 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and welcome to Cube Conversations. Happy to have on the program today, Chad Sackich, who has been on theCUBE many times and has a new role. Congratulations, Chad. You're president of the EMC Converge Platform Division. For audience that doesn't know you, just real quick background as to what you've been doing at EMC and what brings you to this fall. First things first, Stu. It's good to see you again. Thanks, Chad. Always a pleasure. In the same place. In the same place, same place. So basically, the VCE, the Converge Platform Division of EMC, very focused on making sure that we deliver simple and easy turnkey infrastructure and solution stacks, IS, PAS, and data fabrics for our customers. What we do is actually very simple. We're the group that basically delivers on a business outcome when a customer says, I'm sick of tired of building stuff, and I just want to buy it and consume it. Yeah, so build versus buy is a big thing for what VCE is doing. Can you walk us through a little bit the portfolio? I mean, most people think of VCE as V block, but while that's a big piece of the business, it's a lot more. It's very simple, Stu. So to be able to deliver on this buy versus build promise, every customer's a little bit different. At the infrastructure layer of the strata, we have blocks, racks, and appliances. All right. Blocks, V block as an example, are designed for enterprise data centers, broad sets of workloads. They're constructed as integrated systems out of traditional ingredients so they can support any workload inside the data center. But they're available in any size you want so long as that size is big. The smallest V block is roughly about a rack, and it can run many thousands of VMs. In the appliance category, we've got some exciting new technology coming later on this year, but those are really designed to start small. They're designed to scale up in a simple and easy modular way. Invariably, they're hyper-converged offers that use software-defined storage stacks. They can run broad workloads, but their superpower, if you want to think of it that way, is that they're super turnkey. They're available at entry price points which are really, really low, and they can scale up modularly to very large scale, actually. And the middle, you have racks, and racks, namely VX rack. These things are designed to be hyper-converged, just like appliances, to be software-defined so they can scale up, and they have a different operational envelope that's very simple and easy to turnkey. But the primary difference between a rack and appliance is if those are designed to start small, these are designed to scale big. And when you're designing a system, if you're gonna scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes, you need to contemplate the networking domain in everything you do. So VX rack is designed to scale to enterprise data center scale, which could be thousands and thousands of nodes. Those three layers, blocks, racks, and appliances are our build versus buy promise for infrastructure. All right, and if I can summarize that. So, I mean, the V block is what most people know VCE for. It's where most of the revenue is, market leader in the space against, you know, many of the kind of big companies. The appliance, the hyper-converge, it's growing fast, but still much smaller, very software-driven, as you said. It really simplifies on the operational model a lot too, and the rack that you're putting in the middle has some of the characteristics of each of those, I guess, right? Is, you know, the appliances today, most of them don't have a lot of networking, as opposed to the V blocks got networking built in there, because that's how Cisco's done it. The nerd in me, and you know me, man, I'm a passionate technologist at my core. You know, technologists want to disassemble these various things and look at how they're constructed, and it's important, because they ultimately create the system envelope of economics, operational model, and what workloads are the best fit for each one of them. But in the end, it's kind of like going into a McDonald's and saying, do I want a cheeseburger? Do I want, you know, a quarter pounder? Do I want a McChicken? They're all sandwiches. They're all infrastructure, which is converged. The appliances are the chicken nugget, I think, right? It's a chicken nugget. Exactly, you could have lots of little nuggets and add them all up. The point is being that they all have the same, in essence, brand promise, which is bring your workloads. We're going to simplify and deliver a faster, more agile enterprise by moving you out of the build of something that is now, no longer, frankly, a differentiator for most businesses. Now that's the beginning. And to be clear, far and away industry leader in that business, you know, a $2 plus billion annualized run rate, we grow on a quarter by quarter basis more than the startups that are at the fringe do in a year, right? And as we expand out into more and more of the hyperconverged space, it's going to be on like Donkey Kong this year, I think, for everybody out there who's playing inside that market. And we respect our competitors a great deal. However, customers are telling us that that's not enough, that the buy versus build boundary is moving up into the platform domain. Before we get to that piece, a lot of people look at, OK, EMC pulled VCE back in. Cisco's ownership is less than it was before. EMC's being bought by Dell. So Vblock, I understand there's a trademark. I mean, that's work with Cisco, networking, and UCS, are in there. If I go to the other components, how does Cisco play? How do those conversations between EMC and Cisco and, hey, VMware's over on the side, do you've got a great relationship? Give us a little bit of insight on pack those relationships. It's a great question. I think what's important for people to understand is that our partnership with Cisco is sacrosanct. In the Vblock domain, that business is wildly successful. And this is now Cisco's largest single route to market for UCS and for the Nexus family, which is their largest, I think, revenue and margin growth part of their business. It's the core of their data center business. It is their data center business. And that business grows. Our customers, thank you customers, are very appreciative and longstanding relationships. So that is not changing. In the rack category, we have not been using Cisco UCSC series in there for some time. And it's frankly because in the rack scale deployment model, it's much more software defined. The server choice is an industry standard server and less differentiated as a component inside the overall system design. That said, in every rack that we, VxRack system that we sell, there's a Cisco-Nexus componentry. And that's because the network fabric that binds these, our customers are telling us, Cisco is their networking partner of choice. Their preference is that the interface of the network layer supports their best partner. And as that VxRack business grows, our partnership with Cisco just deepens. Yeah, and that ties on the VCE side. You've got the V-Scale, the VCE V-Scale tying together the blocks, the racks and the appliances. We had a customer that I won't name here on camera, but we had a customer in 2015 invest $70 million with a single customer. Again, just to be clear, that single customer represents more revenue than many of the new startups, one customer. And a big part of why they picked VCE was actually V-Scale, which was that we were able to build a network fabric that linked together all of the components of the data center, that linked data centers together, that allowed them to move fungibly pools of compute network and storage around inside the data center. So it's very important. The thing that I would highlight is, is that again, people always look at things on the surface. It takes a degree of curiosity to look one level below the surface. Clearly, someone made a comment that says, if people think that the Dell, EMC Dell thing is not gonna change the Cisco dynamic, they're delusional. I read that quote somewhere. I don't think it was you guys. We're not delusional. Let's be clear, we're gonna use Dell servers inside VX Rack and our hyper-converged appliance business, period. Recognize that every one of those that we sell today, we do not use a Cisco server in it. We don't currently use a Dell server in them, but every one of them has a Nexus switch in it. As that business grows, Cisco's business grows. So Cisco remains the networking partner, but the ODMs lose out some on their server side. All right, let's go up the stack. How does Cisco, I'm sorry, the VCE, you're now the EMC Converged Platform Division beyond the infrastructure? How do we move up the stack? It's short and simple. Customers that buy versus build tendency is just moving up. Customers want to turn key IaaS, PAS and data fabric solution, ultimately in the same way that Converged Infrastructure taught us that storage, networking, compute are increasingly commoditized and the value is in the system. Increasingly, as customers look at what they're actually using those systems for, they're going, I want a turnkey enterprise hybrid cloud. I want it to run my traditional workloads and my new cool, funky new cloud native workloads. Then you've got other customers are going, I'm all in on these cloud native workloads. I don't need infrastructure that's resilient. I want a turnkey next generation PAS and cloud native IaaS, right? And we've been working on a native hybrid cloud stack for that. And people are saying I want a turnkey data fabric, whether it's using Hortonworks, whether it's Pivotal Data Suite, Cloud Era, Splunk, Data Stacks, whole slew of, it's a broad ecosystem there. They want a turnkey answer for that. In 2015, we hardened, curated and industrialized the enterprise hybrid cloud using vSphere and vRealize and we can do that as a turnkey in 28 days. Boom, get them up and running on top of a vBlock or vXRoc system. We're going to accelerate that and that's something that, again, if you add it all up as the converged platform division of EMC and ultimately as EMC and Dell come together, that brand promise of, if you come to us and you're clear in your mind customer that you want to build versus buy, you want to use versus manage and you're realizing where you provide differentiations above. Uniquely, we can do it with data center scale for traditional workloads on blocks for new styles of workloads as well as workloads that are more traditional on top of rack scale systems at the edge using appliances and turnkey, IS, PAS and data fabrics. Yeah, so just to wrap that up, Chad, what we look at Wikibon is we say people need to operationalize things much better. We've talked about simplicity before but we put out a definition for what we call true private cloud and that means that whatever I'm going to own in my own environment or even have it hosted, that needs to look and manage similar to what the public cloud do. Self service, a lot more automation and it sounds like moving beyond just blocks to give some options and their software in there is helping move along to help customers, as you say, buy that versus having to build it and put it together themselves. Totally and one thing that's great about the public cloud model is it's crystallizing people's thinking. When you consume a public cloud, IS or PAS offering, you have no control over how it's assembled. You simply buy, you use, you don't manage, right? For many customers, they start to ramp that up, they start to realize both the CAPEX and OPEX, wow, if I could have that as similarly a turnkey, that would be awesome. And we're the leader of doing that for customers around the world and growing extremely rapidly, right? I think that one thing that is also what to expect in 2016 is we're gonna add one more thing. If you think that we have blocks, racks and appliances at the infrastructure strata, enterprise hybrid cloud, native hybrid cloud and data lake at the platform part of the strata, we will crack the code of being able to go and say, do you wanna on-premises, off-premises? Do you wanna as CAPEX or do you wanna as OPEX? Do you wanna run it or do you want us to run it? And as we add that one extra ingredient, it's gonna be very exciting time for our customers. Yeah, it's that balance between simplifying and giving choice, so really appreciate Chad. Always great to catch up with you. Congratulations again. Thank you, Steve. And we'll be seeing you at lots of events throughout the year. Check out wikibon.com for the research, SiliconANGLE TV for all the video and siliconangle.com for the news. Thanks for watching. Thanks everyone.