 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017, our eighth year coverage with theCUBE, formerly EMC World, now Dell EMC World. This is theCUBE's coverage, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillan. Our next two guests are Crepa Nero, who's the Senior Vice President General Manager of the mid-range and entry storage solutions at Dell EMC. And if you're Luke at GUDelly, VP of Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you guys. Likewise, thanks for having us. So give us the update, we're hearing a ton of stories because the top story is obviously the combination, merger, acquisition, whatever side you want to call it, choir two. But all good, good stories. I mean, some speed bumps, little bumps along the way, but nothing horrific, great stories. Synergies was the word we've been searing. So you got to have some great growth with the Dell scale, entry level touch point, growth, high end, get more entry level. Give us the update. Yeah, absolutely. So again, first and foremost, I wanted to call out to all our customers and partners that are critical for the success that we've seen, no doubt. And actually we've committed better together going forth, which is why you saw two of our launches both on the uni line and the SC line, which historically were part of EMC and Dell respectively prior. And main point is a lot of the feedback we got from customers was, they really respected and appreciate our customer choice first philosophy, but also understanding that there's clear demarcation where each of those technologies play in their sweet spot as well. How are you demarcating them? Absolutely. So traditionally, pre-EMC acquisition, what we actually ended up determining is when you defined the mid-range markets that we were looking at, it was more in the upper range, upper level of it, where we're driving value from a technology aspect and with our uni products that we're focusing heavily into the all-flash market segment too, which is one of the major refreshes we did here. And then in the Dell storage, which is very server affinity, a direct attached construct at the entry through the lower end of the mid-range band, it was actually some very clear slim lanes of where each of the respective products played to their strengths as well. And so as a result of that, we've really taken that to heart with a hybrid offering on the SC side to get your economics, and again, effectively, our 10 cents per gig is David Gould at Outline on Monday, as far as the most affordable hybrid solution there on the market. And then you go to the upper premium level of value capability with all-flash to deal with your performance workloads and other characteristics. Dear Luca, talk about the overlap because we addressed that with Gould, hit him head on with that. Turns out, not a lot of overlap, but as you guys come together with, we just had Toshiba on this earlier, flash is obviously a big part of the success. Getting those price points down after the entry mid-range, enabling that kind of performance and cost is key. But as you look at the product portfolio, where are the areas you guys are doubling down on and where's kind of some of the overlap being taken care of, if any? Yeah, so let me tell you, the first things that is very important and we have in this show is the reaffirmation of investment in the two product. So we have a panel, actually yesterday, we also have a panel with 120 customers, divide 50% between legacy, Airtage Dell, Airtage EMC customer, and the amazing things there was the flash adoption is very strong, but also they want to have economic, also for hybrid, it's very strong. So this is really fit our two product. Because if you remember, compelling has been created as the best storage for data progression. And we double down on Unity now that we announced a completely full line of Unity product today, right? So and the other things on the SC line, we reaffirmed the completion of the family with the new 50-20, that provide more performance, more capacity, much more limits, and will drive our 40-20 customer to a very new product. So yes, some people before, they think, oh, these guys, they have a lot of overlap, but actually we have two amazing product that they play together in this market. And they talk about the customer dynamic because that's interesting about that, almost the 50-50 split as you mentioned. They got to be, I mean, not, I mean, their indifference is probably, they probably like bring on the better product because I'm not, I mean, I have not hearing any revolts, right? And no one's really revolting. Can you just share the perspective of some of the insight that they're telling you about what they're expecting from you guys? So I think it's very, it's very fun to be in this position where we are right now, where we have such a good portfolio of product where customer, company, people inside of our company start to learn how this product works, right? Because you sell what you know, right? Or you use what you know. You, people, right? Try to do the same things every day. So we are forced now to look outside of our product and say, you know, we have two products, what is the benefit? And now we sparkle this discussion with the customer. And in any customer we have a, we have before tremendous amount of common customer, right? The customer, they have preference, but now they say, oh, let me an SC customer say, oh, maybe I have a use case for an old flash array with Unity and the SC customer say, oh, maybe now I can run this application on Unity or SC or open up to a different things. What we say is, this is the line I use. We are the top one now because we can solve any use case, right? If you look at our competitors, they try to cover everything with one product, right? You can mix and match. Yes, we can mix and match and we have a very differentiator part between the two. As we said, SC economy, drive economy with the fact that we can have the compression on spinning media, right? Unity optimized for flash. Is there any incompatibility between the two to the two platforms work pretty seamlessly together? Yes, yeah, so let me expand a little further on that. So one of the things we did highlight is part of the all-flash offering for Unity 350 through the 650, the four new entry models. Customers were surprised, you know, and there was some questions on the level of innovation we were driving. A year later, getting a full platform refresh was a very, very big surprise for customers. I typically two years, 18 months of other vendors in view and they're like, you just launched the product last year and you already have a refresh. And we did that because we listened to customer requirements and in the all-flash, the performance is absolutely critical. So the controller upgrade, we went from a Haswell to Broadwell design. We actually added additional core capabilities and memory and all with the architecture built to do an online data and place upgrade that we'll be driving later in the year too. So in the SC5020 that we announced too as a separate product line, two complementing as Priyuk has stated, but the third area that hasn't been necessarily amplified but customers have raved about seeing in the showroom area is our cloud IQ technology, which is actually built off of Cloud Foundry. That's the value of the portfolio of the company and is strategic aligned business and actually it does preemptive and proactive, not only monitoring, but we're taking that from Jeff Boudreau's keynote today, that whole definition of autonomous and self-aware storage, well, in mid-range because of all the use cases and requirements, we're driving that into it and there's actually, we have compatibility between UNI and SC in cloud IQ as that one pane of glass, it's not an element manager, but more to take that value to a whole new level and we're going to continue to drive that level innovation beyond, not just through software, but clearly leveraging better together talent to really solve some key business needs for customers. As David Goulden always says in the queue, it's better to have overlapping holes in the product line. So that's cool you guys got that address and certainly mixing in matches. That's the standard operating procedure these days and a lot of the guys in IT, they know how to do that. The key is does it thread together, so congratulations. The hard question that I want to ask you guys is, this is what everyone wants to know about, we're the customer wins, okay, because at the end of the day, you'd be number one at whatever old category, scoreboard, the scoreboard of customers is what we're looking at. Are you getting more customers? Are they adopting? Are they implementing variety versions? Give us the update on the wins and what is the combination of Dell EMC coming together. What has that done for sales and wins? Yeah, so there's a public blog I posted before Dell EMC world and it's about the one, two punch with mid-range storage. What was the title of that blog post? Basically a one, two punch relative to our mid-range storage and I'll provide you the link and follow-up. I'll look at it right now. The reason we preemptively provided that was the biggest question I would get from customers is which product are you going to choose? And our point was both, right? Both products, the power of the portfolio. We don't need to choose one. And our install based on both those technologies is significant, but in that post I also did quote some of the publicly available IDC data which showed us in our last quarter in Q4 when you compare Q3 to Q4, we actually had double digit quarter growth for both UNI and SE, our primary leaning lines in both the portfolio which actually allowed us to get effectively back into a mid-range market share segment. Now that's for purpose, Phil. That reflects a very positive trend for Dell EMC mid-range storage portfolio. That's correct. According directly from your blog post. That's correct. One, two punch drives mid-range storage momentum. Correct. And it's not only the storage, right? I've been with a very big customer of us. I was telling to an analyst this morning, it's amazing to see the motion of the business that we can do now that we are Dell EMC. So being a private company in one sense allow us to do things, creative things that we didn't do before. So we can actually position not only one product or two product, but the entire portfolio. And as you see, right? With the server business, the affinity that some of these storage they have with the server, we can drive more and more adoption for our customers. Just quickly, how is your channel reacting to all this? Are they fully under board? Do they understand? Are they out there selling both solutions? 100%. We put a lot of investment in our channel and enablement across the mid-range storage products and portfolio as well, because that's the primary motion that we drive as well. And that had allowed us to actually enable them for success, both from education, enablement and clearly proper incentives in play. They've been very well received. The feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. And we've been complimenting that more and more with constant refresh of not only our technology and sharing roadmap delivery so that it can plan ahead, is that story what to use? Mike Amarius Haas and David Gould and the question, they both had the same answers. Good to see them on the same page. But I said, what's where the wins? And they both commented that where there was EMC storage, they bring more Dell in. Where there was Dell, they bring more EMC storage in. Consistent with- Yes, that's what I just described with this customer. The new business motion that we can now propose, like we have a very loyal customer from Erita GMC for example, but now we can offer also server, a software defined on top of that and the store, right? And you can enter from the other one, from the server and position now, a full portfolio of storage. All right, I'm going to ask you a personal question. So let's get your reaction to take your EMC hat off for a second, but your industry participant, individual hat on. What's the biggest surprise from the combination, from your area of expertise and your jobs that you've personally observed with the combination? Customer adoption, technology, technology debt that wasn't there, chaos, mayhem, I mean, what? Yeah, so I'll comment first. I think the, I mean, recognizing the real power of global scale. And what I mean by that is the combined set. So from an organization in R&D investment, being able to have global scale where you have engineering working literally 24 by five, right, based on, in fact, you'll follow the sun model. That's how you're seeing that innovation engine just cranking into high gear. And that was further extended with the power of the supply chain and innovation bringing together has been, in my opinion, has been super powerful, right? Cause a couple of customers had shared with me. It's like my concern is if I go with a startup that may not be in business, where else to the supply chain leverage and the level of innovation, breadth and depth of products. That's a great point. Before we go to your look, I wanted to double comment on that. We're seeing the same thing in the marketplace. A lot of the startups can't get into the storage, pure, I don't mean pure, the pure storage play because scale requirements is now the new barrier to entry, not necessarily the technology. So that's kind of reaffirming. That's why the startups are kind of doing a lot of data protection, whitespace stuff, and the valuations, by the way, are skyrocketing. Go ahead, your comment. Observation that surprised you or didn't surprise you or took you by storm. What is it? I need to say that I'm living a dream in this moment because I think it's a few times in life that you can experience a transformation and you can have the ability actually in my role that I have right now to accelerate this transformation. And it's not the common things to do in a company that they already established. So this shake, this come together, give you more and more opportunities. So I'm so very excited to do what I'm doing and I love it. Injection of the scale and more capabilities is like going to the gym and you're pumped up, you're in shape. Actually, I start to go to the gym after 20 years. It's like a good meal, you're a talent. You can appreciate a good buffet of resource. Dell's got the, is it gourmet? You know, every day I found something new, some product that I didn't know, something that we did, innovation that we have in the company that we can actually use together. It's very, very exciting. And the management teams are pretty solid. I mean, look at, they didn't really just come in and decimate EMC. They essentially, it was truly a combination. Some say that EMC acquired Dell, some say Dell acquired EMC. The fact that that even distinct disgust shows a nice balance in terms of a lot of the EMC at the helm. It's great sales force, great commercial business with Dell. Very well played, I think. You guys feel the same way? I appreciate that, and couldn't agree more. And I think it shows in as you look at business results and even from an employee satisfaction level, we continue to see that being record high, right? Because there's always that incertaining, but actually the interesting piece is people have really been jazzed based on the one, the opportunity ahead. All right, we've done complimenting. Let's get to the critical analysis. What's on the roadmap? A lot. What's coming down the pike? I know you're probably, hell, you do earnings call a lot of stuff, but you guys have been transparent some of the things. What can you say about what's coming out for customers? What can they expect from you guys in the storage? I'll let you look at running the product manager team. He drives that every day. So I have to not say much. Spill it all. Since I'm getting in trouble. You're telling, just spill it all. Yeah, come on. That's the problem. You're living the dream, come on. We have only 20 minutes, so. No, really, as I said, we announced the 50-20, right? We had the 70-20 in August. We are planning to finish the lineup of the new family of SC, for sure. We announced the ability to tear into the cloud. We're going to expand that. Also, we announced a full new set of family of flash unity. So we're going down that trajectory to offer more and more. And we going to be very bold to offer also upgrades from old gen to the new gen and non-destructive upgrade and also online upgrade. So it's a very, very beefy roadmap that we show with our customer in the ADHD section. I need to say, the feedback is tremendous. And to your point at the beginning, what is the ecosystem? How you integrate the thing? You're going to see more and more, for example, the UI, the experience for the customer being the same. So the experience from UI perspective. Simplicity. Simplicity is the new norm. Cloud IQ key, but also going deep in the product to have the same kind of philosophy. Hey, I always say, great business model. Make things super fast, really easy to use and really intuitive. Can't go wrong with that triple threat right there. So that's like, that's what you guys are going on. Absolutely. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the insight and update. Congratulations on the one, two punch and the momentum and success. That's the score where we look at on theCUBE. Our customers adopting it, sharing all the data here inside theCUBE, live in Las Vegas with Dell EMC Rural 2017. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.