While there has been plenty of news this week surrounding VMware Inc.’s latest offerings, Dell EMC has not been lost in the shuffle. The company made several significant announcements involving the Software-Defined Data Center, turnkey hybrid cloud platforms and a set of pre-tested, cloud-ready systems that combine Dell EMC and VMware products.

“Our job is to help (customers) on the journey with on-prem and make it easy to utilize and navigate the multicloud world as well,” said Bob Wambach (pictured), vice president of marketing, Converged Platforms and Solutions, at Dell EMC.

Wambach paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Dell EMC’s recent announcements and how they are designed to support the hyperconverged infrastructure . (* Disclosure below.)

Driven by Dell’s PowerEdge servers, the VxRack SDDC will integrate with VMware software, including NSX 6.3. Dell EMC is looking to capitalize on VMware’s network virtualization platform for the automation of network services.

“The killer app is NSX,” Wambach said. “VMware is the best company to take the lead on how to automate.”

Customer interest in HCI

An important part of Dell EMC’s strategy is to take full advantage of customer interest in the HCI, which has been the fastest-growing systems market segment by revenue in 2017 (64 percent growth year-over-year). This week’s announcements surrounding Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud turnkey platforms underscore that plan.

“The hyperconverged infrastructure is ready for the vast amount of workloads today,” Wambach said. “It ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of customers.”

There is also a partnership between Dell EMC and VMware to provide customers with a lower capital investment alternative to the turnkey models through VMware Ready Systems. These pre-tested cloud offerings combine VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC with cloud software.

Michael Dell, founder of his namesake company, was quoted this week as describing the Dell EMC and VMware combination as akin to peanut butter and chocolate. “That’s what I think about the Ready Systems,” said Wambach, who noted that Dell EMC also provides additional customer solutions, such as Ready Bundle (pre-configured infrastructure) and Ready Nodes (with vSAN). “We provide the hyperconverged infrastructure.”

The steady drumbeat of major announcements regarding hardware, software and services illuminates what many in the industry refer to as the “stack wars,” a battle to build the most powerful architectures for the enterprise IT galaxy.

“VMware is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars,” Wambach concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE