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This week marked the seventh year for the VMworld conference and theCUBE ‘s coverage of the event. Each of those seven years included an interview with the candid and always fascinating Chad Sakac, president, VCE – Converged Platform Division at EMC.
“theCUBE has become a fixture of VMworld for me … but I can’t believe it’s been seven years. That’s insane,” Sakac exclaimed, as he joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the VMworld 2016 event in Las Vegas.
This week, theCUBE features one of our highest-ranking CUBE Alums, Chad Sakac, as our Guest of the Week.
During the interview, Sakac discussed how customer demand led to VCE realizing it needed to create an “easy button” for turnkey software stacks. He also broke down what the Dell-EMC merger means for VCE; talked about the technology of his cloud mission going forward; and made a few off- and on-the-record predictions. Additionally, he discussed his new role as president of VCE and the necessity of finding talented people with multi-function mojo.
Furrier noted how the show and the host company, VMware Inc., have changed over the years. Sakac discussed the company’s growth and how it has responded to change.
“VMworld has always had a huge community. One of the things that’s been defining about VMware’s whole journey has been the community, and that’s one that stayed pretty constant. There’s a lot of people here … who show a passion, a love for all things VMware is doing,” Sakac explained. “That said, it’s a very different show, a very different context, a very different ecosystem. Literally at the beginning, it was one product. Now if you look at the keynotes, they have to struggle to get all of the awesome into an hour and a half and do it in two days. … In years past, all of VMware would have been [about] one thing.”
Sakac continued: “The other thing that’s going on is the entire ecosystem has changed. We’re seeing consolidation in the ecosystem, but we’re also seeing … that realistic balance of what’s happening in traditional IT, private-public hybrid cloud models and how that’s going to play out over the next few years. There’s no question that public clouds are a huge part of the landscape for here, for now, for tomorrow and forever.”
Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies, Inc., announced during the show that Sept. 7 will be the close date for the Dell-EMC merger. Furrier voiced that what people want to know is if everyone will have fair access to VMware as an independent company due to the mega-merger. Sakac only sees an opportunity for all.
“Frankly, I think that not everybody understands what’s going on inside the industry,” he said. “The server storage and networking ecosystems as standalones are actually shrinking as workloads move to SaaS [Software as a Service], as workloads move to public cloud IS [public cloud Infrastructure as a Service]. The parts of the ecosystem that are growing, [have] our customers saying, ‘I want converged, hyper-converged and turnkey software stacks’ because that’s the way they want to consume. They want to simplify stuff down.”
Sakac added: “To be able to pull that off you have to have all the ingredients inside the stack. Increasingly, you will not be able to be competitive without having all of those components in the stack, and this is why I am passionate that convergence and hyper-convergence and turnkey software stacks will be at the center of Dell Technologies. I keep telling Michael, and he keeps agreeing, which is a good thing. Now the reality of it is, in spite of that statement being true, it is also true that people will continue to want variability. That may be a declining set, but it’s a bigger set of customers.”
Miniman jested by saying, “Now that the Dell deal is announced, this is the final nail in the coffin of VCE [the converged platforms division of EMC], correct?” Sakac explained the shift in the company’s positioning.
“Absolutely,” he quipped before declaring, “Of course not. The reason we are shifting the way we talk about VCE is something really simple. If I say VCE, what’s the first thing that appears in your brain? Vblock [what VCE uses for racks containing the components of its data center products]! And that’s a good thing in a sense. … The difficulty of it is that we are now no longer just the Vblock group; we have these hyper-converged appliances that are growing, like sync and customer are voting with their dollars,” Sakac said.
He added: “I think in a short amount of time we will be number one by customer, by revenue [as an] HCIA [Hyper Converged Infrastructure Appliance] player in the market. Furthermore, we also do these turnkey cloud stacks. So, realistically, VCE is more of a product brand than it is a company brand, and we are no longer a separate company. We are part of EMC, and on September 7 we will be part of Dell.”
Miniman pointed out that in addition to VCE there are more solutions and a cloud piece Sakac’s team is working on. He asked Sakac to share his progress in these areas. In response, Sakac took Miniman on a tour of how VCE is building the easy button.
“First things first; it’s important to understand this at its core. The original idea of VCE, which is now eight years old, was a basic premise that said, ‘We have a pile of giblets that are all awesome; however, customers struggle to assemble them and they want to have a turnkey offer that they can lean on us to not only deploy, but sustain and support as a single offering. That was the origination story,” he said.
Sakac continued: “Replace server, network and compute with hypervisor, IT business operations, a CMP [Configuration Management Plan], all of those things, and you have the enterprise hybrid cloud. We started getting feedback from customers: ‘We love vSphere [VMware’s suite of virtualization products] we love vRealize [VMware’s product that enables the creation and management of hybrid clouds]; we love vRealize Automation and Operations [for unified cloud management]; we love all of this Log Insight stuff [which allows the management of syslog data]. We’re all in with VMware. Can you guys give us the easy button?’”
Conitnuing on, Sakac said, “We’re now up to hundreds of customers … but it is the most curated, the most turnkey way to get the VMware SDCC [software-defined data center] deployed. I think we have a way to go because we need to make it so push-button easy, and Cloud Foundation is a core part of that. Think of Cloud Foundation turning into validated designs and the enterprise cloud being the ultimate manifestation.”
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.
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