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Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management

Dell Technologies

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

pause_circle_outline Introduction of Caitlin Gordon, VP of Product Management at Dell Technologies.

play_circle_outline ETR survey highlights hybrid cloud as a top investment priority for organizations.

play_circle_outline Modernizing Application Platforms: Dell's Strategic Partnerships with VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat for Enhanced Virtual Resource Management

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Cailtin Gordon, Dell Technologies – VMware choices and decisions

Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management Dell Technologies

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

TheCUBE analyst Rob Strechay meets with Caitlin Gordon, VP of product management at Dell Technologies, to decode the hypervisor shakeup after Broadcom’s VMware deal and why private cloud just leaped up the priority list. Gordon lays out the customer reality: pricing and packaging changes, open and flexible design needs and a firm push for investment protection so teams aren’t stuck. She explains how disaggregated infrastructure enables clean migrations, shared storage across ecosystems and right-sized compute and storage. Partnerships with VMware, Nutanix, Re... Read more

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What is the focus of the discussion in the segment regarding the transition of hypervisors and how it relates to the Broadcom acquisition of VMware? add

What percentage of organizations surveyed prioritize hybrid cloud spending, and how does it rank compared to other areas of investment? add

What are the key partnerships and options available in virtualization and container platforms for data centers? add

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Cailtin Gordon, Dell Technologies – VMware choices and decisions

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Rob Strechay

>> Hello, and welcome back to Dell Technologies: 5 Steps to a Smarter Private Cloud. In this segment, I'm joined by Caitlin Gordon, who's the VP of Product Management at Dell Technologies, and we're going to deep dive further into what has been this transition of hypervisors set off by kind of the chain reaction caused by the Broadcom acquisition of VMware and how organizations really are looking to broaden their portfolio of hypervisors and have some functionality in there and really simplify it. So welcome on board, Caitlin.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think one of the things, and we'll kind of throw up this stat there is that when we went with our partner, ETR, ETR.ai, they went out in their July survey and found, of over 1300 purchasers and organizations that are purchasing, they found that 34% were going to spend and made a priority, their third highest priority after cybersecurity and AI was hybrid cloud at 34%. They're really investing in this. Why do you see that? You see it from the customer side, this VMware inflection point has caused people to really take a step back and look at what they do for private cloud.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, I'm glad you have a stat for it. We certainly feel it when we go into customer conversations. The two topics they want to talk about is to, no one's surprise, AI, but the second one is private cloud. Which I just looked up the date actually, it's been almost two years since the acquisition of Broadcom and VMware, and it's been a tough couple years for our customers. It is something that was extremely stable for them in their data centers, but this acquisition, the pricing, and the packaging change, some of the route to market changes, has really affected the way that they're thinking about how they're going to design and architect their private clouds and even who they want to partner with, and ironically even has fed into how they're even thinking about their AI architectures as well. So yes, the chain reaction is a good way to think about it, right? It was an acquisition of one company of another, but it then led to very big changes, which have actually required nearly every customer I talked to really think about what do they want their private cloud design and architecture to be? Who do they want to partner with on that journey?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that what we see in the data that we see out of ETR and our own data that we're using with theCUBE Research is the fact that everybody's looking at how they're going to modernize their application platform and really focus on that transition to private cloud. And a lot of that is also driven, like you said, by AI and how they're doing that. What has been some of the key, I guess you could say, considerations that customers are dealing with as they evaluate this?

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's a lot of different aspects to it. Of course, a lot of the conversations start with emotion, right? You've changed a package and a price, and have shifted the earth underneath something that was relatively stable. Then quickly kind of becomes an alternative, whether you call it multi or you just want to move to something else. There's this new notion that I need to find something else that I can run my private cloud on. What are the different alternatives out there? But also the fact that unlike 10, 5 years ago, maybe even three years ago, I am, as a customer, what I hear again and again is I can't be locked in. I need to have something that's open, that's flexible, that's reusable. So yes, I do need to find the right hypervisor or container platform, some combination of that, but also the infrastructure and the architecture underneath that needs to support my business today and into the future, including my private cloud and these modern workloads. So it's really the buying criteria has changed for something that had been so stable for such a long time.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, and you guys partner with a number of other providers of that cloud operating model or cloud operating system, I would say, at that hypervisor and container level. Have you seen that organizations are looking at how they can modernize, consolidate where their VMs are and take in these new technologies as they modernize their app platforms?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, absolutely. We have strong partnership within VMware of course, but also with Nutanix, who, again, is in the hypervisor and in the container space. Red Hat really started on the container side, but really has innovated a lot on the virtualization side as well. You also have Microsoft in the mix. And then we also have some open source partnerships in there as well. So the breadth of choice is not the problem. It's actually the new challenge is what is the right type of platform? Who are the right partners that you want to bring into your data center? What are you optimizing for? Microsoft, you want to optimize for more of a hybrid cloud. With Red Hat, you're optimizing more on a container platform. So you have a lot of different options out there. But our customers, I think in a lot of ways what we hear from them is they feel like they've lost control. And giving a lot of choice is great, but what we've really designed not just our architecture for, but our whole strategy around is to help not just with the choice of who, but to make sure that no matter what choice you make, the architecture and the infrastructure underneath can support that today. But also knowing that it won't lock you. That disaggregation of the infrastructure, but also the hypervisor container layer from that infrastructure is really, really critical because customers, first and foremost, the number one thing I get, I need investment protection. I can't get locked in.

Rob Strechay

>> Let's dive a little bit deeper in that because I think that disaggregation and disaggregated infrastructure to me makes a lot of sense. I did hyperconverge way back in the day and it would grow linearly. And we've talked about it on other episodes about locked-in storage, stranded storage or stranded CPU or memory, or what have you. How do you see disaggregation and disaggregated infrastructure really helping your customers?

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's a lot of different aspects, and a lot of people are talking about disaggregated infrastructure now, which is good to see. And there's a lot of value. The basics, which we've talked about for years. We used to say, build, buy, remember that era?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Caitlin Gordon

>> But you have the idea that you can scale your compute and storage separately. That's obviously really important, but also means you can size your storage and your compute appropriately for each component. But on the storage side, it also means you can share that storage across multiple ecosystems, on the compute side where you can reuse that infrastructure for one environment to another. You can also have multiple in the same environment, and that is critical. Disaggregated doesn't just mean the ability to scale this separately, it's the ability to reshare that, to use that, have it be truly open and disaggregated.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that to me, that is one of the keys is the reusability, the non-lock-in, the flexibility to grow. Because sometimes, funny enough, when you build software, you don't know how it's going to grow and what it's going to need and all the resources for the long term. But when you look at it and you look at how Dell Private Cloud is addressing this, what are you talking to customers about those challenges you're helping them address?

Caitlin Gordon

>> In a lot of ways, the Dell Private Cloud is the culmination. I've been here for now 20 years, and it's almost bringing together all the innovation we've had over that time into something that our customers are now asking us for, which is an exciting thing. We've really built what they need as they're asking us for it because it brings together the simplicity and the automation, the validation work that we always built into our industry-leading HCI portfolio. Combines that with our best-in-class disaggregated infrastructure, with our PowerStore, with PowerEdge, and it's all designed around that simplicity, that flexibility, and that reusability. And it's not just the fact that it's reusable because it's open compute and open storage. We built that automation in so that you have the ability to have simple deployment, simple day-to-management, things like continuously validated state that we always used to talk about in HCI, we've now brought that to disaggregated infrastructure. But on top of that, we've also built in is the automation to reuse that infrastructure. So when your contract ends with one hypervisor, for example, you can simply just decommission that from that environment and re-provision it to the new ecosystem. That's extremely unique because you could never do that with HCI, and you can do that with the Dell Private Cloud.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think one of the things... We've talked a lot, so I feel like I know you very well in this. It really is about the application and how you modernize that application platform. But one of the things that I find is interesting is, and maybe I'm too much of a geek on the weekends, I'm sitting there reading all of the /VMware Reddits, which is, if you want, some very interesting comments.

Caitlin Gordon

>> I'll add that to my rotation.

Rob Strechay

>> It's a good one to see what people's challenges are with what they're going through. One of their biggest things is literally transition.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> What is Dell's approach, and how are you helping them transition from where they are to where they're going with that new modern application platform?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, and I think something we've seen and we've talked to customers about already for almost two years now, is the conversation I think is almost starting with the wrong question in a lot of cases, which is, where am I going to go? Well, maybe we need to start with a different question, which is, what is the right architecture I need to support the answer to the first question? And then you can answer it differently. And if you think about for how we've designed our strategy with the Dell Private Cloud, we very purposefully have supported VMware first. Because what we know is most customers, even if they do end up deciding to move off of VMware, they're not starting there. They're starting by how do I have infrastructure that has that investment protection, that has that reusability, and has the ability to evolve with me so I don't have to make the choice to make the infrastructure investment? And I think that's the flip that we're trying to really educate our customers, and we have acceleration workshops and consulting services available to really help have the conversation about where you go. But the first conversation is what's the right architecture? Who are the right partners to support that?

Rob Strechay

>> And funny enough, you also really know the licensing aspect of it as well, which can be very confusing to organizations out there. So again, I think that's a resource that you provide in spades, which is great.

Caitlin Gordon

>> All too well. Yes, we do.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, yeah. Maybe too well. I think one of the things, just taking a step back, that I also like is that, to your point, and I'm going to double click on investment protection. Because I think what people miss with disaggregated infrastructure is the fact that you can build off the same platform. A traditional HCI, if you were trying to do it, you would build another cluster and you would do wholesale migrations. Talk to how disaggregated infrastructure really helps with that migration.

Caitlin Gordon

>> I think of it more as enabling a modular approach and a much more agile way to transition. Because you can keep your part of your environment on one hypervisor and instead of the old way, which is you got to stand up some swing capacity and move it and then move it into the new environment, you simply can stand up what you need for this portion and then stand up another cluster over here of something new, and you're able to really have that clean migration, that clean reuse. And the best part is that you don't feel like it's a one-way decision. I think that's part of what we've heard loud and clear from customers is when I move to an HCI motion, I feel like it's a one-way decision and that's it. I'm moving to, and I'm not going to move off of that. Now you know you can move to something and then you can move off of it when you need to. And that's really critical, because you have the storage that you're sharing, you have the compute that's open, and you have the great automation software from the Dell Private Cloud that goes with that. And part of, you mentioned licensing earlier, one of the important things we built in here is that the licensing model is it's Dell Private Cloud is a subscription from us. So lots of different flexibility of how you consume that. But then the third-party licensing is all bring around. So if you have an ELA, you can bring that into the model. Gives a lot of flexibility to say, bring that third party, the hypervisor of choice, but really simplify that Dell part of the stack.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that makes total sense. So let's bring this back together and wrap up. What are your key thoughts from the Dell Technologies perspective, what people should be thinking about as they go through this transition?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, I think now that we've had some time to get over the emotion and get to the logical part of this transition for customers, the biggest thing for us is we have the privilege of having one of the biggest VMware install bases in the entire world. We have industry-leading infrastructure and industry-leading IP to simplify these. So we really have the unique and privileged, and I think position of requiring to help, helping our customers here. So it's really about making sure we have those conversations early and often. We don't wait until contracts are six months out so that we can help design an architecture as we decide what the strategy is. Are we staying? Are we transitioning? Are we going to have more of a multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor strategy? We can help with all of that and we have solutions to really support that.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that's key. In fact, in those Reddit threads, it's like don't wait until you're three to six months out. Because transitions, it's not all straightforward and everything won't migrate. And VMware is not going anywhere, but at the same time, I think having a multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud operating model makes a lot of sense and will simplify a lot of the platform engineering that people are looking to do as well. So thank you for coming on board.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, thank you for having me. Great to talk to you again.

Rob Strechay

>> It's been great. Always great to see you. And always great to see you too. Thank you for joining us in this segment of Dell Technologies: 5 Steps to a Smarter Private Cloud. We'll be back with more.