 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE at VMworld 2016 at the Mandalay Convention Center here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome the program, my first time guest. First hope is the VP of Global Channels with SimpliVity. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so VMworld is not only a user conference, of course VMware has lots of channel partners that are here. VMware is a critical partner of SimpliVity. So tell us kind of, how's the week been for you so far? Week's been great. I mean, there's no better place to socialize with your partners. Get out of the business setting a little bit. Of course you have business conversations, but you have an opportunity to really get to know them better and understand what you can do to help them and certainly being able to do it rapid fire during a three-day period. It's a lot easier than flying around the country. Yeah, so sometimes you talk about drinking from the fire hose. I think we're kind of submerged under water because there's no shortage of technical knowledge. All the people are here. Maybe there's a little bit of extracurricular activity too. Or you can just spend all night talking to some of the best people in the industry here at the show. Exactly. So to tell us kind of your role, you've been in the company three years, how important is the channel? The channel's critical for us. From the top down, it's very interesting how much support we have at the CEO level down for the channel program. We're 100% partners. We've always been 100% partner. We intend to be 100% partner. And that's really resonated very well with the partner community. The partner community can invest in a SimpliVity relationship and can invest in building the capabilities and know that we're not going to pull the rug out from under at any point. They compete with each other rather than competing with the mother ship. All right, can you sketch out for us kind of the breadth of the program, how you become a channel partner for SimpliVity, different levels, things like that? Yeah, the beauty of the program is in the simplicity of the program. So we really... We would expect nothing less. We can't get away with complicating channels if we're set out to simplify IT. So we try to make it as simple as possible. Our mantra is simple, efficient, lucrative, loyal. Just happens to spell sell. Just was a coincidence, just worked out that way. But the simplicity of it, you shouldn't have to hire somebody to manage our portion of the program to understand how to make money. Should be pretty clear how you make money. Yeah, that's a great point because look, when we're talking on the channel, the old adage is it's a coin-operated business when you talk about it. When we started talking about this basic convergence, there were some people on the channel that was like, I make millions of dollars racking, stacking, cabling. As we simplify the environments, how do I make money? There's that change in the channel. Bring us up to speed as to what you've been doing, how companies are excited to partner with and offer the SimpliVity solutions. The partner, I think the partner community really responds to being part of the activity. I've always said the best way to learn how to sell SimpliVity is by selling SimpliVity. And it's not really intuitive what we do. We are very, very different in the way we approach simplifying IT. And we're very, very different than all of the other so-called hyper-converged vendors out there. So we really need to take the time to explain to customers exactly what we do. And if we do it with a partner sitting with us and the partner sees the excitement on the face of the customer and sees that it really is truly resonating and there's interest there, they suddenly want to be that trusted advisor. So activity begets activity and the more they do, the more they want to do. And that's typically how we win over the people in the partner community. All right, George, let's walk through some of the technology pieces that go with what you're doing. So first, let's start with VMware. How do you put those pieces together, work with the channel? Of course, the channel's been critical since the earliest days of VMware. Yeah, so we, I mean, we naturally targeted VMware partners out of the gate. Prior to coming to SimpliVity, I worked for EMC for 17 years or 68 quarters, as I fondly remember it. The partners that I used to work with were the natural partners to start to work with. A lot of the people that we hired have background with Cisco, NetApp, EMC. So we have a lot of relationships with those types of partners. So right out of the gate, we had the perfect ecosystem to go approach and start to take them through what would differentiate it's our product. And then as we found the right partners, we gave them the right amount of training, the right amount of support. And as you mentioned earlier, it needs to be a lucrative program. These guys, like you said, are coin operated and we have to be the best return on time. Sales reps work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They're going to spend time where they're going to retire the most quota. We need to give them the opportunity to retire the most quota. And we need to have lucrative rebates and such for the company so that they can reinvest in the business and it kind of snowballs after that. And the hypervisor itself, it's VMware that most of your customers are using. Is that no EM relationship? Does that come pre-loaded on the box? And are there other offerings from the VMware catalog as they've been expanding that work their way into some of the solutions? So right now we run exclusively on VMware and our product is managed out of eCenter. That will change in the not too distant future. I'm sure you've been briefed on some of that, but in the meantime, we work with their partners. We don't sell VMware licenses. So the partner will sell the VMware license and the partner will sell our technology and we'll integrate them together and then provide the total solution for the customer. What's also has changed and you might have heard us talk about our Meet in the Channel program is that now we've broken it up even further. So we used to sell, the customer could, the VAR could sell our OmniCube and VMware. And now we've given them other options for the OmniCube where they, if they have a preferred server vendor like Cisco or Lenovo, and they would rather buy the server from the server vendor and buy the software from us, then they can buy the VMware, our OmniStack technology and their server of choice, provided we've qualified it obviously. And then they will integrate those three together and sell to the customer. So we're trying to provide more and more choice, if you will. I'm wondering if you could help us impact that a little. When I talk to most users of SimpliVity or other hyper-converged technologies, most of the time the customer doesn't care that much about the underlying compute. They might have had some special cases. So, you know, other certain users that are just, you know, I'm a Died-in-the-Wolf Cisco customer. I want it. Or is it the channel partners that are, you know, helping to drive that decision? How do we determine a kind of the traditional Dell-based offering that you have, Cisco, Lenovo, or other options? It's kind of a combination of both. So there are customers that really have a server preference. We've never lost a deal because we didn't run on their server of choice. So clearly they see value in the software. But we like to give them choices because if they have a Cisco environment and they're using UCS Manager, then they're going to want to continue to do that and we don't want to wheel in something that doesn't fit into their environment. So we give them the opportunity there. And a lot of the VARs have a bias as well. Right, so if you look at some of the VARs, if you're a Cisco VAR, you may not want to put Dell technology in that account. You'd rather go to your buddy over at Cisco and say, hey, I can run the servers through you. Let's all work together and collaborate. And it's a win-win for everybody. And I'm curious, you've got so many features built into your product. Are you getting feedback from your channel partners being kind of the voice of the customer for enhancements there? Do they come and say, hey, or there's other pieces of the VMware stack that we want to integrate or we want to sell with your offering? Well, we have integration for NSX. We have integration for, if you realize, we have integration for UCS Director. So all those things are packaged in, but we're, the most requests that we're getting today are for additional platforms only enough. Because they do have, it could be a VAR that has another preference outside. For instance, some of the VARs that sell Dell want to break up the OmniCube and buy the Dell separately. So we've allowed them to do that as well. If they want to leverage those other relationships, because the more people that want us to win, the higher likelihood we're gonna have to be able to win. And we let the VARs kind of control that, right? It's the VARs that are our lifeblood that bring us into these opportunities. So we want to give them the ability to stay in their selling motion and leverage some of the relationships they already have rather than take them completely out of their stream. Yeah, but most people that don't understand the space, a lot of times they said, oh, it's these boxes. We hear appliances and you have that term. At its core, SimpliVity is software. There is a controller card for, some of the advanced functions in Accelerator, but it is kind of software at the core of what you're doing there. Yeah, yeah, it's software. We just wrote software that needed a little bit more horsepower. So the Accelerator card is just that, right? It replaces the need to throw a bunch more servers out. And other technologies have a lot of server overhead to run when you're taking a technology that used to just manage the apps and used to have a specialized device that was a server that managed the storage. Now you have the server has to do both. Sometimes it needs a little help. All right, so George, what about when we talk about cloud? It was kind of the morning keynote on day one from Pat Gelsinger. How does cloud and service providers fit into kind of the channel play that you have? Well, we've recently announced a cloud service provider program. And what we've noticed that there are some pure cloud service providers, but then there are a lot of our vars that want to add some as a service offerings. They might want to add DR as a service. They might want to desktop as a service. They might want to just have infrastructure as a service. So we've seen a lot of crossover between the service provider that wants to have a selling relationship as well and the selling partner that wants to have an as a service offering. So we've offered up a cloud service provider program that kind of, I hate to say, combines the best of both worlds, but it gives you the ability to ring up credit with some civility in either and be able to combine them for benefits. So if you do both, we want to encourage you to do both and take advantage of some of the benefits that the program has. And we see that we can offer some of our traditional vars and some of the service providers a very, very competitive platform to be able to offer as a service on and keep some of these workloads from going off to the traditional public cloud, so to speak. George, I'm curious, what's the pulse when you're talking to kind of your traditional channel partners, the ones that have sold storage, maybe they sold UCS, what do they think of public cloud service providers? Are they concerned? Are they plugging along with what they're doing? What do they think? I think it's a little bit of both. I think it's definitely eating away at their business. And I think they're starting to see a world where they either have to be part of it or potentially put their business at risk. So I think some of them are embracing some of those cloud offerings and selling them, some of them, and then they're selling the on-prem as well. And we think we give them the ability to kind of give their customers the economics of what the cloud would offer, but still that control and that efficiency and elasticity performance and everything that they would potentially give up if they went to the cloud. All right, so George, you've known a lot of these channel partners for many years. What's the vibe at the show? Do you think they're optimistic about the future? Any kind of feedback on kind of the Dell EMC VMware thing? Is that kind of a top of mind item for them? What's the pulse? I think they're just waiting for it to play out. I think the good news is that it's over now. I think, I believe I heard yesterday that the China, the China piece is all set. So officially September 7th, it's almost 12 o'clock. They're going. I think that's going to put a lot more people at ease. I think the uncertainty was more of a cloud than actually what's happening, but I'm not Nostradamus. I have no idea what's going to happen on September 8th, but I think the vibe around here, we pay more attention to how can we accelerate some of these partner relationships? How can we give them a tool that helps them be competitive and resilient, and we understand that they have other technologies that they have to deal with, and they've all been selling a lot of the legacy products that we're replacing, so it takes time to migrate them over, but in the meantime, we give them something to go be disruptive where somebody else might have the legacy business. Great, George, want to give you the final word. What do you want to talk to kind of your current and expanding channel partners out there about? I would say to the partners that we have today, we're getting a lot of our partners investing. We're growing in leaps and bounds, never fast enough, obviously, but I would encourage the partners that haven't invested in at least exploring what we can bring to the table that they look into it. I would say to the ones that we've been co-investing in already, they know who they are, and in those cases, we're going to pour more gas on that. We want them to know that we're reciprocating that interest and that those who want to go make it happen in this space, we will do whatever we can to enable them. We will make them as profitable as we possibly can. We'll hold their hand through the entire process and make it a big win for them, both short-term and long-term. George Hope, really appreciate you joining us here, giving us some of the channel perspective here. One of some of the many angles we've been covering at VMworld 2016. We'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.