 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 and my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Peter Burris. This is our eighth year at VMworld, day two. John Siegel is here as the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. John, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to be here, yeah. So we've been talking a little earlier this morning about the bottlenecks and how that's evolved. It was originally the compute that was the constraint. Spinning rust became very, very clearly five, six years ago was very clear that it was a major problem. VMware did a great job putting forth APIs, it solved that problem, then Flash came in. Now the bottleneck John is shifting to the network. It is. What's going on there? Give us some context. Absolutely, so I think loud and clear I think to your point, so the keynotes this week, I think Pat Gelsinger made it very clear, I think that the era of the hypervisor, we've moved beyond that now, in terms of where the modernization, where a lot of the innovation's happening. And next up to your point is really the network, the era of the network over the next decade. And really what's important there is ensuring that we have a network that is software defined, that can orchestrate resources to put them in the right place at the right time. And so what we have is we have a solution called vScale actually, which is very relevant to this space, which has a very solid fabric, and supports NSX and uses NSX at its core. And really what this is about is taking the term key experience that customers prefer to have today in the system level, if you will, like we have with VX blocks, for example, and extending that now to the data center and actually multiple data centers. So I think this is very, very relevant. This is a data center, modern data center type approach for the future. So Pat, so not Pat, but Chad was, we had Chad on earlier, we asked Chad, what's going to be that kind of Dell EMC cloud experience? And he went through a couple things. He made the observation that there's going to be, we're on the verge of significant platform competition. Not something that we haven't seen in a while. And one of the things that we agreed to or we agreed on was the idea that increasingly we're going to evaluate platforms based on how well they bind to other platforms. In the context of what the business needs, the workload needs, the realities of the data. One of the things that gets at least me excited about VScale is that it starts from the premise of this is how you're going to bind CI and HCI and traditional, you're going to bind it together using this fabric, this set of technologies. Talk a little bit about that. Absolutely, so I think to your point here, so with VScale, oftentimes I try to paint the picture for customers, what if you could actually move your workloads around, right, across the infrastructure as you need to? What if you could share resources across CI and HCI by resources, I mean data protection resources. Could be compute, could be storage, could be network resources. And be able to- Security, exactly, you know, across that. What if you could assure that the upgrades, the expansions, the patches, right, are fully interoperable across the data center? That's the experience of VScale. That's the modern data center approach. And to your point, this is where the future, I think, is going for data centers. It allows customers to take what they have today and legacy infrastructure and marry that to modern infrastructure in such a way by, on top of that, using orchestration policies and software to find networking. And that's different from the sort of original, it's an evolution from the original VBlock, and then that was a block of infrastructure and you managed that block. And now you're talking about what you call the binding technology across the data center. Is that the fundamental difference and am I missing something? Yeah, no, that's a great point, yeah. So I think to take a step back for a second, right, seven years ago, we jointly engineered, jointly pioneered the CI space, with VMware and Cisco. And we did that, first of all, what was our premise? Our premise was how do we simplify IT? How do we help our customers spend a lot less time maintaining and managing and sustaining infrastructure, spend more time delivering IT services, delivering applications faster to market and those types of things. And the answer was VBlock and VXBlock, to your point. So that was essentially a converged infrastructure with compute, storage, networking and the ability to manage and sustain that across the life cycle. So on one hand, that was at a single system level, but now customers are saying, what if we could do that across the data center? That's what VScale is, it's the same approach, right? The ability to now, to sustain that in life cycle, that infrastructure across the data center and we do that jointly by engineered solutions with Cisco and with VMware. So I want to share something with you. Peter, you said something to me the other day which I thought was quite instructive. You said, look, the technology for this stuff is largely matured, it's the people in process behind it now that we really have to worry about. When converged infrastructure first came out, I remember I wrote a piece talking about the organizational implications because you had a storage person, a server person, a networking person. And it advised my readers, get your house in order organizationally beforehand and as I started to talk to more customers, I met one in an insurance company who was a big VBlock customer. He said, you got it all wrong. Here's how a change agent doesn't. You put the stuff in and the organization will figure itself out which I thought was pretty radical. So I bring that forward today. But it only works some of the time. Right, but so what are the organizational implications? As Peter's point of the technology's maturing, it's maybe been demystified. What are you seeing in terms of that people in process evolution? Well, first of all, we're seeing more and more focus and investment when it comes to IT moving up the stack. Right, so what we're, again, what we're trying to do is say, do you really want to spend time which frankly isn't necessarily a competitive differentiator on maintaining that infrastructure? Or do you want to actually hire resources that can develop the new applications, develop the services, and move across data centers and actually bring new customers on flying faster, you know, if you're a service provider, bring new applications online faster if you're any enterprise out there today that's trying to make a difference. So what we're seeing here is, I think the level and sophistication of the IT personnel that's getting hired is different now. And I think what we're seeing is that fewer resources are required to do the day to day routine tasks and it's actually becoming a great opportunity for IT to move up the stack. So we, you know, for example, Inovalon, right? That's an example of a customer. Actually, I think you may have met them, Peter at Cisco Live, and they are a healthcare data analytics provider. So in the healthcare space, big data's making a big impact, right? It's about how do they improve patient outcomes? And big data can do that. And so Inovalon's at the heart of that. They're a service provider providing data analytics, big data solutions for healthcare providers. They needed a way to, first of all, get to market faster with their solutions. They needed to be able to onboard new customers faster. And by the way, they didn't have, they didn't have the investments to hire new people. So what they had to do is they had to find a way to triple their infrastructure without adding any resources. And by the way, they did that. They did that with ECL. Triple their capacity. Yeah, their capacity. Exactly, their capacity, their capacity in the infrastructure. Not the physical assets. The capacity. So that shows you where the investment, and that allows them to innovate more up and up the stack. And that's what we're seeing more and more. So in many respects, what I see you saying, and let me see if I got this right, is that it used to be that the server was the primary citizen, and you configured everything around, and then it became other things. Where we are now is increasingly the data is the primary citizen. That's right. And what we need to be able to do is put in place technologies that can allow the data to be where it needs to be, but very rapidly and quickly share it appropriately based on the workloads. And the only way to do that is look at how you're going to connect data resources together. And including applications. And to me anyway, VScale is this interesting technology that allows you to think in terms of designing your infrastructure around the placement of the data. That's exactly right. What about it is so interesting to you? Maybe you could elaborate on that. Well, because at the end of the day, Dave, what we're really, again, we're trying to look at these data assets, and we're trying to figure out how can we create value. We talked, I talked to Colin last time, people like to talk about data as a new oil. Well, the problem with that is that oil still follows the rules of scarcity. I use oil here, I can't use it there. With data, I can use data here, and I can use it there if I have that fabric in place, that very facile way to connect those data resources together, and that's why I get the amplification on the value of the data, the value of the infrastructure assets that I have in place, and the value of the IT organization, that's why I amplify it. And what VScale is allowing people to at least start thinking about and doing, is to say, I can share these resources in new ways if I think in terms of how they bind together in under control, under management, so I can very quickly start putting these resources, reconfiguring these resources in a way that allows me to generate new levels of business value. This is exactly right. So what's always interested me about just convergence in general was what you were talking about, John, and Peter, I'm tired of what you just said, is that IT labor problem. I think we're way, way beyond IT management, operations people trying to hold on to their jobs. Right. And it really talks to the business value that they're delivering. When you talk to people about what you do with those resources that you freed up, they got their weekends back, or they shifted people into sort of development, application development, enablement roles. You know, maybe not coding? Frankly, they get into clear development. You know, oftentimes what I find is that CI, for example, can be a career development path. It can enable career development paths for a lot of IT organizations out there today who are looking to say, you didn't find ways they can't actually hire additional resources, but what they can do is if they can actually, you know, at least help to greatly simplify the day-to-day tasks that they're doing, they can now start to spend a lot less time on those mundane tasks, and more time on how they can differentiate the business, which is up the stack, which is developing new applications, developing new services, exactly right. And I think what we do find, though, is that if CI, if converged in infrastructure in general and hyper-converged is put in, but the organization doesn't change, right? Let me be able to do that for one second. I know we got to go. I know this is really important to me, and I want to test with you very quickly, and we got to wrap. The computing model, when we talk about computation model, the computing model, we talk not just about the technology, but the way we think about a problem, the way we approach a problem with technology. And what's so interesting about this is a converged, hyper-converged, V-scale in these technologies are not only a new way of thinking about technology, but they enable a new way of thinking about how we're going to solve a problem. And that, to me, is the career path for today's infrastructure geeks who've been focused on a product, because they can become more relevant if they help the business think new ways of solving problems at new computational models. And leveraging that data in new ways. Absolutely. Right, so I think you're right. So basically we're creating a fabric and ecosystem, if you will, to connect all the resources together, and then we have the ability to do software-defined, if you will, orchestration. And we need those people inside the business. Well, and the business benefits because there's a talent war going on, and they get to retain them. So John, we do have to go. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Absolutely, it's a pleasure as always. All right, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.