 The Cube 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. Welcome back to EMC World 2014. I'm Jeff Frick, we're in the Cube. For the first time in the history of the Cube, we have two Cubes going side by side here at EMC World. I don't know why I'm stuck on that. Maybe it's because Pat Gelsinger's over in the other Cube. So we are delighted to be here. It's our fifth year at EMC World. It's actually where I think the Cube first got started many moons ago, but so we're rolling on. We're getting out there, extracting the signal from the noise, getting the smartest people in the room where we could find, inviting them in the Cube and talking to them, asking them the questions that you would like to ask them. And joined for this segment is my partner in crime, Stu Miniman. Thanks, Jeff. We talk about finding the smartest people. We always look founders. So we've got Varma Kunaparaju, who is co-founder and CTO of Vistara, which is a SaaS company, a technology partner of EMC. We're talking about V-SPECs on this solution. So Varma, thanks so much for joining us on this segment. Thanks for having me on this show. So we heard a little bit about Vistara from the last segment talking about how you can kind of orchestrate some of the solutions. But for those of our audience that aren't familiar, can you just give us the quick intro on your company? Sure. Vistara is fundamentally a unified operations platform, IT operations platform, bringing the entire infrastructure elements and the applications that are running in the federated infrastructure in a single pane of glass. And the premise for Vistara is to be able to kind of bring these federated infrastructure elements, whether it is private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, into a single operations framework. That's what Vistara is about. Okay, so multiple locations, and you said, I hear it's like public clouds, so can you give us a little bit, I mean, things like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, can I deal with them? What don't you do? So what we don't do is, you know, there are elements of IT that potentially are not beyond IT operations. But in the IT operations framework, whether the infrastructure elements are on-premise, private clouds, or public clouds, or hybrid clouds, including the VMC and VMware framework, we bring all of that and give the complete life cycle management on the entire elements as well as the workload. Okay, so when I think traditional, you know, storage, network, compute, virtualization layer, and you know, the cloud pieces, you guys covered all. Yes, yes. How long have you guys been around, and what, you know, can you give us some metrics as to kind of adoption, how many customers you have, how many different technology partners you work with? Absolutely. So Vistara, as a technology, we've been in development for like more than five to six years. The technology is completely mature. We have about 1,000 plus customers, 150 partners, you know, the large resellers in the country, who are faced with this big shift in IT, where what used to be on-premise now is getting federated into private and public clouds and the service providers and the resellers wants to kind of bring value on top of this federation. That's what, you know, Vistara brings a big differentiation. We've been fundamentally architectures as a SaaS platform, fundamentally architectures to allow service provider and resellers and the channel to really leverage the technology. And you know, today we have marquee customers, some of the very well-known private and public cloud, hybrid cloud solution customers are on our platform. So Varma, talk a little bit about from the customer perspective, when you guys engage in about their journey with this hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud. You know, do they kind of start down a hodgepodge of paths and then realize the management difficulties of these disparate systems and bringing you in or are you coming in early, helping them really design a multi-cloud strategy and then implementation to take advantage of the various opportunities. There are two kinds of customers that we come across. In a large enterprise where there is an IT organization that's very mature, they may approach the solution where they have certain capacity metrics and things like that that they wanted to use to figure what needs to go into private cloud and public cloud. But in the mid enterprises, typically a reseller or a channel partner really measures those elements and engages in a solution-worried approach to the customer. And then initially they start with provisioning an orchestration because you know, you brought up a private cloud, whether it's V specs or any other convergent infrastructure. They start with provisioning an orchestration which is a day one problem of how to leverage that infrastructure element to bring virtual machines and workloads. But what happens on day two to day 2000 where the infrastructure elements now got provisioned but now someone needs to monitor, manage, maintain, automate and be on orchestration. That's when they realize that the operations management is going to play a big role and just start to play a major role and then they bring us in this particular case, in the later case, typically resellers and system integrators are the people who bring in. In the larger enterprises, enterprise IT organizations will bring in. One of the big challenges when you look at solutions like this is who owns it? When it converges infrastructure, is it storage guy or is it a virtualization admin that owns it? Is it a cloud architect? So what can you tell us about kind of the operational challenges and how are we doing about getting our arms around this as an industry? So I think it's a great problem. In the traditional world IT, each of the ITs is like a separate tower. You have a network tower, you have a storage tower, you have a VMware tower, you have applications which are run by applications of the team. But in this new world, when the infrastructure elements are getting converged and brought together as a solution, the solution that operates needs to kind of facilitate all those individual towers. So this startup brings a very interesting equation there. You can create a role and rule-based access to all these people and make those individual towers, continue to operate as their towers, but you have a single pane of glass where you get the visibility that you wanted to get. And at the same time, bringing all those infrastructure elements and then maintaining those operations people so that the network guy can go and troubleshoot a network problem, but there is some correlation that took place before the event and alert went into the network guy. So that's what this startup brings to the table and the answer to your solution is it's a collaboration between these individual towers, which is bringing the federation of the convergent infrastructures into the enterprise. So, it's funny. I've been an analyst for about four years and one of the jokes you could always make is when I look at cloud or some of these solutions, there's two big problems you always have to find. It's security and management. We've seen the big companies make so many acquisitions. Large networking company, I feel like every quarter they make an acquisition to this space, EMC's got a pretty broad portfolio. Why has this been such a hard problem for the industry to crack? So the two fundamental issues with the, particularly with the federated and cloud infrastructures is all of a sudden the workloads that are sitting inside the enterprise are no longer sitting in the enterprise. So there is a question on what this would mean to the enterprise IT security. And that is a big problem on the security side and one of the things that Vistara brings to the table, not to kind of preach about Vistara is, Vistara brings the compliance story. Any IT activity that is done in the infrastructure is completely video recorded and brought to the compliance team. So whether the element that is running in the cloud, whether it's private or public cloud, the IT guy, if he does any action on the infrastructure element, all that action is completely video recorded. Whether it is RDP session, VNC session, SSH session or a telnet session is all video recorded and brought it to the IT compliance team. That's number one. Number two, you brought beyond security is the element of the visibility and then giving a service provider oriented report. What has been done on this infrastructure so that you can figure out at the end of the month or at the end of the week what has been done. All that is very important in these convergent infrastructures and cloud adoption. Interesting. So what's next? What are we going to hear about in 2015? What we see is just like the infrastructure elements are getting federated between private and public clouds and other things, we believe the service personnel, the IT personnel, that an enterprise really needs, is not going to have all the talent that is needed in the house. So that side of the story is going to be federated. Whether the mid-entreprises leverage resellers which are becoming more and more as system integrators slash service providers or OEMs, original equipment manufacturer EMC, being able to go remotely deliver services into the end customer is going to be a big trend that is going to take place in 2015 because the infrastructure elements are getting complex and the IT to kind of manage those elements may or may not be in house. So the trend that we see is the service provider and being able to deliver those services into the mid-entreprises from various locations is going to be the big trend. So really the delivery of the capacity, the delivery of what that service can provide rather than the tools for the individual company to execute those, right? We always joke about at some point in time will GE sell jet propulsion and stop selling jet engines where they manage the engines, they do everything around the engines and oh by the way the airline just buying units of jet propulsion and that sounds kind of similar to what you're saying where the providers actually manage the infrastructure and deliver the capability as a service. So IT as a service, if you look at that, IT as a service has stood in two big fundamental shifts. One is the infrastructure elements, the other one is the IT personnel to manage that infrastructure. So infrastructure elements being federated is where converging infrastructures and cloud and cloud solutions are playing a big role. In 2015 and beyond, we believe personally Vistara as well as the industry, you know, in my view will shift towards how do we make the management of that IT infrastructure elements being done by external IT teams, OEMs, service providers, system integrators, resellers, participating into the ecosystem to deliver the service. Yeah. Which part of the stack do you think will fall first into that model? Initially it starts with the infrastructure elements itself because there is a lot of complexity in the converging infrastructures whether it is, you know, storage, network, you know, element portion of it. And the second portion is the operating system and the workloads that are running on it. So those operating system and below will be the first level of things. Then the second layer of things is the applications and the workloads that are going to be. Yeah. Almost like an OEM cloud, right? OEM Amazon. So Farma, you know, you guys sit in an interesting place in the marketplace looking through the big clouds, through the private stuff. How are customers doing about getting their heads wrapped around, you know, how they really kind of justify where they put stuff and what services they use? So, you know, I think initially the enterprises immediately jump on saying that everything that is on premise, they wanted to kind of jump on the bandwagon and the public cloud. They realized that some of the workloads needs to go into public cloud and they scale in the public cloud and then they realize the cost involved in public cloud and they bring some of the elements of the workload to private cloud and then clear the hybrid cloud. So we see the answer to be, you know, experiment, do some stuff and then come back. But I think that is going to change in the next year or two when there is a lot of learning that is happening on what makes sense in the private cloud, what makes sense in the public cloud and that analysis is where the service providers, resellers and the enterprise ITs are getting educated and that's going to bring right elements and right workloads sitting in the right places. Okay, so you deal a lot with the resellers out there. I guess the last thing I want to ask you is, you know, what advice do you give the resellers on how to, you know, help customers with this whole adoption of, you know, cloud convergence, you know, migrating to the third platform that, you know, really new IT practices? Great question. I think my sincere advice is traditionally resellers have been in the hardware resale business. They've been reselling the hardware, leaving the hardware at the end customer site, maybe day one bringing up kind of a service and then walking out and then go to the next hardware, next hardware sale because there is a capex oriented to things, a big budget, big dollars and then walking out. That needs to change in this year and moving forward because the more that they walk out, the end customer is not going to figure out what needs to be done. So the my sincere advice to the resellers is, engage with the customer, keep the relationship sticky, understand what the customer's needs beyond the bringing up the hardware and maintain the relationship with services that go beyond day one. The services that go beyond day one are management and operation services. Be as a trusted advisor and deliver manager services to the end customer beyond bringing up day one and infrastructure on that. That's where the recurring revenues are, that's where the margins are, that's where the industry is looking for solutions from the resellers. All right, well, hey Varma, I really appreciate you coming, talking to Jeff and me about your perspective on the industry, giving us a little bit of insight as to what's happening on Vistara. We will be right back with our next guest here from EMC World 2014.