 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage here, day two of Dell EMC World 2017, along with my esteemed colleague, John Furrier. First time we've been together all week. Great to see you. Where have you been? Where have you been? Because usual day two, we're doing. You've been right there on the blue set. I'm on the other set. Now you're on the white set. Two double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World. 26 interviews a day. It's what theCUBE is all about, yes. Super excited. We're with Armageddon Amad, who is the Senior Vice President and GM of Blueprint Solutions and Alliances at Dell EMC. Sorry about that. It's a mouthful. Sorry about that. All right, so first off, let's talk show. Just in general, I mean, you're feeling about this confluence here. 13,000 plus biggest show ever. Just a melee of announcements. A lot going on. A lot going on, and we're super excited. You saw the keynotes yesterday and today. Pat Gelsinger and I know Jeff Clark couldn't make it, but I think Jeremy did a pretty good job, right? Talking about our client business unit. Just Jeremy Burton. Jeremy Burton, yeah. It's been great. And then yesterday was our, you know, David Goulden and Michael talked about the whole ISG platform, which is our infrastructure solutions group of server storage, networking, data protection. Lots of buzz. Customers, partners. We have 4,000 channel partners here as well, along with our technology alliance partner ecosystem. It's great. This is the first Dell EMC world, right? I mean, you know, John, we were, you started coming to the very first or the second Dell world that has to be. 2010, I think was our start. This is our eighth year coverage since 2010. First Dell EMC world. Dell EMC world. I mean, there was one event in Austin, but that was kind of like a mini, one month after the close. I think it was in October. That's right, yeah, yeah. Kind of framed. Dell world, yeah. It was kind of like a mini kind of toe in the water. But this is full blown transferring over to the new brand. New company, Dell Technologies. You didn't mention David Blaine, though. Keynotes. I mean, I'm still amazed by the card trick and then the ice pick in the hand. The ice pick to me was mind blowing. That was a little creepy. It is, it is. But you know that reference with David Blaine? I'm sure somebody's already told you all the ad campaigns that Jeremy Burton has launched that it's not digital transformation is not magic. It's not magic, right? So it's that connection point, right? That was very cool. Yeah, it's very cool. All right, so blueprint solutions. Four key areas. Walk us through those, if you will, to give us an idea of what you're touching. Yeah, sounds good, John. So, we're focused on delighting our customers related to customer outcomes and customer workload. So we have, we talk about, we have a great marketing campaign, but at the same time, we have a lot of good positions in Gartner Magic Quadrants, as well as our number one market shares. So if you look at servers, storage, networking, data protection, conversion infrastructure, hyper conversion infrastructure, we're number one positions in all of them. There's still products. Either they are build based products where we sell your product and you sort of build those together for you, right? As a customer, or you buy a orientation from us, such as a conversion infrastructure or a hyper conversion infrastructure. What we're doing with ready solutions, we actually put ready solutions on top of that. The ready solutions umbrella is really around ready nodes, ready bundles and ready systems. They're focused on four critical areas, actually five critical areas. First one is our high performance computing focus. Now it's not your grandfather's HPC anymore, right? This is HPC moving from academia and research to now evolving much more into genomics research. It's moving into life sciences, moving into manufacturing, finance and others. Second big area focuses data analytics. So think of Hadoop clusters, analytics clusters. Third focus area is business critical apps. Fourth is software defined infrastructure and then the fifth one is hybrid cloud. So what we're doing is we're trying to create these ready solutions all across the customer continuum of if you want to build, we have a ready node for you or ready bundle. But if you want a full lifecycle or turnkey, then that ready system exists for that purpose. Talk about the value to customers. Because one of the things that we're here, Michael yesterday talked about the opportunity, the growth opportunity, certainly in the mature market of data center, huge numbers. But the consolidations have been there and then the migration or transfer to hybrid is a lot of new things. So there's a lot of learning involved. How is the ready fitted to that? Is that one of those things where it's like we have something for you and in case they want something turnkey, POC or production system, what's the customer profile for this? So John, what we're seeing is customers obviously, if you look at data analytics or high performance computing or even hybrid cloud, it'll give you an example of high performance computing. We have a customer TGen. It's a research, cancer research type of customer and they were looking to do genome sequencing. Genome sequencing would take them 22 months. Now with our ready bundle for high performance computing and life sciences, they're able to deploy that in 22 days to now we're working towards 22 minutes. Imagine that, genome sequencing that fast. So rather than them figuring out, do I have to take this server and in order for this server to work with NVIDIA or Melanox, I have to configure the server BIOS and firmware to be X, Y and Z. What if we do all of that as a ready solution? So the solution's ready. And then the customer, and that's where our partnership comes in with Intel. Intel's a huge partnership as part of AI and our framework related to machine learning as well as us taking high performance computing to new growth areas. So we work with Intel, we work with NVIDIA, we work with Melanox to put all of that together as a ready solution. And then TGen is able to now focus on cancer research and the care that they provide to children. And in 22 months to 22 days, that could mean a lot in terms of human progress. So we're super excited about that. So I got to ask you another question Michael talked about was the ecosystem that's there, but also they want to be the strategic partner. And so the world's changed with the acquisition and the merger of equals, if you will, Dell and EMC, there's so much more product portfolio. So how has that changed in the alliances? How has that changed in the ecosystem? Because the synergies are coming to the table pretty fast. Marius Haas pointed out specifically deals where you're winning a lot more where EMC wasn't and Dell was, you're winning more storage. When it was storage, there's more Dell. So a lot of those synergies are coming to the table. How is that similar synergy affecting your alliance area? Yeah, so we use John alliances to not just resell their software. What we're evolving to is to take alliances and this new business unit that we've created for Dell EMC together for solutions. It's full of engineering resources, product management, product marketing. It's a full business unit that we are enabling through alliance partner applications. So if you think about workloads or if you think of, let's say, let's take Hadoop. Hadoop is a key workload unstructured, structured, right-based basic systems. So we have some critical partnerships with Cloudera and Hortonworks as well as Splunk. So let's take those three alliance partners. Now us just reselling that to customers is interesting but wouldn't it be fascinating if we actually take Hortonworks, Cloudera and Splunk and actually build out a ready bundle solution, Dell EMC ready bundle for Hadoop. And it's powered by Cloudera, Hortonworks and Splunk. Now that helps the customer very quickly stand up a solution for Hadoop, so synergy. So let me address how in the past at Dell we would essentially sell a Hadoop cluster with a bunch of great PowerEdge servers and we would attach DAZ storage to it, right? Direct attached storage. We did not have something like shared storage or network attached storage like Isilon. Now imagine if now we have Isilon, so my group and working with Carl Corbis and Jeff Goudreau's Isilon group and we essentially brought Isilon into all of our Hadoop offerings. So imagine that. So now Synergy, what Marius has talked about or Billy Scannell talked about and now on the product group side we're also taking those platforms. Customers are just delighted by that because now we're not only just giving them a server with DAZ running Hadoop but it's now including- Okay so here's the hard, here's the hard tough question. Yeah, sounds good. I'm a customer. Well that all sounds good. I'm used to dealing with speeds and feeds with Dell and the EMC's always been great with storage. What experience do you have doing this? Now I kind of know you have a lot with VCE and VBlog in the past of doing some of these, I won't say purpose-built but whatever, ready solutions. Integrated solutions. It's not new for you guys. So talk about that question that people might say, is it too new because of the experience? Share some color on that. No I think that's a great question. So focus, let's pick an example. So we have a lot of customers who are looking to deploy these sorts of solutions but at the same time we have to simplify the value proposition for them. So if you look at customers moving to, just swiping their card card and going to AWS. Now if you're a system admin, you want to ensure that you are providing a service to your customers. You could be at a general manager, a general motors as a CIO or an IT manager or you could be a commercial customer. You want to ensure that you are providing a service and your service has to be differentiated. So what we're doing John is we're, obviously our history of VCE, which is now Converge Platform Solution Division, CPSD, that Chad leads, right? I work in Chad's group. And what we're doing is we're taking a lot of the best practices from there but also a lot of the best practices from our heritage Dell side on creating a lot of validated solutions that Dell has created over time on an open ecosystem. So you know Dell's history, Michael's history of 33 years. Michael founded it with Intel, Microsoft, the differentiation. He knows alliances. He knows how to embrace open ecosystems as long as we can ensure that we can make money doing this together. And solving the customer problems. And solving the customer problems, right? That's what customers want. Well one of the things Michael said yesterday, I asked him what's the, everyone has their, a company has their DNA, Moore's Law Intel, Bezos has lower prices, faster delivery. I said what does he tell us? Listen to the customers, but also helping them figure out the technology equation. This is kind of ready solutions. Is that kind of in the same focus area? Like, hey this complicated stuff, VxRail, VC and all this stuff's going on, VMWare, here's the package. That's exactly it, John. You hit the nail on the head because if you think of the portfolio we have, you saw the keynote, it's a lot of products. We have 40,000 sellers now at Dell Technologies. The channel must love it. Think about that, 40,000, right? And then the channel partners who are here, when was the last time you met a channel partner who was like, yeah you know I actually charge for the front end pre-sales that I provide. They usually don't charge for that. So imagine if there's a ready solution, they don't have to spend a lot of money doing the pre-sales activity. They can actually focus a lot more on deployment and support. You're going to prove me wrong on theCUBE. Usually I have these Notre Dame moments where I say, you know, I said to Pat Gelsinger, hybrid cloud is not a product. There's no SKU for that. You're going to probably turn that into a SKU. We are, by the way, we have a SKU. It's called Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. And now we're taking it one step further, which is taking EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and native Hybrid Cloud. You're productizing something that is going to be an end to end life cycle type situation. But we're not just stopping right there, John. So if you take EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we're actually adding workload orientation on top of an EHC. So if you want to deploy an EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, for VDI based workloads, or you want to deploy that for Splunk based workloads, now wouldn't it be nice if we actually give you that one SKU, which is our engineered system area? And then we create a ready system out of that and we give you a full turnkey solution. Well my final question before John wraps things up is the show. People aren't watching or want to know it's like it buzzes great, we got two cubes, all that great stuff. But for you, what's the hallway conversation? What's been the reaction to the ready solutions? I mean, certainly it's the first Dell EMC world. Can you share just some commentary and color around some of the hallway conversations and the insight here? So, you know, customers are spending more and more time towards workloads. So think of a pyramid and think of business sits on the top of the pyramid. And really the very first thing in IT they care about is platform. They want a platform. Underneath that, the next priority is then orchestration. Underneath this virtualization and the last priority is a bunch of products. So think of that triangle. We're trying to move up as much as possible. So hallway's conversation from customers here, channel partners is, give me that platform. It's a ready solution. I may not be ready for full turnkey blocks, racks, or rails. So maybe for a specific workload like SAP, I may be ready to deploy that on a VBlock. But I'm not ready to take my other applications and deploy that on an engineered system. I still want to build, but make it simple for me. And that's where I already know it's gonna be possible. And those guys can wrap services around it too. That's it. Yeah. And Howard Elias, this entire services organization, we actually provide a full, you know, PDIO, right? Plan, design, implement, and operate. Awesome. You're always ready. Yeah, we're ready. You are always ready. We are ready. We're ready to delight customers. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. And I think I'm gonna be on theCUBE in just a few minutes. All right. Again, two shots. Same day, same man. Back with more here from Las Vegas, right after this.