 Everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of Dell World, wall-to-wall coverage. We bring you the signal from the noise, we extract it, we bring it to you, our community. We're here in Austin, Texas, what a great city, a lot of action, a lot of mojo. 5,000 people here at Dell World. This is the second Dell World, and Dell brings its customers in. We're hearing strong messaging around convergence, end-to-end, a real commitment to the PC business, unlike HP, which you really don't hear them talking too much about the PC at these big events because it's talking about them selling off. There's no question that Dell really wants to use its supply chain leverage, its scale, to really drive that into the enterprise, and we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about networking. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon. I'm here with my co-host. And this is Stu Miniman, also with Wikibon.org, lead networking analyst with Wikibon, tracking all the trends in the space, what we call the software-led infrastructure. One of the major disruptors, of course, is SDN. And joining us for this segment is Armagan Ahmad, who's the global VP of networking sales with Dell. I'm sorry, Armagan's actually a CUBE alum from a previous company where he's done networking, so welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. Great, so if we look at networking, it's an exciting time, as we said in the industry, for so long, Cisco's dominated. Some big trends out there are helping to make networking a little bit more sexy and interesting. Things like converged infrastructure or in software to find networking. And with the acquisition of Force 10, Dell had already had networking, but now Dell's a bigger player. Depending on what segment to the market you look at, I think what I heard from your folks is, overall, you're number four in the market, and if you look just at 10 and 40 gig, which is where all the growth is, it's number three in the market. So Dell's definitely, as Dave said, accelerating the growth using its supply chain. So bring us up to speed. What's new with Dell networking and what do you attribute that growth to? Yeah, Dell's networking business has been growing for seven consecutive quarters since we have bought Force 10. It's been a great growth story for us. It's not just networking as a meat to vendor to some of the legacy networking providers. We're looking to change the industry. We find that the industry started off with the first wave, which is more from mainframes, and you had token ring, and you had a lot of vendors who were no longer there. But then it went to the second wave, which is client server, and then that required a three tier type of architecture. And then the third wave, as it comes in with convergence, cloud, and virtualization, we're finding that that's really the differentiation that Dell can provide. You referenced, Stu, that Dell's known for supply chain advantages and value advantages. We're essentially trying to drive our server storage networking in a converged infrastructure format that we call active infrastructure. And that allows networking to become a common denominator, and it actually connects it all together. So we're excited about it. It's been a great growth story for us that actually helps us protect our server and storage business. As you know, some of our competitors are also talking about server storage and networking all together. So we feel we have some clear differentiations. And I've just been here two days and we've been meeting with incredible amount of 5,000 customers here and some great feedback on how our traction is right now. Great, so we've talked a lot with some of your convergent people. So Dario was telling us the momentum there and obviously that packages some of the networking. Where else is Dell being successful in the networking space? Why are customers choosing Dell and what differentiates you in the marketplace? So you know, we take a look at our differentiation to be not just take a me to approach, actually design a different network. So either you can take a pure play network or you can take a converged infrastructure approach. So from a pure play network perspective rather than going through your traditional three tiers and going down to a two tier, one tier. I know a lot of other vendors are doing something similar but we don't take, for example, the big seven foot high chassis based approach, right? So what we did was we actually went to a distributor core architecture which is very dense in terms of ports. So it's got the 128 ports of 10 gig and it's got the 40 gig capability. And now that we've added BLT on top of that and it gives a fault tolerance, we're seeing a good adoption across manufacturing vertical. Public sector is a big adoption for us. Healthcare with our solutions with BYOD on the edge of the network, but also at the data center side on how they can take advantage of it. I would also say, Stu, that our approach of taking virtualization on where a lot of that traffic we know, you and I were talking earlier that it actually does connect East West traffic which is currently about 50% of every server that's out there is getting virtualized and Gartner is predicting that by 2016 it would be 80% of the servers will be virtualized. So you do need to architect the network in a unique way and we feel that our virtual network architecture that that's our framework that allows us to differentiate with the distributor core and then actually take that distributor core fabric and bring it all the way inside our blade server chassis that I'm sure Daria would have talked about with you earlier where you essentially take our blade server which is already, as you know, we're very close to becoming number one for our server market share and how we're actually taking advantage of our blade servers with the M1000E blade server technology and you can now take a ecologic I SCSI array and put that directly into the chassis and then you can now take the Force 10, 10 gig and the 40 gig blade and layer two fully functioning layer two, layer three and put that in and then you have the server that can be managed by Active Systems Manager and that's a big differentiation for us and I'm hearing some good feedback from the customers. No, no, we've seen a good progression so first of all on the architecture standpoint absolutely a differentiator for Dell is if I look at the Cisco's or Juniper's of the world it's really more of a scale up architecture that they've got technologies that do the ethernet fabrics brocade kind of in the same camp too. You guys are really much more of a scale out architecture not only on the network but that really matches with what you've done on the storage with things like ecologic and even on the compute side where Dell's much more likely to sell a thousand smaller servers than some of the big ones. It really just is kind of in your DNA. Sometimes it's a lower margin thing but that fits well and it's actually I think an advantage long term especially in some of the service provider markets and web companies. Yeah, absolutely and service providers and web companies tend to do a lot of business with us with Dell, with our servers and storage but it's also this design is also ready for a lot of headroom. It gives you the capability as software defined networking starts to kick into gear and you start to see a very similar adoption rate to what VMware saw with virtualization and as SDN starting to become more pervasive you're seeing acquisitions that every company around the world is making around building out their software defined networking capability. We're taking an approach to say we've always been standards based but we're saying that it can actually be two fold software defined networks. You can either go through a controller based approach or you can go through a hypervisor based approach. I mean you saw the VMware acquisition of NYSERA in terms of what they did at the hypervisor to actually make it even more important. We're working very closely with a lot of our hypervisor vendors to see how we can try to bridge our distributor core fabric architecture that actually is now as you said going into our blade server chassis with the Ecologic iSCSI as well and we feel that the customers are saying that they want to really focus on their priorities if you're a car manufacturing company you really want to focus on if you can get a car out maybe it comes out in three, four minutes they can get a car out every three minutes at the end of their supply chain and if we can make the server storage and networking more of a consolidated way for them to manage and for them to have resources that can also manage it more effectively. I think that goes a long way with customers. So on the SDN piece though, you're guys in the field selling this product. What's the discussions they're having with customers today? What's the feedback? Are customers ready to listen to that message? And along that same track, how are they changing organizationally? It's been traditionally network guys. Really resonated with me when Michael Dell was saying if you're managing ports and configuring VLANs today you're going to need to change. So what's that reality in the field? Where are customers today? Yeah, so today I'm sure you talk to enough customers as I do and customers still have a lot of their silos with servers, server people responsible for servers and storage people and then you've got the network folks and then they've got the software and application folks. So I think it's starting first with a network decision maker to a server decision maker to a storage decision maker actually coming together themselves and saying, hey, let us actually bring this all together and see if we can bring down the number of resources we need to manage the server and the storage and networking and virtualization. So it starts with that first. And I think a lot of customers are very focused on CIOs that I talked to just today. They're very focused on consolidating that approach so that they can have that one lens view so that then they can talk about workloads and automation versus saying how much VMs you have on your server and can the network traffic handle that or not considering how much is going ESS now? But then software defined networking is also something that I think that comes also with it where they're starting to say that control plane and the data plane discussion, you know all the chip vendors are still very much of a control plane and data plane altogether but eventually as that starts to separate out and you either go through a controller based approach or a hypervisor based approach, I think those customers are starting to have those discussions and we're certainly part of those discussions. So I wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of things. First of all, you sell a lot of stuff to the cloud. You're kind of an arms dealer to the cloud but you've got your own cloud offerings. So talk about how that all works. I mean, what that discussion is like. You guys are big. You play in all these different sectors. We have this competition going on. So share with us how that all shakes out. So from a sales approach perspective, Steve Feliz who is our chief commercial sales officer and we've got a worldwide approach to really going in front of a customer and having a broader discussion with a customer versus just a networking discussion or a server storage discussion. We have a very, very specific advantage in the market where we touch the customer directly. We create a lot of value with the customer and that discussion helps us not only just talk about cloud, actually start with a server storage and networking discussion and say, Mr. Customer, we can actually help you develop your own private cloud because some of the technologies, for example, we just acquired Gale Technologies under Marius Haas's leadership as of the last few weeks and that again helps us move more up towards a subscription based model or a deployment model that a customer can go out and deploy. So as we take our sales, go to market with having a direct relationship with a customer and leveraging that and leveraging our partners to go in and bring the whole ecosystem together, that seems to be our advantage. So the other question I had is, if you look at the networking business, it's just dominated by Cisco, right? We got like two thirds of the marketplace, which is, well, first of all, why is that and how has that been sustainable? And I guess the third, I'm going to ask you three, four questions in one, but is this whole software defined and converged infrastructure, is that going to potentially break the stranglehold that Cisco has on the market share? So as I was telling you too, I think this networking industry in the last 20 years, it's evolving, it's going through a lot of transitions. If you look at the first wave, which was 80s and 90s, it was mainframe based and you saw a lot of companies that were around like CableTron and 3Com and Novell and Digital and Bay Networks and others and then there was a second transition that took place and that was really in the late 90s to 2000s and it was more about the Ethernet standard. But it was done in a client server environment and competitors such as Cisco did really well at it and they owned a good chunk of the market share. But now as there's a third wave that's taking place because that requires a very different way of architecting a network because customers and the data is not flowing north-south anymore. It doesn't go from a client to a server. It's flattening. Yeah, it's flattening, right? So it's actually going virtual and when the servers are talking to each other and users are actually talking within the servers, the network needs to be re-architected and we find that this is the perfect opportunity for Dell to essentially provide a value proposition like virtual network architecture where we say that you can actually create a distributed core architecture from the traditional ways of doing things which are big, big honking chassis that take a lot of power and cooling by the way, right? And a lot of the adoption that we're seeing, for example, some really market leading web tech companies in China, also in the Western US and Europe where they're taking, I mean some of these customers have 60,000 servers in their environment, physical servers. And for them to architect it, using that first wave and second wave is a challenge and when they're deploying it with this distributed core fabric that we have now provided as just a data center network rollout, they find a huge advantage where it's sort of one-fourth the power consumption versus our competitor. It's one-fifth the cost of our competitor in a like for like situation and then it's one-sixth the packaging and the footprint. So just think of the headroom that we're able to give a customer and then we don't stop there. We then take it to a converge fabric when the customers are ready to take their server storage and networking and put it all together and then really get it managed by one single pane of glass management. Yeah. Are you suggesting that you don't need that core capability to compete in the marketplace? I mean people say, ah, well that lacks the core. So you're saying you can compete with that essentially virtual core, distributed core, and replicate the capabilities of the big guys. I think it will take some adoption. We're already finding many major customers, Fortune 500 to 100 to SMB, mid-market type customers adopting this because they, and it's not just in green field environments because we have a standards-based approach, they tend to say that, hey, you know, can it work with their existing infrastructure? Can it work with Cisco? Can it work with Juniper? Do you have similar CLIs or not? And our CLI, Command Line Interface, is very, very similar to, you know, our competitors. So it makes it very easy for them to transition but then as soon as we start talking to them about, you know, the headroom that we would give them and the opportunity they have to then actually get ready for the control plane and data plane discussion which then drives the software-defined networking, that becomes a big differentiation for us. Yeah. So Armagon, we're running out of time here. I do have one last question for you, big data. Okay. So, you know, big data, there's been a little bit of debate in the industry as to, you know, the kind of buffers and architectures and how you put it together. So, you know, what are you seeing in the field? You know, how is networking affected by big data? In, you know, Dell's estimation. Yes, dude, that's a big focus of Dell. You talked to some of our Quest counterparts, you know, where we've brought in our Quest software tools, but it's really, big data is in two poles. I mean, you essentially take a look at the data that's there and how you analyze this data or the data that's there, how do you actually get access to the data in real time and how you communicate that data? So I would say there is a big data analytics that's required, which is more behavior-based analysis that you can look at and see how you can make sense of the big data that you have because of trends where, you know, Stu and Armagan would send emails to each other. It's sort of become the thing of the past and maybe, you know, I'll post on your Facebook and you on mine and Twitter. And how do you know how many people have read it and how do you actually make marketing advantages or, you know, if we were in Europe just last week and talking to a very large hospital chain that does sleep studies and they've got a very large, you can imagine, take six hours to do a sleep study and how much data you actually gather for six hours and how do you get access to that data? How do you move that gigabytes of data with a 10 gig or 40 gig architecture which doesn't slow it down? But then how do you make sense of it as when our quest tools start to come into gear? So I think it's a combination of a network compute and then the business analytics that really helps that and some of the solutions we have there is really phenomenal. Okay, so Armagan, thank you for joining us. Going to bring this interview to a close. This is Stu Miniman. All right, I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at Dell World. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest.