In an interview with CRN at the annual EMC World conference in Las Vegas, Todd Pavone, COO of EMC's VCE converged systems division, addressed a wide range of issues including how the impending merger with Dell will impact VCE, the battle with SimpliVity and Nutanix, as well as the strategies partners need to adopt in order to stay on top of the market.

The interview came with EMC's VCE Converged Systems business rolling out a new x86-based, rack-scale, hyper-converged infrastructure solution for native hybrid cloud that will use Dell servers when the two companies finalize their pending $60 billion merger.

Like previous VxRack products, the new VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino nodes will use Cisco switching.

What follows is an edited excerpt of CRN's conversation with Pavone.