 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Happy to be joined today by Chad Sackich, who is the president of the EMC Converged Platform Division. Chad, great to catch up with you. It's great to see you again, Stu. All right. So Chad, last time we talked, VMware had announced the VSAN 6.2, now EMC's got the announcement. You know, give us the thumbnail on it. Well, so for those of the folks that tuned into that, it was great announcement. You know, you and I have been traveling a lot since then, living out of suitcases, apparently. Yeah, same shirt, same jacket all the time. It's unbelievable. So, listen, it was great to talk to you about it, you know, in advance of the launch. I'm glad now that we can have a discussion where I cannot tease, but actually directly say what we're doing. Open the kimono, share it all. So at VCER point of view, customers want to buy, not build. Our point of view, not all customers are the same, not all workloads are the same. We need to have a portfolio of blocks, racks, and appliances. In the appliance category, we learned a lot in 2015 with VSPEX Blue. You know, we learned what customers wanted, which is that they want an offer from EMC and from VMware. We learned that they like the idea of hyper-converged appliances at low entry points, but we learned that they needed some things that we didn't do in the first release. The VxRail is not a rev of VSPEX Blue, it is a NetU product based off of those learnings. The first thing is that they needed certain core data services that were really important. So data reduction, namely Ddupe, compression, encryption, you know, erasure encoding. They wanted all flash configurations, and that's something that, you know, we really needed VSAN 6.2 to be able to deliver. So check done. The second thing that we discovered they wanted was originally we had one appliance and form factor. You could buy it in any size you want, so long as it was, well, we had two, but the variation was only the memory footprint, right? With VxRail, we've got four offerings in the portfolio, ranging from really small to larger configurations, lots of configurability in each one of them. So the customers have got a broader range of options that they can pick from to fit exactly what they need. The third thing that we discovered is that, and this is partially tied to the fixed configurability, you know, initially, we said, hey, let's focus on simplicity maniacally, and that idea was right, we just, you know, dialed it up to 11 as opposed to like a more reasonable setting. So for example, right out of the gate originally we said, you can have it in any sort of maintenance and support as you want. So long as it's three years, maintenance and support. Some customers said, I want one year. Some of them said, I want two years. Some of them said, I want five years. And all of that stuff, packaging and everything, ultimately meant that, you know, we realized price elasticity is really important in this market. So VxRail is available at price points that start as low in that, as the 80 to 50k price bands, right? So, you know, going in with a very, very economical starting point, but maintaining the brand promise of simplicity and being able to scale. So that is awesome. There's two other things in VxRail that I think are just completely unique. So a couple of quick questions though. If I looked at the EvaRail program, you know, a couple of concerns customers had. Number one is from when VMware announced the version of software to when it got fully baked in, it was taken too long. You know, is this being sped up now? Yeah. So we realized there's several lessons learned and, you know, again, I don't know whether it's useful, but I actually think if I'm a customer watching or a partner watching, you'd actually want to see your partners kind of go learn, listen, adapt. A very interesting thing occurred here, which is that we realized that hyperconverged appliances is not an ecosystem play. Okay. So what's that mean? What that means is that basically the way that the EvaRail program was designed basically said, hey, we need to have a broad ecosystem of partners and that meant that we have to define the lowest modular base version of the software. That means that the hardware has to be extremely prescriptive and cannot vary from one to the other. That means that there was always a lag inside the system of an EvaRail release and the hardware vendor support and all the hardware vendors had to be the same and ultimately that was not the right winning strategy. What we learned was customers want open ecosystems when they do it themselves. When they buy VSAN, when they want to assemble it, they buy VSAN ready nodes. Great. But when a customer says I want to turn key appliance, they choose the appliance and therefore VxRail is a unique and exclusive partnership between VMware and EMC. That means that we can iterate around this so quickly because there's not a broad variation of ingredients inside the ecosystem. In some ways it reminds me a little bit of the early days of what was Acadia and then VCE is that the lag between getting that interlocked between EMC, VMware, and Cisco in the early days and you got to pull that together and make sure that it's in sync. And so what we've announced today has got a small amount of lag relative to the VSAN release but in Q2 there's a software update and from that point onwards every VMware and every VxRail release is in synchronicity which is huge. What it means for customers is if you've picked vSphere, if you've picked VMware as your standard at the enterprise or at the edge, this is a way to just simplify consumption and deployment of your standard because by definition it is the standard packaging of the latest version of VMware's software but industrialized into appliance with a single support model. Huge. The second thing that I think that we learned is that customers want to be able to consume and buy this technology from a broad variety of routes to market and so VxRail is available from EMC, it's available from EMC's partner ecosystem and it's also available from VMware's partner ecosystem. So I'm sorry, channel and direct then. Channel and direct. However a customer wants to go, great. Okay, so what do you say to channel partners that say I'm a little worried that EMC and boy, Dell's buying EMC, maybe they're going to take the business direct? You know what I would say is that ultimately the thing that's always guided us is the customer, that's always the case. Not every customer is going to want to go with one route to market, another route to market, we want to open that up as much as possible and that's always going to be the case no matter what the circumstance. And I'll just tell you, just netting it out, VxRail basically is an unbelievably compelling hyper-converged appliance. It's got incredible data services, unbelievable performance, particularly in the off-lash configurations, rich data de-dub, compression, erasure coding, so on and so on and so on. It is available in very, very small entry price points. It's available to customers in any channel they want and through that tight partnership between VMware and EMC. It means that for customers that have picked VMware as their standard, easiest way to simplify deployment and consumption. So last question, can you just lay out for us how this now fits into the overall portfolio that you offer? Yeah, so at the VCE Converge Platform Division of EMC, we have blocks, racks, appliances, very simple. Blocks, large enterprise data center, traditional workloads that need traditional infrastructure. Racks, enterprise data centers that are designed to scale big. When I say scale big, I mean really big. Think hundreds of nodes, thousands of nodes, both for some traditional workloads as well as this weird new world of cloud-native workloads that are less dependent on infrastructure resilience. And VxRail is basically our answer for SMB and SME, as well as Enterprise Robo. Now just to be clear, when I say SME, VxRail can scale from very small number of nodes, three nodes, all the way up to 64 nodes. At 64 nodes, you could run most enterprises on it, right? So just to be clear, if you've got 1,000, 2,000 VMs, VDI instances, VxRail is a great answer for you. If you need more, we're the only Converge Platform solution in the market that has that breadth. And one thing that I think is just an example of where we're going that's really cool is VxRail is already integrated with VCE vision for support, for RCM for updates. So customers who are building a real Converge Platform for everything, all their workloads, not just one or the other, can have a similar experience and a similar partner to consume it from. Great, so choice and flexibility, and you're not stuck on one of those platforms when you go from one to the next. All right, thanks so much, Chad. I really appreciate the updates here. And thank you so much for watching. We'll be coming to lots of events where you can see Chad, and find out what is happening in the Converge hyperconverge market.