Dell EMC and VMware Inc., recently announced the inception of VMware Tanzu Mission Control, an enterprise-grade Kubernetes user pane to help juggle countless software clusters across varied operating environments, and VMware Enterprise PKS, to help enterprises deploy, run and manage Kubernetes.

What was their reasoning to partner together on even more Kubernetes collaborations? The future of IT, applications and data, according to Varun Chhabra (pictured, left), vice president of cloud product marketing at Dell EMC, and Muneyb Minhazuddin (pictured, right), vice president of product marketing, cloud, security and workspace solutions, at VMware.

Chhabra and Minhazuddin spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the two companies’ new collaborations and the impact on the enterprise (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Furrier: What’s the big takeaway from your standpoint that you’d like people to know about? What’s going on at Dell EMC for the VMware relationship?

Chhabra: Both Dell EMC and VMware are very, very customer-driven companies, where we respond to customer feedback and we try to respond to them very fast. That’s been true throughout our respective lifetimes. So I think there’s two broad areas of collaboration. One is in the cloud space, which is all about making sure that the innovation that VMware’s bringing to market, we are providing that in a tightly integrated infrastructure solution. And then we’re also making investments on data protection. It’s so important to be able to manage your data in this multicloud world. You have applications sitting everywhere. We all know that data’s the crown jewel.

Minhazuddin: It’s really … validating from the VMware point of view how that works. It’s about applications, it’s about the infrastructure, and it’s about the operations. And it really kind of together — as we talk about Tanzu, PKS — it’s giving our customer the choice of: ‘You pick Kubernetes environment’ — application choice.

Walls: What does it do for you all then in terms of challenge, especially at your teams, because you’re talking about all this customization. … What does that do for you all in terms of how you approach that, how do you change your mindset, and how do you change what you deliver?

Chhabra: Both Dell EMC and VMware — or any technology provider that’s worth their salt — is in the business of building platforms. And platforms are essentially extensible. They really provide a foundation that other people can innovate on top of. That’s how I think you handle the customization. One thing I think we can all agree on is that IT has always taught us that there’s no one size fits all. So I think providing choice along every single dimension is super important for our customers.

Furrier: This is new for enterprises. This requires full hybrid capability. This requires data at the center of the value proposition. 

Minhazuddin: The biggest value is business and IT are coming together around the area of applications and data. That’s a given. Because the successful businesses are the ones who leverage those, and the guys who fail in the future are the ones who don’t pay attention to how critical applications are to the business logic and how critical data is to mine and get the behavioral analytics to get ahead of the curve.

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: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE