Microsoft and Dell announced this week their official partnership to offer fully native, supported VMware cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. In the wake of the multicloud movement, would-be rivals have met in the middle to ease cloud migrations and deployments. So what do industry insiders, as well as customers, think of VMware’s latest team up?

Jeff Woolsey (pictured, right), principal program manager, Azure stack HCI/Windows server/hybrid cloud at Microsoft, and Bob Ward (pictured, left), principal architect at Microsoft, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the new partnership between Dell and Microsoft, how customers are responding, and what to expect with future innovations (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Knight: A couple of days [ago], Satya Nadella stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now what are you hearing? What’s the feedback you’re getting from customers?

Woolsey: Everyone is telling us the same thing. They’re very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel it’s the best of both worlds. This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and making our customers super productive.

Miniman: Give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. 

Woolsey: The key part of this is for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well-known, well easy-to-use Azure infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it’s time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you’re using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don’t feel like there’s a massive change going on. 

And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we’re making that super easy, as well, through integration in the Portal. And you’re going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long roadmap together. 

Knight: I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell-Microsoft relationship. What is it like to work so closely with Dell? 

Woolsey: We’ve been doing this for a while, so it’s not like we’re strangers to this. And we’ve always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways — whether it was in the client, whether it’s tablets, whether it’s devices, whether it’s servers, whether it’s networking. And now what we’re doing is we’re upping our cloud game. We’re saying, ‘There’s an area here in cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we’ve done traditionally at the hardware level. Let’s take that into engineering investment, and let’s do that in the cloud together to benefit our mutual customers.’

Ward: It’s not just about talking about the servers anymore as much. Even though that’s great. It’s all about solutions. And I’ve started to see that conversation happen a lot lately.

Woolsey: And it’s generally not a server conversation. Customers don’t come to me and say, ‘Jeff, I want to buy a server.’ No, no. ‘I want to buy solution. I want something that’s pre-configured, pre-validated, pre-certified.’

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE