 TheCube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine. VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And we're back. We're focusing on cloud and specifically on this segment we're going to talk about service providers. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon.org and you're tuned to SiliconANGLE TV's live wall-to-wall coverage from EMC World 2014. Going way beyond storage, talking about cloud and as I said, service providers. My guest for this segment is David Trigg, who's the vice president and general managers of EMC Global Service Providers. Thanks so much for joining us in this segment, David. Thank you, Stu. It's great to be on and have this conversation. So looking forward to it. Yeah. So service providers have just been hot for the last few years. Many of us in the industry have said that the service providers are the new channel if you talk about what's going on there. So first, can you tell us a little bit, you know, what is the, you know, global service provider group inside of EMC? Where does it sit in New York? Yeah. We sit as a solutions organization. We kind of have two functions. We've got a sales function that sits within alliances and they're responsible for the relationship with our service providers. And then we've sit within the solutions group and we're responsible for developing all the solutions to be consumed by service providers as well as enabling our service providers through training and sales enablement and then actually also taking our service providers capability and feeding that back through our capabilities in our hybrid cloud solution and putting it back to our field and to our customers. Yeah. I like the tagline you had for your group is you're the one to put the hybrid in the hybrid cloud that you have. Can you give us some examples, you know, when you say service providers sometimes is a nebulous term. Right. It seems, you know, I mean, CSE, you know, big company, CSE and Accenture and those guys, you know, Rackspace, you know, and there's thousands of companies that says they're service providers. Even many large enterprises basically internally act as a service provider. So, you know, what is a service provider? Can you just talk to us about some of your clients and users out there that you guys work with? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We launched our service provider partner program actually at EMC World three years ago. So we're now three years into this. We didn't define service providers because we didn't want to necessarily go out and just partner with every large telco under the sun, which could have been maybe the bias a little bit. So we have officially in the last three years and gone out and partnered with about 100, a little bit over 100 service providers globally. And we've got kind of what may feel like on the service or random mix of service providers. So we have partnered with some large telcos. We've partnered with some pure plays. We've partnered with some outsourcers. Even some, you know, enterprises like NISI. We've partnered with them as a service providers. They've stood up their infrastructure as a service. And we did that in a little bit of the spirit of learning, seeing what they were going to do, how they were going to define their market, and how does EMC really help enable them? And as the market continues to grow, so we've got multiple partners in all categories, but, you know, some of our best rack space, dimension data, CSC ones that we're starting to showcase some of their capabilities with our hybrid cloud capabilities that we're building here within EMC. And then obviously VCHS as part of the Federation's cloud is an important strategic piece of what we're working on as well. So, you know, I wanted to get into all those technologies, but before we do, you know, I'm just curious your perspective on, you know, the service fighter market. Because, you know, when you look at kind of the cloud space, you know, there's a few of what we would, some of us call kind of the web scale, or the hybrid scale mega cloud guys. I mean, you know, nobody's going to dispute, you know, there's not a big player out there, Google and Microsoft have their place out there. Then it's funny, everybody kind of throws stones, you know, some of these telco guys, or, you know, these are just hosting guys that are changing the new business model. But as you said, you know, it's a broad spectrum of what's out there. And some people think, you know, that underneath those big guys, you know, there might be a couple of dozen, and other people say there's going to be thousands of players out there. Where do you see in kind of that maturation of the service provider market, you know, what's the EMC's take right now as to, I mean, I know you want to partner with everyone, you know, large and small, but you know, just what's, if you're in this space, what's your take on this, and you know, just put your crystal ball in action a little bit. Yeah, well, first of all, I'm not an analyst. I'm not in the job of making bold predictions. But I'm here to help EMC kind of navigate the changes. So we are seeing today that market is obviously still relatively immature, I would say. You know, maybe we're in our adolescent years at this point, you know, we've kind of gone through, but we're kind of in our awkward adolescence. And right now what we're seeing is kind of a tale of two worlds, quite frankly. You have the large-scale service providers that can go kind of that hyperscale, can make the big investments. It's obviously not a poor man's game to play and participate in that. And then you really see the niche players, and they really have a specific niche, they serve a specific market, whether it's a specific geo, a specific technology, enabling a specific support service or model. The ones that we see that are struggling are the kind of the ones that find themselves in between that world, where they're kind of having a hard time defining. I can't tell you how many service providers I've met with that said, hey, we're going to launch storage as a service. And I'm like, that's great. And you're going to target it. And they're like, anyone that needs storage. And we're like, okay, good luck with that, right? You know, and those are the ones that are kind of struggling. Where it ultimately plays out, it's going to be interesting. I think there will be obviously the large hyperscales, although the market will continue to merge. And the niche players, I think, will be there. But there's going to continue to be a fairly big expansion, probably followed by a contraction, but I think the overall market's going to continue to grow fairly aggressively. Okay, so EMC's got a pretty broad portfolio. And then if we expand to the Federation, it's even more of that. So, you know, what are the top things that you're partnering with service providers on? What solutions out of the EMC or the broader Federation are the ones that are kind of hitting stride with some of these service providers? Yeah, well, our technology is very well-enabled, obviously, as especially some of the larger service providers are looking to get more and more into an enterprise-grade capability and are trying to offer a spectrum of services, whether it is a public cloud. Our technology is very well-enabled in a lot of the private cloud, managed private cloud, et cetera, et cetera. And so we are facilitating a lot of storage as a service, infrastructure as a service, and we're a piece of that component. But we're also starting to work, and as you saw or hopefully saw from a lot of today's announcements, we're continuing to expand our product set and solution set so that we can better enable and allow service providers to stand up services much more rapidly, manage their infrastructure over a longer period of time, and get a longer return on investments. And that's something that we've learned a lot working with service providers. They're standing up a business that they want to run 8, 10, 12, 50 years. We're working with a lot of our enterprise customers. They understand it's a three-year kind of renewal cycle. And so that's where we've had to adjust and are making a lot of investments and key investments to help enable service providers. Okay, so how are those cloud providers really enabling the hybrid cloud? Well, right now it's very much about a lot of pro-services. Some of them that have done a good job have a little bit of, it's less about enablement of a true seamless, what I'd call hybrid cloud, that technology we're just starting to get there. What we sometimes would call federated if I could have an application that spans your thing. Well, yeah, exactly. We're starting to be able to actually do workload portability, workload mobility, whatever term you want to use. But what hybrid cloud has been is more of giving customers options and really choice about where they put their workload. So it's, hey, do you want to put it on your data center? And we'll manage it. Do you want to put it in our data center? We'll manage it. And or do you want to put it in a shared infrastructure? The service providers that kind of have that continuum in services and then the capability. So a lot of the systems integrators are doing great things to be able to help manage customers across that. Because customers, quite frankly, there's still some level of confusion in the marketplace. And the service providers that are having success with that confusion are really helping those customers evaluate their workloads, evaluate their applications. Because it is an application discussion. And it's probably even before that solving a business problem discussion when service providers are getting better at and quite frankly the industry's getting better at. So at the beginning of the segment, I teed it up that many have looked at the service providers as a new channel opportunity. Especially if you look at kind of EMC's core storage products. So my understanding you've got like certification programs and things like that. Do you guys look at them as another go-to-market solution and how do you certify them or position them compared to kind of the traditional channel discussion? Right. When we went out and launched the partner program we look at them as a potential another channel but we didn't want to treat them as a true reseller channel. So we went in with a fairly strong foundation to build a relationship on. We didn't go out with you got to be certified. You got to be here because again we went in a little bit more of the spirit of learning. But over that time what we've learned and we've partnered with about a hundred service providers globally formally. It doesn't mean there's a lot of other service providers that are building stuff on ours. And we've got about five hundred services in the market based upon EMC technology with those hundred service providers. And then we've kind of basically just said anything that's on the table that you want to help with will help. And so we put together a program and a structure to be able to help service providers. Whatever that might mean. But now we're changing that a little bit as we need to go after and help support our customer base because that was more of a general marketplace right. But as we look at we need to go after and support our customer base in our field we are putting together much more of a certification framework looking at you know an offer standardization how do we match up SLAs how do we really make sure that we've got kind of minimum tech criteria and that's really what 2014's about and that's why for this show Hybrid Cloud is such that it's a little bit of the coming out party I like to say of really enabling you know the Hybrid Cloud as far as EMC and then using a lot of VMware technology as well in the Federation. Yeah so how do you really incent that kind of loyalty because you know when I think about especially those guys that were hosting providers that moved into kind of the server fighter market for the most part it was you know I've got it and you know we go to the various shows and you sometimes see the same guy you know giving a session at every single show because they're mostly like you know I want your business and you know infrastructures infrastructure you know we'll let them fight it out so how do you guys parse that? Well it's been a lot of learnings over the years and as we've looked at kind of really what EMC strengths are and we have some unbelievable strengths we've got unbelievable technology capability and unbelievable at the same point we're competing every day for service provider business but also EMC's fortunate that we tend to be fairly strong from a go to market perspective in most markets not true in every market around the globe but that's where we wanted to leverage and say look to really leverage our go to market strength and couple your capabilities with our capabilities we're going to have to go take it to the next level with the certification that's what we felt like gave us the credibility to have as opposed to hey build your services and our stuff and we'll help you market we'll help you sell which most partner programs this really takes it to that next level and has a combined solution that's leveraging our strengths their strengths and our go to market power jointly it really helps us kind of have that next level conversation. So you know for a couple of years we heard Joe Tucci you know really say out there you know we are going to not compete with the service providers out there if I look at the federation ways it can partner with service providers but it can also compete because they have I can buy the services straight from VMware and Pivotal seems to be blurring the line on some of that so what's the emcee line on that now and is it okay to compete as well as partner. Yeah I think it is if you look at the majority of players out in the marketplace most are taking a mixed model VMware has launched VCHS and I think they did it for the right reasons to improve their capabilities they see a market opportunity see a way to actually accelerate the market I'm less concerned about competition than I am about market adoption and market awareness and really accelerating the market for emcee the storage component we still maintain a fairly neutral that we are not going to become a service provider but we're certainly taking approach to market through VCHS and through our service providers and most of our service providers are seeing the opportunity more than the threat it doesn't mean there isn't a threat for some but overall it's a very positive message that's being received fairly well once it's understood and you're able to work it out and really go to market together. Yeah so last question if I look at the overall market service provider market has been outpacing traditional IT spending by a significant amount you know you read all the reports and everything you know is this a trend we expect to go on for a couple of years or you know do we hit a wall in the service provider market? Yeah I think everything that we look at it goes on at least in the foreseeable future you know at least the next three, five years it certainly is going to continue in our most recent earnings announcement we did make the statement that the service provider segment has been the fastest growing segment for the last eight quarters so we're seeing success we're outpacing the market we believe in the space so you know I'm very proud of the team and the teams that are working with our service providers and with you look at the lines continuing to blur between what the telcos are doing you know what we're seeing in the SaaS ISV space and what cloud providers and you know the more traditional infrastructure side I think we got plenty of runway to continue but there's also going to continue to be more clarity the requirements going to become more clear the applications that it's supporting and how they support it you know the target markets all of those things will continue to get refined and more focused over time which is great it will help all of us continue to compete and help support this market All right David thank you so much for coming on Thank you so much. Appreciate you know congratulations on the success service providers definitely an area we're all keeping a close eye on and definitely look forward to having you back again some time. Appreciate your time and we'll be right back with our next guest with the live coverage from SiliconANGLE TV at EMC World 2014 in Las Vegas