 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2016, brought to you by Dell EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell EMC World in Austin, Texas. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Armugan Ahmad is here. He is the C-Device President of Global Solutions and Technology Alliances at Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Great to see you guys again. All right, another year in Austin. Things are happening. Yeah. Anything new? It's exciting, man. So, is this a new role for you? Yeah, so it's an evolution of my previous role. Last year, if you don't talk to you guys, thank you for having us. By the way, every year you guys come here, we come to you, end up seeing you guys in different places. You guys do an amazing job. Last year was our solutions and alliances what we call our organization, which is more Dell-oriented, right? But now it's Dell EMC Solutions and Technology Alliances. We added the technology in front of the alliances, which is really ensuring that we're differentiating between our technology ecosystem of alliance partners versus the global alliances that we have and JS Snyder's team that drives our phenomenal system integrators, ISVs, our service provider, go to market. So that's really where we created that differentiation. But it's really taking what we had with Dell Solutions and Alliances Organization and now bringing it forward with Dell and EMC. So you're a whole 35, 40 days in, but now the portfolio's dramatically expanded. How did that affect your go-to-market and some of the choices that you're now putting in front of customers? Yeah, so Dave, great question, right? Michael's always stood for choice in front of customers and my team leading with technology alliances is the forefront of that, where we continue to work with our broader ecosystem. So we know that VMware is now part of Dell Technologies, but we have to continue to work with a broader ecosystem of partners, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, Intel, Nutanix, right? And then on the Hadoop side of things, Hortonworks, Cloudera, Splunk, our open source based vendor. So that's a big part of us continuing to drive that change in the market and make sure that those application providers are part of our infrastructure that we're leading with. Last year I talked to you guys about the Dell Blueprints, which are now going forward. Dell EMC Blueprints, which takes all of that technology ecosystem of partners and brings it into an easy, digestible way for our customers to consume, either through a build or to the buy continue. Yeah, and when you went back in the day when you were partnering with EMC, I'm sure you had a lot of these types of playbooks or whatever you used to call them back then. Things have changed a lot, but in terms of understanding how to work with each other from a cultural standpoint, what were you able to, as organizations, bring forward? Yeah, so as you know, the EMC team, right? Billy Scannell's team is a phenomenal sales engine that has been on the enterprise, very focused on that enterprise sub-segment. And then the Dell solutions coming in from Marius Haas's organization, which has had been very strong in the commercial sales side of things, right? So when you look at our commercial public sector based customer base, when you combine both of those together, our customers are still looking for that choice based on workload. So regardless if you're in the enterprise space or you're in the commercial space, you know the customers are looking for a hybrid on-premise and off-premise, seamless workload migration offerings. They're looking for VDI deployments, they're looking for high-performance computing in the enterprise space, they're looking for that in the commercial space that's more evolving into technical computing. How do we ensure that we are providing solutions that are simple for our sales force, our channel partners, but in the end delighting our customers with the offer? So really from last year to this year, what we're finding is the phenomenal expertise that we get now from the enterprise sales force and the commercial sales force, we still find that we need to continue to make it simple for them to carry the whole portfolio. And our technology partners that fit into this ecosystem of Dell EMC blueprints that can offer, be it an enterprise customer or a commercial customer, a continuum of offerings. We know, I mean, IDC, I think IDC, you guys had Matt Eastwood here earlier, and their data shows that by 2016 to 2020, we know a lot of customers will still continue to build their environments. And the buy experience, be it converged, hyper-converged, it's growing very fast on Kagger growth, but by 2020, when you look at the whole TAM of total addressable market, there'll still be a smaller chunk of the build. So our opportunity there with our sales force on both enterprise and commercialists is to offer that choice. So Joe Tucci was always famous for saying that overlap is much better to have than gaps. Yeah. You guys live that, but the challenge, of course, you're bringing up is complexity. And so even from a salesperson standpoint, sometimes they might not be sure which blueprint to bring up. And then you mentioned, you know, the Hadoop, I won't mention them because I'll forget some, but the Hadoop opened a big data ecosystem. So many companies, you know, popping up. The deals that you guys do tend to, they're not Barney deals, as we like to say, I love you, you love me. They're substantive and they lead to revenue generation. But how are you, you know, you mentioned the blueprints, but still how are you managing that complexity with the field? Sure. So we always like to start with the customer outcome, Dave, right? So it has to be, what is the customer interested in doing? So customer has a project called a big data project. What does that mean? Is that a, you know, unstructured to structured data migration, which is really a Hadoop cluster that they're looking to build or are they, or have they already gone past a journey of crawl to walk and now they're moving to the analytics, which is the run journey, right? How to be insured, so that's big data, right? And analytics combined. High performance computing, technical computing is a big one. VDI deployment as workloads is a big one. Databases is probably the massive one that we have, be it SQL, Oracle, or SAP. Those are really the first and foremost discussions that customers want to have with our sellers, right? And or our channel partners for that matter who are all here. And then when you say, if those are the workloads that customer want to deploy, how do they want, what architecture do they want to consume it? So if you use that Hadoop example, right? So we have some phenomenal solutions in Isilon, which is our NAS-based storage. Before EMC, Dell could only lead with a NAS-based storage. So now you can think of us working with Cloudera or Hortonworks, our open source-based Hadoop technology alliance partner, working on our compute and our storage via DAZ or NAS storage, or a network architecture, which Stu and I know quite a bit about for our past lives on network architectures, on software-defined network, or an open network platform. How do you bring all of that together to now offer a full end-to-end Hadoop solution versus, hey, I've got a great NAS-based solution for you for that Hadoop? That's more of a pinpoint solution where we are trying to now drive more of a broader discussion with our seller, but more importantly with our customers so that the customers are not having a silo conversation, they're having more of an ecosystem conversation. Armaghana, I wonder if you can help dig in a little bit on some of the changes happening in the application space. I think about Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, there's lots of classification going on, there's lots of cloud adoption for these. How does that change the go-to-market dynamics of the interaction between? I was just in a customer meeting with Chad Sackich, and I think Chad's probably going to be up here tomorrow or the day after. Today, I think. Is he? Yeah, it's phenomenal. He's not feeling well, so you should just take it easy on him a little bit, but I'm sure he'll already have his emergency, he would have already gotten his vitamin C going. But Chad, I think said it best, he said human beings are human beings, they always look for an answer of black and white. Either the applications live on-premise or they live off-premise. The reality is, it is a hybridization world more and more, right? You need on-premise and you need off-premise too, right? And the key here is how do you continue to go drive that clarity to the customer on what workload is best for you? The customers that we were meeting with earlier today, they were really grappling with, everyone's showing them a screenshot of AWS and say, hey, this is how much it will cost on public, why should I do it on-premise, right? And the customer really want to be at that journey point for their application to decide, if they want to deploy it on-premise and they want to do it with a Microsoft-based Azure connection or they want to do it, as you know, our announcement last Friday with VMware and AWS, right? You can do it that way or you can really run it as a service on customer premise using a hyper-conversion for structure. So to your point on applications, let's say if it's a SQL database or an SAP database or Oracle database, they also have their cloud offerings, right? Sacrifying, as you were mentioning, classification. And how do you continue to provide a value proposition on customer premise that allows the CIO to make that decision on what you want to put into the cloud, but then when you want to move it back seamlessly. And that is really the next generation of conversations on applications that's happening, which is how do you match the API from what's on-premise to what's off-premise, right? So it's Azure Pack today, tomorrow's Azure Stack. You know, it's the VMware-based cloud foundation today in ESX so that the ESX on top of EC2. How can Dell stand for that choice by working with SAP, working with Microsoft SQL, working with Oracle, but then having the different app providers as part of our technology alliance that makes it simple for them? The biggest gap we see isn't necessarily the economic of price of this box versus price of this service for a year. It's the different operating model. And we've had a lot of discussions with customers lately that have said, yeah, they might have done something in the public cloud and for one reason or another, they want to pull something back on-prem, but they love that easy, simplified, operational model that they get the public cloud. So how do we kind of close the gap on kind of the new operational model as opposed to the running around the data center, you know, pulling wires and pulling our hair out? We're all very familiar with that model, right? And the reality is that build environment, a lot of customers are still building, using those old ways of doing things, right? The analogy of, you know, we have a lot of server hugging going on, right, in different environments, but customers, be it that or be it virtual machine hugging, be it storage or networking, there's still a lot of that silo and fiefdoms that exist. And quite honestly, I mean, I'll just blatantly come out and say it. I mean, I think we need to really disrupt the internal ecosystems of how we run those applications where if you don't do it, someone else will make that decision for you or put it into public cloud. So you really need to, you know, that's where our technology ecosystem partners really come in. So when we lead with driving this, be it, you know, in the Dell Technologies ecosystem with VMware, but also in our overall technology alliance ecosystem with Microsoft or Red Hat for that matter, or Colonical or Morantis, how do we ensure that we're providing that choice? But they have to work with us, right, in the customer environment. And you know, I just met with a customer who has, you know, is running Ceph, right? But at the same time, they've got VMware and at the same time they have Microsoft, but they have it for different workloads. They have Ceph for more of a VDI workload with Zen and Ceph working together, right? And they're Citrix environments, but they have, you know, our solutions on the VMware and Microsoft. So Dell being number one in a lot of these areas, we call it number one in everything and you'll see it in the keynote tomorrow, right? Be it storage or servers or hyper-converged and our ability to be number one in Flash. How do we drive that outcome that is workload focused? So that is really the key when it comes to applications. Well, and you mentioned outcome-based sort of dialogues with customers. That leads to a workload discussion. In your role, you don't want to over-rotate. You can't go too far in the future, but you want to anticipate the trend. See, maybe it's not telescope, but you got the binoculars out. So my question, I've gone to specific to some of these emerging workloads around, you know, deep learning and machine learning and AI, you know, some of the GPU type things that are emerging. What are you seeing there and what kind of solutions are you providing? That's a great question. So, you know, that is more related in our high performance computing and technical computing area. So, you know, I met with a customer today who's consuming on a monthly basis a petabyte of data that is going on, you know, marine research and that's connecting it back and they have to crunch all that data. I mean, they can't even virtualize their environment. They have to, you know, use native cores in two socket running, what, 27 cores of capacity and just churning it through. You know, our partnership with Nvidia and Intel, you know, those two are very critical in those areas, right? So when you look at high performance computing and technical computing work that Jim Ganthe's team is doing in chat sackages organization, it's just, you know, that GPU and our ability to work and not just have GPU in our high performance computing and technical computing offering and our technology alliance partnership plays a very active role in working with Intel, working with Nvidia's of the world or even AMD's for that matter. How do we go drive that level of differentiation with life sciences or genome testing or manufacturing where they have those workloads? So we're trying to evolve high performance computing from just traditional research base to now manufacturing and finance and science and technology as well. It's interesting, right? Because it leads to a whole different selling motion and persona that you're selling to. I mean, same with IoT, right? You're selling to operations technology. How are you seeing the personas to whom you market and sell evolve? Yeah, so Andy Rhodes, for example, who leads our IoT business, I saw your tweet, he was here earlier. And Andy Rhodes does a great job, right, Don? I think Michael mentioned this morning at the executive summit where the devices that make a lot of that, a lot of the sensors and the devices that make that traffic go and then we have that gateway. How do we drive that gateway now back into a big data blueprint? So that's something that Andy's team, Jim Ganthe and Chad, myself, we work very closely together to ensure not only do we have an IoT gateway, how do we now connect that back so that the gateway collects all that data, but now you have to work in a Hadoop cluster or a SAP HANA or even a Splunk-like analytics engine on the back end so that we're actually offering a full solution. But think about it, right? Dell EMC is probably the only place that you can do what I just said we could do, right? Because we have the offerings from the client device to the IoT, to the framework back from compute, to storage, to our network architecture that helps connect it all together. So that you can actually take that IoT persona and then connect it back and actually provide what customers need to have as an outcome when they have deployed that phenomenal IT solution, IoT solution that we have. Armageddon, one of the challenges I hear in the field is kind of the paradox of choice out there. So it's great that you've got lots of options. When it comes to stack, I look at 2017 and it's going to be, oh, we've got the Microsoft stack, with Azure stack, we've got OpenStack stacks, we've got Nutanix, we've got your racks, Rails and everything else that Chad's going to have on. How do you be a bit more opinionated to help customers get to the right solution rather? Because if you give them the Sears catalog, they're just going to say, oh boy, I can't figure it out. And I'm sure Chad will cover this, but I'll also cover it because I think, him and I were saying, we need to continue to deliver this message multiple times so it's understood with our customers, our partners, our internal audience, right? Which is, there is a continuum. So when you look at those workloads we just talked about, there's almost five stops to a continuum, right? You can start with build and then you end up at buy. Stu buy is really that opinionated, which is, it's all in, this is how you do it and if you're all in, you go and go drive that. And I'll explain that in a second. It starts with the first three stops, which is reference architectures, bundles, and validated systems, right? Those are build-based environments and you get that and you can put different ecosystems based on Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat OpenStack, or any OpenStack for that matter. But then when you start moving more into the continuum of buy, which is engineered systems, so now you look at V blocks, VX blocks, right? So now you know that our V blocks and VX blocks are really with our Cisco partnerships on the servers, Cisco partnership on the networking, and then our storage platforms that are driving this with VMware. We know that is a very opinionated stack and the customers can expect this for a specific workload and they love that, right? But underneath that engineered system, you also have VX racks and then you have VX rail, which today is a VMware-based stack, but tomorrow it's also becoming a Cloud Foundry-based stack and it's evolving into other technology alliance partners. But it will still be a stack so we can provide that choice in that stack solution as well. But then finally you end up in Nirvana and then Nirvana is that final and fifth stop of hybrid Cloud Platform. Today Dell EMC has a phenomenal enterprise hybrid cloud offering which is VMware-based. We have a native hybrid cloud-based offering which is, you know, Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry-based. But then what you'll see there is we'll evolve more because today from the Dell side of things you have the Cloud Platform system from Microsoft which is running Azure Pack and we've already announced that we're doing the work with Microsoft on Azure Stack and we're going to continue doing that. But that offering will also continue with OpenStack-based solutions that we have that we can go drive in the validated systems solutions and then across the continuum so that your absolute rights do as customers choose to go into a opinionated stack, then that is for the workload. I think going back to the chat comment of human beings think either this way or this way, I think, you know, when it comes to this, you either go with an opinionated stack or you go with an open-choice environment. You can't have something in the middle and what Dell EMC is standing for is that we really want to provide both. And the channel is a major actor here, right? Yeah. The channel pretty much knows what it wants to do. It wants to go where it can make money. Yeah. And it can make money where the customer has demand and where they can get good margin. Yeah. I mean, so what are you seeing in the channel? Well, how does this all play with the channel partners? So our Dell EMC revenues that we have, Dell EMC blueprints, I should say, the workload-based revenues that we're driving, almost over 60% of that revenue comes from the channel partners. I just came from meeting with, you know, host of channel partners that John Byrne made some phenomenal announcements today. I don't know if you guys saw that, you know, providing choice to our channel partners, phenomenal benefits and the Dell EMC program as it comes together as one partner program come February timeframe. The channel partners also think about it, right? With all the discussion that's happening between public cloud, SaaS, on-premise, off-premise, channel partners are spending a lot of time on pre-sales activity. Oh, yeah. Pre-sales activity costs money the last time I checked. They don't charge for that, right? So if Dell EMC has these blueprint offerings that come in small, medium, large sizes and they come across those continuums, channel partners have already gotten their work cut out, have actually had their work done for them and then what they have to do the work afterwards is the implementation work that they can charge for. So channel partners actually love that because not only do we have these deployment guides or these runbooks that have been created or have this opinionated at stack, they have the ability, Dave, to actually work with us where we have created sales messaging. So almost like a generalist sales, what did they say for this workload? What are the five things that they have to say? And then they can actually, our channel partners have access to all of that Dell EMC blueprint material that they can leverage with their core seller but then that's like a one-on-one level training. But then there's 201 level training, 301 level training, and then finally you have the 401 level training, which is my favorite systems engineering world that you get into, right? The channel partners like that. And they're getting much, much more sophisticated. They have to, right? Because as we know, selling boxes still love it but it's not the future. It's not. And they know that the public cloud onslaught is on top of them as it's on top of everybody but they have to start truly working in the world of not boxes but in a proper hybrid on-premise, off-premise, move the workloads around. And I think things will evolve as we go into the next year. I'm really optimistic it's going to be a good thing. All right, Armageddon. I have to leave it there. I'll give you the final word. I can say you're 35, 40 days in, taking ahead the next 12 to 18 months. What do you want to accomplish? What are the milestones that we should be watching? So I think number one, super excited with Dell Technologies coming together with Dell EMC, our sales force, of enterprise sales force, the Billy Scannells Group, and the Marius Haas sales force from commercial with John Burns, channel teams all coming together. I think this is going to be unbelievable. Number one, right? Number two, our sales teams, we have a lot to sell. How do we simplify it for our sales teams, for our channel partners, for our customers? That continuum of built-to-buy, quite honestly I think we still need to continue to do the work to simplify this so that customers understand the built-to-buy continuum and they have those choices from us. How our technology alliance partners power each one of the stops is going to be the key. And I think with our sales teams, our channel teams driving that message, delighting our customers, I think we'll be in pretty good shape next year. All right, oh my God, thanks very much. You're coming by theCUBE. Always a pleasure to see you. Thanks man, always great to see you guys. All right, good luck with the mission. Thank you. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube we're live from Dell EMC World 2016. Right back.