times in infrastructure conversations we talk about point and click upgrades. In a large data center, there's a lot of dependencies in upgrading software because you have different products. In an HCI platform, the software is literally all packaged and bundled together and just tremendously simplifies the act of performing updates. And one of the problems that we find in environments is candidly good hygiene related to keeping your infrastructure updated to not the bleeding edge code releases but the latest and greatest most secure software updates to navigate yourself around all the vulnerabilities that inevitably good-minded security professionals find out there. We want to make sure that we keep those systems updated with the most current firmware and operating environments. And HCI platforms engineer all that integration in the software, it makes it a heck of a lot easier. How do you, we've talked about a lot of choices, a lot of options, different kinds of migration paths. I mean, how do you help me get there at the end of the day? I mean, boil it down to maybe what is that basic question that you asked the end user about what their functions are and what their priorities are to help me decide what to do? Yeah, so I would start it at a very high level with any customer and that would be more around their strategy of helping formulate their strategy for infrastructure acquisition. And that's asking them, how much, what are your applications like? How well do you know your environment and your employees? There's a lot, I used to be an IT professional actually in a customer environment and I used to love to tinker with stuff. And a lot of times I would go out and I would put, I would leverage my boss to acquire technologies just so I could tinker. And a lot of technology professionals love to have that latest and greatest technology but they deal with some of the obstacles that you encounter of being on the bleeding edge. So I think one, I would understand what are the skill sets of my organization? What are the priorities of my organization? What are the applications I need to run to support my business? And so when I found that, there are some environments that have custom applications that required a simpler procurement experience, a simpler prescription on how best to integrate. In our portfolio at Dell EMC in the Converged Platform and Solutions Division, we have a Ready portfolio that's designed for build outcomes. So those organizations that want to accelerate the procurement of things that are going to work together, we sell build outcomes in our Ready portfolio. Then on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have architectures that are designed for buy outcomes, literally the integration is packaged and the value proposition is to simplify ongoing operations through life cycle assurances, release code management, ongoing validation that integrations are going to successfully operate. Now we have array based integrations and hyperconverged based integrations in both ends of those spectrums. So the first thing is, where do you fall? Are you a build customer or are you a buy customer? When you find yourself into that spectrum, now let's talk about do the applications require arrays or do the applications lean themselves to be more virtualized, more encapsulated, capable of supporting scale out deployments that lend themselves to more hyperconverged environments. What we'll find a lot of times is organizations have requirements for both. It's trying to figure out what percentages spend, what percentage of infrastructure you want to allocate in both of those use cases and what the skill sets of your organization are to be able to handle the ongoing operations. There's a lot of good IT staffs out there that can handle the ongoing management of infrastructure. Build outcomes are great for those. There's a lot of IT organizations that are scrapped for resources and capability. They want their nights and weekends back. Buy outcomes are great for them. So that's where I would start. Got you. Well, before we let you go, I want to just make sure everybody home understands they're not giving it away. They're not giving the equipment away. It's not really going to happen. That was purely a metaphor, right? Thank you. Not going to happen. It's funny when he said that Michael Dale strolled up to the set to free. Great. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. Appreciate the time. Best of luck the rest of the week. Thank you guys. Have a great show. You bet. Thank you. We continue with our coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017. Live from Las Vegas. More coming up right here on theCUBE. Cool. Thank you.