 Okay, we're back here live at Sapphire in Orlando, Florida. This is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events district to signal from the noise. We are ground zero for Sapphire. This is the Global Communications Center. We're all the actions happening. Vishal Sikha behind us earlier. We broadcasted live the press conference, Kosiya, Jim Snabe, and Bill McDermott. And this is where we get all the action. This is where we're broadcasting. We have three straight days. This is theCUBE. Our guest here is Jamie Erbs, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for VCE. And I'm joined by David Floyer from Co-Founder of Wikibon. David, welcome. Jamie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. First time in theCUBE. Welcome. Oh, thanks. We've had a lot of conversations over the years about SAP and obviously EMC and EMC world about VCE and the world's changed for VCE over the past two years. Yes. In particular, a lot of activity, integration, prefabrication, and obviously software-defined to everything in the world, software-defined data center. So these are the mega trends that are driving a lot of infrastructure changes at the data center where complexity is a big problem, and David Floyer was pointing that out in our last session. So what's the update on VCE from the product standpoint? Give us a quick intro on the update. Well, as you've said, we've undergone a lot of change over the past now three years, a little over three years. And starting from our roots is kind of a service integrator or service-oriented company to now being a product company. So some very dramatic change over the past year and a half as we moved towards that in becoming a product company. And we came out, we came to market with a series of Vblocks or general purpose workload systems that we offer the last two, last year 300 and the 700 served us quite well in the market. We grew pretty dramatically, pushing out billion dollars in the run rate. So we've had a nice run of it. But this year we started to also think about applications, a lot more significantly about applications because as we went into the data center, saw the complexity there, saw the application landscapes, and we quickly realized that infrastructure really had to adapt to and accommodate the kind of applications that were running there. So we have moved towards as well another product category called specialized systems. And the first offering in that category is SAP HANA. So that is a HANA appliance that's designed and made for execution and support delivery of SAP HANA. And that's our first entry. Others to come in that space for us, but we find that it's a great experience for customers in that we're able to offer the VCE experience as a whole as far as our total value proposition in the context of the mixed workload systems that we sell as well as now HANA right alongside it. So SAP landscape as a whole can be managed in a very ubiquitous and common way. So we've been talking to a couple of your customers during the last day. We talked to Bill Reed, who's your EMC customer. And we talked to Mr. Lin from West who works in Philadelphia. And they were talking about the importance for their environment of reducing complexity, reducing, virtualizing things from reducing costs in those SAP environments, these SAP instances. So can you talk a little bit about the process that you go through with a customer in order to fit VCE into the SAP environment? Yeah, well it really starts before the customer engagement and the engineering that we put into the VCE products. The V-blocks themselves, we do a high degree of physical engineering from the get-go to make sure that these V-blocks can be consistently fabricated in factory. So having a quality and consistent build that's done from factory that lands in a very predictable way from the onset is the right starting point that you need for any kind of an application implementation project. So the engineering that we do from a physical side sets the stage. It drives the consistency and standards in the equipment and the elements that go into the V-block. Then beyond that, we do a logical build as well. And in that logical build, that's what we're pulling forward, the software pieces. We're also in the deal cycle talking with customers about the application landscapes or portfolios that they have that they expect to run on the V-block. And we go through an exercise of sizing the V-block appropriately, putting together the right configurations in terms of storage subsystem configurations, VMware configurations, the balancing between say maybe it's a physical to virtual implementation. So what percentage of the V-block should be configured with what we call bare metal to accommodate physical instance of applications running versus how much of their application landscape will be virtualized. And in many cases, customers maybe don't quite have the confidence to run some applications in a virtualized model, but if they can implement them side by side in the V-block environment, watch that operational behavior and then move them as they're ready. You know, it gives them a nice environment to do that in a predictable and in a safe way. Jamie SAP is announcing a lot of innovations in their portfolio in the line of business process. Cloud is the big one, and VCE really was looking at that as a key enable for these private cloud infrastructure. How are you guys vectoring into that today? Obviously with the CEOs on live behind, actually they're not live, they're on the analysts, the financial press conference, the executive team behind us, you know, we're hearing kind of the echo loud on. And so they got to integrate across their portfolio. That means the data centers need to be retooled. How do you guys vector into that trend that they're putting forward? Yeah, so we've always believed in, you know, choice with customers. We believe that private cloud has a place in the data center, and if we're able to, you know, insert V-blocks in an overall construct and in a strategy for customers that allows them to have their applications running in a public cloud model, private cloud model. We have many customers who, for whatever reasons, still have policies, compliance, challenges where they demand certain applications to run in a private cloud model. So we allow them to use cloud and as a service types of operating models, same operating models they may use against public cloud implementations, but to put, you know, underneath, put the V-block under the same operating model that they have. So that's, you know, our strategy is basically to fit into that hybrid cloud strategy. And we see that also there are some customers that looked to public cloud implementations for infrastructure, for SAP HANA that we heard about, especially from a sandboxing or app dev kind of environment, and to use that as a first step and then move towards a production environment that's in more of a controlled and policy managed environment internally. So in building these systems, how do you deal with keeping them up to date? How do you deal with my memory of my environments and operations was that we were forever having problems in terms of the microcode level of this piece of hardware and the software level of this. How do you integrate that and how do you then integrate the hardware along with the level of the right level of software from Oracle and from SAP and others? Yeah, I think you're alluding to release management. Release management is quite a challenge and I know in my days in operations the network guys would come forward with, I've got the latest firmware and I'm going to do a change window this weekend and we'd hold our fingers and hope that it wouldn't crash, you know, my warmth of implementation and yes, everything else. And then you find out after the fact that conflict with your storage subsystem. And so at VCE, that's exactly one of the investments that we made that, you know, when there's a purchase of a V block, it's not just an acquisition of an asset, but there's a service, an embedded service that comes along in the context of release management, for example. We have a team of engineers that full-time are getting the latest patches, the latest releases and doing, we have a test harness set up with, you know, 2,500 plus test regression tests and such that constantly pound the new software patches, firmware, microcode against the combinatorial of all the different V block arrangements that we expect and we provide a quarterly release to our customers. With clear instructions about what to install first or dependencies, that sort of thing, so it matches into their change window. Again, we're very sensitive that, you know, choice and operating model of the customer is something we have to fit into, so depending on their compliance and the way that they do change activity, we also have customer advocates though and residents that sometimes customers want people with cloud management experience in their shop, so we're able to basically drop people on site as well that live with the customer and perform those changes on their behalf. So with some customers, they really kind of have a hands-off experience with a V block. They, you know, bought the asset, we run the asset on their behalf as well and then above the hypervisor is where they tend to pick up the responsibility for the release or change management of applications above. But we're constantly looking out for, again, that balancing of applications and making sure that the tuning of the system with these advocates and with these residents that the tuning of the system matches their application landscape. So what sort of benefit does that give to an operational people? I was talking to one customer and they were sort of doing a back of a napkin on the benefit. They were thinking they probably would say something in the order of 20% of the people they had doing this sort of work. Is that the operational people? Yes. Is that what you're finding is? Yes. We absolutely are seeing that. And we actually work with customers as well on a TCO analysis perspective to help them quantify expected savings that they'll see. And we tend to break that down across implementation and across ongoing operational practices, whether it's in the release area that I talked about or in reduced downtime. We haven't actually had a, I started in July. I haven't witnessed a severity one outage of V-Block since I started. And I think the last one that I've heard about was about 18 months ago. That's phenomenal availability that's baked into the product. So customers really appreciate that. That gives them, when you're able to apply your people towards not fighting the fires and the outages every day, but attending to the forward movement of the business that too yields savings for customers. We also have a seamless support model, which around incident management when there is an issue that's going on, a single call. So we're providing a multi-vendor management support model that customers can take advantage of and that we provide with every V-Block. And that then allows them as well to reduce the complexity of incident management and resolutions. So time to resolution is expedited and they have less phone calling and management across the different ticketing systems. We integrate that and provide a seamless experience in that regard as well. Excellent. So VCE has been getting a lot of buzz obviously on the speed side, V-Block in particular, right? So speed to value. Yes. We heard 27 months with EMC's IT group. We were talking earlier yesterday, six months they had a real project and you know what a specific need, but again six months this is unheard of and kind of IT years. Right. I mean six months in IT is like six years, IT years. Right. So that's a real issue, right? And people want more integration, want more prefabricated, but there's still integration involved. What product innovation are you guys driving that's going to increase the speed to value in terms of deployments? Right. Gone are the days of the old ERP deployments, so six year migrations and gravy train, consulting gigs. People want milestones, they want to have quick action. So what are you guys driving on the product side? Yeah, so yes, you're right. Right now time from PO to first implementation and putting applications on the V-Block is around 45 days, 50 days along that time. We have seen some very interestingly aggressive projects that have spun up and have started really, you know, time to value is hitting within a 45 day mark. So that's pretty amazing. However, in looking forward, driving simplicity, driving time to value, those are the hallmarks of VCE, our philosophies and what we're investing towards. If you go to our booth here at Sapphire, you'll see an interesting prototype that we have a demo running in booth that introduces TOSCA. And when you're dealing with a highly standardized infrastructure development, the ability to bring in automation tools or standards like TOSCA and enable fast implementation of applications and in this case SAP applications, you can imagine the kind of reduction in time to value that we can drive with that. So we're looking at, you know, it's a 60 second implementation of a package. Of course, the packaging work has to be done, but we're working with SAP on those fronts. But you'll have to come and see the demo to see what we're talking about there. But driving now those concepts of standardization, automation, time to value. Orchestration. Well, yeah, orchestration. Yeah, now we allow customers to have choice in orchestration tools that they use. But TOSCA is one of the things that we proved out and we have a prototype showing. Well, my final question is David, you have any more questions? I just have one more from your background. Yes. I've been in the large node implementation before, building 10,000 node implementations of systems. So where do you think VCE is in applying that to those scale of operations? Yeah, hyper scale kinds of implementations. Yeah. Very interesting world. And yes, in my background, I've got a rich history across startups and a large enterprise. I was the CTO of EDS data center services. Wow, yeah. Hundreds of thousands of servers under management, millions of VMs, that sort of scale. But that's different because it's a thousand enterprises independently managed in a hyper scale environment. Scaling points are different and we do have customers that have that sort of a demand. And in our product strategy, what we have under design and that we're working towards is to allow a hyper scale type model on a trajectory of, say, compute scale or storage scale. We see different balance depending on the, again, it goes back to the applications that you're hosting and running and what does it mean? What drives your scale? There's not one node. No, there's not one model. I think that's something we've always learned in my team. There's never one size fits all, right? But again, we're looking, it's my job, I think, to design in the right levers for expansion, the right levers for understanding capacity expansion points and the right levers for understanding business expansion as well, whether it's geographic in nature and working with EMC. I can't ask for a better kind of business model to work in because I've got $200 billion of R&D coming into my product line, you know? So it's a startup culture, but with that kind of an R&D backing. So I've got, you know, at my fingertips, the Cisco R&D line that comes into our hands and the EMC and the VMware products. So it's, as a matter of fact, I've got too much. Too much choice, you know? It's a nice playground. It is. It is. It's great. So, you know, a couple more questions to spark in my interest. So obviously you have a background in the large environments. You have a background in HP, labs and the kind of environment. Hyperscale's the big buzzword. Yes. So, you know, what's different about VCE now? I mean, the old VCE, you know, Stu Miniman would say, we can find motherhood in Apple Pie, VCE is great. But now with hyperscale going full mainstream in the enterprise, people want hyperscale in the enterprise. They're just trying to put it together. So what's the new innovation that's driving VCE in hyperscale? How does it compete on a cost basis with some of these hyperscales, which are very low cost? They are. They are. And in my conversation with Stu specifically, I said, can you help us, actually, in the translation? Because most of the hyperscale conversations I've had have been more in the public cloud provider context or, you know, companies that are offering at scale internet-based applications or software kinds of services. And, but in the enterprise, the hyperscale demand has been a little less. But I'm sure that there are value, things like, oh, it's low cost. Everybody says that, you know, but why? You know, because of the high degree of standardization, because of the cookie cutter implementations, you know, application design and architecture is very consistent in those worlds, right? So, do you really see that in an enterprise? So, we're trying to look to see the values and the actual advantages of hyperscale. How does that really translate to an enterprise? And that we need to get clarified. And right now- How does the work go to the cloud for those types of applications? There's a balance, exactly. Is there a balance here? And again, back to that hybrid cloud model and how can I facilitate, you know, working within the context of a hybrid cloud type of environment? But, you know, keeping the needs of the enterprise in mind. But I'm very interested to learn more and to hear more feedback from customers about impact of hyperscale specifically to the enterprise. And then I know a little more about design. But right now, like I said, I'm looking for designing the right configuration levers, designing the right capacity expansion levers in our products so that we're able to grow. Flash is definitely a key contribution there, right? So, that'll bring changes. The advances in Cisco and UCS blades, et cetera. So, advances in those product lines, I'm looking to give us the next advantages in our products. Hey, Jimmy Gray, I want to ask you one final question, parting question. Obviously, around the corner is these big mega trends are exploding. Okay, what have you learned in your VCE that you're dealing with right now that you can share with the folks about? What do you think about the most, on a personal level relative to VCE? As a product person, you've got to kind of have the 20-mile stare. And you have to think tactically at the same time. So, what is your big thing that you're thinking the most about? Right, right. Well, for myself, interestingly enough, it's less about the technology because, as I said, I've got a $20 billion R&D pipeline to give me lots of technology. My focus is around how can I change the supply chain of the data center? How can I change the way that IT is consumed and to rethink how quickly? Again, it's about time to value. How can I continue to push those hallmarks? And so, that's really what I'm looking for the advances. I think the VCE value and what we can contribute in terms of innovation will play into that sort of an outcome of that accelerated time to value of changing the way that technology is acquired, implemented, used, life-cycled. So, the entire life-cycle assurance, you know, and keeping up with that, to me, that's really the contribution that we can make and keep an eye on. Okay. Jimmy Irves, the Vice President of Product Marketing at VCE. VCE is changing the way things are done with VBlock. Great success. We are here at Ground Zero for Sapphire, live in Orlando. This is SiliconANGLE. We're the ones at Cube. Our flagship program. We go out to the events. I'm sure I can see them from the noise in behind us as we're here. We have the executive team for SAP, and we will meet with it shortly and get some more information. And we are on the ground getting all the data we can live in the Global Communications Center in Orlando. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.