 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We're here in Las Vegas, two sets of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Justin Warren and happy to welcome back to the program, Tom Burns, who is the Senior Vice President of Networking Solutions with Dell EMC. And welcome to the program for the first time, Jason Chan, who's a Senior Director with Global Network Services with Dell. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. It's great to be back. All right, so a lot of discussion about networking. We were talking off-camera. I was the keynote this morning as the guy with the networking background. It was exciting to hear. We're talking about multi-cloud and inter-cloud and all of these things. So we're going to dig a little bit to the SD-WAN space, which is pretty interesting. Tom, help set us up a little bit because I think most people that watch the space, SD-WAN, a lot of growth. VMware made an acquisition. Dell provides a platform for a lot of these. So help tie together where Dell fits into the story. Sure. Well, SD-WAN, as you said, it's a huge market. Well, it's a small market, but growing very quickly. I think I saw something recently, something like 40% annual growth for the next several years and obviously a huge opportunity for both Dell technologies, but also our customers to capitalize on that technologies. If you think of SD-WAN, you have to kind of think about the cloud, workloads, applications, what's happening with all the connected devices, what's happening with us being connected no matter where we are, and what's happened in the data center around software-defined everything, the vision around SD-WAN is to have that same type of impact or that realization now in branch offices and out at the edge and so forth. So really, SD-WAN is the enablement of really creating virtual network functions, the elimination of proprietary hardware and technology, simplifying choice, but then also helping provide all that connectivity and pushing more and more of the, let's say, processing closer to the edge and closer to the branch. Yeah, one of the biggest challenges we have in networking is I think back to things like way and optimization. Well, I probably had the two ends and then, well, I needed to worry about the stuff in between. Now in the networking, a lot of the networking I need to worry about isn't networking I own. If you start talking about some of those endpoints or sites that, you know, to the cloud or to these other environments, what do you hear from customers, Tom, is that they kind of deal with it? Well, that's exactly right. If you think of WAN optimization, then you think about VPN and security, you think about load balancing, all of these various aspects that in which customers had to have, in essence, different boxes with different sets of software taking care of these branch offices or basically the offices were underperforming. They weren't connected enough and employees would be complaining and so forth. What's happening now is that, really, it's elimination of all those proprietary boxes onto a very compute-centric platform similar to what we call our VET 4600 we announced several months ago where basically you're now putting these particular functions on a compute platform. You could carry VPN, security, firewall, obviously WAN optimization, load balancing, lots of different things on a single box and then obviously helping that connect to the rest of the environment in the branch. And customers are really looking forward to the opportunity around the cost savings, agility, flexibility, and then obviously the elimination of proprietary infrastructure. All right, so Tom did a good job of setting things up. Jason, give us the reality, you've actually deployed this stuff, you know, familiar, give our audience first of all a little bit more about your role and then how SD WAN fit into some things that you've done recently. Sure, so I head at Global Network Services for Dell Corporate, so in IT. So if I look at our organization, you know, we partner with Tom's organization from a product perspective, we partner with our support folks as well for when the things don't work and we have to call. But in both cases, we actually wear that customer hat, right? So even though we're an internal organization with Dell, you know, we do have to kind of keep folks honest, keep ourselves honest, but it's also the life cycle, right? That, you know, we help the product teams with feature requests, we help our support folks that, you know, if, you know, Dell is a company of about 140,000 team members. So my team, we manage about 20,000 network devices across 12 global data centers, seven manufacturing locations, 300 branch office locations, and that's like our SD WAN sweet spot. And then we have about 100 partners, supply chain partners, because you know, we also have the luxury of Dell.com running across our network, right? So, you know, at the time's point, relative to SD WAN, you know, we've been looking at the market, I would say, for about two and a half years. So for us, it was never a matter of if, but it was a matter of when, right? And so even before, you know, the VMware acquisition of LL Cloud, again, because I'm going back two and a half years, you know, we've been looking and working with the peer play SD WAN providers in that period of time. We've been working with a lot of carriers. Obviously, you know, we have strong partnership with the carriers, the carriers choose their partnerships, you know, and you kind of see who survives, right? So, you know, in our analysis, we actually were sitting on two viable vendors. VMware bought VeloCloud kind of tip the scale one way, right? So sure enough, you know, you kind of fast forward to where we are partnering with again, Tom's product. He mentioned the VET 4600. Fantastic product just came out in April, end of April. So we are using that as a foundation from a universal CPE is really what we refer to it as to do exactly what Tom was saying, you know, we're virtualizing a lot of network functions on this box. You know, there's, you know, we are getting away from the traditional router, secure, you know, the WAN op, you know, physical boxes for firewalls, all that, right? And we are putting the single box, we're running a VMware hypervisor on top and we're plunking on, you know, VeloCloud is actually virtualized on that box. We're doing virtual firewall on that box. You talked about WAN optimization a little bit earlier, right? And actually what we're seeing, you know, I want to say the issue, the challenge that Dell was having is probably very similar to what other customers have. Yeah. So if we do, you know, my team has a very formal traffic management practice, right? And we were seeing about 70% of the traffic on our network is internet bound, right? So really I bucket into three reasons, right? One is a lot of business segments are moving to SaaS, right? Two is, you know, there's a lot of just internal efforts even from an IT perspective or from a procurement perspective where we're trying to put more on our network, you know, for example, I have a company issued phone, but if I go to any Dell building, you know, I'm doing Wi-Fi, mobile Wi-Fi dialing on it, right? So it's like, we're doing cost shifting, right? But on our infrastructure. And the third is, you know, we have a very, I would say generous acceptable use policy, right? So, you know, you can stream videos, right? Right or wrong, you know, but what we're saying is like if you look at social media, Facebook alone, if you go to a news feed, I mean, just the amount of content. So it's not like we're adding more people, but it's the amount of content that comes on a page is just enormous, right? So we were getting into that, hey, we're being a police versus the enabler for digital transformation, right? And so with SC WAN, we're actually breaking that mold, right? Because we tie that to like our legacy WAN topology, which was, I would say, you know, prevalent in terms of what a lot of companies are doing, where it's heavily based on MPLS, right? So cost MPLS transport, remote branch office locations, they're internet backcalls across those MPLS connections outside, you know, to our regional data centers, where we have our full security stack and our big internet pipes. With our SC WAN solution, we are doing local internet at every location. You know, we are, you know, doing dynamic multi-path, which is a feature of the fellow cloud, you know, offering one of the benefits there. So, you know, we're not sacrificing, I would say, any, you know, from a posture perspective, you know, we're actually making better use of our bandwidth, we're making better use of our costs, right? So that's, you know, there's obviously a cost savings tie to it as well. Yeah, so a question I've got is that this is a transition, as you were saying, there'll be a traditional way of doing things that there's MPLS and people are used to doing it that way. And then SD WAN provides these new opportunities. So how did you approach the transition from the way that you were doing things to a new SD WAN? And maybe Tom, you can give us an idea of how things are, how that conversation goes with customers more broadly. So when we start with you, Jason, and then Tom can tell us a bit in about everything else. Yeah, it's, it is definitely a different way to do the WAN, right? It's, you know, I know there's like a slogan out there, the new way to, new way to WAN, right? And, you know, it is a different interface, I mean, everything about it is different, right? I mean, it is an overlay, you know? So, you know, you think about some of the software to find data centering, you know, NSX in the data center, same kind of principles, right? So it's an overlay network, which, you know, again, it's the same skill set. It's just a different GUI, right? I would say, you know, in terms of how you navigate, you know, now there's different concepts you certainly need to look at. You know, traditional routing is, hey, that's a layer three protocol. You know, I think the beauty that VeloCloud offers, right? Or SD WAN offers is, now you're almost talking about per application based routing, right? Okay. So, you know, we have the ability, because before, again, we would show business critical, mission critical, recreational, Netflix, all over the same pipe. You know, yes, we would QOS some things, QOS voice, that whole thing. But now it's, you know, we can be very selective, right? It's, by all means, all your social media go directly out, mission critical, come back over a traditional link. You know, it's not totally replacing MPLS, you know, but certainly we're able to use internet based transport more heavily. You know, also you get more capacity with it. And then the technology, the software, you know, provides almost that QOS, but an application based level. So we are prioritizing the traffic that we care about. You know, it is, you know, that's kind of, the secret sauce I'll say in terms of how they, you know, handle, you know, voice, you know, package it or, you know, latency. You know, so again, that we don't necessarily provide a negative experience, right? Okay. And Tom, how does that conversation go with customers more broadly? Yeah, I think that he said it, pretty similar to what we hear from customers. Many of the larger enterprises are really using it for capacity expansion. They don't want to put in more expensive IP and PLS. So they're redirecting certain traffic through SD-WAN, keeping the original network there for more, some more of the more critical applications. Then as you kind of move down from large enterprise to medium enterprise, you've got a lot of, you know, kind of green field opportunities, obviously pilots, green field and then full. But again, I think it's really, you know, an overlay or an advancement. I think it's going to be some time before customers going to completely rip and replace their IP and PLS, but they're certainly going to be able to expand this way. That being said, we see a lot of small SMBs, retail stores and so forth that basically didn't have the IP and PLS and they had really lousy connectivity. And they're trying to drive again more and more of these applications. Imagine, you know, security checks at certain retails that have to go back to the data center because those particular stores may only have 3G connectivity right now. With solutions like SD-WAN, you can actually make that connectivity happen and push some of those, you know, security capabilities down to the store level, obviously making the customer experience much better, moving faster and so forth. So I'd say it's a variety, but I think similar to Dell, capacity expansion, simplification of the network, redirecting traffic in certain ways, and then as you move down into some of the smaller branches or even certain vertical markets, it's a full-on replacement or let's say an add to them from a connectivity standpoint. Jason, last question I have for you. If you could give one piece of advice for your peers, whether it be something that you should have planned a little bit more, pulled other people involved, you know, what would be from the learning that people could help accelerate this? I would say get familiar with the other supporting technologies that might come along with it, right? And what I mean from that is maybe some of the security stack, right? So a lot of companies, I'm sure like Dell, again, they backhaul a lot of traffic and it's to a data center and that's where they have their full security stack of proxy, full packet capture, all sorts of stuff there. So now as we go from just a handful of, you know, I guess points of presence, now you go to hundreds or thousands, right? Depending what you're doing. And then it's, you know, you have to look at cloud providers, you have to look at other capabilities in terms of risk mitigation, you know, from a security perspective. So internal to Dell, yeah, you know, honestly, you know, we spend some cycles, right? Kind of going through that. So it's just, you know, engage them early, you know, have that conversation. They need to be on that journey with you for digital transformation in terms of, you know, making the business case work and everything, right? In terms of what you're trying to achieve. All right. And of course, by Dell EMC networking. That's right. That's right. All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there. Jason, Tom, thanks so much for an update. You know, super-endursing space, lots of growth, trying to really, really see it hit the knee of the adoption. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here at VMworld 2018. Thank you for watching theCUBE.