With VMware Inc.’s recent agreement to acquire Pivotal Software Inc., it’s clear that Dell Technologies Inc. — which owns majority stake of both VMware and Pivotal — is gearing up to have an even better collaboration around applications and Kubernetes, creating more opportunities for hybrid cloud and infrastructure as a service.

VMware is seeking to achieve a new focus on developers and organizational modernization, and Pivotal plays a needed role in this mission, according to Bob Ganley (pictured, left), senior marketing consultant at Dell EMC, and John Allwright (pictured, right), director of product marketing at Pivotal.

Ganley and Allwright spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during VMworld in San Francisco. They discussed the trend of companies using applications, Kubernetes, and evolving IaaS (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Let’s start with Dell EMC. On-premise where the data center is nearly going away and the edge has emerged, you’ve got to have an operating model that’s got to be cloud. And that really seems to be the focus, clearly. 

Ganley: Absolutely. What we see is that customers today are trying to deliver value through applications. And it’s all about apps, because apps is where that value gets delivered to the customer. So as organizations are trying to deliver those applications, the question becomes: ‘What’s the best place to put the app?’ So right workload, right cloud is a big thing for us.

Clearly, organizations have been adopting public cloud in droves. What we see is that they’re trying to figure out how do they get that public cloud infrastructure to work with what they’re doing on-prem. What we’re bringing to the table is a solution called Dell Technologies Cloud. We’re super excited about bringing together private and public in a hybrid cloud solution in a way that provides consistent infrastructure and consistent operations.

Miniman: I’m so glad you brought up the apps. It’s that modernization that customers are going through. What are the patterns you’re seeing? Containerization? Where do all these pieces fit … when they’re talking about their application development?

Ganley:  It’s interesting, because every customer is on an application journey. Organizations have clearly adopted virtualization. And most organizations are now trying to pivot toward, ‘How do I get more efficiency, more agility, for my virtualized applications?’ That’s really where infrastructure as a service and IT as a service is adding a lot of value today.

So, the question becomes, ‘As I’m working with my existing virtualized applications — and now looking at next-generation apps and developing those — how am I going to bring that along?’ We see this physical, to virtual, to infrastructure as a service, to container as a service as being a very logical progression for customers.

Furrier: This relationship between infrastructure and developers is evolving very quickly. I would love to get your thoughts on how you see it.

Allwright: Kubernetes has been something that’s been driven down from developers. They’re saying, ‘This is the infrastructure that we want to run our applications.’ Working at the levels that typically infrastructure is provided, there’s too much work for them to do. So, in some cases, they were packaging up Kubernetes with their applications and saying to the infrastructure folks, ‘Hey, deploy this.’ I think we’ve now kind of crossed the point where infrastructure goes, ‘Well, this is a thing, and I need to provide that.’ Why not bake that into the infrastructure? So Kubernetes is kind of DevOps materialized in a product.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE