Dell Technologies - Wood IT Work

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All right, you're listening to episode 44 of the CTO Advisor. On the line I have Julian Wood, who's been kind enough to give up his Sunday evening to chat with me about Dell EMC and VMware. Julian, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hey, hi there Keith. Well yeah, thanks for you for taking the time to chat to me. Yeah, I'm Julian Wood. I'm an independent infrastructure architect living in London. com but I prefer wondering whether things are or aren't going to work.

You know what, speaking about whether things are or aren't going to work, that's a pretty good segue into the topic of Dell EMC VMware. We obviously saw and met each other again, once again, at VMworld 2016. We got a chance to do vFit run on Sunday and have a nice little chat and stroll and talk a little VMware, the future of IT. And I think the time is off. Well, I think the time is well. VMware is now owned or mostly owned by Dell as part of the EMC merger that got solidified on December 7.

Let's talk about this whole thing from a hybrid IT and IT perspective. High-level thoughts Julian, what do you think about the merger? To be honest, it's actually difficult to try and pull it all apart. I think technically from a merger they've done an incredible job to announce something in a year, pull it off with all the possible financial shenanigans and approvals that have to go on. I think that's an impressive amount of mergers and acquisitions cleverness that's gone into it. So there's certainly kudos in the actual technicalities of getting the merger.

Personally, it came out of nowhere that Dell was going to be buying EMC. I presume there were many people in the know beforehand, but you know that news literally landed at VMworld Barcelona last year. So that was quite a surprise and I saw a number of people wandering the hallways of VMworld Barcelona, sort of partly a little dazed and confused wondering what the future holds. And you know, literally next VMworld, not even a year later, that dream is a reality. In terms of how it's going to work, I partly think that it has to be a good thing from a financial perspective.

I think having the markets peaking in your company and having very much a short-term view of the next financial cycle of all the stuff that's going on is in a way an impossibility in this turbulent time of IT at the moment. So you've got a whole bunch of financial people literally speculating on your company and making wild guesses and bets. Some of them may be right, some of them may be wrong, but I think we all know that share prices are just an idea, a sentiment based on sort of rather short-term view rather than a long-term look.

So I think Dell having the courage to go for EMC, to gobble VMware, to gobble Pivotal, to gobble Virtustream is a bold move and the fact they can now have a much bigger portfolio to do things behind closed doors is, I think from a Dell perspective, a way that they can grow themselves and then find out something, the sort of next step. But whether that next step is the right thing or the wrong thing remains to be seen. So what are your thoughts?

You know, I think that's a really great point on the ability to have patience. You know, the only shareholders they have to really appease is Michael Dell and MCD and I forget the name of the buyout firm that Silver Lake. They just need to make those investors happy with the long-term plan. I think from that perspective they have a leg up on a company like HPE which is going in a different direction of basically splitting itself apart and making sure that they're agile enough to be focused from a market results perspective and from a technology perspective to deliver on that short-range vision.

So I think from that portion is brilliant. One of the things that I'm trying to wrap my hands around or head around from a technology perspective is how does this enable them to come out with the right technology and still be able to pay the bill or at least the right technology roadmap. We know that both Dell, HPE, NetApp, all the big legacy system integrators and system providers such as Cisco, they all need a substantial shift in the services that they offer and the mix of services they offer and I think Dell is well positioned to do that transition but one of the things that I'm struggling to understand is exactly that big ship.

What is that transition? What from a customer's perspective because now I'm a Dell customer being an EMC customer previous to the acquisition and a VMware customer previous to that. What is it that I'm looking for from a Dell when it comes to the next two to five to seven years of technology? Well I think this is what opens up the literal big can of worms because historically enterprises in a way trusted their vendors quite a bit because infrastructure was pretty stable. If you were a NetApp customer, a Cisco customer, an EMC customer and you wanted to know what the next big thing was, well that was going to be bigger, better and faster but of a similar kind of thing.

Yes there may be some new software way of delivering it or that kind of thing but you were quite comfortable going to EMC and saying, you're my storage partner, what's your roadmap over the next three years so I can get a faster SAN or to Cisco for a faster, bigger, more agile kind of network but nowadays all of that talk is completely different because cloud has completely fragmented and I truly believe that enterprises are very likely being led down the garden path by listening to the old traditional infrastructure vendors and in a way I feel sorry is actually not the right word because that implies that they are helpless but I think enterprises very much at the moment are struggling even now to define what cloud is, what the opportunity it brings and the problem is if they're going to talk to a VMware, an EMC, a NetApp, possibly an Oracle, you know what answers are they going to get back?

The answers they're going to get back are bigger, better, faster, more of the same thing and cloud isn't about the same thing and that's I think going to be the crux of the issue facing enterprises at the moment, who they're going to trust for advice, where they're going to get the advice from and how are they going to decide how to do cloud wherever that may sit. And I think that's one of the things that I'm having a tough time digesting. When I look at cloud, you know, and I'm not talking about lift and shift cloud where I'm just, which is what VMware.

Well that's a good point, I was going to say. Yeah, we'll park that. This is what VMware kind of sold doing is cross cloud presentation. Basically, you know, let's take what you're doing to your data center today and let's do that in the cloud. So when we talk about cloud proper, I just wrote a piece on this, on embracing cloud APIs, talking about cloud formation, Google functions, Lambda. When I talk about these types of transitions from a technology perspective and I look around and just basically for help because these are really tough things to transition from.

Not just from a pure technology perspective, but from a organization perspective and navigating people and process. And I look at my traditional providers, Dell, EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and I question whether or not they have the chops from a, from I guess I would call it a management or a consultive, management consultive process to help me through that. So I guess that's the part that I'm seeing missing in the Dell, the EMC merger is how do they, you know, add credibility to their technology story.

Well that's it, I think they do and they are going to have a great infrastructure as a service story, but is that actually the cloud that you want to build? Do you want to pick up your VM, your on-premises VM that's running on vSphere, right-click storage vMotion, right-click vMotion, whichever kind of migration and move that VM somewhere else and say, whoop-dee-doo, slap on the back, gold star, we've done cloud. That's not quite the same thing, I think doing cloud is going to be, affect so many different layers.

If you, if I'm in an enterprise, I want to look through my suite of applications and I want to SaaS everything that is non-critical to my business and that I reckon is a huge proportion of your portfolio. So if you're talking, I mean there must be legal software, your internal legal software, internal finance, sales, marketing, all the kind of organ grinder stuff that is non-differentiating from any other company, why are you running that in-house? Why are you maintaining those servers? Why are you doing that?

That is non-differentiating, it takes your army to do that and that's not going to be helpful. So literally it's going to be, must be maximum five to ten percent of applications in a typical enterprise are either written in-house and there are questions about whether they should be written in-house or not and whether they are actually critical to the enterprises and you probably find if you're going to do your research that some financial companies, their most critical apps are probably sitting in Excel spreadsheets because that's just the way it's been done and that's a crazy kind of thing and that's trying to navigate that kind of stuff and then tie that together with moving infrastructure around between the clouds is such a sort of disconnect from the way things are done before.

Yeah so I think one of the really interesting pieces that you said in there which is traditional infrastructure companies better faster and what I heard at VMworld was better faster VMs across clouds and from a pure, when we talk about EMC, VMware, that whole federation of companies with the exception of Pivotal, that that federation of companies is well positioned if the infrastructure answers, you know what, we want better faster cloud migration. We want to be able to move VMs across cloud. We want legacy network architecture across cloud, NSX and AWS and Google Compute Engine.

All of that makes sense because we're just going to keep doing what we're doing today just across someone else's data center. Dell is well positioned to provide that. But one of the things that I think I foresee coming and I think I agree with you on one part when it comes to the SaaS piece, that non-differentiating applications are going to be SaaS. Email is a great example of that. If you're planning on deploying or doing an email migration and you're not seriously looking at Office 365 or Google Compute then I question what you're probably deciding.

Question your leadership. Yes, question your leadership. Those are kind of low-hanging fruit. com or your insert app here, your legal app where that SaaS offering gets you to 80% and then you need to do something else to get to the other 20%, that whole 100% solution. What do you see SaaS going in that next five to seven year path? Well, I see that the promise of cloud and more bandwidths and better connectivity and identity tying all this thing together, creating actually a super fragmentation of clouds and I think that's a very good thing.

For example, an enterprise at the moment, not even just looking at the SaaS kind of thing, but for an example, an enterprise may have an on-premises data center, they may have outsourced all their email to Office 365, they then may have a mainframe, an Oracle database for their customer data, but they are running their front ends potentially in Amazon or Azure or any number of other kind of cloud providers. That's already a fragmentation of their estate. I am very much against this hybrid cloud being a notion of one private cloud linking up to a single public cloud.

We're definitely in a multi-cloud world and VMware was, I think, quite good in spreading that message, which is good. But that same kind of model, I think, ties very nicely into micro-segmentation from a networking perspective, ties very nicely into containerization from an app perspective, and we think of containers as a way to break down multiple kind of apps. But I think that whole model is just going to permeate everything. So you're going to have, for example, a SaaS provider for, as we said, a legal division or a marketing division, and that's going to do 80% of what you're going to do.

But what you're then going to be able to do is bolt on additional services from some other SaaS offering to do the other 20%, and it may not be one, but that could be another 10 different providers that provide XYZ or doing some kind of analytics or doing some kind of analysis or some kind of refactoring or reformatting or that kind of thing. And I very much see, as enterprises are starting to move their edge from on-premises into the cloud and getting that identity there, because that's obviously a key piece of security of tying these all things together, yeah, why not?

com or on top of any other number of kind of offerings. com is then going to be clever and do is they're going to sniff the market out for those extra kind of bits and pieces and bolt ons and add it themselves. But I very much see a growing market, which is what the sort of promise of cloud is. If everything's sort of out there, there's no reason that can't be linked together and you can sort of pick and choose bits and pieces from various providers to create this sort of a, is soup the right word, or something tasty and something delicious that you sort of assemble yourself from from other components.

My favorite thing is that this looks like, you know, in the US and Louisiana part of the country, there's this dish called jambalaya, which is kind of a bunch of different, a melody of a bunch of different things that come together to be something extremely tasty. That sounds like it. And so yeah, from a SaaS model, I see that just coming then back to the original point we were walking through of, you know, Dell EMC being an infrastructure provider, as you mentioned, Pivotal is that, haha, Pivotal slash key part of that.

And what's interesting is I wonder how that's going to play out in the medium to long term, because at the moment Pivotal is still a separate company and VMware is a separate company. But I can, I could very much foresee sort of clever people at Dell being in a way private, in a way happy to maybe cannibalize, I don't know if that's the right word, or see the eventual, the eventual sort of shrinking of the VMware as an IaaS play, but very much looking forward to a sort of ascendancy of Pivotal.

And I think that's what a federation can have when they have those two kind of components, and that's where their success should be, is you have seeded the markets on-premises with vSphere, you haven't seeded the market in the cloud with vSphere, but that, you know, that may or may not be happening. But what you can seed the market on is Pivotal Cloud Foundry. And if you can make vSphere the place to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry on-premises, in IBM software, in vCloud Air, vCloud Air Network, anywhere, as this federation, you can then seed that next generation of the platform coming.

And then in a way you don't mind if Pivotal ascends, as one would want it to do, does it really matter if VMware starts to shrink a little bit and isn't necessarily so relevant and money generating, because you've got that balance for the next wave of innovation in a platform. And people are using already this platform already. I don't even think it's something we're looking too far into the future. Yeah, so I don't think I have much to add to that. I think Dell is an interesting company with it being private.

It has a portfolio of companies that positions it well to compete. The big question is, do they have enough runway? Do they have enough flexibility in their finances to see this thing out to the end? And can they, you know, resize the organization as necessarily as the market shifts and if it's going to shift too fast? Very, very interesting story. So Julian, with that, let's wrap up. Where can people find you on Twitter and blog? Can you repeat that all for us?

com on the blogs. And I spent quite a bit of time at VMworld going to a number of sessions and recording a couple of things and thoughts on the keynotes. There's some big blog posts which I'm dissecting at the moment because they're easier to read. So yeah, follow me on Twitter or have a look at the blog and hopefully you'll be able to get a bit more of an inkling with some commentary and personal thoughts, be it right or wrong about VMworld.

All right, and that's it for this episode of the CTO Advisor. You can find me on Twitter at CTO Advisor. com. Rate us on iTunes, share with your friends, get the word out. Thanks a lot.