>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston
connecting with thought leaders all around the world,
this is a Cube conversation.
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with the Cube.
We're in our Palo Alto studios today
for a Cube conversation
with some of our friends from VMware.
Big announcement
today, and we're excited to have Kit Colbert come on.
He is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform Business Unit.
Kit, great to see you again.
>> (Mumbles)
Thanks for having me.
Happy to be here.
>> Absolutely.
So, big announcement.
It's the second generation of the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
Now, you guys just brought this to market
barely a year ago.
Tell us about the new announcement and some of
the excitement around the changes
that you guys put in place.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so, this is been
a project that's been in the making for a few years now.
We at first announced the product version of this
in April of last year,
and then, we announced the general availability of it
in August at our VMware conference.
And so, as we've been engaging with customers
since we went GA what we've seen and heard from them
was that you know they're looking for more
data center style options.
Traditionally when we first started this project,
you may remember it was called Project Dimension
before it became the product of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC,
back when it was Project Dimension we had more of an
edge computing focus, we were focused on how can we get
Compute and our VMware infrastructure out to factories
and retail settings and so on and so forth.
And so we designed this system for those types
of environments, half-rack configuration,
smaller numbers of servers.
Things like power supply and UPS built in.
But as we heard back from customers, what they said was
hey this is great but we have a lot of needs at our
data center today and so the idea there was
let's rethink this offering for the data center
and actually produce the types of rack architectures
and server types that customers are looking for.
>> Just goes to show, you try to give them
ying and they want yang, right?
(laughing)
So just it's a very different kind of challenge then,
going into the data center environment and you know
one of the promises of cloud is obviously provisioning.
Right, and spinning things up?
So that's a really important piece of the puzzle.
How're you guys addressing you know letting people
add capacity and kind of change this configuration if
it's actually in my data center?
>> Yeah so you're seeing a number of different things
that we're doing here.
Really, enhancing the maturity across the board
of this offering.
So it's important to realize that this is a cloud server.
That yes, even though the physical server is in the rack,
reside on premises for a customer,
again a new data center at a retail location,
it is a cloud service and that we are
running this and managing this like a cloud service.
And so like any good cloud service,
a customer shouldn't have to interact with any human being,
right they can just call an API.
And indeed that's the way it works.
Either through an API or through a UI work flow,
today a customer can come on and
order a new CDC rack for their environment.
And that initial provisioning, you know
we fully automated that and we had a Dell service
technician coming out to actually figure the hardware out
on site but then after that, you know,
we didn't have many options for customers.
Lets say that they started out with
maybe four nodes onsite but then they realized
oh I actually need six or eight nodes.
Right, they're getting more applications on there,
greater usage, and they just need more capacity.
And so what we support now is this ability to
actually again use an API, using a UI,
request additional servers, for their existing racks.
And this is again something very simple to do,
in just a few weeks those things will arrive.
The service technician will be there
to install them and get that customer up and running.
>> Right, I was going to say you know typically,
its order and then you got to put the stuff in
and deploy it, right, and then support it.
So you just touched a little bit on the deployment.
Did you basically take that order and then just
with your distinct process get into the data center
and light up that additional hardware?
>> Yeah so we've done a lot to
really automate this whole process.
And the really powerful thing here is that
you know this partnership that we have
between VMware and Dell runs really deep.
So we've actually engaged and integrated
into their manufacturing process so that
as we get that order through the API, through the UI,
from a user, we can ship that over to Dell.
Tell them the specifics of what that customer ordered
and Dell can get started manufacturing that.
We actually, again, as part of that manufacturing
process integration we can get the latest version
of our cloud software onto those servers.
We can install unique cryptographic keys on those
servers so we can identify them.
And then we work with the Dell shipping and
the Dell service technicians to actually
meet those physical servers when they arrive
and properly set them up and configure them.
So for the customer it's a completely hands-off experience,
I think that's a really powerful...
They're not in, you know, they don't need to get in
the nitty gritty of hardware configurations,
installing our software, managing the life cycle of it.
It's much much simpler than that and so
you know I think we've really taken that and
expended it here, both with the additional
rack types, we offer a full rack now for the data center.
New host types, a new host type that's much beefier
better for data center workloads and finally for that
expanding capacity that we just talked about, as well.
>> Right, and then on the support side I assume
you know even though it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC,
that probably the first line of support is still
VMware, still the software on top of the infrastructure.
>> Yeah, and that's a good question.
And yeah you're right, it is.
It's a VMware run, VMware operated service,
and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support.
So it's not one of these situations where you've got two
different vendors pointing the finger at each other.
And the customer has to figure all that out.
No, it's on VMware and we need to figure it out.
We obviously work with Dell on the backend.
We've also integrated with their telemetry systems.
So we can pull all the different sort of hardware
telemetry monitoring data that they're getting
so we can understand the health of those
servers that on it.
And when we detect a problem you know
is that something we can fix remotely
by just accessing it with our engineers
or do we need a service technician to actually go out
there and fix a physical issue.
>> Right, right, so it's just interesting
you guys launched this really thinking more edge and
you're getting drawn into more of a data center so
why're you getting drawn in?
What're some of the advantages you know that the
CIOs and CTOs are seeing with this type of deployment?
>> Yeah so the data center part is really interesting.
And again the process, we thought there would be
more need at the edge initially just because hey
these edge environments are really difficult
to manage and they're kind of distributed
and people don't have IT stuff there.
But what we're surprised to hear about
is the very urgent need the customers have,
their data centers.
Now again, they have service at their data centers,
they're running these things today.
And what they find is that it just doesn't work that well
and that they're spending a lot of time and resources
on just keeping the lights on.
And it's you know these things don't differentiate them
as a business, you know one of the things
I talk to customers a lot about is that no customer
has ever differentiated itself by how well
they run VMware infrastructure.
And that might sound kind of crazy at first right,
but you know it's true now that can differentiate
themselves negatively by how poorly they run
our infrastructure and then you know their apps
don't work very well.
But to some degree having working VMware infrastructure
is just table stints, and then what they do at an app
level is what differentiates them.
And so this idea that we can come in with VMware cloud
on Dell EMC just takes care of all that
operational overhead for them,
is really really powerful.
And so as you see folks and customers and companies
going through these digital transformation cycles
modernizing their applications, they're like
oh man I need to actually modernize my infrastructure
as well and so that's a compelling event that we say
is like oh so they're going to rethink this.
And so rethinking that they're like well why am I
doing all this work in the first place?
Lets actually rethink the whole thing
and take a fundamentally better
approach i.e. a cloud approach.
And so that's where VMware cloud on Dell EMC comes in
and again I think that's why we're seeing
so much interest from customers and again where
CIOs and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits.
>> Right, and I'm just curious you're taking a
from kind of a product development, product release
point of view, right?
Is this kind of typical VMware you know kind of
speed and pacing or is this really you know
the getting to the second gen and the shift
you know kind of in your data market
as really more of a response to the market
cause again as I was preparing and looking up on the
initial launch was, it really wasn't that long ago.
So to kind of pivot and call it second gen and
include features and functions that are coming back
from the market would you say that's kind of typical or
are you guys getting a little bit more agile in your own
product development cycle and getting away from those
massive PRDs and MRDs and actually they're trying to
respond more quickly to the base of the marketplace.
>> Yeah no that's a great point and yeah you're right.
We are going through our own little transformation
here at VMware as well, right?
We are shifting from a company that primarily sold
shrink wrapped software to a company that sells
cloud services and so you know,
as you look at that it actually changes a lot
of what we can do.
We can respond much more quickly, much quicker to
this sort of customer feedback.
We can ship new updates much more frequently,
and so you know if you look at our traditional visfare
release cycles those were what every 12 months?
18 months maybe at most.
But what we can do now with our cloud releases
is actually update and do major updates every three months.
And so we call this kind of the second major advance
of VMware cloud on Dell EMC but in reality it's
our third, our fourth actual release of our
underlying software and so we're actually doing
these underlying releases much much quicker.
I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch
in particular is because the fact that again
customers have been asking for this data center
level support and really optimizing the solution
for the data center and so now we've gone and done that.
And again I think we're going to see a lot more
interest from the customers on the data center side
because of it.
>> Great, well Kit thanks for giving us the quick update.
Congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it,
listen to those customers and they'll tell you
what they want.
>> Definitely yeah we're excited to, thank you.
>> All right Kit, thanks again.
He's Kit, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE.
Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.
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