 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs, live continues covered from Dell Storage Forum 2012 here in Boston, Massachusetts. Joining me for this segment are two gentlemen from VMware, Felipe Payette and Tracy Waller. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So theCUBE is where we find, we go to the biggest tech events around, find the smartest people we can, try to separate the signal from the noise and explain some of the biggest challenges and opportunities going on in technology today. And absolutely, this is a storage show and looking a lot at infrastructure. And I don't think anyone would argue that virtualization in VMware have had a huge impact on what's gone on for more than the last decade. So, Felipe, if we could start with you, tell us a little bit about what's your role at VMware and what are you doing with Dell this week? Sure, sounds good, thanks Stu. First of all, thanks for having us. We're excited to be here at the event as a petabyte sponsor and showcasing our longstanding partnership between Dell and VMware that's going on a decade now. And one of the things that we are actually proudest of is the tight technical integration between the two companies. One of the things that I spend most of my time on is working on that joint solution development activity between the two companies, and without getting into the weeds too much, that means working with Dell and our engineering teams to make sure that we take advantage of APIs and integration opportunities to develop both the best performance and the best manageability of virtualization on Dell infrastructure. And a lot of that's being shown off here at the event today. Great, Felipe, I definitely want to dig into that in this segment. I think back when I started working with VMware in 2002, sure, all the server guys were closely with VMware. It was almost kind of like, okay, this is the next generation operating system, hypervisor, throw it on bare metal and go with it, but there are deep engineering relationships and I'm sure you're close on that. So, Tracy, when we look at the relationship with Dell and VMware, can you talk about where we are, since you're on the sales side, where we are with Dell? I kind of always hear the jockeying people talk about. IBM says we're number one, and HP says we're number one, and Dell says we're number one, and I know VMware loves all of its OEMs and partners equally, but give us a little bit from the sales side and your role. Well, from the sales side, Dell, by volume, is the number one reseller of VMware, both in the Americas and globally. My role is to actually engage with the Dell sales engine in the Americas. So I've got a team of people that we work with the different Dell segments from S&B through Public Large Enterprise to make sure that that selling engagement works smoothly and flawlessly, that they know how to represent the solutions that we've built together to the customer and how to best represent the pain points and the value proposition that that joint solution can offer the customer base. So Tracy, how many people are we talking on each side that are a part of this solution that the engagement, I should say? In the Americas line, we have upwards of about 65 people that are dedicated to the Dell VMware partnership. About half of those are VMware badge and the other half are licensing specialists and technical specialists that carry a Dell badge, but they are 100% dedicated to the partnership in the Americas. And then globally, that probably almost doubles globally. Great, because real bodies, real people driving those solutions and helping sell that drive. So Felipe, we've heard a lot of announcements this week from Dell and we're kind of in the middle of the summer show season here, looking forward to at the end of August, VMworld where kind of the whole ecosystem comes together. So what's new from a joint development and solution standpoint with Dell and VMware? So one of the things that we spent a lot of time talking about most recently is how, by enabling integration between the two technologies, we delivered to our joint customers a single pane of glass management interface, not just for their physical infrastructure, but for their, I'm sorry, not just for their VMs, but for their physical infrastructure and that means not just Dell servers, but also ecological and compelling storage. So we get the question asked a lot regarding why customers should come to Dell to buy their virtualization infrastructure and the very simple answer to that consistent with what folks have been hearing from Brad Anderson and from Darren Thomas in their keynotes this week is that we deliver a better together story. So when you say single pane of glass, you're talking about vCenter, correct? I am, I'm talking about vCenter and the ability to manage your VMs as well as your Dell servers, your ecological storage and your compelling storage from that single pane of glass interface. Four customers that are virtualizing on VMware. Yeah, no, great point and we absolutely see VMware and your competitor Microsoft trying to pull in a lot of the management. Tintress, we had Darren on this morning and we talked specifically about management which is a hot topic for him and he actually said that a single pane of glass is really unrealistic, it's about APIs and policies. So I don't think we're necessarily at odds with what the discussion is here because obviously Darren and his team and all the products are looking to work very closely with vCenter. But a total single pane of glass that I can do everything at, we're not there yet, but the APIs and the policies and working together between the two companies that's getting us towards that kind of holy grail. Exactly, and for again, for customers that are virtualizing on VMware which Tracy can talk to, the install base that we have through Dell which is massive, we are delivering that single pane of glass management interface and we are expanding on it with things like our vCenter operations management product which has been out since vSphere 5.0 that was announced last year, which by the way, all of this, the whole suite is being refreshed in the near future that delivers substantially enhanced manageability and predictive analytics and really, really powerful capabilities. And again, based on the fact that there are plugins for Dell infrastructure into vCenter which are not just sort of link and launch plugins that'll take you to a different interface but really allow you to manage from within vCenter. It's a pretty powerful value prop but we're not trying to boil the ocean here, right? We're not saying that vCenter is the single pane of glass management interface that's going to manage everything including VMs from other hypervisors. Great, now we're all looking forward for, I believe 5.1 is what the rumored version is and we expect some time between now and VMworld, I'm sure you can't confirm or deny, but go in there. So Tracy, sounds like, do you have some data points for us as to, we talked about how many people we have, what's the install base, what's the growth pattern? I'd seen a trend a couple of years ago that the big OEMs seem to be a smaller percentage of VMware vSphere, where are we today? Well, I mean, Dell's still growing. I mean, they still represent a very significant acquisition engine, especially in the SMB space for VMware. They've captured hundreds of thousands of customers over the course of time and the strategy that we've now set up with Dell over the past years really go from just data center, the data center consolidation to more of a cloud strategy and Dell invested a billion dollars in their services organization just around cloud. We're fortunately a big part of that and now we can go in and talk to that install base and talk to the customer about a hybrid cloud solution. We can talk about capacity as opposed to just server and storage and the product feature function of that plus VMware, we can talk about compute capacity on how to attack the business critical applications and then optimize that customer's workloads on their on-premise data center or move it into Dell's data center on their vCloud branded environment that they've built out. Great, so if I think back to really the vision that VMware's been putting forth for the last two years, it's the three layers of the stack and infrastructure is kind of the foundational piece. I love, Paul Merritt says we want to kind of forget about infrastructure and make it invisible and Steve Herrod comes back and said, well, we want to make it really easy so that, you know, it kind of works together. What about the other two layers of the stack? So really the end user computing and kind of the next generation applications. Felipe, I think you have some comments as to Dell's engagement on those. Yeah, absolutely. I'll start at the top of the cake. On the end user computing side, and actually given that we are at a storage event, we'll pull in the storage layer as well. We have done a lot of work with Dell to develop Dell's desktop virtualization solutions, their DVS offerings, which deliver a view for virtualization based on Dell infrastructure. And we've got, you know, Dell pre-configured offerings or Dell's factory validated offerings that will give users the ultimate in manageability and user density and in user experience for horizontal use cases, just so desktop virtualization in general, but we've got a step beyond that and work closely with Dell's healthcare segment, their federal segment, and we're working with other areas to develop vertical specific offerings. So just one example of that is Dell has something called the Mobile Clinical Computing offering, which is a healthcare specific follow me desktop solution based on VMware in view that delivers clinicians the ability to access their desktop from anywhere instantaneously with a single sign-on capability that saves them minutes over the course of a day or possibly even hours over the course of a working week and gives them instant access to patient information in a location aware format that based on where they are in a hospital, they can quickly get to the information they need. So that's just one example of one of the solutions that we've developed jointly. When it comes to the application space, Tracy mentioned that in the app space we're also working with Dell on things like mission critical application virtualization and beyond that there's also opportunities that we're in the process of developing with Dell to go after the developer space. There are three million plus developers that use the spring framework and you saw last year that we had the spring source acquisition, lots of opportunities there to work together with Dell and that there's sort of things in the works there. Absolutely, so we actually covered the node summit earlier this year, Joyance, a good Dell partner, VMware was also there, we got to talk to some of your folks. So Tracy, at the field level, how much of the relationship is based on kind of the infrastructure and how much is their training education or actual delivery on the other two pieces? Well, the bread and butter is the infrastructure. I mean, and to Steve Harris' point, making it easy, I think that's what Dell and VMware have been doing is making that infrastructure layer easy. As we actually move out and start talking it to the Dell sales team today and to their technical teams, we're putting a lot of emphasis on the management stack, on the business continuity, backup, recovery, all the things that you need, all the solutions that you need to have in place so that you can go capture those mission critical workloads, right? To really get to the pain point that the customer, why is the customer buying all this technology? They're buying it to run applications and we ultimately need to have Dell be able to have the Dell sales engine and the technical force be able to have that conversation and a deeper conversation at that level and worrying about the bits and bytes of the infrastructure layer. And it's been a very, they've been very receptive to that message and I think they're doing a great job carrying it forward and we're starting to see a definite uptick in sales around the operations layer, the operations management layer around our viewer desktop layer and around site recovery manager and some of the other solutions that we have in the security space. So, public cloud's a little bit of one of those jump balls out there. I did a tour of the Switch Supernap in Las Vegas last week and I saw EMC there, I saw Dell there and I saw VMware public cloud there. So, how do you guys balance kind of working with a partner and kind of driving some of the new applications and solution spaces where VMware's been doing some acquisitions like the slide rocket to the world and was it the social? Social cast? Social cast and everything, yeah. So, on the public cloud side actually, I'm glad you're bringing this up because this is one of the things that we've been most excited about since VMworld last year when the Dell Public Cloud Service was announced. So, Dell amongst our strategic partners is unique in that Dell and VMware together really today can offer the full hybrid cloud portfolio from on-premise cloud building blocks like Dell's Vstart offerings, which are factory pre-configured building blocks for on-premise cloud, right? To custom configurations with Dell services that'll come in and stand up your on-premise desktop, I'm sorry, enterprise virtualization solutions to the Dell cloud service with VMware vCloud data center. So, customers can now buy their on-prem infrastructure from Dell and they can burst out their workloads using our vCloud connector technology to the Dell Public Cloud. So, you mentioned how we wait, you know, working with our different partners. We're actually very excited about the fact that Dell is in a unique position today to be able to offer customers the full VMware-based private cloud as well as the public cloud service and be able to move workloads back and forth from one to the other. So, Tracy, I'm assuming you're talking to the end-user, the customers in the field quite a bit. There are any kind of, you know, early cases that you think are kind of, not foreboding is the wrong word, but kind of the early indicators as to some of the transformations that are going on in this space. Yeah, I mean, from the cloud standpoint, yes. We're already seeing Dell take customers that were initially, hold on one moment. Let's keep going. We saw customers, they've gone in where they've captured the traditional data center on-prem and these customers now look, how do we move test dev? You know, I don't need that workload capacity, you know, in my own data center. How can I more efficiently use Dell's data center? And they're already moving those test dev applications over to the data center. We're seeing more and more disaster recovery conversations going on between Dell and the customer around how do they use that public cloud for that type of function. You know, the security piece seems to be a question that all customers have. Dell's come back with their secure works offering to show how they can actually secure that public environment, you know, or the Dell cloud, you know, in a much better fashion, the competition out there. And I think customers are starting to adapt it. They've had over the course of the past six months, they've had a pretty big uptick and customers moving into their public cloud offering. Yeah, you know, it reminds me so much of the journey we saw on just server virtualization, starting in the test dev, rolling out to what percentage of virtualization, getting some of those key use cases and key verticals. And we're seeing the same thing on cloud. Everybody wants to test it out and make sure that it's going to work on something that if it doesn't work, no one loses their job over it. I think we'll see that same evolution process. Yeah, so one of the other big things we've been talking about the storage show here is Flash. And, you know, Dell's showing off their project Hermes. Virtualization, you know, has a kind of a unique interaction with Flash. Fusion IO made their IO turbine acquisition. Philippe, is there anything you can share as to, you know, what you're seeing partnering with the storage guys on Flash interaction? Probably a little bit early to tell. You know, there's definitely things that we're discussing at the engineering level and some pretty exciting things that are going to be coming up over the course of the rest of this year. But I think a little early to talk about anything specific, but you're absolutely right. That's another area where sort of, you know, using Flash-based technologies for caching and for improving performance of the storage tier is a pretty exciting area. Okay, great. So, Philippe and Tracy, thank you so much for joining us here on theCUBE. We look forward to upcoming announcements from VMware. Definitely look to see more from the Dell VMware partnership at VMworld at the end of August. And this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. We'll be right back after this break.