 Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE here at VMworld 2016. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my guest host, Keith Townsend. Happy to dig into this session to some of the happenings in cloud. And for that segment, welcoming back to the program, Peter Cutts, who's the Vice President of Global Solutions inside the EMC Converged Platform and Solutions Division, or it's EMC-CPSD now. EMC always changing around the acronyms, moving things around. We talked to Chad this morning, but thanks, Peter, for joining us. Thank you for having me. And of course, if we can't put an acronym on it and square it, then, you know, we don't have something. All right, speaking of acronyms, your group, the main two things you have, it's EHC and NHC. Give us the update on kind of what those are, the announcements you had this week and what you're talking to customers about. Great, so exciting stuff. I mean, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, EHC, we always had to throw the acronym out, but from a standpoint of updates, what's been really exciting is, look, it's a turnkey IS platform. It's helped customers accelerate the VRealize suite, converged complete turnkey IS with life cycle for apps, all that stuff. It's been great, phenomenal. Customer adoption, as Chad mentions, it's growing like crazy in the announcement. We kind of said 178% growth, you know, really just screaming. The key is the updates are really focusing on our customer's needs. So we've been interviewing and doing a lot of agile fashion development with the developers and line of business owners in our customers and just having them help us refine that feature. So it's been really great and, you know, so we're really focused on a couple things. More sites, simpler and literally allowing, you know, compliance across the board, encryption on demand, cross cloud encryption, those type of things all kind of been the fundamentals of it. So adding more to it while continuing to make sure it's rock solid and delivering what our customers need. Okay, so the EHC being infrastructure as a service, it might be tough, I would think, to find, you know, what is that killer use case? What's the thing that's bringing customers to EMC, deploying that solution? What's the case, some of the key drivers there? It's really a couple things. So turnkey, right, so I need this, you know, to be life-cycled, managed, supported from a single organization, a single kind of entity. Because again, you know, the piece parts and kind of assembling it is a way to do it, but a lot of our customers are saying, I want to focus on, you know, my value, which is building banking applications or manufacturing or other pieces. So killer use cases, true IT transformation and automation. So being able to deliver a complex application with micro segmentation, firewall rules, all without having to have human beings touch all of those pieces, it's all automation, it's all self-service. So self-service is the key. How are the business units developers in line of business owners? Yeah, so Peter, it's interesting, you know, cloud was one of the major focuses that Pat talked about in the keynote on Monday. He even looked out and said, you know, public cloud, you know, five years from now is kind of that transition point. You know, is that scary for some infrastructure players or, you know, because, you know, I said, if you think of EMC as a storage company, it's like, if I say, gosh, that could be a third or half of my available market would be gone if I'm not a player. How are you making sure the DMC stays relevant and important in that space? So I think a couple of different ways. You know, when you look at it from a standpoint of public and private cloud and the comments that Pat made is very salient, which is like, hey, it's not going to happen overnight, but there's a lot of things that are well placed there. And I think when you see some of the stuff that we do with Virtustream and other things that are coming up, you'll see that we'll also have a play there. But again, public cloud is absolutely part of the enterprise hybrid cloud. That's why we call it hybrid. Chad says, you know, we get about a B plus right now. I think by the end of the year we'll be approaching our A minus. And I think next year we'll really hammer it into, you know, A plus territory because the use cases, the monitoring and the capabilities that we provide are differentiated, especially across the, especially this multi-site addition, compliance, things that are important. There's still important way of managing that and having IT policy around it. So making that easy is really part of our job. So whether it's public, private, we got to help. So talking about EAC, is this an on claim within the data center or is this a integrated solution in an existing VMware vSphere environment? If I'm a customer, do I have to manage this separately for my existing environment or are there hooks into my existing data center? Well, so there's a couple of different ways. A lot of times the way customers are approaching it is they're starting a net new project because it's totally transformational. Like nobody ever touches a storage array again, except for during the first initial setup to create pools. Nobody touches the IP networks anymore. They don't log on to switches to a provision. So it's a little bit different. And so a lot of customers start in like a new project, but what's powerful are some of the tools that we brought to bear that says we can take a virtualized, complex, multi-tiered application and import it into the new, you know, kind of EHCV realized power infrastructure and apply all of the cloud semantics we've built so that you can just do that in a very easy fashion. So I would say that, you know, a lot of customers are managing it separately because it's a different way of doing business and doing IT. Right, if you're going to provide complete self-service, you've really got to make sure that you have everything set up to make sure you allow that. So if I bring in the EHC, or, you know, tell me from customer experience, are customers bringing in EHC and then finding that they're migrating processes and workloads from their traditional infrastructure into EHC? Absolutely, absolutely. So the key piece of what we built of being able to ingest workloads and apply all these semantics, because actually moving a virtualized workload out of the box into cloud is not like something that just happens. And to apply all these different new policies and provisioning policies and encryption on demand and all these different features self-service, you've got to have an ingest capability that allows you to apply all that in a simple way. And so that's what we've helped customers do is really onboard workloads and pull them in fast and easy. So some of the, you know, networking pieces are pretty critical, especially if you talk about, you know, hooks into multiple clouds. My understanding is you've got NSX in there in the EHC piece, not something I'd heard too much about before this week. Maybe you can unpack that a little for us. Well, so I think there's a couple of different reasons people are using NSX. One of them is the obvious kind of micro segmentation you saw where like why is internet traffic hitting the database, right, directly? That was a cool demo from CrossCon, but even in the data center, that's something where, you know, intrusion can now happen inside the data center. So micro segmentation, being able to isolate, you know, what talks to what is really important, that's built in, right? So part of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, you know, kind of build structure says we support that. Then you pull in some of our partners like Palo Alto and Infoblox, we've actually built kind of modules that allow you to ingest those and put those into your environment seamlessly and easily. And so things like firewall rules and being able to, you know, provision on demand, all again, self-service by policy, that's all included in the automation. Because if you don't really add that, if it still takes two weeks to get a firewall rule, you're not really moving things faster, you're not creating that agility that you need to with the self-service approach. So EHC has been a strong onboard ramp to services like Amazon, Hybrid Cloud. Exciting announcements from Pat yesterday or CrossCloud. How does CrossCloud fit into the EHC roadmap? Well, I think, you know, from the standpoint again of helping our customers on the journey of making sure that if they do have multiple clouds, you know, they have the freedom to move to protect. So building in that automation, I mean, part of our work is to actually make sure that the provisioning processes for EHC are seamless to the public cloud, you know, other public clouds that are out there. And so in this case with CrossCloud, I would expect us to be able to leverage that and we're partnering with obviously VMware to make sure that we have the capability to either take a workload off, back on premise, if that's a customer wants to do. I've talked to a lot who want to do that. They start out in the public cloud and they're like, yeah, you know what, I'd really like to bring it in. These are things that will help make that easier, I think, and also, you know, make things more secure and manageable. So speaking of secure and manageable, so I have an EHC, I have CrossCloud. Let's tell you another part of my data center. Is there an integration path between the NSX that exists in EHC and the NSX that exists in the other part of my data center? Yes, absolutely. I think that the beauty of NSX and the software defined networking is it really does allow you to bridge across the data center and provide that. So absolutely, no, and again, that goes out to public clouds, anywhere you use it, it allows for that. So absolutely. All right, Peter, let's talk a little bit about NHC then. Can you kind of compare and contrast kind of the customer set, you know, the business drivers, you know, what's differentiating that and, you know, are there paths between those two? There are, and one of the things you see, especially when you look at kind of the solutions, you know, EHC is really all about, you know, the complete automation and self-service nature of stack-based application development, as well as traditional applications like Oracle SQL, you know, branded apps that need complete automation, life-cycling automated, you don't want to have people patching things anymore, you know, all of that stuff gets kind of worked into it. From a standpoint of the value it provides, it's really returning back, you know, what I would call, you know, savings. You know, some of our customers that you guys have obviously interviewed and talked to, you know, 25% of savings and cost, right? That's a huge deal, right, out of EHC. But then there's this other piece of the business, which is, you know, I need to have agility that is completely focused on, you know, what we call the green field, however you want to look at it, it's really all about cloud native. And when you get into cloud native, one of the things that's powerful about native hybrid cloud, we've basically taken a similar but different approach to the enterprise hybrid cloud and we've taken basically the package of turnkey paths and really built it so that customers can realize an actual platform that allows you to deliver that paths experience and that developer experience literally turnkey and lifecycle it. Because again, just because you're in, you know, mode two or platform three or in cloud native, you're in a situation where you still have infrastructure that's underneath as Gil just mentioned, right? You got to lifecycle that. Pivotal cloud foundry releases once a quarter. You got to make sure that you continue to update that and then you've got to have an operations panel that allows people to actually talk from the applications team to the operations team. So, and we've built all that and given that kind of power to the customer. So, when customers look at it, it's really a two pronged approach where I can actually automate, take cost out and invest in basically cloud native apps. And by the way, the cloud native apps still need to talk to the systems of record. So you got to have both. And it's a really powerful, you know, kind of combination for customers. All right, so Peter, want to give you the final word, you know, talking to lots of customers at the show. Any kind of, you know, really fun or interesting or, you know, surprising stories that you've heard that you can share with the audience? I think the stories that were interesting to me, other than of course, when Chad and I did the analyst thing and I got the mic twice, I think it was out of that. No, it's funny, that's a story. He wrestled it from them. I wrestled it from them, but it was, you know. No, from a standpoint of customers, I've just been walking around, I was able to talk to some of our customers here and the excitement that they're hearing about kind of that transformation and you can hear it across the board with now the new Dell announcement out today as well as, you know, people are shifting to cloud, people are getting this, people are starting to see this cloud-native development, people are getting NHC and EHC more and they're seeing that they can really start to provide services with better agility and they can do it all with a self-service nature but still keep the compliance and control of what they need to do and again, that's what we're trying to do and deliver to them every day. All right. Peter Cutts really appreciate the updates on everything happening in the Converge platform and Solution Division inside EMC. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from BM World 2016. You're watching theCUBE.