 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE. My co-host is John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome back to the program Bob Bodeo. Thanks Stu, I'm so glad to be here. All right, so Bob, you're the Vice President of Infrastructure Solutions Marketing and Big Difference. Last year, you were with, it was at HDS. I was with Tachi Data Systems. Now it's at Tachi Vantara. That's right. And you had a little less facial hair when I talked to you last week. You know, it was around about November. I said, I might do theCUBE again next year. So I need to look different. Yeah, I had one CUBE guy this year. He had, hey, got like almost a mountain man beard. Oh. And the week before, he shaved it because he was coming back on theCUBE. And he was like, ah, I didn't, but yeah. Well, you know what? We beard, no beard, diversity is what we like on theCUBE. Got to make the videos look different, right? So next year, I'll be beardless again. We'll do it again. It'll be fun. All right, so I guess that, you know, the follicle discussion is interesting, but the Hitachi story is an interesting one. You know, Hitachi, of course, huge company. A lot of different technologies there, but bring us up to speed on what came together with the Hitachi. Yeah, sure. So for a reminder of what we did, so we were Hitachi Data Systems. That's the part of the company I was with. And again, Hitachi limited out of Japan, very large, over $80 billion organization of which Hitachi Data Systems used to be the IT arm that took those solutions to market around the world. What we did is, many might remember, we had purchased Pentaho, open source analytics, you know, great ETL blending capability. We brought them into the family with Hitachi Data Systems. We also had a sister company that was called Hitachi Insight Group. Hitachi Insight Group was really there to kickstart our efforts around IoT. And if you've heard of us talk about our Lumata platform, if you look at what strings all this together, we've been having a lot, and I'm sure we'll talk about it here, of conversation about data. How do we help our customers with data? You know, of course we've had a history in storage, but how do we bring it together, analyze it, bring new things, make that infrastructure more flexible? So that was what Ventara was. It was the bringing together of those three entities. And we continue to add. So we're doing more and going to bring more companies into the fold. I love that Bob. I mean, we know the trend we've been watching for quite a number of years is IT is going from that cost center over on the side that said no to survive. You better be responding to the business, tied closely to the business, or the business will go elsewhere for the solutions. And in the same way, storage can't just be some growing expense that I can't manage it, I can't do this to data is the lifeblood of business today. You know, I get to see some customers, not always as many as I'd like, but work closely with our field. And I was at this great customer of ours, it was a regional bank and I was talking to, it was fundamentally a very storagey audience. And I was, let's be honest, I was the corporate guy, I was a bit of the appetizer before the technical team, and I was having a data conversation. And we have this thing that maybe we'll talk about, we call it the stairway of value and how customers should think of their value getting more important and how they can help, IT can help expose that value. And I was going through this model and I was worried, man, I might be losing this audience. But the lead person was writing and I kind of stopped, I said, does this relevant to you guys? And he said, you know, I'm presenting on data to the organization next week and I'm taking notes. And so what we're seeing is storage people, they also want to be able to have this conversation. How can what we do to make storage more accessible, move that data more quickly, valuable to the organization, to your point. Yeah, a stairway to value. That's the power ballad for IT of the future. It does have a nearly built-in theme song, although we haven't gone there yet. For us actually what it is, is we talk about at the base layer kind of storing and protecting and then it's enriching the data. So if you think of, often that's a metadata conversation, how do we bring more value, explain that data, make it easier to use, then we get up and activate. That's blending maybe, you have the static systems, you want to build a repository for analytics, how do we help you activate that? And that really puts you on the path for monetization and that's the M, so we call it our C-Model. So Bob, I love Hitachi Ventara and the idea of it. I got to say I understood Hitachi data systems better because it's a storage. It was a very, very smart, super smart storage company and you could compare it to other storage companies. But now I'm just curious in your, as you go and talk to customers, does that change who you talk with? And because Hitachi Ventara as part of Hitachi too is about the industrialization of data and everything from oil fields and all the way down to a box in my office that might store my data. So, but you've got the open source crowd and data scientists, you've got all the industrial and medical and healthcare stuff, as well as still these super smart storage scientists there. How do you start that conversation and who do you end up talking with? It's very interesting. I mean, there are some companies that we approach at a Hitachi level and they're going to do major manufacturing projects or government projects and we can bring the whole set. But oftentimes we are leveraging where a customer knows us and branching into new areas. So, the storage base that we have is the most obvious to leverage. But what we're doing now is things like we have some IT automation and analytics tools that help our customers know what's going on with the systems and their environment and how to take processes out. Well, we can bring Pentaho and tie in non-storage systems, non-IT systems like security, power and cooling and really give a whole new dashboard. So, that's a new entrance and then the IT team can be an advocate to help you meet new business people. We also go in and speak to the business, of course. We can do that through, we have IT governance go to markets and data analytics go to market motion and we're beginning to blend those better and better. But to be fair, there are still some silos in how we talk to the customer depending on the audience. But what we see is if we can use data as a bridge, that's when the audience is sometimes meet each other, for the first time it seems. All right, so I love some of where this is going. Let's dig down a level. You do the infrastructure solutions group. So, when you talk about CI and HCI and all those pieces, we're talking multi-cloud a lot of things. What's the latest, what are the conversations you're having with customers about that? Yeah, very good. And really, for us, it's all been about agility. Data agility, sure, but you can't make your data agile if your infrastructure is very static. And so it doesn't take much to convince a customer we can build them trusted storage. That's like telling them the sky is blue. If they know Hitachi, they know this. What our conversations are now is about, what about the rest of your applications to surround this? On that trusted storage, how do we cloud enable it? What can we do there? On HCI and Converge, well, obviously here at VMworld, we partner deeply with VMware. So we are working with, for instance, how do we run some of our applications in the AWS VMware cloud, as well as be that HCI or that rack scale system on site to manage it. So we're really having this agility conversation. How do we build the systems to be ready for this onslaught of data? Because it's great to have an IoT conversation, which remains of interest, but the reality is the systems folks need to be ready for that wave that's coming at them and current process is just going to add controllers. I mean, that's not the way to think about it anymore. There's new types of systems that are making customer lives easier. Right, so from the VRS standpoint, I believe VSAN is part of the partnership. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything particular for VMworld? Yeah, across the portfolio. So of course on the storage, we work with VVOLs and we do all the protection integration with SRM and the like, but really what's of course hot is hyperconverge and we have our unified compute platform, HC line that is based on VSAN. And that's doing very well. We actually had a session here with some great customers. So both Kanagra Brands and NCL told their stories of picking Hitachi and they've seen some great results. So that business is doing very well. We've also introduced what we call unified compute platform RS for the rack scale infrastructure. And we do a number of things with that. So we'll do bare metal systems for analytics workloads, but what's really got people excited is we sell a complete package with VMware Cloud Foundation. And that gets customers not only ready to get up to hybrid cloud quickly on site, but really have that hybrid ability. And so we're beginning to do things like certify core applications so they can test. We have a tech preview out on our Hitachi content platform, object store, it's actually in the app store for VMware's AWS cloud. Now it's a tech preview from us because we know it works, but there's a scale thing. And you know Hitachi, right? Where it's going to work perfectly before we let our customers go crazy. So we're really getting into those hybrid conversations and also enabling an as a service. I don't know if we talked about the as a service cloud that we have on offer too. No, please. So on top of all that technology, one of the hot offerings we have is called Hitachi Enterprise Cloud. And we have the VMware based offering, which has been doing very well on a much newer container based platform. So on the VMware offering, really it's all of the VMware tools, but a customer never touches anything. They don't touch our storage, the servers. It is an as a service model that we come in with services, help them bring in their applications, help build the service catalog for that customer. And really all they do is consume the service. So while the hardware might be on site, it's really, they're largely indifferent to it. We do all the underlying capabilities, upgrades and such, and they just provide out services to the business. So it's a really great option that people don't even know we offer. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you've had a number of conversations here at the show. It's the customers that have, the companies that have decades of appearance, you start with that base level of trust and therefore you can help customers. You're not might be the bleeding edge, but when you're there, customers know, oh wait, you're going to be around. I know that this thing's baked and ready when we get there. The bleeding edge is fun and there maybe are some things we do, but I think it's fair enough that maybe that isn't always us, but I think I have heard us call the adults in the room from time to time and over at the booth, we hear a lot of these. You know, we've been playing with this, but it's going to get real. What do you guys do in this space? And while it is maybe some fun marketing to be on that bleeding edge, it is great to know that when it really matters, customers always trust us and that's a huge vote of confidence. All right, Bob, really appreciate the update there. Absolutely. Technology is like IOT, rapidly go from, this is super early, but I need things we can trust, so absolutely. Congrats on the progress. Thank you. We look forward to seeing, you know, how Hitachi and, you know, the beard look next time. Look forward to it. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage from BM World 2018 soon. Thanks for watching theCUBE.