 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE here in Las Vegas at the Sands Convention Center for EMC World 2016. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Gracely. Love when we can bring in some of the people that have been behind the scenes, making stuff work for many years and be able to tell their story on the program. Happy to have on for the first time, Bob Womback, who is Vice President of Marketing with VCE, which is now the EMC Converged Platform Division. Bob, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stu. Brian, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, so, I mean, Brian and I have known you for many years, and I was saying, Bob, why haven't we had you on the program? And it's because, well, you used to bring over Michael Capellis, Praveen, the former CEO. And now, we've kind of upped our game and we're bringing you on the program. For those that haven't met you, please introduce yourself to the audience. Give us a little bit about your background and your role inside EMC. Sure, so, Bob Womback, I've been with VCE since the beginning and had a variety of roles. I was a former EMC-er, and before EMC, about 20 years in high tech, primarily in system architecture on the design side. So, more recent in my career, moving over to the marketing side and wearing a lot of different hats, and it's been a great, great journey growing up with VCE. Yeah, so, right, Bob, I remember when I was back at EMC when the allocadia stuff started, talked to you about some of the architectures, because I knew the server side pretty well, and there's things that we've heard over and over over the years. So, it seems like not a week goes by. I'm sure you've heard VCE's dead, the relationship with Cisco, obviously is falling apart. The latest, of course, so bring us up to speed. Where are we with kind of VCE as a business and the Cisco relationship? So, first, I used to cut those out. We had a bulletin board, where we would actually post all of the rumors of our demise. Yeah, follow them like Bill Belichick, right? Right, and you know, I think what we always felt good about was nobody was ever criticizing what we were trying to do, what we were doing for customers, this journey we really were on together with our customers about how to do IT better. It was more about the longevity of Cisco, the relationship between EMC and Cisco, and those were pretty hard, you know, for customers to understand, a customer a bit like, well, tell me what is going on with Cisco and EMC? And from our perspective, it was always pretty easy. It was like, let's ask John Chambers, let's ask Joe Tucci. So, I think we've always felt we've had really strong backing from both of them. Chuck Robbins has been very committed, so we have, we've built up a very powerful franchise with the V-Block. Even though we've broadened our portfolio, V-Block remains central to a lot of our largest customers. It's our biggest business. And then if you look on the networking side, Cisco networking runs throughout all of our infrastructure. So, even as we build up, you know, the VXRAC business, which is off to a nice start, that's all Cisco networking as well. So it's, you know, it's been great for Cisco, great for EMC, great for us, and we're continuing to partner very closely with Cisco. Great. So, in the last earnings, I believe I heard that you guys are on a $3 billion run rate, so first of all, congratulations on that. Thank you. The product line and how you align to, you know, what you're selling, you know, it's changed a lot over the last few years. You can tell me, you know, what are the conversations you're having with customers? Why do they turn to your group and, you know, give us some insight into some of those customers? Yeah, I think that one thing customers are trying to do is they're trying to understand where is the industry going. Everybody has in common, we're being asked to be far more agile. That's kind of like the number one driver. At the same time, how do you be more agile when your budgets are about the same? So the theme of, I need to simplify things because what I know is my biggest expense is my people and my people are frequently doing things that don't really look like they're helping the business. They're trying to keep the lights on. So by simplification, a lot of that has to do with new technology advances using technology and more intelligent ways to increase productivity, but it's also changing the way we do things. There's this, you know, the customers now are really latching on to don't build what you can buy. And that I think has been propelling a lot of our growth because we offer the obvious simplification of why purchase separately servers, networking, storage, and then all the hassle of bringing that stuff together, integrating it, making it interoperable, and then curating that over the lifecycle when VC can do that for you. And as people look to move more to software-defined storage models and software-defined infrastructure based upon hyper-converged technologies, the same philosophy takes hold. Do you really want to take your servers, figure out what operating systems you're going to put on, and then build software-defined storage and hyper-converged on that, and then manage that separately, or do you want to have that done for you? And people increasingly want infrastructure as a service, and that's something we do very well today. And, you know, looking forward, I think we'll see more of the platform as a service as people look for. I don't want to deal with the management orchestration, you know, how I have to plan for mesos or Kubernetes or, you know, open stack, whatever it is I'm doing, I really want that stuff to just happen for me. Yeah, Michael Dell made a mention in the keynote. You know, the whole idea of simplifying a customer's buying process has always been super-passionate for him, was how his whole company was built. The EMC obviously shares a lot of those same philosophies, but it goes much beyond day one. You guys have had customers for a long time, repeat customers, give us a sense of, what is that ongoing relationship with VCE in terms of how you help maintain things for customers? How do you, you know, where are you taking friction out of the system for customers on an ongoing basis? It's a great question, and back to your Dell analogy, Dell has an incredible supply chain. I mean, they know how to make procurement incredibly simple down to, you know, knowing what country you're living, what day of the year it is, what color might be more appealing to you. They really understand the things that will make it easier for a customer to buy, compel customer to buy things, and then delivering a really high quality product. For us, we have that same level of intimacy in the data center, understanding what goes on in a data center. It's not so much, you know, predicated on the technology, but it's taking technology and understanding how these things go together. And when you find things that are complex, things that are error prone, things that are very, you know, manual, labor intensive, how do you standardize those? And then once you standardize those and take the variance out of it, how do you automate those to take the human error out of it? And that's really the journey that we've been on. So many of our best ideas have really come from our customers. You know, you, you know, they've been, they've been sort of leading this. It's, if we're all doing the same thing in our data center, it means it's an opportunity for you to figure out how to put this in software to automate it for us. That's really where our vision software came from. It was largely driven by customers having this, this consistent information, but it's all, it lives in one system. How do I pull it out of here? And that's really where we get some of our, you know, best ideas is just listening to customers talk about what's challenging for them. We have a term we use at Wikibon. We call it true private cloud. We've done some forecasts. We really think that over a long period of time, the next six to eight, 10 years, we're going to see a lot of those, you know, sort of operational inefficiencies or just repeatability, get pushed back with vendors driving it into your products. You guys obviously sound like you're ahead of that curve. You're already seeing that trend and you're trying to build it in and make it something that every customer can take advantage of. Yeah, I think, you know, in hindsight, everything's 2020. I mean, I remember when, back in 2011 in Wikibon, we were plastering Wikibon all over because you guys were basically claiming that, you know, by 2020, most infrastructure was going to be delivered, converged, which sounded wild at the time, right? I mean, it sounded absolutely wild, but we're like, look, these guys, these guys believe in what we're doing. And we are seeing that come true. And more, as you look at customers now trying to set up environments, whether it's DevOps environments or application development environments, they're using new technologies, but there's not a lot of skills. So they bring in people and they build up a pilot and they get it to work. And then it doesn't, maybe it doesn't do something that, you know, quite the way they want it. And they're trying to, well, how do I rebuild it? And it wasn't built. It wasn't built to be sustained. It wasn't built to be augmented and evolved over time. The people that did it are in high demand, so they go off somewhere and the customers are finding that even using some of this new stuff that's supposed to be an easy way to develop is actually hard. So I think you're absolutely right. I really think this is a trend and this idea of convergence has to work up the stack. So Bob, I'm wondering if you can comment on what's holding customers back. I remember back in the early days, it was just like, I have a storage budget, I have a server budget, you know, I have a network budget and just aligning that to buy something was difficult. You talked about all these new technologies coming in. You know, what's stopping IT from, you know, going faster and being more agile? I think it's a combination of things. Change is always a hard thing. And I'll tell you what I've noticed is at a certain scale of a company size, you can always peel off a few people to go try something new, all right? And that's how we got our start in a lot of the big global enterprises. They're just like, okay, I'll buy a VBlock system and see how it works. And they weren't really committed to the idea. It was more to compare it to what else they were doing. And it's like, wow, this stuff is really great. And now they start moving other things on it. If you're a smaller company, it's really hard. You've got this year I buy servers, next year I buy networking, the next year I buy storage. So they've got financial barriers, they've got organizational barriers, maybe silos, maybe you need consensus from everybody. So there are a lot of reasons why it's difficult. I think that what is moving customers now to embrace it more aggressively is they are seeing a willingness on the part of the business to go around IT, shadow IT budgets, either moving off into the public cloud, where maybe they're getting some of the agility, but they're not getting the service levels they need, the data sovereignty and transparency. So this I think is encouraging a lot of IT people to say, I can't just do the status quo. Hyperconverged is, I also think, going to be very helpful for customers who need a lower starting entry price. It's a small fraction of what you, if you think about a V-block, where you're starting list prices is up $800,000 or more, where now you come down into the low, several hundred thousands, 300,000 for a hyperconverged VXRack system, and that makes a big difference. And the appliances are also for point projects. They're a great solution. So I think the early adopters, they were on early. The early mainstream, they were on fairly early. Once you start getting into the late mainstream and some of the laggards, change becomes very difficult for those people. And I think you can't ignore the fact that some customers are going to be faced with greater internal barriers than other customers. And then it's just how people feel about adopting new things. It's not new anymore, though. It's pretty much mainstream now. Yeah, so some of the early V-blocks, some of the feedback was, hey, we're not used to, like you said, we're not used to buying storage and compute in the same cycles or depreciation, things like that. You guys have worked through a lot of those issues. Your processes have gotten more flexible. I mean, if you went to a customer today, is there any reason you couldn't have an all VCE data center? I mean, are there any other big barriers or is that something that people are starting to feel comfortable with? No, I think we have a lot of all VCE data centers already and by all VCE, it doesn't necessarily, they've all standardized on X86. There are a lot of customers that have, but we have customers where they'll run their mainframe, right? They have a mainframe and they're running the storage off of a VMAX that's on a V-block. So it's very common now for customers to say we're really all in on this because if you do a great job on part of your infrastructure, let's say you take half of your infrastructure and you make it three times as good, right? Well, any further improvements on that are really dwarfed by the mess that's in the 50% that you've had in touch. So it really becomes something where customers tend to more go all in. I mean, that's really what's driven our growth has been repeat business by customers. So Bob, we've seen great expansion in the portfolio. You've got the blocks, the racks, the appliances. You talked about some cool new technologies. We look forward, show us a little leg from a roadmap standpoint. What do we expect to see from the Converged Platform Division over the next year? I think what you're going to see and the challenge to do is really when you, the reason there's a portfolio is because different use cases are best served by different types of infrastructure. So blocks, very, very good for traditional workloads. If you think about some of the advanced business continuity, disaster recovery capabilities that have evolved in blocks over times, this is what really runs a lot of international commerce today, right? When you go swipe a credit card, a lot of things that you do are dependent upon blocks technologies. Racks are catching up in a lot of areas both for traditional workloads. And I think you'll see them be the mainstay of these new cloud native applications and workloads which are going to eventually overtake the traditional workloads. So the challenge for us is to simplify the story and then simplify operating a data center as the portfolio becomes more complex. So we're at today where we have a VX rack where you can have different node personas. One, the flex for multi-hypervisor heterogeneous environments, SDDC for VMware specific. Stay tuned tomorrow for a big announcement on cloud native but allowing customers to have a very flexible infrastructure where you can have all of these things and even maybe reconstitute things, reconfigure over time under single management. That's really a longer term journey but that's where we're headed because today, how you manage a cloud native environment is actually different and it's a good thing that is different from how we manage, say an enterprise hybrid cloud because there's really a lot of heavy lifting and brute force involved in managing an enterprise hybrid cloud that has a lot of different traditional applications and we can simplify things a lot in the native hybrid cloud. So it's again, it's this turn of the crank doing some, I would say revolutionary stuff up in the upper layers where people want to buy a platform as a service where it's not just a great developer experience but it's a phenomenal operations experience as well. All right, well Bob Lomback from VCE, the EMC Converge Platforms Vision. Appreciate you sharing with us kind of the updates and where things are going forward. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. It's always fun.