 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE here in VMworld 2018. Joining me is my guest host, John Troyer and I'm Stu Miniman. And coming to the program, it's hard to believe for a first time, Jay Krohn, who's a senior consultant storage portfolio with Dell EMC. And I say that just to give our audience a little bit of context. Jay works for Dell EMC, but we both work for a company called EMC back in the day. And Jay has had a number of roles where he's brought lots of people on the program, has known theCUBE since its inception. Yet, you know, ninth year doing it and now you've made it. Right, I'm finally here. All right, so Jay, give our audience a little bit of your background and what you're working on these days. So I'm a long-term storage veteran. As Stu said, I worked for the old EMC back when the only product we had was SCSI connected symmetrics, you know, and have been through the fiber channel wars. You know, I've been through the SAS wars, the SATA wars, the SSD wars. And I'm now working on a couple of cross portfolio programs. The one we're here to talk about today is the Future Proof Loyalty Program. Yeah, and for our audience, that doesn't know what a SCSI connector is. It was this really fat plug that plugged in. It had actual pins that were like designed for. Lots of wires. On and off, so those kind of protocols, you know, have kind of changed and everything, but you know, when I interviewed at EMC in 2000, it was like, oh, that connection that I would take two computers and connect them. That was a SCSI cable and it was relatively short length. So wow, we can go down memory lane here. But Jay, you're talking about something specific. We talk about the future and it's tough to predict it, but Dell's going to make sure that everything's Future Proof, right? Of course. All right, what's that mean? What's interesting, back in the day, we were competing and innovating primarily just in the technology dimension. And a lot of us are technologists. We've had a fun time doing that, but as people have gotten more sophisticated about the way they buy technology, they're looking for other assurances that vendors are going to be there for them when something goes wrong. So there are nine different, what we call offers or pillars in the Future Proof program that are really intended to give customers peace of mind, probably most importantly, protect their investment, the money that they spend on IT. And to your point, give them a path forward. So what we've done is looked across the inventory of things that Dell EMC already offered. Many of these were business practices that we already had in place. And what we've done is turned up the volume and made them more, basically more visible to customers and to our selling forces. And the response has been really good. And the financial ones, of course, are the ones that people, shall we say, gravitate to at the beginning, because when they're making a purchase, whether it's effectively an extended warranty or a trade-in credit on their old stuff, think of it, when you go buy a car, you get a trade-in, so you're protecting the investment you made in the car. These are all things that customers are interested in getting. And we get from Dell EMC. Okay, and just in case people didn't catch it, I think the umbrella for the program is the Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty Program. Is that it? Okay. And one of the things that's important for folks that have been watching, it was started originally as the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program, because it was generated out of our storage business. And what happened is the customers and salespeople were so excited about it, they said, can you add more? And we said, yes, we can. And so in July, for example, we added data protection, the IDPA DP4400 product, along with a guarantee specifically tailored for that product. We're here, one of the reasons that I'm here, and we're here at VMware, is we added VX Rail on Monday. And I mean, that one's extremely exciting because even before it was officially in the program, we helped a customer with a six-figure purchase through one of the Future-Proof benefits. And then we have another, we have an eight-figure deal in the wind right now on VX Rail based on some of the pillars of the Future-Proof Program. And so, Jay, when you're talking about some of the, you know, you're talking about some of the pillars, some of the motivators for the customer then, I mean, some of it's just the transparent financial, some of it's kind of de-dupe and storage guarantees. Correct. All those, you're including all those. Correct, correct. And then, because part of it is to make, bring Dell and EMC together was complex, or created some complexity and some confusion, shall we say. So part of the reason we created this program was to make it simpler to consume and to make some of these things easier to find. Well, right, right. I mean, much, I mean, like buying a car, right? Enterprise hardware has always been a little bit mysterious. Like, how does it cost? Well, how much money do you have? And then I'll tell you how much it costs and shady, I mean, not shady, but discounts. And it's not very, it's very opaque. But like, a lot of these things are real clear. Out in the open, actually, I just went through the website, like, we guarantee you're going to get this, you can do this in three years or five years, we guarantee this, and it's pretty upfront. Exactly, I mean, what you mentioned is the, the clear price maintenance program. I mean, again, as we all know, there were some pricing practices with customers that were neither clear nor predictable on maintenance renewals. And so that's been something that's been extremely exciting. That is, in fact, one of the things the VxRail folks are excited about, where what ends up happening from a customer perspective is when they get the quote, the quoting system automatically generates your prepaid maintenance price and your renewal price, either three years or five years from now, depending upon the contract you pick. And it's right there on the paper, and I can't get clearer and I can't get more predictable. You know, here's what you're going to pay now and here's what you're going to pay later. As a cultural shift, was there any kind of discussion internally about, well, wait a minute, sometimes I hold these, I hold a couple points for a partner, I hold a couple points to make sure I get a deal. Was there a discussion about the change in culture being so? Well, it's, yes, is the short answer. I'll say it was a culture change, but what's happened is the industry has shift. We don't use SCSI cables anymore and that maintenance pricing practice has pretty much been voted down by the customer. So, you know, it's, it's innovate or die. And so, and part of what I want to, what I want to say is the innovation is not only in the products, we're doing some innovation on the business side as well. Yeah, Jay, I'm curious, you know, we've said on theCUBE many times, the bar that customers will measure everything against is how they do things in the cloud. So, how I consume it, how I think about it. But one of the challenges of the cloud is sometimes there's uncertainty as to what that bill's going to be next month. Right. So, maybe you could give us a compare contrast as to what you've learned and is there a comparison between this program and what you've done in the whole So, this program is targeted at the infrastructure products. So, it's not so much to compare against the cloud pricing itself. However, what we've done here also announced this week as part of the larger Dell EMC cloud marketplace is what we call the cloud consumption models. And this is a couple of the cloud financing programs. Again, that were already in place from Dell financial services. They give customers the ability, if they really want to buy infrastructure that they put in their data centers in an OPEX model, you can do that. And, you know, it's called Flex On Demand. There's a couple of really exciting high velocity, they call it Flex On Demand Velocity for Unity and X2. Where, again, there's a rate card so you're not coming in and having the sales person sharpen the pencil and say, here's what the price is. So, they'll come in with a rate card on how to consume that. And when we take a look at that pricing model versus both some of our system vendor competitors, as well as some of your, shall we say, more prominent cloud competitors, as Michael said, the cloud is an operating model, not a place. And if you want to have that operating model for the way you pay for the infrastructure, buying an extreme IO capacity for us with the cloud model is cheaper than buying SSD capacity from one of the cloud providers. All right, Jay, I want to give you the final word. I believe there's a website, people want to find out more. What is the final takeaway you'd want people to have about this program? Well, basically, investment protection is number one. Peace of mind is really important. There are a number of guarantees about product performance. And as we've said, the future is right. We're giving you a way to go there. All right, Jay Crone, pleasure to catch up with you on camera as it is always off camera. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here, the Cube VMworld 2018. Thanks for watching.