Dell Technologies World in Review

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Hey, welcome back to the CTO Advisor from But we got more important things to talk about today. First off, big show, right? Yeah, thousand people. Yes, it's massive. Lots of people coming through. It really hit me this morning trying to get into the main keynote session. It was Yeah, yeah, it was it was nuts. So were you at? Is this your first Dell Technologies EMC world event? No, no, I was here last year. This time.

So I was kind of curious to see how the message would evolve, how it changed, where they were, you know, where they're going to be today versus last year, especially given the fact that we've seen so many vendors make other announcements, cloud. I know we always say cloud is advancing was advancing, but it really has. I've seen more of my customers start to make concrete moves into the cloud. And I've been very anxious to see what Dell would do. So I've been famously quoted to say that Dell really doesn't have a cloud strategy outside of VMware.

I might, would I be considered wrong if I took that statement from last year's Dell Technologies world plopped it here? Would I be wrong? No. Okay, no. Well, okay. So the things that I've seen today, and then it's just a one. So the message could evolve, it could change. They could drop something tomorrow morning that that alters everything radically. But where I think that works for them is that VMware right now is still the basis of everyone's IT infrastructure.

So if you're doing anything locally, you're going to have VMware. And if you haven't yet made the move into cloud, VMware is making it easier to take that knowledge, that investment you've made in VMware, and extend that into the cloud. So it could be a valid enough strategy. So I don't know if I've been quoted, because I have said this, is that VMware is probably in pole position, or at least no other company is better situated than VMware to help organization into cloud, digital transformation, whatever you want to call it.

vSphere, to your point, is the foundation. I walked away thinking, you know what, Azure, VMware Cloud on Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS RDS, AWS Lambda running on vSphere, Azure Services running on vSphere. Oh, Cythe and Nadella on stage validating that message. I kind of walked away thinking, yeah, keep from both last year and this year is at the same time, right. Dell does not have a strategy for cloud outside of VMware, while at the same time, VMware, no one's better positioned to take advantage or help companies into cloud than VMware.

I don't know why I feel some type of way about that statement. I feel like there just should be some separation between VMware and Dell. As a Dell customer, or at least supporting customers that are Dell customers, what do you think about the VMware-Dell kind of tightening the partnership? It's okay. I don't have too much trouble with it, because my customers have run VMware on Dell gear, they run it on HP gear, they run it on white boxes. It does work anywhere.

So that flexibility is there. If you're at a Dell show, and they push VMware on Dell, I don't have a problem, it's their show, right, should have that message. And then they have those other really cool technologies, what they announced today, the fully managed service offering, where they give you a VxRail, VMware, and some type of cloud management on top. Yeah, so I did attend a session on that, right after the keynote, because I really need to know more about it. And it sounds really cool.

Really? Yeah, yeah. So you've played around with Kubernetes, you know, you're kind of a cloud native infrastructure guy, you know, you're one of the cool kids. Dell Cloud, Dell Cloud, Dell Technology Cloud, powered by VMware. Sounds cool. It sounds cool. Because if I take off my, my infrastructure hat, and I put on my business consultant hat, it makes more sense to just buy the infrastructure, know that it works, have it be fully supported, know that I still have the option of expanding it in different ways.

And then letting my guys become experts in the application, and thinking about what does it take to make my application work, all the other stuff, all those knobs, you don't have to have those arguments anymore, you don't have to have the discussion of, well, should I run Kubernetes on bare metal or VMware or whatever, that goes away, because I now buy a box, and it's giving me everything I would in the cloud, but it's local, including all of the management that I would expect to have in the cloud, except as in my my data center, the demo that they showed where you go into their portal, and you say, I want to buy a new rack, and I want it to be in a different city.

And then they walk through what that process looks like where they say someone in their infrastructure to get the ticket, they start building out the rack, they work out the delivery, and they roll it in. I mean, what more could you ask for? I mean, the AWS was kind of lauded for announcing this at reInvent just in December, we don't know when we're going to see it. VMware and Dell announced it. Now this is based off of VMware, the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, so VCF, not anything new.

This is what VMC is built on. This is what VxRail and VxRack has been pushing, it's just that it's managed, and we can consume it as a leased or rented service, or we can buy it. However, it's going to be delivered. The big difference is, this is the next step after the announcements at VMworld. So I have to switch the conversation a little bit towards kind of the broader market and competition, because we always want choice. As consultants, as end users, we don't work for Dell, we don't work for VMware, we want the industry to give us options.

What's our options? What's the alternative? If you have a on-prem platform that you need to maintain, you're running SAP, you don't want to move it. You're running Oracle Rack, and you don't like Oracle's story, and you don't want to pay double for licensing in AWS. Check out that video, it's Oracle cheaper than AWS. If you don't want those options of just going straight to cloud, and you want to run on-prem, you don't want VMware Cloud on Dell. What do you do in that case?

I mean, HPE has Greengrass, I guess, but they really don't have a cloud management overlay that I can put on top of that. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because I was looking through this whole thing, and I was wondering, what's Nutanix's next move going to be? Right, you know, could they maybe step in and just say, you know what, we're going to have a cloud management layer too. Maybe that happens? So that is called the ideal that I can use. I can, you know, there's an overlay that is funny that, you know, Google Next was just a few weeks ago, and Nutanix was kind of quiet around Google Next, which is Google's their premier part cloud partner.

So that whole Xi on Google, I don't know what happened to that. But this is really hard stuff. I mean, VMware has been trying to stuff. I got a little zing in on VMware on Twitter. The last time VMware had kind of this front facing customer cloud thing that they presented was the interface for their VMware was for the VMware cloud, which wasn't a good product. The interface wasn't good. The experience wasn't good. And here they are again.

But I wholeheartedly believe this is going to be a much better solution, because I think the scope is narrow. But I don't, I just don't see an alternative to the solution. No, and maybe that's, that's why it exists. Right? You know, that's, that's a really cool thing. You know, if, if you're, you're Dell, and you're trying to figure out how do you survive in this, this new world, you know, what can you do to make yourself a differentiator? What do you do with all of these different pieces and companies that you've acquired over the years?

Makes sense. And they have the experience from working with AWS, right? They know how to package a solution and put it together and get it into a data center and say, well, if we're doing it there, could we do that, you know, ourselves for our customers? Yeah, so I don't know if I'm ready to eat my words on Dell does not have a cloud strategy. I would still like to see more stuff on the storage piece of it. Because Dale is still EMC Dell EMC is still part of Dell technologies.

Yes. NetApp with their data fabric. Very compelling. Yeah. Very compelling story. And I look at Dell EMC, I expect to have kind of an equivalent story this I wish new I personally wish Nutanix would have went into cloud data management, they would have, I think they could have had a compelling story. But as I look at the market, you know, there's kind of two runaways in the market, there's NetApp with their data fabric vision from the large vendors, there's other vendors like Pansura and, and, and fracking faction that play in a different part of the market.

But from this big data fabric, multi cloud perspective, there's NetApp. And then from a workload management, network security, there's Dell EMC. And then Cisco still has their Cisco story. And I really don't see where HPE and Nutanix is filling fitting into that story. I'll be at HPE discover next month. So I'm looking forward to hearing the HPE story. They're much smaller, more agile, able to better execute. They're coming up this thing that they did with Nutanix would not have happened a year and a half, two years ago.

So I'm impressed with their ability to move from a business perspective. I'd like to see what they can do with competing against the Dale juggernaut. Yeah, yeah, that'll be a really cool thing to see. And it is possible that they're just holding out. Well, they should probably stop holding out. I think it's time to show your cards. Yeah. Let me ask you this real quick. Have you seen anything about pivotal? Because it seemed like that would have been there would have been a big pivotal announcement this morning as well.

But so maybe they're, they're saving it for tomorrow. But pivotal is one of those interesting things that was talking to a peer just other days, we were, he leads a open source project. And we talked about why isn't it that VMware has more just dedicated open source people on staff that just isn't working on VMware angles to the open source, but just doing open source. And this pivotal relationship inside of Dale technologies has always intrigued me. They don't, you know, when my perception is that when you take when you take an engagement from from pivotal, if you don't embrace their opinionated way of application development, the whole thing is kind of dropped and Dale doesn't have kind of a story around that.

And that was my initial frustration with VMware. And Dale is that if you didn't buy into if I'm a deal customer, Dell technologies, custom big EMC shop, big deal server shop, big deal security shop at the time, big deal networking shop, and I want to talk to deal about cloud, but I don't want to do VMware. There's an Azure stack. Decent story. Yeah. But what if I want to build a private cloud? You know, I kind of feel like there's something missing there.

But that could just be me. Yeah. Yeah. And, but I'm also not sure if that lack of an option hurts them. I don't, you know what, they listen to their CFO, they, they paid down $14 billion in debt over the past couple of years. So I don't think it's hurting them either. So they're, they seem to be clicking on all eight cylinders. So Nathan, I really enjoy you spending time being on a CTO dose again. Where can people find the blog and you on Twitter?

Okay. I'm at Nathaniel Avery on Twitter. com. com click on the CTO dose videos where you can find more CTO dose. You can follow me on Twitter at CTO advisor until the next CTO dose talk to you on Twitter.