 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, we start to see them from the noise. We love VMworld, a lot of action. We just talked to the VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Levine, and entrepreneurs. Just guys, it's a lot of action. We're talking to all the companies making that, building out cloud, delivering services. It's truly a growth market. I mean, there's so much action going on in terms of new ventures, new markets, existing markets, and new markets. It's really exciting. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. Join my co-host, Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Hi everybody, Ted Newman is here, and Ted is a longtime CUBE guest. He's been to the Wikibon offices, and Ted looks after IT transformation for EMC Global Services. There's a really good perspective on cloud, and how people, customers are moving toward the cloud, some of the challenges that they have. So, welcome back to theCUBE, Ted. Good to see you again. Thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. So, VMworld, is this your 100th VMworld? Is that right? I think it's only my fourth. Okay, cool, but yet a big session. Monday, I understand. Why don't we start there? What are you doing here? Tell us about that session. Sure, yeah, so Monday evening, we had a session with EMC IT talking about vCloud Suite and Puppet working together to help customers bring applications that have been deployed out to the public cloud back into the private cloud. So it's a pretty exciting story for us. We did it for EMC IT. We had a number of applications. We embraced cloud pretty early. We built a bunch of applications for the cloud. They were out deployed on public clouds, and we found that we could save a couple million dollars by bringing them in-house and running them on our own platform as a service, utilizing VCAC and Puppet. So it's a pretty compelling story. Yeah, so let's talk a little more about EMC IT. We love having them on theCUBE and doing interviews with them. They're candid, they're quasi-independent, even though they're EMC IT, but they're IT guys, right? So they tell it like it is. So what was that use case? Specifically, you're saying you brought it back in from the public cloud? What, so there was some shadow IT going on at Jotucci's organization? No, I can't believe that. It wasn't shadow. So a few years back, we actually had a mandate to use cloud and to build some new applications for EMC on cloud technologies. And at that time, we deployed it to the public cloud because we didn't have a private cloud that had the capabilities that we were looking for. In the meantime, we've also made a couple of acquisitions. Sure, you're aware of, right? We're always pretty acquisitive. And we had some applications that were deployed to public cloud as a result of those acquisitions. Right. In the meantime, we were doing a lot more with platform as a service, both for our customers and internally. And we decided to really go all in on that, built out a very robust platform as a service offering and moved some of those applications from the public cloud back into the private cloud. Saved some money at the same time. So this, obviously we're hearing a lot about hybrid cloud. Pat Gelsinger was very definitive on theCUBE earlier today about his vision for the hybrid cloud, how it's, in his view, the end game, not a stepping stone to the IT utility. It is the future. So a big part of that is automation. You really can't claim cloud without pretty significant degrees of automation, in our view anyway. So I wonder if you could talk about that. You guys, I know have some services in that regard. I think made some announcements recently. So talk about automation and automation as an imperative. Sure, we actually announced some services yesterday, part of our hybrid cloud enablement offerings, where to help customers build and automate their clouds. And I completely agree with you. In order to be able to claim that you're making use of hybrid cloud, you have to be automated and orchestrated to some extent. And that's why we're focusing on helping our customers become service brokers, essentially, right? It helps with a number of things. Being able to consume from providers, internal and external, those services that you need, right? That cuts down on shadow IT, because essentially everything's going through one place now. So you don't have to, you're acting as a gateway, really. So there's that, but automation's at the heart of being able to do that. You can't move workloads to where it makes sense to run them if you don't have automation. And you certainly can't get the business units on board if you don't have the agility that comes with orchestration and automation. They're not going to sign up for these services unless you can show them how it actually adds to their agility and decreases their time to market. When you talk to customers, Ted, you always get the, listen, I want to get from point A, I've heard this for decades. I want to get from point A to point B with as little disruption as possible. I want to understand the business value. I want to be able to realize that business value. And I want to be able to show it back to my constituents. And I just really don't want to disrupt my existing operations. So those are tall orders, especially when you're trying to bring in things like cloud. I'm sure you hear that too. So what's the secret sauce to be able to do that? Or maybe there's no secret. Maybe it's just certain blocking and tackling, but what's the game plan? Yeah, I don't necessarily know that it's secret. It's certainly, it requires both executive sponsorship as well as some grassroots, right? You need a group of dedicated folks who get it. We're going to be willing to work on this sort of thing and the executive support to say that this is the right way to go. We've found, and I think VMware released a study earlier this year that said the greater your scope in terms of transforming operations, the higher your return on investment. So we've talked about that in the past as well, right? Go big and you're going to realize good things. But seeing as something that the guys in the server room are doing themselves, the business isn't going to buy off on that. So from that perspective, the idea is, treat it as an enterprise program. Treat it as something that's going to help you either introduce new channels to revenue or increase your time to market and get the business on board as well. That's one of the things that we did internal TMC and all of our successful customers have done that. And I know you've talked to some in the past who said by being able to tie this to new revenue or faster time to market, we've been able to accelerate this and get everybody on board. Well, we had Express Scripts on earlier this week. I want to talk about that, but before we do, I want to push back a little bit on what you just said, go big because you're going to realize more value and it sounds good, sounds true actually. I would agree with it. But there's an element of risk to going big. So how do you minimize the risk of going big? That's a great point. It's all about, you've got to be able to minimize risk. So you want to increase revenue, minimize risk, and hopefully reduce your costs, right? Those things, there's a lot of dynamic tension in those three goals. Not hopefully, you better reduce the cost or you're going to get chopped. Well, anybody can do the other two things by increasing cost, right? So the trick is being able to do that in the context. Or at least keep the budget flat, right? At least flat. That's a great goal as well. So from that perspective, what we've found is if you understand what you have in your application portfolio and where the opportunities are, right? An application inventory really helps. What do I have? Who's using it? What business functions are these applications tied to? That's going to tell you where you can actually get some bang for the buck without being super risky. And by taking this as an enterprise type approach, where you're thinking in terms of risk, revenue, and cost, not just revenue and cost, you have a much better chance. So you guys, we've talked about the application portfolio before, but you've got services to help people sort of assess the application portfolio. Again, this is something that sounds good, sounds sensible, but not easy, right? Because you have a huge laundry list of applications and you can boil the ocean on that. Some companies have thousands of applications. So you try to chunk them in suites and look at them reasonably. And so what's the process like? I mean, I would think conceptually, you're trying to take your costs, understand where the costs are by the application, and you're trying to understand just sort of the relative business value. You're trying to understand what business processes those applications support, and you're trying to understand the interdependencies within those applications. So a customer can't just hand you a spreadsheet or a piece of paper or a tool, say, yeah, it's all in there, right? Or can they? Well, normally I'd hand you a guy and say, this is Tim, he knows everything, right? Yes, this is Tim, right? So you have Tim as the service. I'm going to chain myself to you for a month and you're going to suck your brain. So there's a number of different approaches, and we actually acquired a company earlier this year called Adaptivity that gives us a great tool to be able to do this. It ties into CMDB systems and discovery systems and that sort of thing, and allows us to get this good inventory as well as has a nice interface for the business owners to come in and say, yeah, you got this right, you got this wrong. But what we found is if you want to be successful, if you map the business first, you start out with, you know, how do I get revenue into the doors? And then from there, identify the functions and processes and then applications. That's going to help you really understand where your priority needs to be. Right, okay, I want to go back to your session earlier. What kind of questions were you getting from the audience? We were getting all kinds of questions. So that was the best session in terms of questions that I've had at FanWorld, EMC World, et cetera. I think we probably got about 30. Many of them came in from Twitter, so that was terrific. A lot, we had questions ranging from how do I get started with this sort of a thing? How do I get my executives on board to you know, how does this change operations? Do I need to change my organization to support platform as a service? How do I get my developers on board? How do I do things like patch management, et cetera? So we had a wide range of questions from, you know, the very strategic, all the way down to the very tactical. Did you get any questions around, so when we had Jim McBride on from Express Scripts, he was talking about this, you know, the accountability issue, the contestability. Did you get questions like that, either in your session or generally from customers, and what do they like and what's your response? Well I think, you know, one of the great things about vCloud and platform as a service built around vCloud is it gives you an opportunity to leverage contestability across other vCloud providers, so I think that's terrific. Jim is a great architect, one of my favorite customers, we've worked with him a lot in the past, and you know, the concept of contestability is where I think the market is moving, right? So the idea that I can hold service providers, internal and external accountable, and be able to move my workloads to where I know I'm going to get the service levels and the cost and the functionality that I need, that's what we need to be able to build, both from a provider as well as an enterprise IT perspective. So we get asked about that a lot. Excellent. All right, Ted, well, we're out of time, but thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, congratulations on a great talk, I heard it was excellent, packed house, and 100 plus people in there, so good to see you again. Thank you very much for the opportunity, I really appreciate it, it's better every year. You're welcome. All right, keep it there everybody, we'll be right back, this is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2013, and we'll be right back.