With a recent team-up between tech giants, Microsoft Corp. is expected to release its Azure Stack hybrid cloud operating platform on Dell EMC hardware this year. Amidst plenty of buzz at this year’s Dell EMC World conference, expectations are high for the two partners to meet customer demand for more agile, agnostic systems integrations for enterprise computing.

“We are ready to announce the details of our offering that will be coming out in the second half of this year. And we think that it is going to be a transformational offering for customers … to enhance and delight the customers that choose to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy using Microsoft Azure Stack,” said Paul Galjan (pictured, center), senior director of Microsoft Hybrid Cloud, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, at Dell EMC, Dell Technologies Inc.’s infrastructure group.

Galjan, Mike Schutz (pictured, left), general manager of product marketing, Cloud + Enterprise Division, at Microsoft, and Mark Nouris (pictured, right), group vice president of hybrid cloud at ATOS International, spoke with Paul Gillin (@pgillin), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

The discussion centered around the pending release of  Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, customers expectations about the product, and how and when Microsoft will deploy the product.

Questions, concerns for the Azure Stack

Microsoft has suffered long delays in shipping Azure Stack, but at this year’s Dell EMC World there was a great deal of interest in the product and what it will mean for customers who use it. In general, it will bring the benefit of a hybrid cloud computing platform to the customer’s on-premise environment, allowing them to modernize their legacy applications. And a lot of customers are trying to decide what that digital transformation means for them and what value it can provide their business, according to Schutz.

“Cloud obviously plays a big role in that,” Schutz said. “Converged systems and hyperconverged systems play big part in how they’re transforming their [information technology], and hybrid cloud sits at the intersection of those two really big trends around hyperconvergence and public cloud.”

Questions already remain about the actual release date and exactly how Microsoft will deploy it.

“What we’re doing is bringing our global scale cloud platform with Microsoft Azure serving millions of developers and IT pros every single day,” Schutz stated. “We’re taking that same technology and bringing it to our customers that will run on Dell EMC hardware in their data centers, thereby really expanding the reach of cloud to meet our customers where they are.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE