 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We're here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris, Mike Adderberry is here. He's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at Dell EMC. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. Dave, thanks. Peter, great to see you guys again. The ecosystem is absolutely exploding. VMware is on fire. The data center is on fire. The technology business is just, as Pat and Michael were saying this morning, this is going to be the most boring time ever relative to the future. What's happening in the ecosystem? Bring us up here. Well, I think as Michael and Pat have talked about this week pretty proficiently is the fact that technology transitions are all out in front of us. It's a new world. The opportunity for both on-prem and off-prem infrastructure is all out in front of the companies, the family of companies. And we're putting together some of the best offers, the best combinations of technology, Dell EMC infrastructure, VMware infrastructure management and a host of ISVs whose workloads we combine with all of our infrastructure and platform technology to drive customer outcomes. Well, actually, let me jump in on this real quick. So one of the things about ecosystems is that there's a danger in the metaphor of the ecosystem because an ecosystem evolves in response to a number of things. But ecosystems in the tech industry require care and feeding. They have to be set up. They have to, contracts have to be written. Programs have to be put in place. This is really, really hard work and it's undervalued by customers too much. So tell us, talk to us a little bit about the work that goes into forming an ecosystem, sustaining an ecosystem, and then creating new degrees of freedom in some of these partnerships as these new problems emerge and these new types of complexities and these interesting problems get to be solved. Well, so I'll start at the start, which is we've got the vestige of two great partnering companies, Dell, classically and EMC classically. EMC classically partnered much more deeply at a technology level and Dell partnered at a go-to-market level, right? They could monetize in a high-velocity way these partnerships. When you put the two companies together, you get both the monetization and the deep technical alignment between the partner and Dell. But you can start at the very simplest instantiation of a solution, a vSAN ready note, or a VxRail, hyper-converged appliance. Basically, we take VMware goodness in their software-defined storage offer, and we combine that with a very tightly configured set of offers from our PowerEdge server lineup and our VxRail lineup, and we test the configurations, and we test them and tighten them and test them and tighten them so that we can give customers a very prescriptive understanding of what their outcome's going to be when they deploy a hyper-converged offer running on Dell EMC infrastructure. So for what that means, if I can, sorry Dave, what that means is that in your, so the partnership then becomes measured not just in terms of whether the logos are together, but whether or not it's been engineered together. Whether it's been tested together. Whether the support regimes are put in place. And that's different from how we used to think about. Well, and that's a critical point. And Andy Jassy on stage this week basically said, hey, this is not a Barney deal, Barney B, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. It's got substantive engineering going on. And so that's really what differentiates a core partnership that has teeth versus one that's just what we call a Barney deal. But I wanted to ask you to go back to the sort of different cultural nuances that you mentioned, Dell, high volume, high velocity, EMC, very high touch, bring those two worlds together. Are there inherent conflicts there or are you able to, are you in the process of sort of re-engineering how you form those partnerships? You know, interestingly enough in the 2000s I managed the partnership between Dell and EMC from the Dell side. Interesting, yeah. And we created a lot of good customer outcomes by combining their storage platforms, our go-to-market prowess, but it was all learnings that we could transform the business with when we actually did a hardcore marriage between the two companies. So I would tell you then it was two companies trying to play nice together. Now it's one company and we're playing really effectively together. So. I'll tell you something there. I talked to Chad about this at a show recently and asked Michael Dell about it as well. If you look back, that was an epic partnership. It was. That you needed. And the outcomes were tremendous. And I argued that in fact, if Michael had a mulligan, that he would have just bought EMC sooner and drove that integration sooner. He essentially said, yeah, I wish I could have bought EMC sooner. But I think that to your point, you had a partnership and now that you're one company, you can really drive some outcomes that you couldn't through smaller tuck-in acquisitions. Are you seeing that? Absolutely. So what we have today because of the combination, because of the marriage is one portfolio. Right. Compute storage networking combined with the goodness from our family of offers, whether it's VMware or Pivotal. You heard a great announcement about Pivotal today and what they're doing with Kubernetes. So we're going to be able to combine all of those things, the breadth of our portfolio in a way that we never could before when it was a partnership based on siloed offerings. Now we can really build solutions and we've got a whole family of products which we call ready solutions that combine cross business unit portfolios and our family of products as well. So can you talk about the scope of some of the technology partnerships? Maybe get specific on some of the ones that you're excited about. I mean, I know you're excited about them all, but yeah, at the time we have, maybe you could address a few. So principally, I would start with VMware. While VMware is a family member of ours, we still manage the relationship much like we would a partnership where you have to play team ball and drive your technologies together and test them and ruggedize them. But once you get past the infrastructural software of virtualization, customers don't stop at virtualization. They run workloads on that virtual infrastructure. So you look at SAP and what we're doing with HANA and IoT and Leonardo. You look at what we're doing, frankly with Microsoft, what we're doing with some of the public cloud providers and connecting both our infrastructure on premises with the capabilities of the public cloud in a way that leverages the most appropriate cloud to run a particular piece of software and a particular workload in. Those workloads are going to gravitate towards the best usage model for a customer, but we want to have a full complement of offering so that we can offer the right cloud for the right customer at the right time and the right price. So I got two quick questions for you. And one draws off of what you just said. And that is, I really like that notion of technology partnership and go-to-market partnership and the expertise at EMC and the expertise at Dell. Customers want invention, which is the engineering element, technology partnership, but they also want the innovation side, which is it's been applied to my business and I'm adopting it and it's creating business value for me. And I'm finding, are you finding that as Dell broadens its, or Dell EMC broadens its this notion that even the technology partnerships are becoming informed by the innovation or the go-to-market partnerships so that it's making the technology side that much more successful? Absolutely. So we want every day in the hardware business you have to fight commoditization. You fight that by simply adding value, right? It could be business model value, it could be technology value. We've had innovation everywhere we can. So those combinations, both of our technology and our partner's technology, but in a way that doesn't just combine it, it doesn't make it easier to buy, makes it easier to operate, makes it easier to understand, it makes it easier for a seller to sell it and a customer to buy it and consume it. So you'll hear Chad talk about an easy button a lot. That is our mission in solutions is to combine those things in a way that makes it easy for everybody. Here's the second question I have and it's going to be a challenge out to you because increasingly as companies become more digital businesses and recognize the role that these technologies play in driving their business models and their go-forward, they are struggling with this question of partnership. They are still driving with procurement, driving with taking cost out, et cetera, when in fact they have to find ways to drive with partnership and strategy and whatnot, what can Dell EMC do to train this industry about how to do partnership better? Well I think you demonstrate the value that you create for a customer, for a partner, for a seller in these combinations. If you can show that you create real value through your innovation, through your great partnering, then that's value that any one of those constituents can align to. You create value, you let them harvest that value and they will come back to you again and again and again. So we have to go, Mike, but last question is, how do you see or do you see your ecosystem of technology partners sort of reforming not only to the new Dell EMC but also to this new cloud reality that I'm not going to put everything in the cloud, I'm going to bring the cloud model to my data. Right, I think VMware's going to play a pivotal role in that, right? Because they are the- Pun intended, right? They are pun intended. They are the kings of workload management today. And what customers really want from the public cloud or the private cloud is a way to move those virtual machines around in a very seamless way. So at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where you operate that workload. You're going to operate it in the location that it best serves your mission as a customer. And so I think they're going to play a very instrumental role in how we do that going forward. Mike Atterbury, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It really, Pete, it's your point. This is hard work and customers generally undervalue it but they expect it and it adds a lot of value. So thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We're going wall to wall. This is day two, two sets here at Silicon Angle, theCUBE and Wikibon. We'll be back right after this short break.