As the digital transformation continues to expand into all avenues of enterprise life, organizations are demanding enterprise-grade tech keep up.

Dell Technologies Inc. is listening to these demands, and this means continuing to figure out various ways to offer hybrid and multicloud cloud strategies along with more data protection and management. This includes an evolving partnership between VMware Inc. and Dell EMC, which includes collaborations like VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

June Yang (pictured, right), vice president of product management and engineering at VMware, and Varun Chhabra (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing, Dell EMC Cloud platform, at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty. Ltd., during the recent VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed customer demands around hybrid and multicloud and the two companies’ growing partnership (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Miniman: You’re in a lot of customer meetings. What’s the reasoning with your customers? What are they coming to you to discuss when it comes to their overall cloud strategy?

Yang: For a lot of customers, they’re really looking for what builds the hybrid cloud story, as well as a multicloud story. When we see customers, clearly many of them have very large existing footprints on-premises. And edge, as a growing segment of the infrastructure, is also getting very significant, making very significant investment over there. And, of course, the public cloud itself.

So we see many customers really just trying to straddle the combination of the private cloud, the public cloud, and the edge side. And our strategy is … we want to have a consistent infrastructure that’s running everywhere. So, therefore, we have a consistent operational model that enables the customer and their admins to be able to do that.

Miniman: When you look at the general marketplace, they’re like … “Well, Dell is the hardware and VMware is the software.” There are a lot of … cross-pollination of pieces, and a lot of those are software pieces from the Dell family that tie into what’s happening on [Vmware Cloud Foundation] and the like. So bring us the update.

Chhabra: Data is increasingly one of our organization’s most valuable assets. It’s a competitive differentiator. We see news every day — if it falls in the wrong hands, what happens, right? So what we’ve been doing now, in addition to the amazing amount of work we’ve been doing with June’s team, is to bring this to market.

We’ve also been working on the data production side. So now with Dell EMC, data production is now validated to be working on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC as a data production solution. So this means the customers can not only take advantage of the integration that we have on the infrastructure there, they can also take advantage of … the piece of mind that our industry-leading data production solutions will be there to help them manage the data and protect their data.

Warren: So it sounds like it’s something that you don’t have to think about as an afterthought, which is often the challenge with data protection. If you wait to think about it, it never happens. 

Chhabra: It’s absolutely that way. What we find that’s really exciting about VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is customers are asking us to deliver the cloud model to their data centers, to their edge locations. So that’s how they want to consume software solutions as well. So what’s amazing about this solution is you’re doing everything to the browser. So that’s how you’re going to consume — data protection becomes an add-on service that you want to add on.

And I’m sure over time, we’re going to add other capabilities as well. But … that’s the key part here: the ease of consumption, the ease of use, and basically being able to consume things through the browser is a game changer for infrastructure in the data center on the edge.

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