 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Welcome back to VMworld 2017 everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris, Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Consverged, Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. Good to see you again guys, it's always a pleasure. Good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the influencer reception last night, great shindig, thank you for that. Very much. A lot of momentum in this ecosystem. VMware, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? You know, I see the spring in Pat's step and I look at it and I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is that, is that the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. You know, if you remember last year Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMware has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because made some big bets, had a plan and the bets are paying off and most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy to this week, right? So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said, we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion and that's a cloud operating model and it's not a cloud, you know, it's the clouds and operating model, not a place and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you know, you look at most large companies, maybe they have, you know, Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com, there's all, you know, multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use, you know, on-premise equipment, they want to cloudify that, right? It's how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on-premise equipment but then working with VMware, working with Pivotal is make it easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. So we've been talking all week, I mean, Peter's really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us sort of think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking about all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out, to the data but the implication there, as you've talked about many times, Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and the other attributes of the cloud in order to make that promise, that brand promise come true of what we call true private cloud. So what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us, right? Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them and there's also preferences. They've got CapEx versus OpEx preferences. They are going to make decisions of on-premises versus off-premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLAs, latency, all these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data movement and then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself or I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick VSAN, then we have our Ready portfolio. VSAN Ready knows, covers that, right? So it's easiest way to buy VSAN and a PowerEdge server and if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles and then we start moving into where people are realizing that I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, our VxRack, our VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the lifecycle assurance, single contact support, that's from us. Then there are customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars, right? And VMware is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent and on-premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMware and VMware taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize, they control the roadmap for that. They know how to do the lifecycle automation updates. So what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talked about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. One for VMware, we have for Pivotal, we also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS, on hyper-converged infrastructure. So Bob, you mentioned early on, having given us kind of the overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMware had a plan. Right. And they've been executing about that plan. But you've also got a plan within the hyper-converged team within the whole enterprise cloud team. So software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of the normal separation, oh, just get the hardware and then get the software. But now we're seeing them because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together. Talk a bit about how you're influencing the VMware plan and how the VMware plan is influencing the hardware side of things. You know, it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know, for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. Like people were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises and it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMware portfolio to market with full turnkey system, right? Full stop. It's we own it, we'll make this stuff work. So the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich. And remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure. So you're basing it on a sand fabric, VMAX off-lash, Extreme IO, Iceland data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really, really hard, right? It's we don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is it takes so long to test and QA the new VMware, perfectly fine, very solid VMware features that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this. But for many customers, you end up having this misalignment where VMware's saying, I want you to take these features now. And we're saying that's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So what you've seen develop and the ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world. There's not the largest farmers or governments. Hyperconverged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of workloads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So VMware more takes the lead and this is how we're going to package these up. It's our software suite. We know how to do the lifecycle together you work on the hyperconverged infrastructure which is also co-developed with them. And it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers. If you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates versus many thousands that are VMware ready system candidates. So I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. So we had chat on theCUBE yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. And one of the things he said was in anticipation of these cloud wars or in these platform wars, I think with system arm, that increasingly it's going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. So, and it's interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word bind, how well does this bind to that? Tell me about how your platform is going to bind other platforms. And automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, said increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions, the ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more? Right, so I think it's spot on, first of all. And if we look at two different use cases, the one use case of most customers today, VMware customers, they're using the VMware suite environment on-premises. VMware actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM cloud, to Google cloud. And for me, the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds, you want to do it securely protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that, NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMware is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on and we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMware doing that. And Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say hundreds of customers where these are huge deals, these are $50 million and up deals where you're providing incredible value all in for all their different applications, right? And most, the vast majority of customers today, clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be. And the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies Companies to work together to do this. And the more we work together, another great thing happens is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we would have inherent conflict because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMware is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where when that little friction goes away and you have full alignments of we're all on the same page, we're all saying the same things, it's far more credible. But it also accelerates the customer. It sure does. I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. Right. And we got a wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMware is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. It's real hard. And so you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And then I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about forming the cloud model to your business. When you were describing sort of what you guys do for Enterprise Harbour Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise, but it requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process and a lot of good thinking, so. Right. And it is, it is very, it's by definition customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas Ready, Ready is all, the Ready Solutions portfolio, I think we're going to be huge, just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you're ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's ready systems. Right. If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And high performance computing has been huge for us, data analytics. Increasingly, I think those are connected together. So there's synergy between the two of them. And then the Ready nodes for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself. This is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you, we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is. And we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know I can help you wherever you are. We have something that's right for you. All right, we got to wrap. Thanks, Bob, for coming on. Taking you on a journey of VMworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in the queue. Thanks. All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2017. Right back.