 Live from the Mendeley 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. We were watching SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to all the great enterprise technology so as help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host for this segment, John Troyer, the CEO of Tech Reckoning, and happy to welcome back to the program, multi-time guest, Jim Gauntier, who is VP and General Manager of Dell Enterprise Systems, Engineer Systems. Engineer Systems, HBC and Cloud. Yeah, so Jim, thanks, welcome back. We caught up with you at many shows, of course, Dell has lots of partnerships. I have to think that VMware is a little nearer and dearer to Dell's arts these days, especially, you know, once we, at least by the time we get to October. Yes, I mean, we've always had a great partnership. Matter of fact, it's been multi-decades with VMware, so I made the joke to a couple of folks on Pat's staff. We used to really, really like VMware, now we love VMware, but kidding aside, yes. We're happy, we're excited, and we're looking forward to having as part of the family. Yeah, it's funny, I think back, you know, when I first interacted with VMware back in O2, it was, Dell was one of the companies that pushed EMC to at least pay attention to VMware a little, which we know how that story played, and it's playing out even more. So, topic we're going to talk about today is the engineered system, so, you know, there's converged, there's hyper-converged, Wikibon, we call them server-san. What's your take on where we are with these environments, and what's Dell's talking about here at VMworld? Oh yeah, sure, so as you and I and others have talked about, folks are moving away from the days where we had siloed server storage, networking, and then on top of that, you had to have applications, workloads, and other things. Folks are looking to get to that faster time to, I guess we'll call it time to discovery, lower cost, and to some extent get rid of the edge of engineering. So, the industry has moved from reference architectures on one side to converge systems on the other. Think of converge systems as rack stacked, ready to go, in some cases they may even have the full life cycle, curated experience. We're seeing that there's folks who understand that probably is the end state, but what they don't want to do is student body left. So, in essence, what you're going to see, and unfortunately the press release hasn't broke, so I'm going to have to, you know, be a little bit careful as to what I say, how Dell, looking at this entire environment, actually sees an opportunity, and it's an opportunity to come up with no longer fixed, or rigid, or in some cases, here's bag of parts, but how someone could come up with the most flexible, converged infrastructure, or the most converged systems on the planet, and do that in a way that is modular, is heterogeneous, and allows those customers to really focus on the business outcomes they're trying to drive. All right, so can you talk to us about, you know, what you're hearing from customers, you know, how are they looking to consume this, you know, how's that changing kind of, you know, the buyer, and who's operating these environments? Now, so let me give you some examples of something that you all have helped us with. Back in April, again, back to the Dell, we believe in helping customers focus on business outcomes, we want to focus on future ready, you know all the things that we have as part of our lingua franca. We said that we were going to, A, be one of the first to announce vSAN ready notes, and you know, when we talked to our VMware peers, and we just had a business review here, that business is doing really well, and it's doing really well because customers want to get to the point where they can quickly have the infrastructure they need, the software they need, pre-tested, pre-validated, ready to go, and they're doing it in fairly large quantities. Those are for the ones who want flexible. The other thing we said, and again, it's a Dell differentiator, is hey, you know, unlike some of our competition, we're not going to force you to be bladed only, we're not going to force you to take everything from us. Our customers are asking for heterogeneous. So in April, we said we're going to have a resale announcement with VxRail and VxRack. I'm very happy to say that, and not just I'm happy to say, so is the VMware team, that VxRail and VxRack scenario, that's working out pretty well too. Again, what's the lingua franca? Customers want to get faster time to discovery, faster time to results, lower the amount of iterative engineering, know that what they're putting up, they can spend their time focusing on innovation, not focusing on infrastructure. One of the things I think I'm taking away from this week is perhaps one size does not fits all. Actually, I'd like to joke one size fits none. Exactly. We talked about CrossCloud this morning, and what I find interesting in the new hardware delivery, the new systems deliveries, right? You have everything from small rack and stack, scale out systems all the way up to rack scale and perhaps beyond. And there's a portfolio approach. So how are you guys approaching this portfolio and segmentation of the market? It's kind of fascinating, different horses for courses. Oh yeah, no, very simple. We refer to it as the continuum of offers. I mean, I have the pleasure of talking of, I don't know, hundreds of customers a month, or maybe actually hundreds of customers, especially at these kind of events. And so the net is as we hear loud and clear, everybody is on a journey, but everybody's on a different click stop of that journey. I would love for everybody to do 100% buy the end state, built, ready to go things, for example, such as some of our cloud platform systems. But frankly, there are other customers outside of enterprise who want to start small and build fast. Let's also not forget SMB customers. As a, I guess we'll call it a longtime Dell employee, our founder, reminded me, every success that we've ever had actually had some level of SMB involved. So we also have to build for them. And that's why we do things such as reference architecture. So if you think of reference architectures all the way through nodes and bundles, perhaps all the way up to validated systems. And then on top of that, full-fledged engineered systems, converged systems, all of those are part of the continuum. And depending on what the customer wants to do, that's how we're going to help them. The difference, and most folks have a continuum too, but the difference is one, we're the only ones who can talk about it truly from an end-to-end perspective. When I say end-to-end, I mean client, data center, cloud, software services, and even Dell financial services. And two, unlike a lot of our competitors, we're the only ones who actually use in heterogeneity. Going back to something that we did back in the Julyish timeframe, we had a customer who came to us and said, hey, you know what, love what you folks are doing, but I have a different networking standard. Our answer is great, which one would you like? And so we built them a validated system that actually had somebody else's networking standard into it. That's the mentality at Dell, that's the difference at Dell, and that's why we've got this continuum that nobody else has. Well, talking about this continuum, if you had a time machine, and we project forward a little bit, right? It seems like we are on a path towards more engineered systems. The day of, I sometimes use the metaphor of a shade tree mechanic where you pop the hood open and you'll pop out the carburetor, and we're in a room full of nerds here, and we all love that, but it just strikes me as the time to value and for so many other reasons, the level of automation, we're losing our nerd knobs, we're going more towards engineered systems. Is that, am I wrong in projecting that? Is that how you see it as well? No, I actually see that going down that path, and by the way, I've been seeing this path since my public sector days. These are decades long pathways. It's kind of funny when somebody talks about some, such and such a technology being dead, right? In what decade? But anyway, I'm sorry, I'm right. No, no, no, actually you were dead on. So we actually see people moving there, but you put up a really great point. It's not just about day one. It's also about day two through end. The way that something is delivered, whether it's the, and I kiddingly call it, truck of parts or sometimes bag of doorknobs, all the way up to a full engineered system, that's for day one. Remember, someone's doing this in order to go drive a business outcome, to go drive a business results, to create SLAs. What happens on day two, day 50, day 1,000, day end? So part of that continuum, part of that offering set needs to also be a great management and orchestration layer. The ability to take something and have it configure one way without requiring an army of admins, and then also be able to change it and redeploy it so you don't have what I refer to as stranded infrastructure or basically the capability of having a lot of server storage and networking that's wildly over provision. That's something else you're going to start to see us roll out. And frankly, you saw a little bit of that vision today. I mean, case in point, and you heard both Pat and others talk about it, Cloud Foundation, they actually mentioned Dell because we've partnered really well with VMware in order to do that. And it's based on our vSAN nodes, but you also saw them start to talk about management orchestration. How do I now take individual components and turn it into not only a hybrid cloud end state, a multi-cloud end state, and be able to dynamically manage that on behalf of my customers, the line of business owners, and frankly, I guess we'll call it the IT department itself. All right, so Jim, when we hear people talk about software defined storage, a lot of times it's just, oh, I'm going to use white box commodity equipment underneath, can you talk about kind of where Dell adds value, both in the hardware and you're starting to talk about some of the life cycle and orchestration and things that you add from a software component. Because Dell still has software, right? Yes, we do. And by the way, software, if you're asking about Dell software division, there are still some assets that are staying with Dell. Bumi's a perfect example. In my fact, Bumi's an industry differentiated example. And then there's software within each of the groups themselves. So to answer your points succinctly, yes. Where do we add value? Things such as not to get geeky, things like our iDRAC, which is basically our management controller, the ability to go in, manage, patch, provision, update, be able to know when a server is not operating at its ultimate performance, that's something we do. The management and orchestration layer, the ability to not only look at that from a server perspective, look at that from a networking perspective, look at it from a storage perspective and treat all of those as resource pools. Very similar to the vision you saw Pat and others paint this morning and be able to do that in a templated fashion. So as we like to joke, you should be able to design once, deploy often. No longer do you need the, and I'm sure we've all been there, Visio room, or I should say room of Visio diagrams, multiple program managers, lots of months, lots of dollars, lots of hours, lots of pizza boxes. Now what you can do is have a really smart essay, create a template, make that readily available, show it in the catalog, and as a line of business owner, I know how much, how long, what I'm going to get, and after answering two or three mother mag police security screens, boom, instantaneous deployment. And I can do that over and over and over again. You can't get that from a white box. All right, so how about, how are you helping customers through the process of going from kind of the old way to the new way, education retraining, best practices and the like? Absolutely, so the best way to help a customer understand is to basically figure out what we call interline, depending on who the customer is, depending on where they are within assessment on that click stop of where they are going in that journey, we can say here's what we believe you should start. Now in some cases, it's not always an or statement. I've known of a few customers if you go into their data center, they may actually have a part where it was done with a reference architecture, they may have a couple of others where in that particular rack they have basically a hyper-converge platform and then they've got true engineered systems. But it all starts with, what's the workload? What are you trying to do? Where are you headed with it? More importantly, what are the kind of SLAs that you want to go put in place? And that's how we help pick and choose the interline as to what is the best offering to help them go deliver that result. All right, so Jim Gauntier, really appreciate you coming by, giving us the Dell perspective. You're actually going to stay right there and hope our audience stays right there because we're going to have Jim on with VMware to get kind of a joint perspective of where they're going. So thank you so much for watching theCUBE.