Pat Gelsinger walks on stage and welcomes Michael Dell to the stage. Pat and Michael are doing a prepared Q&A.
First question is regarding lackluster support, such as quality of people and hold times. Pat says he is disappointed in hearing such feedback, as he thinks they have good NPS scores. But Pat said they are very focused, and will have some internal followup. VMware is also introducing Skyline, and proactive support. They want to be your best technology partner.
Second question is about AI, future topics, machine learning. Michael says he are in the most exciting times in human history. Cost of making something intelligent is almost zero. It’s game on! An enormous amount of data created from IoT is amazing. They overlay interesting computer science on top of this data, and the possibilities are endless. Dell thinks a lot about data and AI. Dell is seeing lots of new use cases. If you are not thinking about how you will be using this new data, you are doing it wrong. Pat speaks up and says in 1984 he was architecting the 486 and how they could use it for AI back then. But real AI wasn’t possible until the scale of compute and storage today. Michael says there is a coming boom in edge data, and new requirements in how you deal with that data.
Next question is in the area of SMB, and “don’t forget about us.” Michael says most new jobs are created in small and medium size business. Dell has added 10s of thousands of new small and medium customers. Dell is reimagining their products to support the SMB. Pat states they have 500,000 customers and most of them are SMBs. Pat commits to make sure SMB is kept in mind.
Next question is about ecosystem, HCI, and breadth of partnerships. Michael says he is committed to a thriving ecosystem, and is key part of VMware’s success. He says the partner ecosystem is as strong as ever. Amazing things going on with NSX. VMworld has 400+ partners here. Pat says he’s not so excited about some of the partnerships.
Synergy. Creating value together. How is Dell and VMware innovating together? Michael says cross-selling and deep level of deep technical integration with their stacks, while retaining an open ecosystem. Pat also states strong synergy, like VXrail. Michael says customers have lots of innovation around containers and new applications.
CEO of Pivotal (Rob) comes on stage.
Pivotal says they are now working with world class companies, and in use at 50% of the fortune 500. Michael says all customers are facing similar challenges, such as finding new value in their apps. Rob says customers has thousands of legacy applications. Pivotal has been working with containers for a very long time. Pivotal container (with a K) service (PKS) is a new offering! It uses Google cloud engine, NSX, and comes out of the box with full integration and kubernetes. Sam from Google cloud comes on stage. Sam says containers are coming at warp speed. Google has taken 10 years of container orchestration and know how to run billions of containers. They’ve poured that into Kubernetes, and GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). Sam says customers want to run compute wherever they want. PKS built on Cloud Foundry. Michael says customers wanted partnership and integration.
VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell comes on stage. Ray says many of the new services are delivered as SaaS. They are also aiming at developers to help make your company unique. Ray will now do demos of a variety of VMware products. Ray plays a video about a fictitious company to help illustrate problems that companies face today. They then run through a few VMware products and how they solve the customer problems. They give a demo of AppDefense and various other products.
