 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are here with theCUBE live coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We're joined by John Siegel. He is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome. Pleasure to be here. It's always. We're always happy to have repeat customers. Yes. One of the highlights of the week every time. Yes, excellent. So I want to start off by talking about who your customer is and what his or her problems are. IT professionals are juggling a lot of different responsibilities and pressures. How do you approach your customer? Yeah, I think of what it starts down to. And so I'm with the Converge platforms and Solutions Division. And so a lot of our helping customers with Realty End of the Day is how do they spend a lot less time integrating and maintaining their infrastructure and more time supporting their end users, right? And what we hear more often than any else, the one word I keep hearing all week has been around agility, right? Is, you know, how do I have more agility? How can I be more responsive to the business in terms of, for example, developing applications more quickly, right? And faster to market, whether it's bringing new initiatives to market, new products to market, et cetera. So it's all about speed and agility from an IT perspective. And what they can't do is they can't keep up the agility when they're spending so much time integrating, right? So that's really what, our user really tends to be the ones that are more forward-looking bold and are really looking to, you know, make a mark on their company and on the business. So it's agility, it's speed, as well as cost pressures to how, so what are you coming at with? Tell us about some of the big announcements you've made. Yeah, so I think, you know, and we're with the Converge platforms and Solutions Division. So really the fastest growing part of the IT industry today really is around hyper-converged and converged, right? It's all about helping companies, you know, do spending much more time innovating and much less time integrating. And, and with that, I think you can still hear me. And with that in mind, you know, we have solutions and products that are term key in that way. So customers no longer have to spend their time trying to figure out, okay, how do I build this logical infrastructure to actually support my applications and users? And then how do I maintain it? Whereas we actually provide a term key solution, which allows our customers to spend a lot less time fiddling, if you will, with their integration infrastructure. So let's talk about the history of HCI or converged infrastructure. We can, you know, sometimes it's got a converged infrastructure, a hyper-converged infrastructure. So, you know, from the beginning to where we're at today and the announcements around it, you guys are made around VXRAG. We started out with that basic three note model that, you know, we were solving basic problems in the data center around VDI, the speed of specific applications. Enterprises, we got a taste of that. We want a little bit more of it. And now sounds like VXRAG is that little bit more. That's a great point. Yeah, so as you said, so HCI or hyper-converged really is taking off in the industry. And I think that is, it just really is that answer to agility, right? I think it's really that response to agility and how it's offered to find, if you will, right? And that approach. And so, what we found now is that hyper-converged has now been adopted by 50 or 60% of enterprises in some form or fashion. Because they like the idea of software defined, they like the idea of it's cloud, it's really a good foundation for the cloud right at the end of the day. That's where it is. But what we're finding is now some customers are saying, you know what, I need a little more software defined. I actually want to go all in on software defined. This is where we find the bolder, if you will, CIOs of the world that actually want to go all in on software defined. And that's where they want to start to adopt, well, in order to adopt hyper-converged software defined at scale, you need to consider the network, right? The network needs to be a part of that equation. You need to consider not just the compute and the storage elements of it, but the network as well as part of that. And so, what we do with VX Rack Address is essentially it treats the network as part of the system design. This is really funny how this is happening. I mean, eventually this headset is not what you think about it. It is like the integrating person's, you know, innovating here. So, let's talk about the network and hopefully I can help frame the network while your headset is getting fixed. Traditionally, that three-model HCI solution has challenged the network teams and the server teams and the storage teams. We enjoyed the simplicity of HCI because we could consume it easily. But when we went to scale, we found that we ran into storage performance issues which then affected the virtual machines. Then, of course, that impacted the application. So, HCI up to a certain point was all about storage and compute and nothing about network. That's right. So, VX Rack addresses that network bottleneck. That's exactly right. And I think what we found is that a lot of customers have underestimated, if you will, the importance of the network when it comes to an HCI solution. You're right. So, what the appliance has done, we have HCI appliances today and customers bring their own network, if you will. And that works fine for smaller deployments. But you're right. Once you get up to eight, 10 appliances, if you will, or more, eight nodes, that's when the network becomes really critical because you have much more east-west traffic and north-south traffic going across the nodes and between systems and between cabinets. Suddenly, that network is, as you know, that's what affects the availability, the performance of the applications at the end of the day, which is what it's all about. So, what are you seeing from your most successful customers in terms of solutions, in terms of the ones that aren't underestimating the importance of the network? What are you seeing from them and what would you like to see replicated across industries? Yeah, I think our customers today that are adopting HCI at scale or software-defined at rack scale, oftentimes we have everything from service providers, as you might imagine, those that actually want to provide a HCI foundation for their cloud, right, IaaS. It's a really good foundation for that because if they want to build, and if they want to support a wide range of applications, what VxRack does, it allows customers support in a wide range, whether it's enterprise workloads, traditional workloads, or cloud native workloads, or customers that want to not just support, for example, maybe VMware hypervisor, but also maybe hypervisors, such as from Hyper-V, from Microsoft, they may even want to go bare metal and support containerized applications and containers. So, what we find is the customers that actually have a broad set of applications in particular that want to go all in and hyperconverge, they want to modernize their infrastructure, they want to save money, they want to simplify operations, those are the customers that we're seeing really succeed here. So, we hear this term as customers, cloud customers, whether it's enterprises, proper community clouds, public clouds, what's the market for VxRack, VxReal, compared to the traditional three box solution? Are we limited to just enterprises deploying private clouds, or are you guys actually in the public cloud market with your part, which is, for example, your VCloud network, are they adopting VxRack? So, yeah, so VxRack, hyperconverge in general, is actually being adopted everywhere, so being adopted by not just medium-sized companies, but large enterprises as well, like you said, and it is really a starting point for customers that want to start to build that foundation for the cloud. They may want a hybrid cloud, what hyperconverge really does, provides a really agile on-prem solution with a nice opportunity to leverage the public cloud as well. So, it is being leveraged heavily in what we call hybrid cloud solutions and areas by both medium and larger companies. We also have a number of service providers now that are leveraging, if you will, VxRack as a solution, because what they're able to do is basically spin up new applications, new users very easily, that they wouldn't be able to do with traditional infrastructure. John Siegel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the program. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for my co-host Keith Townsend. We will have more from Dell EMC World coming up after this.