The simplicity of the public cloud comes from its service model. Everything is hands off and automated: Version updates? Security patches? Troubleshooting? No worries, mate. The cloud’s got you covered.

It might appear to be all sunshine and smiles in the public cloud. But what about on-premises, down in the data center? As companies choose to go with hybrid cloud rather than opting for all public, the most sensitive and critical data is staying firmly on-premises. Does this mean a convenience compromise? No way, say Dell EMC and VMware Inc.

“We think that [VMware Cloud on Dell EMC] is really going to hit the sweet spot of the best of both worlds,” said Mark Lohmeyer (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware Inc.

Lohmeyer and Varun Chhabra (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing, cloud, at Dell EMC spoke with spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the release of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

‘Cloud nirvana’ has been reached

The creation of the new platform came from asking the question, “How do we bring the simplicity, the agility and sort of the consumption economics of a public cloud model right, but with the control, the security, the enterprise class capabilities, [the] performance that customers expect from an on-prem environment?” Lohmeyer asked. With goals defined, the next question was: “How could VMware and Dell work together to … jointly engineer something that we think would be really special and achieve those goals?”

VMware collaborating with Dell is no new revelation. But, the level of resources shared for this project show just how closely entwined the two companies are. VMware on VxRail and VMware Cloud on VxRail were previous projects that laid the groundwork for the collaboration required for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, according to Lohmeyer. He compares the growth of the relationship between the two companies to an athlete building strength: “This is a muscle that we’ve been building between VMware and Dell for many years now … delivering a full cloud service on top of Dell hardware; that’s like bench-pressing 200 pounds!” he said.

As well as “bringing the cloud model to the data center,” VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is unique for three reasons, according to Chhabra. First is ease of adoption. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is “essentially the same platform” that VMware and Dell EMC customers are already using for their workloads. “The tools that they use today, [such as] vSphere [server virtualization platform] … NSX [network virtualization and security software], vSAN [hyperconverged, software-defined storage], they are going to be able to carry forward all the work they’ve done there on this platform,” Chhabra stated.

Second is reliable on-site support. The existing global support organization Dell EMC and VMware already have in place means onsite repairs can happen fast. “We have a unique advantage because we have a long heritage of working with customers in their data centers,” Chhabra said.

Proven infrastructure is the third advantage. “If you’re going to take a bet on this platform for your edge locations, your retail locations, your thousands of retail locations … you need to have the peace of mind that this is going to continue to work for you. Even in a fully managed scenario, it is disruptive if there’s hardware failures,” Chhabra added.

Another benefit to both customer and developer is latency reduction. In a traditional model, two to three years can elapse between software development and customer deployment. “With this new cloud delivery model that we’re building together, that latency shrinks down to potentially just weeks,” Lohmeyer said. “We can push those new innovations to our customers much more rapidly, and they can immediately begin consuming them. Literally, those new features just show up in the service.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE