 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi Dave Vellante here with John Siegel, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. John, what does it mean to be a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure? First of all, thanks for asking. It's been quite a year, 2017 for us. Just this past quarter, we became the leader, Dell EMC did, and the number one leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. And we want to thank certainly our customers out there, as well as we think it was really also due to the fact that we have a full portfolio of HCI and really strong partnerships with folks like VMware. Okay, so how about workload progression? A VDI was really sort of the initial sweet spot, that's true, hyper-converged. Yes. Is it evolved, and how has it evolved? It has evolved quite a bit, really. I think over the past couple of years, we've seen it evolve from HCI really addressing, like you said, VDI workloads, small consolidation type projects, test dev, really to the majority of virtualized workloads in the data center. In fact, with the announcement this week, with the support now of 14th generation power at servers, we think we've taken it to another level now, where because of 14th generation power servers, we have the ability to now provide the power, if you will, the performance, and the predictable performance in particular, that workloads require, mission-critical workloads require in the data center. Okay, so we've ticked the performance box. What about the economics piece? How is hyper-converged infrastructure helping IT operations lower costs? You know, it's good. I think that's one of the main reasons that HCI across the chasm in the past year is because it's become a no-brainer from an economics perspective. As customers look to transform IT and move away from traditional IT, the TCO advantage, relative traditional IT, is 30, 40%. I mean, you name it. I think Wikibon's done a number of studies in this area as well. I mean, you name it across the board. So it's really become a no-brainer there. And it's also become very compelling relative to public cloud as well. The on-prem, the on-prem model. So if you look at whether it's traditional IT or whether you look at public cloud, I think what we're finding now is true private cloud built on, if you will, HCI portfolio has become a compelling way for customers to transform their data center and to build on top of that cloud operating model. Okay, so speaking of public cloud, what's Dell EMC's point of view on cloud generally? So our view is that the cloud is an operating model. It's not a place, right? And so really what's all about is providing that term key self-service type experience regardless of where the data is, if you will, whether it's off-prem, whether it's on-prem. I mean, clearly, you know, we don't have a strong opinion other than that we want to make the on-prem experience as cloud-like as possible and we think that starts with a critical foundation of HCI. Okay, John, you mentioned, you know, PowerEdge servers before, a lot of people in the audience might say, it's just servers, it's a commodity, what say you? I'll tell you what. So first of all, HCI is defined by software, right? And I think we've talked about in the past, but it's really the combination of software with hardware that really delivers that term key outcome that customers expect when it comes to hyper-converged infrastructure. And this announcement is really about that combination of software and hardware. And the hardware in particular is the star of the show. It's 14th generation PowerEdge servers. What this brings to the table is powerful, predictable performance, first and foremost, right? The ability now to support mission critical workloads, this is something that we haven't had the ability to really do before in the past. It can now support mission critical workloads in the data center, first and foremost. So it's powerful from that perspective. It's purposeful in that it can now support really any configuration that's required. We actually can support up to 20 million different configurations, I'm not kidding here, when it comes to PowerEdge configurations with VxRail as an example. And PowerEdge 14th generation servers are actually purpose built for HCI, right? They are addressing over 150 different customer requirements out there, from performance, to reliability, to manageability, to deployment. Because typically Commodity servers really built as a compute engine. But instead, what PowerEdge servers are about, the 14th generation ones, they're really literally custom built for HCI. And that's why we think this is going to help take HCI to a whole new level and allow customers to now start to deploy HCI across their data center to build that foundation for the cloud. Excellent, I think you nailed it. I'll give you the last word, just maybe summarize the sort of announcement, final thoughts, HCI, wherever you want to go. I'll tell you what, I mean, we're just so excited. I mean, I think HCI has, as I said, become the foundation for the cloud. And we've got a full portfolio. We give customers choice. You know, regardless of the type of use case they have, regardless of the type of workload they have, we have an HCI answer for our customers. Some customers, for example, want to start small and grow with appliances, others want to actually transform their network as well. And so we have VxRack, as an example there, where customers that want to transform more of the stack. We're excited to have that as an option for customers too. So really across the board, we're providing anything from ready nodes where customers can do a little more of the work themselves to appliances like VxRail and XC series where it's a turnkey experience across the server, the compute and storage, all the way up to VxRacks where we're making the entire data center, if you will, turnkey as a foundation for that cloud operating model. Okay, awesome. Let's see, I lied. Last word is mine. It's CrowdChat on December 1st, where it's kind of an ask me anything on the announcement. Ask me, ask Chad, ask whoever anything, right? You can have all those go. Great, and then where do people go to get more information? DellMC.com slash HCI. We keep it simple, my friend. That's great. John, thanks very much. Appreciate you coming on. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.