 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. We are back in Las Vegas. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Lawrence Vartsman. He is the Managing Executive for Technology Transformation Solutions within BCX, as well as Burtis Vernierden. I hope I'm saying that right. I'm the executive for Dell Technologies within BCX. So thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. So big news today, a partnership to revolutionize cloud in South Africa. Tell us a little bit about that. Yes, I think from a BCX perspective, customer base has been looking for a business critical cloud in South Africa for a long time. That's both our corporate enterprise customer base and the public sector customer base. They're looking for 24-7 support by a local partner, but backed by an international player. So we believe that our partnership with Virtus Stream would definitely be a game changer in the South African cloud industry. So what appeal specifically about Virtus Streams? There's a lot of international cloud providers. What specific about Virtus Streams? I think there's two components being the fact that it provides the reliability, the security of a private cloud environment, but it also allows us the flexibility and scalability as well as the economic benefits of a multi-tenant public cloud. So what type of solutions are you looking to offer to your customers as a result of this partnership? So we're going to look at mostly SAP application hosting and Oracle hosting to start off with our offering. And where's the value between what BCX will offer Virtus Virtual Stream to the customer? Are you guys going to manage SAP applications on top of Virtus Stream? Where's their relationship? So BCX has got a number of Tf4 data centers within South Africa, so we have three Tf4 data centers. So we would be providing the facilities to host the application. We also have a big managed services provider in South Africa, so we would be providing some of the managed services on behalf of Virtus Stream as well. So tell us a little bit about the customer base in South Africa, educate us on the market overall. So we've got basically three different types of customers. We've got a big public sector business, as well as large corporate entities, all the listed entities within the country. A huge amount of financial services and insurance, a big amount of retail customers, as well as mining and manufacturing. And then third category is from an economic perspective, a huge amount of smaller SMME and mid-tier market companies. As a group, we've got access to about 15,000 customers which we'll be targeting. So what's the drive for those customers? What specific challenges has BCX solved for them in the past and what new capability will you be able to offer from a business perspective? I think from a past history perspective, BCX is an end-to-end IT company. We provide system integration. We provide data center hosting, cloud business. We recently became part of the Telcom Group. Telcom is the national carrier within South Africa. So we can provide an end-to-end digital solution to our customer base across all our customers. So Bert, as I was wondering if you could just talk to us a little bit about down the road, what you hope we'll be talking about a year from now at the next Dell EMC world or even five years from now. What you hope this partnership will evolve into? Well, we're moving away from cool and just selling boxes into this cloud world. I mean, so thinking about the cloud world, I think everybody's out there with Microsoft and Azure, those type of solutions. But this is a data center. This is an enterprise mission critical type of workload that we can those clients on. So in a year from now, yes, we want to, we're probably going to talk about the first five or six clients that we brought, we got on the cloud, but after that, we expect it to accelerate. It's about providing something new to our clients. And that's what they want. They don't want to pay too much for a proper solution, being mission critical, being performance-based and being pay-as-you-use type of solution. That's what Virtus.com brings and that's what our clients want. Are you, how difficult is it to get your clients to think differently about technology and to get the buy-in that you need to really make this successful? So this journey with Virtus.com started about a year ago and we've been visiting clients, we've been talking to clients, they're excited about what we can do. So they want it in country, okay? So we've been providing many services for a long time. So our credentials in terms of that is not questionable. I mean, it's good, but can we do it there? And with the networks, I mean, sometimes in hosting cloud solutions in Europe or elsewhere, it's a challenge for the clients, okay? But having it local and us being part of the biggest network provider in South Africa, we can provide those services locally and that's what the client wants. They want their data in country, they want to know, they want to be able to touch and feel even though it's a cloud solution, yes. So a year of conversation in country, what have been some of the major hurdles that you guys have had to go through to get this solution in country? Facilities, networking, what have been some of the specific victories? I think, no, okay, we have all the infrastructure, we have the network and we have the facilities. So we had the first two, two or four data centers in Africa for that matter. So there's only three at this point in time, but we are there, so we're ready for that. The discussion with Virtus.Tree, I think it was more about who will provide the service. I mean, because they were looking for a place to provide their services and we changed the discussion to, we will be providing that service on and off and working with them for the last year, I think they've seen what we can do, what we can provide and yes, I mean, that's how the relationship was formed. So this conference has been about digital transformation, adding value. You guys are talking about adding value at this infrastructure layer, allowing customers the freedom to push investments somewhere else. What have been the interesting conversations you're taking away from this conference here in the US that you're going to go back and have conversations with your customers potentially? I think there's a number of, obviously a number of discussions. I mean, the innovation, I mean, it's so exciting to see what's being done. Okay, so my background is more closer to the data center, not the marketing side of the world, but I mean, the innovation that we've seen and in terms of what gets done with the technology, it's probably the first, I mean, what I've seen so far and what's the most interesting from that point of view. I think we've been, we close enough to the technology, but I mean, in terms of what you do with that, it's the next level of interest, I think. So Lawrence, any interesting customer use cases that you've seen here that you're excited to take back home? Well, I think for us, I think it's more about the vertical solutions that you can derive. We've got a big mining and manufacturing customer base, so for us, the IoT solution sets and moving to edge computing, I think is one of the bigger opportunities for us as an organization. Yes, so there's a number of those. We're very excited. Where is the South African customer in terms of having these distinct strategies? As you said, an IoT strategy, a data storage strategy, an internet, an AI strategy. Are they thinking about all these things as holistically as they should be? Is there anything that concerns you that you're seeing? No, I think the customer base is definitely thinking about it. Whether we are at a point where the cloud adoption has happened as quickly as we had anticipated as an organization, probably not. People are definitely buying more on-prem solutions and wanting that security and ability to come and throttle somebody throughout their service delivery doesn't work, so I think that remains key from a South African customer perspective. One of the other things we've heard about is technology as a recruiting and retention tool for companies. We've heard a lot of statistics thrown around about how people will leave jobs if they don't think the technology is all that and CEOs view it as a real way to keep employees happy and engaged and excited to come to work in the morning. Is that as true in South Africa as it is maybe in Silicon Valley and in Texas? To be quite honest, I don't think it's quite there at the moment. I think from a South African perspective, at the moment, companies are sweating a lot of assets, so people not investing that much in that type of rather invest their money in the business critical applications and digitizing the organizations then looking too much at the workspace at the moment, but I think it's something that would definitely start changing as people start demanding it. So you guys are offering the capability not previously available in South Africa. How did you see customers using this capability as a competitive advantage across the different industries you serve, mining, industry? It's up to the devices. It's we have an advantage in monitoring the purchase stream, in terms of offering the solution. It will take the client to call it to a new level or a new way to operate the environments and stuff like that. So that's where, that's a client environment. That's a client advantage that will be from little to little. As well as cost savings, I think there's a different cost saving benefit to our customer base as well as performance. When you talk about those two different, and I don't know if they're competing priorities, but there are two pressures that managers face today, keeping the budget, but then also driving optimal performance. Where do customers fit? What are they most concerned about? What are some of the things that's on their minds? I think it's a combination of both. It depends on which sector it sits in at the moment where the cost is a bigger driver from a retail perspective. I think cost is a bigger driver than, and driving down costly innovation of putting in new technologies there. So it's our business to go and make sure that we provide a value proposition to the customer to drive both of these objectives. And where do you think in terms of innovation and talking about, I mean, that we were just saying about the conversations that you're having, the innovation that's taking place and how exciting it is and how we are seeing these industries being completely transformed by AI and IoT. When you think about innovation in the workforce and just in terms of how employees do their jobs every day, what is most exciting to you? I think it's the ability to work from anywhere. I think that's from maybe six, especially being part of the national career that's where our ability and having that connectivity available is there to provide our customers with that solution. So it's most definitely, I think there's a big move in South Africa towards working from anywhere to a bit more working from home. So not many people do that in South Africa? Not too many people in different industries. We definitely take and hold. Definitely starting to take hold, yeah. We ourselves are moving towards a more mobile office environment, doing that ourselves as B6 as well, yeah. So one big thing on IoT in the edge, mining obviously big challenges in the edge, you guys are now teamed up with a huge telecom in South Africa. Where are the opportunities when it comes to the edge and providing new capabilities for that IoT in combination with the offering from virtual scene and BCX? I think it's about the different type of systems that we provide the mine. So we look at the management execution systems for mines, the ERP systems, and looking at new technologies around how do you provide safety underground? So South Africa has a lot of underground mines. How do we provide worker safety underground? And it's about how do we get the performance out of getting the data out quicker and being able to analyze and deal with any issues. Virtus Lawrence, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure having you on the program. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, along with Keith Townsend. We'll be back with more from Dell EMC World just after this. Thank you.