Live from Austin, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Dell World 2015, brought to you by Dell. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon.com, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to all the big enterprise tech shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Happy to have back multiple-time CUBE alum, Tom Burns of Dell, welcome back, Tom. Great, thanks, great to be here. All right, so Tom, your title changed since last time we have you on. You are now the GM of networking, which you've had for a while, but you've also got enterprise infrastructure, so maybe we can start there, enterprise infrastructure. I could think of lots of things that that means, but what does that mean for Dell in your role? Well, it's actually a great business for Dell. It's been around for some time, but I took it over last year, as you stated. It's basically made of three components. First of all, it's our parts business, across server storage and networking. When customers want to extend the life, they want additional storage and additional memory, additional optics or blades for their products. We help them kind of extend the life by giving them Dell certified parts, and we do that on a worldwide basis. Great business. The second piece is called data center infrastructure. So, rack, power, cooling, all the various things to put together the data center, obviously along with our server storage and networking. And the last is our resale with some of our partners, such as Cumulus, Big Switch, Riverbed, F5, Nutanix, on a Nutanix basis. The center, all of these various relationships, which is a nice business on a global basis anyway. So, anywhere Dell doesn't have IP, we basically partner with major players around the world, bring the best breed approach, and we can deliver that with basically Dell delivering all the capabilities. Yeah, so I've got some background with Dell. I'm actually, if familiar, it used to be called software and peripherals. Is this the expansion of that? That's correct. So the team basically got put into two groups. One part on the end user client group, which deals with the software and peripherals on end user client, and one in the enterprise side, which is the one that I'm responsible for. But again, great business. Yeah, I tell you, actually, it's a model that many in the industry have followed. Actually, there's a little bit of background. When I was at EMC, they launched a program, Howard Elias, who's helping with the integration, was the executive sponsor for what was called EMC Select. So EMC Select was modeled after Dell S&P, and it helped with all those solution completers. It was hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business that got added in because customer says, I want to buy it, does it help? How do I put that together? And Dell's the one that really set that off of the marketplace. Well, I think it stems from Michael's core strategy around having that key relationship with the customer and delivering to them what they want as far as the solution. So if we don't have it in our IP and we can build up a partnership, get the blueprints going as far as testing and support and so forth, it absolutely makes a lot of sense. But it sounds like I have a little bit of work to do on the EMC side. Yeah, so they've got familiarity with a bunch of that, and yeah, there should be some good synergies there. So, Tom, your background, I think we want to spend most of the time talking networking. So, open networking has been a big push for you guys. I've been out in the market talking about Bright Fox. Maybe bring us up to speed, what are you working on? What's the new announcements this week? And where's the activity in the networking space for you guys? Well, great, we appreciate it. Open networking is something I think Dell really started about two years ago when we launched our initiative in this particular space, and that was disaggregating the hardware and software and providing third-party software. We kicked that off with Cumulus, shortly thereafter signed Big Switch. We've now added Pluribus and IP Infusion. In fact, both the Pluribus and IP Infusion 10 and 40 gig switches will be shipping starting this month. So we now have four partners in the kind of the curriculum to be able to give customers this choice. It's just had huge momentum. We are up to over 300 customers deployed on a worldwide basis, and I'm speaking deployment. I'm not talking about tests or proof of concept. These are real deployments where customers are up and running and really seeing the true benefits of being used, kind of common tool sets, configuration, management, eliminating a lot of the complexity and certainly giving them both the CapEx and OpEx savings. So really good momentum. We're really pleased by the fact that HP followed us with their quote-unquote open networking initiative. We could discuss that if you want. And Juniper kind of put out a quasi-announcement that they're going to port their Juno software onto a third-party switch. And we think there could be others, but it's great to be the leader. And I think we've got about a year and a half head start of everybody else. Yeah, so Tom, I mean, many people saw when Dell bought Force 10, it was like, oh, okay, we're going to integrate the stack. Dell's going to have all the components themselves. And as you said, you made that, you still have Force 10, and Dell still makes, there's some campus switches you announced and there's new stuff there. So how does Dell look at this? What do you make? What do you make open? What do you partner with? How does that portfolio discussion happen? Sure, sure. Well, yeah, we continue to invest in our Dell OS, the former Eftos, coming from Force 10, and it continues to do very well. We continue to add features to it. And in fact, what's the beauty of our open networking initiative and the fact that we use the Oni bootloader, we can have customers trial, a cumulus, a big switch, a Pleribus, or an IP infusion. And if they choose not to go down that path and they want a more traditional networking software as a choice, they simply purchase an Eftos license or a Dell operating software license. They don't rip and replace the switch, they don't have to rewire the switch, basically they could swap to the other if they want to stay down that traditional path. So we continue to invest in that stack. What we were doing is really looking at the stack of server storage and networking and how can we continue to drive simplicity around that particular kind of converged infrastructure. And so what we saw is the capability with some of our software partners to help customers move in this direction versus stay in the traditional networking stack, so to speak. So if you look at cumulus, very much Linux-based, Linux shop, using Chef or Puppet or other open source tools to manage both their compute and their networking now and seeing great benefits about that. If you want a connected fabric, using big cloud fabric, coming from big switch, with basically a controller, although we're seeing lots of activity with BigTap as well in the market. So it's really to provide a faster path to a possible software-defined networking solution using kind of new operating software, new sets of tools. But we continue to drive a path with our DELL OS as well, whether it's programmability, whether it's the use of a hypervisor, or whether it's standard open flow protocol. Okay, so one of the big announcements this morning was the Microsoft and Dell relationship for Hybrid Cloud. How does the networking portfolio fit into that? Absolutely fits into it really well. And I think that's the benefits that Dell has versus some of the stand-alone networking players. We have compute, we have storage, we have software, we have that integration capability and test capability, and obviously a very good relationship and long-standing relationship with Microsoft. So if you recall, about a year and a half ago, we launched the CPS platform, which is really a private cloud for large enterprise. And this is a stack of server storage and networking coming from Dell, obviously packaged with the Microsoft solutions. We're doing that now today in the mid-market as well. So we're offering kind of a mid-market solution, really going after Dell's sweet spot. But again, it's a combination of our converged infrastructure, server storage and networking, along with the Microsoft software applications, and also offering, in this particular case, some of the pay-as-you-grow accommodations from our Dell financial systems. Yeah, the other one, you're giving a presentation this week. I hear there's some of the converged infrastructure angle. Maybe networking hasn't been a huge discussion point. Obviously, Cisco's a strong player, but that's a little bit of a nexus in here and it's not tied into the core. How does networking fit into that conversion, hyper-converged discussion from Dell? Well, you know, it's a great panel that I hosted yesterday around software-defined data center, and actually there's some sessions today where we had four different customers from four different vertical markets talk about how they're building their data center and the benefits that are seen from that. Some of them are more traditional using our Dell OS along with the hypervisor. Some of them have chosen down the open networking path, primarily cumulus and big switch at this point in time, and others are using open flow. What was very interesting about the session is that while each of them are from different vertical markets, a little bit different as far as their path to a software-defined data center, the benefits around time from rack to deploy, significant, the benefits around using open source tools to be able to manage and configure both their server and their networking, absolutely outstanding, huge CapEx savings, both OpEx savings, so it's been really great. So where networking fits is really how do we drive some level of disruption in what's been a very traditional proprietary market and put the network functionality closer and closer to compute, or compute-like as it relates to management and configuration? So maybe you can reconcile that with the discussion we've been having on SDN for a few years.  Some of this is about, you know, that switch itself. If I'm immune to cumulus, it's much more like a white box. We're helping to pull cost out of it. But when you say things like simplicity, it's like, well, we've been talking about that, we need that. Customers are saying, I want it simple, I want to remove friction from IT, but SDN feels like it hasn't delivered it. So have we moved past SDN? Is it more, does the data center have to just take networking as a component of it? What's the discussion you're having with customers, and where are we in that discussion? What's the reality there? Yeah, it's a great question. Someone asked me this question earlier about, you know, what is truly the benefit of software-defined networking? And as compared to what it was when we were talking about it, say three years ago. And I think the initial assessment was that software-defined networking was going to be this capex saving. You know, suddenly it was, heaven forbid you use the term of bare metal switch and that all the intelligence was up in the software layer. You know, the separation of the control plane and the data plane. What software-defined means really is to have a more compute-centric approach so that you put more control and flexibility at the software level, giving much more capability to the enterprise overall. You're still pulling a lot of intelligence from the hardware, and that's why I continue to like the word white box or bright box even more, because the intelligence around quality of service, security and so forth still needs to be there. But I think the overall benefits is really driving this stack. So I think SDN in and of itself is part of a broader software-defined practice. It's not a product, it's actually a practice on how teams are going to have to operate in the data center standpoint. And when you bring the compute storage and networking together, if you're driving software-defined storage, software-defined networking, pushing that particular technical capability closer and closer to compute, you're going to see tremendous benefits. So, you know, I think SDN has moved from a capex, you know, we're going to make it a dump switch to now really it's a piece of the overall solution for a software-defined data center, which is bringing great flexibility, agility, speed, lower cost to the data center teams overall. Yeah, so that's great stuff. So I guess one of the things I look at, it's really about the operating model of our data center. The message that Cumulus brought was, we're going to bring you Linux. Yeah, it's actually Linux and then you're going to manage it just like you do Linux. And there's customers that have that skill set and it fits really nice into it. How are we doing it as an industry? Are we getting beyond the networking silo? Do we need to get beyond that? And, you know, making IT simpler. The stat, you know, I think we've beat to death over the last 15 years is, you know, we spend 70 to 80% or more of IT budget keeping the lights on. Right. And it's like server virtualization didn't move the needle. This software-defined meme doesn't seem to have moved it much yet. You know, how do we get there? And, you know, how does Dell look at that kind of whole operational management piece? Yeah, I think the needle is moving, actually. I would, if you asked me this question a year ago, I'd say what we see in SDN is, you know, some trials, you know, maybe some universities and so forth, but we're really seeing a quick advancement of the adoption around SDN. And I think it's really the business disruptions around cloud, mobility, security. You hear about it a lot here at Dell and you hear at Dell World from our partners and customers. And our customers are really challenged with this. How do they continue with speed and services to their end users, but have a stack that allows them to have that flexibility to roll those services out quickly at a low cost? And I think we're really starting to see the benefits in that this common tools that you talked about with Cumulus. Well, if I can manage and configure my server and also my network, then I'm kind of taking some questions around, well, do I need to have a network administrator to expand or change my network? We have Medallia as an example. We've talked about them before, who's really growing very quickly as a kind of a customer relationship company. They're really expanding their business so they're expanding their infrastructure and they're doing this using common tools with Cumulus, for example. We have other customers such as Ancestry that's looking at an open stack environment. Huge cost savings from a CapEx and an OpEx. Again, using both common tools, benefiting for all the things that are going into the open source area. And what's interesting is, instead of it just being a networking conversation now and you're going in and talking about infrastructure, you see some of the system administrators, some of the DevOps people really getting involved. In fact, many of our initial wins in the open networking was not from the networking side of the house. It was the server side of the office that said, come on in here, we want to talk to you about this. This seems pretty cool. I'm kind of tired of waiting for the networking guys to roll out my capability. Yeah, so the other area that we see a lot of activity in networking, I said two areas. One is open stack and the other one is the container space. I'm wondering if you can kind of speak to what's going on with Dell for both of those. We're seeing a tremendous activity in open stack. It seems that everyone wants to talk about it. I think it continues to have a bit of, let's say, resource constraints on those that are really capable of standing up, operating and so forth, but lots of customer conversations. And then as you move forward into the container, I think there's still a lot of maturity that has to happen in this particular area as to how customers can take the benefit of that. But we're certainly having those conversations on a daily basis. All right, so the last question I have to ask you, of course, is there's the big news last week, Dell EMC, obviously there's certain things you can't comment on, but any color you'd like to add as to what you think, industry consolidation, what's going on, fits into your role. Well, it's interesting, I joined Dell three years ago because of its brand and its capability across server storage, networking, security, software, services, all these various things. I think the statement made last week by Michael's announcement and our announcement with EMC, it just says we're taking that greater step in this consolidation to allow customers to have a true partner to ride this wave of technology disruption, this digitalization of the enterprise, all these things that are happening. So first off, extremely excited. I think it's outstanding that as Michael said today, go big or go home, baby. I think it's a wonderful term and he certainly showed the market that Dell's going to participate. I think the second thing is it's tremendous opportunity for the networking business from the standpoint of obviously additional solutions, addition technologies, it basically being able to cooperate on the channel basis and so forth. So I think a lot of good activities there. I think pieces of EMC will remain obviously unchanged. Our relationship with VMware has always been strong. We offer integration with NSX, we have Evo Rail, we have the Evo SDBC offering from an infrastructure standpoint and we'll continue to do that while we continue to also honor and respect the agnostic kind of VMware position from a software pure play. So I'm really excited. The comments from the customers and partners here at Dell World has been overwhelmingly positive and I think as we bring these two companies together it's just going to make a whole lot of sense for a lot of companies. All right, well, Tom Burns, always pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks for all the updates on the networking and enterprise infrastructure. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2015. Thanks for watching.