 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, along with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls, we are live here at Dell EMC World 2017, and welcome Bill Reed to the program, the Senior Director of the Hybrid Cloud Platform Division at Dell EMC. And Bill, thanks for being with us. Great to be here today. Thank you. Good to see you here. So, Hybrid, so we got public, we got private, we got hybrid, we got on, off-prem. What's an enterprise to do these days? Makes some sense of all this for us. Yeah, it's something that, when we developed this platform a few years back, really we were trying to address our customer need about, we're coming at them from VMware, we're coming at them from at the time VCE, now they're the core products and solution division, we have Pivotal, and all of these stacks are being put into a data center to do something. And our customers came right back to us and said, you're selling it to me, why can't you build it for me to do something that what I'm trying to get, my outcome that I'm trying to get? So from a hybrid cloud platform, we're leveraging VMware, of course, for the hypervisor and the virtualization stack. We're also leveraging the VMware stock for vRealize, NSX, the cross-cloud capabilities that VMware's trying to build to be a broker of that cloud on-premises, off-premises decision that our IT shops are trying to make. Do I run this workload in my data center, in a public cloud, or maybe a managed data center in another location? And that's the essence of what is our enterprise hybrid cloud solution. So what is the driver on that then? I mean, how do you help people assess what should be done within the confines of their own structure? What do they take outside? Yeah, there's been a lot of conversations with our services groups. We look at a lot of the cost factors, what's the most economical? What's the performance data? Is this a mission-critical application with dozens of other components that integrate to that from a data perspective? What's the latency of the user expectations? And then we come up with a pattern, essentially, that says these are your rules, these are your approaches that you want to take when it comes to on-premises and off-premises. The leading conversation starter obviously is cost. What can you do with what you've got? What do I have to invest in as part of my digital transformation, my IT transformation? We build the product, the enterprise hybrid cloud. But customers at the same time have to realize that this is a people and a process transformation at the same time. David Goulden spoke about that a lot this morning, that we can help them from a technology standpoint. They've got to be ready for that people process change as part of this to really gain the value outside of what they can do with this. So, Bill, let's talk a little bit about the evolution of that hybrid cloud platform. There's another show going on. You know, years ago, we got into this debate, OpenStack, VMware, V2Cloud Director. And then we all figured out that it was just really hard. What has been the lessons learned from the onset of hybrid cloud to now? I think the word hard is definitely the first five words out of the mouth of every one of our customers. And even the early deployments, it was hard. As we've learned a lot through our deployments and as we've learned a lot through adoption, since we went live early in about 2015 early timeframe, we've really focused around automation and repeatability. If you take the VMware stack, you have tools like VCloud Foundation that of course are very big for what we're doing now and in the future. They can automate and give us lifecycle for some of the components. And a lot of what we did two years ago was really trying to figure out from a support matrix which versions of which software work together to give you that outcome. I ask at the core applications on top of that and then ultimately business outcomes. Can I provision an entire stack by a developer rather than have just IT administrators benefiting from that automation and that component? So the evolution, the learnings from what we have from the earlys are being put into the products day after day. And now what we're starting to see is where we started two years ago, V blocks were everything, VX blocks were everything. Now customers want to start small and scale out. So VX Rail is now live and supported as at the end of April with our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud offering. And we're having a lot more attraction and a lot more attraction to that offering for customers that are willing to make a change but want to understand what that change looks like in a small scale first and then work their way upward. So typical deployment, is this Brownfield, Greenfield? We have the ability to do both. We have the ability to take the vCenters within the EHC stack, the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud stack and point it to an existing vCenter. The risk that you have to that is, of course, the history that you've had to get that VM to where it's at. So Greenfield tends to be where a lot of our customers start. They look back at their data center, thousands of hosts, thousands of applications and they say, I know I don't want to do it that way anymore. Show me how to do it in a new way. So we'll do a lot of VM to VM, V to V type migration to the new Enterprise Hybrid Cloud infrastructure, gain the benefits of new processors, new generations, tools, the automation of the self-service catalog, the financial transparency that you might have, integrated data protection that you now get from that and say, this is how we're going to do things moving forward. And over time, you can either shut it down, decommission it, rationalize it, upgrade it or port it over to the new Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. But we have the ability to point to old as well as build new. So let's talk a little bit about capability. You mentioned V to V. So we're taking traditional legacy applications, moving that over to Hybrid Cloud. What type of new applications or cloud native applications being built with Hybrid Cloud? Cloud native is of course a huge, huge conversation. Customers are saying, I built things in the past and I want to keep it in the past and I want to start investing in cloud native. We've got solutions like our cloud, our native Hybrid Cloud, which is based for the pivotal, you know, developer ready infrastructure. Complimenting that, we've got our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud where we've got the VMware stack, traditional three tier applications, workload SQL as a service, database as a service in general. And those work together to support the needs of a customer who said, I'm going to innovate this way moving forward with native Hybrid Cloud. I've got Enterprise Hybrid Cloud to run 80% of my data center and those work together very nicely. So no Hybrid Cloud strategy is complete without Public Cloud? That's right. Who do you guys integrate with? That's Hybrid, right? Yeah, that's right. The first question out of everybody's mouth is what does it mean to be Hybrid? And from the way we look at it is, you know, again, we're leveraging VMware's VRealize Suite. So you've got Azure, you've got AWS, you've got, you know, softwares with IBM as any managed VMware as an endpoint and a type of location can be integrated into the solution. So from a deployment model, it really comes down to all of the items that we mentioned earlier around cost, performance, the integrations, the resource expectancy, you know, all of that in that space comes together to build you as a broker. If you go back to a couple years ago, IT was not being included in the conversations and businesses taking their credit card out and going off to public. Well, there's security risks, there's no integration for their IDs, data is out there and hard to come back in. We wanted to build that platform to be that broker between the two so that IT can come back to the conversation as a partner and broker the conversation to say, this runs best in this data center here or maybe a data center across the country or maybe the public cloud is the best option for that and let IT partner with the businesses those decisions are being made. Yeah, you mentioned Azure too, you have a new, that relationship continues to grow right with Microsoft and some announcements this week about continuing that. You could talk about that a little bit about how Dell EMC is aligned with Microsoft and particularly with the Azure staff. Yeah, you heard the announcement this morning from David Golden, you know, what's coming with Windows Azure Stack, we announced it last week actually. And I think that really just takes the relationship that Dell's had with Microsoft and goes one step further. And the differences between the Microsoft Azure Stack solution, you know, Dell EMC Microsoft Azure Stack and the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really, the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is based on everything Dell technologies. So we've got the core sweet spot where Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is Azure Stack answers the question for those customers who have a Hyper-V background or really an affinity to staying with Microsoft, we've got a solution to support that as well. So sounds like in the Hyper Cloud solution, V realizes the glue that brings all of this together. What is the developer experience? When we talk digital transformation, they get a big business challenge, they come to IT and IT says, well here's a Hybrid Cloud, what's that experience like for them? Yeah, and there's been a few different deployment models where we've talked to a few different customers about their choice and their preference for how things are going to be built out. In some places they've used VRLIs for a systems administrator. And while you gain some value, you really haven't transformed your experience to the developer, the ultimate end game. Other places are now saying, here's your service catalog to the developer teams. Developer lead comes in and starts to provision their recipe for their standards. And the IT systems administrators build out a template, a blueprint with tools like Puppet for example, that can now automate that manifest and that for workflow to give them that developer ready infrastructure, that developer ready VM that they're looking for without having to go through the same checks and balances and approvals that they would have had to in the past. The shops that are doing that are really seeing the differences where IT is now a partner, the transparency of the cost and the consumption that comes along with that. You mentioned VRLIs, VRLIs is really a center of this but with V Cloud foundations to do lifecycle with SDDC manager behind that, NSX with the cross cloud capabilities for software defined networking, you really build out the complete stack and give everything back to the users. Financial transparency, automation, self service catalog, end user performance, end user experience for the expectations of what they're looking for for their outcomes. So from a customer experience perspective, can you share any specific customer stories or generalize? What are some of the victories people have realized using hybrid cloud? You know it's an interesting thing as we've gone back and looked at our install base of who's done the most. There's really not one industry in particular but we've had some tremendous successes in the financial space where there's tight controls but they want performance and agility and they want it built to a blueprint and a template. We've got other customers that are starting to deploy, we've got energy sector, we've got health sector, we've got a whole bunch of customers in the background that have really started to embrace this. And now as we're looking for VxRail for what that's going to do for us, I think that's going to open a lot more markets than we may have been able to, maybe we were ignoring them in the past and not really addressing their needs as well as we should have. So VxRail, VxRack, all of the capabilities we're embracing the full suite of what Dell EMC is offering from a platforms division and what core platforms and solution divisions are going to do for us. And that's the beauty of it too, I think, is that you can go off in any direction basically here. It's just not, there's not one sweet spot there many. That's right. Bill, thanks for the time. It's been a pleasure having you here and again, I think you're at the center of a fairly interesting storm if you will. Absolutely. And what's happening, a new transformation, Dell EMC. Thanks for having me, thank you. Back with more here on theCUBE from Dell EMC World 2017, live in Las Vegas right after this.