 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 to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is the senior director primary storage marketing at Dell EMC. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. Direct from Boston. That's right, the hub of the universe. Indeed, well we would say so. So lots of news coming out this morning, yesterday, talk about some of the, I mean if you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid-range storage market in general, sort of lay the foundation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new products fit in with what customers are needing right now. We'll break that into a couple pieces. I believe that the mid-range of the storage market is the most competitive. There are the most players, there are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market, about 58% or so. So that attracts a lot of investment and competition. So what we announced today was the Dell EMC Unity XT series. And that built on all the momentum and the success we had with Unity, which we actually announced basically at the same conference three years ago. So we've sold 40,000 systems. Good, now we're the market leader. And the first part is the external storage market, its decline continues to be exaggerated. One of the analyst firms predicted it wasn't going to grow at all last year. Well, it grew 16% and actually grew $3 billion. It's with Unity, its original design points, like those sort of day one engineering principles, were really around a couple things. One was a true unified architecture, being able to do block storage, file storage and VMware vVol's that was built in, not bolted on, like no gateways, no extra window licensing, and no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity, and making it easy for a customer to install, easy for customer to manage, use a customer to use, remotely manage. And then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own, like not even to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward. And the engineering challenge that we took on with the XT was in a lot of mid-range systems, especially those that have an active, passive architecture design, it's hard to do everything at once. Process application data, run data reduction, run data services like snapshots or replications, all without significantly impacting performance. In a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say, okay, if you want performance, turn this function off. It was that challenge that our engineers took on, and that's where we came up with no compromise mid-range storage, and that's Unity XT. Yeah, Sean, it's really interesting. I could probably do a history lesson on some of this space. I mean, think back to our early days when we were first at EMC, it was like, oh, the data general product line, getting merged in, very competitive landscape, as you said. Most companies had multiple solutions. Unity, in the name of it, was to talk about Dell and EMC coming together. But what I want you to comment on is, there was often, okay, somebody came out with a new idea, and they sold that as a product, and then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happen again, and again, and again, in the storage market. What are some of those key drivers as to what customers look for, how you differentiate yourself? Are we past that product feature churn? Are we in the platform phase now? We always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these, but there's a reason why we still have storage arrays, despite the fact that it's been nibbled at by some of the other cloud and hyper-converged type of applications. Yeah, I'll answer that a couple of ways. In that, especially in the mid-range, our customers expect the system to do everything. It has to do everything well. It doesn't get to be specialized, because for a lot of our customers, it is the IT infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything, and one feature isn't really going to break through anymore. The architectures, the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening, well, the new competitor has to start at ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of it. The second thing I would say is it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud IQ. It's a storage monitoring and analytics platform that you can really, you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal. And if you want to be, of course you can, but you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, PowerMax, SC, ExtremeIO. Today we announced Connectrix support for sandwiching and VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, as well as making it smarter. So it's hard to have one feature break through when you need the first 10 to even get in the game. Well, as you said, for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And so how do you manage expectations and how do you work with your customers maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do? Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love them because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. But yeah, there are different architectures have different systems. PowerMax is an enterprise high-end resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a $10,000 price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that want all these high-end features like an end-to-end NVMe implementation. Well, that's actually why we have PowerMax. So you don't want to build another PowerMax with Unity. And so while the new Unity XT, it is NVMe ready and that'll give us a performance boost. We're balancing the benefits of NVMe with the economics and the price point that come with it. All right, so Sean, talk about from the user standpoint, we've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember it used to be Contest. It's like, all right, well, you know, bring in the kids and see how fast they can go through the wizard or, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure should just be a button you press in. I mean, heck, cloud, it just kind of does it. When we look at the mid-range, you know, where are we in that, you know, management? You talked about cloud IQ. You know, how do we measure and how do customers look at, you know, how invisible their infrastructure is? Yeah, I think every, I don't think any marketing person worth a salt would say, my product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity. But I think it's, we're evolving. And again, it's that outside-the-box experience. Now, the element manager Unisphere for Unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VMware tools? How do we plug in, how do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansible? Again, it's moving the storage management out of storage. You know, Stu, remember 20 years ago we helped create the concept of a storage admin. Well, things are coming full circle and except for the biggest companies, you know, that it's becoming the VMware admin that wants to manage the whole environment. Okay, I wonder if you can walk us up the stack a little bit, you know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new applications, you're talking about AI and ML. What's the application space that's the sweet spot for Unity and, you know, you mentioned kind of containerization in there, you know, cloud native, how much does that tie into the mid-range today? Yeah, I think it goes back to that all of the above. It's some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of workloads to the cloud, whether it be cloud tiering or running disaster recovery as a service. Where you know you need the replication, you just don't want to pay for and manage and own that second site in the cloud. We'll do that as a service. So I think it's, again, it goes back to that being able to do everything. And with the rise of the internet of things, with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, there are just more uses for data and data continues to be the lifeblood of your business. But you need the foundation, you need the performance. And with XT, it's now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression and deduplication. With XT, that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so that the system doesn't have a ton of overhead. And you need multiple paths to the cloud for those customers that already have workloads in the cloud. Know they're going to go there in the next 12 months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future-proof them across all boards. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them, but then you get more advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts, the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated. Analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't going to grow, it grew 16%. Why are they getting it wrong? And also, what do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not sure they're getting it wrong. They may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers are using data. What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there's a lot of space for both best-of-breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like hyperconverged. It's not an or conversation. It's an and conversation. And one of the things that I love working about Dell Technologies is we have the and. You know, for us, it's not one or the other and that's all we can sell. We have the and and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over 80% of our customers have both. So Sean, you mentioned working for Dell Technologies. There are a couple of people that have been at this show for a while. They're like, boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit inside there. You know, Dell EMC, you got still a storage company. There's still EMC in the name, isn't there? Very much so. We wouldn't be spending all this time in R&D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our storage sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments if you're not committed to storage. We struggled for a while. We were losing share for a while, but that ship has turned. For the last four quarters, we've grown market share and revenue. We're a pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote and that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. It is a much younger workforce and a workforce that wants to work in different ways, collaborate in different ways. How are you personally dealing with that, with your team, maybe a dispersed team? How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? You know, I, maybe I can't write for the Harvard business or anything like that. For me personally, this is my approach. This is one guy's opinion. For me, it's about people. You want to manage the project, not the people. I expect and I trust my staff and they range from 22 to 62 to be adults and to get the job done. And whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'clock or Tuesday at nine o'clock, if it's due Wednesday, I'm going to trust them to get it done. So it, there's a little of professionalism. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding and flexibility, but I participate in that change too. I don't want to miss my kid's game and I want to make sure I can bring my daughter to the dentist. So I think it's for the best because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see, and again, I didn't write for the Harvard business review, a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think it's that far away. Well, a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's just sort of get your work done and do what you need to do. So I love it because then we come back to being more, it's even more about a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually a reinforcing cycle, what I found. And that's good for business. That's good for the bottom line. Employees, you'll pay for it. You'll pay for Harvard business review. I think I should. So Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show, give them a big, give them a flavor about what's happening from a mid-range store and around the environment here and tell us how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and Pro Basketball Hall of Fame in the sections in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports guy you are. Not enough is the answer to that first question. Quite simply, the best mid-range storage just got better. Now the market leader, when all the advantages we have in Unity, we just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, our customers are going to love what we're bringing forward. And I think it's our sales guys are going to find it much easier to sell. So we're thrilled with today's announcements. We're thrilled with where the market places. We're thrilled with our market position and the best is yet to come. Well, we were thrilled to have you on theCUBE. So thank you so much for coming on. That's always a pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage from Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.