 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll go back to San Francisco next year, but here in Vegas, third year in a row, and I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Troyer. Welcome back to the program, Gil Schneersen, who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC. Gil, great to see you. Good to see you. Still great to see you, John. All right, so caught up with you at Dellworld just a few months ago down the strip. At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle, but since then, that Blift-HOW is like autonomous vehicles, so we know things can change pretty fast in the area. Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end? What's changed since last we've talked? Thanks for asking. As you know, we're moving very fast. We're moving very fast, picking up many, many new customers every quarter, but the reason for that is because we keep innovating. So for example, in this show, we announced a new G-Series, a new 560, which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model with more memory, more CPU, more capacity, very popular form factor by our customers. We announced that we're now doing a sim ship with VMO. We're calling it synchronous releases. Our customers told us that they don't want to wait between a V-SAN release and a VxRail release. We announced VxRail participation in Dell's customer loyalty program, which is a lot of features for future proof. We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center, which is kind of a sign for things to come as where do we need the whole solution to be with networking inclusion. More configurability for VxRail SDDC. In other words, we keep moving forward very quickly. Yeah, and Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one, so V-SAN, I said when it was first announced, this was the rising tide that will really raise all the ships in what we launched as the hyper-converged environment. VxRail was at the time EMC and VMware creating a team together, took the product people, took some various components and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace. It was very successful, thousands of customers. V-SAN's got 15,000 customers. You've got to be one of the top deployments out. Is it still the, you're all under the Dell family, but is it still made up of those people? And how does that teamwork and innovation between various groups work today? No, look, when we did this, there was no runbook. How do you take two teams from two companies? But we discovered all the time that what we've created is extremely powerful. We were growing three times the market. And obviously that's not a simple thing. And so on both of our sides, we're doubling down on the roadmap, the integration between the companies. And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment because what you really have to do is move more things towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly because you don't want to forgo quality. So we're very happy with this model. And I think customers are happy with this model. You take the software, you put it with a specific configuration, you automate it to match and you get something that's very resilient. And I think both of us know that and both of us keep investing it because it's working. That's great. Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on with what you said about the VMware and the Dell teams coming together. So my tribe is on the VMware side, right? And the VMware admins have always been very involved with storage and for the last couple of years, they have been very involved cross-training on vSAN. So I'm kind of curious about the demand for VxRail and where it's coming from. Is it the VMware folks that are saying, hey, let's look at this? Is it the C level? Is it the old storage team? Is it the business unit? Like what's driving this transformation? Yeah, I'll tell you what. Two years ago, you needed to talk to people about YHCI. More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI. And we have a very unique position because we are part of the VMware stack. And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later, but HCI has its place, but we're already looking at what multicloud means from infrastructure standpoint, right? And so if it's a transformative conversation, it would be some sort of an architect in their environment that's transforming. And they'd have a cloud project and they'll have a name for me, you know, cloud one, my cloud, one of those. But most of the cases is still a tech refresh. They're moving from a three tier architecture to a consolidated hyperconverge. And V admins have a lot to say. The server admins have a lot to say. And the reason they buy an appliance or basically buy our automation is because they realize that it saves them time and it takes away risk. And many of them, by the way, choose to deploy Visa on their own with servers, which we call ready nodes. And also very successfully. In other words, it's how much value you want on top of Visa and that you're willing to pay for and they're voting with the wallets. Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud because it's one of the big themes of the show. And it's funny because we know that Visan is a critical component of the VMware cloud foundation, you know, the VCF stuff. But I hadn't really thought about, I mean, VxRail is just built with Visan. So I still, even though I know it's a software thing, I think of it as an appliance and something coming from Dell. Talk to us about how VxRail fits into the multicloud world for customers. So VxRail, you know, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack. They differ only in parts of the management stack on top of them. There's a VxRail manager, there's an SDDC manager that comes from VCF. And by the way, those over time will find their way into some way of consolidating the stack. And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is because we have not, we keep innovating with the Visan team, we keep benefiting from their innovation, we keep adding on top of it. But more and more you'll see us integrate with other parts of the VMware stack. So for example, I think Pat touched on our future or upcoming integration with our cloud assembly services. Right, so you could take a software based management and you realize and manage VxRails that you own as a service. So our current roadmap and investments are not only to invest in being the most resilient, robust, Visan based infrastructure, but tying to every part of the VMware stack so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud. So between VxRail and VxRack and the different touch points across the stack, we're really weaving it into the entire stack. That's our strength. We are a VMware product essentially. Right, and so we've realized that we need to take the whole breadth of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate at every level so this choice becomes a no-brainer for customers. You know, since VxRail is an appliance, like what's the, how often does it get updated? And are people capable of taking those updates since it's an engineered system like that? Yeah, look, in the past, when people wanted a lot of things to work together, they'd qualify them, they test them, and then they'd go upgrade them manually, piece by piece through a recipe, if you will. What we've done in the appliance model, we've added our own IP, which basically takes all of that and automates it. So what our customers get is a downloadable package from the EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update, all of the drivers, all of the firm are involved and does a one-but update for each node in the cluster and cycles with it automatically. So because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware, and by the way, customers are concerned with express patches, those we do within seven days or even faster. So every time VMware moves forward, every time we move forward, we package it all up and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically. So it happens as fast as they need it to be, you know what I mean? It's, there is no limitation because it's an appliance. It's the same thing as having a stack. I wonder if we could talk a little bit up the stack. The early customers that I've talked to, we know that modernizing your applications can be really challenging. A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is step one, modernize the platform. Step two, start modernizing the applications. What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers as they go through that kind of transition? That's a good question. I think most of the customers we're talking to today are still modernizing the infrastructure. That's the reality. They need a more agile environment because they need to take care of things up the stack and go into development models of all sorts. You can also see that there's a lot of success with our joint work with Pivotal on Pivotal-ready architecture. And so Pivotal and us have created the ready architecture based on VxRail. The value in that is really Cloud Foundry and what it brings to the table and the design. And we see a lot of adoption for that. So people are adopting Cloud Foundry as a development model and a deployment model. They're using VxRail as an infrastructure and obviously because of its ability to migrate across environments, that infrastructure transcends, it makes sense. So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people are still modernizing their base infrastructure to be ready for greater things. Absolutely, all right. Gil, want to give you the final word? What should we be looking for from your group as we go through the rest of 2018? We're going to keep moving. We're going to keep innovating. We're going to make sure that the solutions fit into the existing VR environments in a more seamless way every time we work on it. And I got to say, if there are customers, are customers watching this Cuban interview, I keep reaching out to customers, say, look, we have many, many thousands of customers now. We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them. So if anybody's watching and they're interested in a conversation, telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap, voicing their opinions directly to the product group, I know my title and Twitter handle are going to appear at the bottom. I invite people to reach out and talk to us. All right, great closing point, Gil. We're always loving fostering conversations and feedback. So Gil Schneerson, his Twitter handle is on the screen in case you're, you know, Schneerson doesn't, you know, come off your keyboard nice and easy. John Troyer and I'm Stu Miniman. We're also always loved the feedback when you said it on Twitter. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.