 in the noise, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE. We're here at VMworld 2015. We're at Moscone North. Right at the street level, come on by and see us. This is a really amazing setup here. We've got dual cubes this year. Peter cuts us here. The Vice President of the EMC Solutions. Focus on cloud. Peter, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you as well. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. So this is like the, I guess, EMC world's your Super Bowl. This is kind of like the playoffs, even though it's semifinals. But big show for you guys. I mean, wheelhouse, customer base, it's your peeps. That audience is expanding. We're hearing a lot of dev ops. You're talking not just storage admins. You've got all kinds of additional roles. But so you guys have been very active in the hybrid cloud space. Hybrid cloud is a big theme of this show. So give us the update on what you guys are doing, what you're doing in hybrid cloud announcements that you're making and what's going on at VMworld for you. Yeah, so the show has been incredible. To this point, the keynotes have been great. I think when you think about the unified hybrid cloud and then the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, which is really kind of an instantiation of that, giving an example of having a complete offering that can bridge off premises, just matches the messaging, ties together with our launch, which is really about continuing down that journey and offering more features and extending the number of sites we support and adding the number of use cases to protect data. Also adding kind of automation in a way of how people continue to deliver applications from a standpoint of making sure that they can create them and run them through their life cycle, again, fitting completely in with the themes that are going on here. So tons of alignment, security with NSX, all tied into the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, really just a great kind of tie together across the board. So, I mean, it fits so well. It feels very aligned in our customer attraction and excitement is just so high and it's just been phenomenal. Yeah, so you guys have obviously stepped up your emphasis on the Federation. I mean, Joe Tucci has came out and said, you're going to see more from us on the Federation. It's a strategic advantage for us. How has the Federation sort of changed the conversation in the customer base? Well, I think for those customers that are interested in the Federated Offering, which really is a complete kind of holistic, inclusive offering that allows you to kind of get the outcome in a very short period of time in a reliable, repeatable fashion. I think that's really what's kind of enticed customers to be really invested and understand the value they pull out of that. And having that repeatability in those customers that have come out and understood that, driven huge amounts of savings, with customer coming out saying tens of millions of dollars easily saved through the kind of implementation driving of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, those are the things that we kind of continually see and we're driving over and over again. So EMC has had a vision of Hybrid Cloud for a while. I mean, when Cloud first came about and sort of laid out this notion that you're going to have stuff in your data center, you're going to want to move stuff outside, you're going to want to apply the same corporate edicts for security and compliance and governance internally and externally and you want that sort of seamless solution. That's a vision that you put forth, I want to say at least five or six years ago. And then it became, okay, we got to do this. I think you kind of summarized it very well. I think we had a great vision and we were a little ahead of our time and I think that what's come into our kind of wheelhouse in the last few years is we've been able to make that real, fit with compliance, fit the corporate governance in, fit the security models all into a package solution that customers can execute on very quickly and actually be able to focus on their line of businesses, their business units and their application developers to make sure that they're delivering services and not worrying about how does infrastructure tie in, how does my backup policy fit in, how does all my corporate compliance fit. I can automate all that into a complete self-service experience and I can then do charge back, show back and make sure that I'm operating a true cloud model. So from a standpoint of making it quick, fast, repeatable and again, adding all the services and focusing on value, that's what it's really about. And the problem with hybrid cloud, in my opinion in the last five years is it hasn't been a solution, you're in the solutions group so, and you can't just make a solution overnight. So it takes a lot of work. So talk about the components of that solution, how you've actually gone from concept to piece parts to solution. Yeah, so I think the kind of journey was, started a couple of years ago with a few people sitting down looking at it saying, what does cloud mean for the Federation but what does cloud mean overall for EMC and when we started to look at it we said, look there's some automation layers that have to be there. One is the cloud M&O, one is a hardware M&O, one is a storage M&O and one is a network M&O. I think some of the pieces were just coming together when you look at Viper NSX and you kind of layer on top of that the vRealize suite and it's kind of growth. All of those tied together with the surrounding products really created the foundation for us to be able to get to the level of automation and experience that we can drive today. So using not only the whole vRealize and vCloud suite but then dropping into the EMC portfolio for the right tier of infrastructure, converged infrastructure or just the components they need to deliver services. Okay, so let's talk proof points. How's it going, customer traction, examples? Customer traction is great. We have a couple of great references who have been speaking at the show as well as going through some public examples of how their savings and their operational kind of what I would call effectiveness has gone up substantially. When you think about UNT and looking at University of North Texas quoted as saying, look, this is a way I can transform my operational model, transform my people and deliver better services to our students and end customers and literally achieving that through a very short path, focus on my catalog, deliver value. And again, that's just a real valued example of how you can transform significant traction in the financial industries with a little less open naming. But from a standpoint of just pick your bank, there's quite a few of them. And a lot of traction with making sure that you go from a one specific example where trying to drive better reliability and effective services and self-service and deliver to their business units. I mean, everybody knows, I don't have to go through it. Let's face it, all of the industries are changing, mobile banking apps, the way you do loans, the way you even do personal mortgage insurance, all those things to be accelerated. And then, of course, in healthcare delivering targeted environments and services, basically to hospitals and healthcare and pharmaceutical. So again, it's really cross industry for us. We haven't, one vertical, I would say financials is very strong, but I'd say it's across verticals. Everybody needs the automation. Everybody needs the service levels. Everybody needs the protection, specifically for their platform two applications and everybody needs to drive cost out to go invest in new platforms. And you mentioned before, self-service. Self-service is the key component of this. And it's what we did a study recently and we were sort of comparing, if you're an enterprise with typical enterprises, its application portfolio, the average age of the app is 20 years. So they're not just going to shove all that stuff into a public cloud, but at the same time, public cloud is another arrow in the quiver. Sure. But what you're, my understanding is your strategy, and we looked at this in the study, is you're enabling the ability of the organization to say, okay, I'm going to essentially maintain my existing processes, I'm going to modernize them to be more cloud-like and agile, and I'm not going to have to rip and replace all those and learn new. And so that's a major cost advantage, time to market advantage. Is that a fair summary? It is. There's a little bit of transformation required though from the approach. When you think about the cloud and the automation, what's really important about it is you're right, the processes and the kind of governance models, and this has to have a seven year retention and this has to have 15 minute RPO. Those things don't change, but the way they're implemented by automation and through the system is different. As an example, we don't create lones on storage arrays, we don't create network segments and actually go in and assign IP addresses to ports anymore, we don't go in and create a VM. The end user drives that whole experience, and basically the automation drives, whether it's a multi-tiered application with database, could be middleware and of course a web presentation layer. They choose those things, they pick the compliance requirements or they're forced on by IT by a simple business. Give me some storage or give me some compute. Give me an application, give me a VM, or give me storage, could be, but it's mostly like give me my service, platform as a service, application as a service, give me those things, and all of those underlying things, I don't need to know how they work, but I get the services. So the infrastructure is sort of at the back end provision for them. Okay, so what kind of training do you have in place to help organizations go from where they are today, which we don't have to describe the typical IT organization to this enterprise hybrid cloud approach? Great question, so we have a full cloud certification suite that literally goes across and teaches you basically cloud from a strategy perspective, architecture perspective, and again, not EMC specific at first, it's really meant to first of all look at cloud and address the issues of automation and transformation, and then moving actually into the kind of more specific federation enterprise hybrid cloud should you want to get there. But a full curriculum, and again, leveraging all VMware's training and the federation together, it gives you a differentiated experience and a way to get there quickly. We're talking to Peter Kotz, who runs the cloud solutions business for enterprise hybrid cloud at EMC. How are organizations changing internally? Is the org chart changing, are the roles changing, are the titles changing, can you address that? Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that I learned when we first started this was your charts are changing in a lot of ways, but for the positive, a lot of people are able to focus more on value added services to the customers, the catalog, the important things, the application transformations, the other things that you really need to do. And so there are some structural changes that go along with that, and we think of someone like a cloud architect or a cloud administrator or a cloud operator or a cloud kind of capacity planner, those are the roles, and less so, again, storage is more part of it, network is more part of it, and again, being able to create services is really kind of the portfolio. And then of course, the big org chart change that's really challenging for customers but a huge opportunity is creating, almost like your own product management or services kind of sales group to go in and say, what do you need, sales or marketing? What data sets do you need? How can I make them accessible? Those type of things and driving kind of a different relationship between IT and the business units. So your portfolio of services and offerings extends beyond just EMC, you've got a whole, whole portfolio, I'm particularly interested in the public cloud piece of that. What does that look like? I mean, obviously vCloud Air is in there, you just made an acquisition of Virtustream which I'm sure you're figuring out. Maybe can you talk about that component? Yeah, so I think from a standpoint of the beauty that customers are looking for is a single portal and a single way to provision, whether it's private or public. And what we provide today is that experience on AWS and vCloud Air. And the uniqueness that you have of being able to measure, meter, charge back, be able to control and allow kind of different access or free access depending on your policies to that infrastructure and allow that kind of capability of consuming new resources. Again, single portal, great experience. I think what's also unique about the vCloud Air experience in this case is that you can move workloads that are offline back and forth between that infrastructure based on the NSX and then soon to be online with the vMotion that was talked about. That's differentiated right there. So people can have applications that are running in on-premises and actually move it off-premises while it's running. Today it's an offline move, but at least you can still move it exactly how it is and restart it. And that's a very unique kind of option for customers to be able to go in and out. So when customers think about, it depends. Depends on what you're cussing me at talking about. But generally the model, many customers' eyes is they got infrastructure service, they got platform as a service and they got software as a service. Let me start at the top and work way down. So SaaS is popping up everywhere, a SaaS-ification and you guys aren't, maybe there's some SaaS products in the Federation somewhere, but generally speaking, an apps company. So where do those fit in the offering? I mean, you're supporting apps, obviously. Where does the SaaS piece fit in if it's a sales force, for example, or a work day? How do you interact with those pieces of my infrastructure? Well, I think from a standpoint of just because you go to a SaaS provider or to any one of those services, the fact is your data is still critical and you still need to be able to access it, back it up, control it and do those functions. And some places you may leave that up to the SaaS provider and in some cases you may want a function to be able to take that off their premises or their cloud and back it up to a different cloud. And as a function, that's actually what EMC is actually focused on with spanning as a technology acquisition. And then you look at other customers who are looking to archive to a public cloud and use that as a tier of backup. Again, from the Maginatix now cloud boost kind of approach. So we're adding these features in to the Enterprise Hybrid cloud to allow those to be accessible to customers. So still looking at SaaS as being part of it and making sure that we at least acknowledge and make sure we can support that. So the customer has the choice. If they want to just run a thousand different bespoke processes, go for it, but you're offering a way to do it as one. And then the PAS layer, obviously Cloud Foundry is part of the federation. That's a key component. Talk about the PAS layer a little bit. Yeah, so when you think about the PAS layer, that's when customers truly make the kind of journey from what I would call to LAMP stack or stack-based development into a next-generation approach with Pivotal Cloud Foundry specifically. And transforming their developers, transforming the way they deal with it, but having a reliable infrastructure underneath it that can actually scale out to web scale. The new announcement we have with VX Rack offering a different tier underneath, being able to scale out and provide that performance and reliability, but not going to the traditional block route for something of that approach. Again, all options underneath the umbrella. And again, it allows flexibility for the right choice infrastructure at the right time for the right solution. And how about the data layer? If I want a data service from Cloud Foundry, that's part of it. So from the catalog that we've built right now, you can provision HDFS as a service and basically access it through any of the distributions that you may choose. So Pivotal HD is integrated by default on the big data suite. And from the standpoint of Hortonworks and Cloud Era, also, again, options because we use Isilon on the back end, which allows that multi-port. But that class of storage is actually available in the catalog for the end user to consume and obviously pay for. And then how do you go to market? Maybe we could talk about the sort of ecosystem that you've built, the partners, the direct sales force, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so I think when we started this, we were extremely focused on direct because we were trying to learn the motions and kind of gain how this would flow and how we'd be successful. And we did a lot of enablement on our sales force as well as VMware's across the federation. I think that now what we've seen is our partners are really good at this. And they have a lot of skills in this area. And so we've built this kind of program around federation ready. And Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really kind of a culmination of the example of where we're starting. And it's a really valuable program. And our partners are embracing it. And they're fitting right into that mold because they have the skills across the stack already. And so it's been a real powerful kind of new arrow in our quiver, if you will. And it's growing. And it's a great experience. Last question. Actually, second or last, penultimate question. So what should we be looking for in terms of progress that you want to make over, let's say, 12 to 18 months for your organization? What are the signs of success? What are the parameters that we should be paying to as outside observers? Yeah, so I think the continued growth and adoption and energy by customers is there. I mean, we are larger than what I would call most startups would ever be inside a company in under a year or a year and a half, we'll say, of true operation and sales. What we'd like to do is continue that growth, but continue that partnership with our customers and our partners to make sure that we're focusing on the end user developer and line of business and making sure we tie that all together into the solution and keep that focus so we make sure that we're providing the services needed up the business layer and keep that relationship very strong. That's where we focus, that's where we've been and we want to continue that. And if we continue that focus, I believe that we'll add more services to the catalog and we'll also make that transition to complete and help really deliver the full application lifecycle management. And then my final, final question is just, impressions, VMworld, conversations at the show. What's the bumper sticker to give us your thoughts? It's exciting. I think when we first started the kind of initiative, it was always about explaining what it was and how we did it and why we did it. And I think customers are coming back to us now going, this just makes total sense. And all joking aside, before we get here, I was kind of asked the same question, like, how are the customer meetings going? I don't want to say they're never easy, but it's great to have good conversations and be able to help customers transform very quickly and make very quick progress, fast progress and help them deliver to their customers what they need. So we want to continue that journey and it's been exciting and the theme of the show is perfect and it fits into everything we're doing. That customers are excited. They're sort of open to new models. They really want, as you said before, move value up the chain. So Peter Cutts, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's always a pleasure to see you. Thank you. Great to see you as well. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from San Francisco. Right back.