 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at EMC World 2016. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Happy to have on a couple of partners. Recently won the distributor of the year from EMC. From Avnet, it's John Tomfatt, who is the director of supplier solutions for the EMC part of the business. And Doug Sobieski, who's financial services sales executive with Avnet. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for making the time. We really appreciate it. So, first thing, I want to get your view on the show. We say, you know, there's lots of customers that are here. They're going to labs, they're going to sessions. There's the partner ecosystem showing their new technology, EMC is there. But, you know, the channel is, I mean, a big piece. We've seen great changes in the channel. John, maybe start with you as to, what's the partner experience here at EMC World? I think there's a lot of excitement, right? Dell Technologies is on the lips of every person I've talked to here at EMC World. So, clearly, it's about opportunity. And I would just say that our EMC partners are very excited to engage with Dell. And we're getting lots of inquiries from Dell partners who want to learn how to start an EMC business. So, that's where it's at. Yeah, and Doug, have you been to the show before? No, this is my first time. All right, so let's, as a newscomer, get your vibe. It's exciting. It's great to see everything that's going on in the industry. It's great to see the recognition that Avnet's getting as well, but it's been a lot of fun. All right, so speaking of recognition, John, you know, some pressure releases, some awards, you know, to tell us what the news is. Well, I think the most exciting news is the fact that we won Distributive of the Year. And I think that speaks to a couple of things. It speaks to validation of the hard work that we've worked on behalf of our partners, right? So, it's all about partner enablement and getting them to revenue faster. And I think the award speaks to the effort that we did there. Relative to the press release, it showcases a solution that we put out. In fact, it's an Isilon SD edge appliance, right? Where we integrate it with Dell servers. And I think that also speaks to the leadership that we innovate right along with EMC and make technology accessible for our partners. Yeah, John, maybe it would be helpful to our audience that maybe knows kind of what a distributor is, but kind of solutions and some of the pieces that Avnet puts together. You know, how's the business model changed a little bit and what does that mean? Right, so I think that in the old days where distribution was about stocking product and really about financing products, I think distribution sort of 2.0 or distribution 2.5 is about how we help accelerate how partners transition in terms of IT transformation, right? So we're all caught with how do we all speak and help our partners make money and sell the solutions that continue to make them relevant. If I were to then describe what Avnet is today, is we are the single best enablement engine that helps partners adopt EMC technologies and its solutions and bring it to market, right? And be relevant in the IT transformation discussion. All right, so Doug, you know, there's a bunch of financial aspects to what he was saying. We talked to customers, time to value something that they say, you know, it's always about moving faster and accelerating. You know, what's that mean in your world? What's going on in my world is we're seeing one of the biggest shifts in how end users pay for IT assets. And you know, the market, you know, people are using terms like pay by the drip and consumption models and what have you. And there's a very recent event that has accelerated that. And that's changed my world incredibly because there are some recently announced accounting changes that are coming that are going to require that leasing, all leases will eventually need to be on the balance sheet for the end user. So our partners, we're working to enable them because their phones are ringing with end users looking for usage-based models. And AvNet, we knew this was coming. And years ago, we developed a consumption-based master services agreement concept called Capacity Now, which we created from the ground up to solve around these issues that we knew were going to come faster than most people expected. And you know, we feel that we've got one of the most transparent, friendly versions in the marketplace that's a true utility model. So if I had to quickly describe it, think in terms of your cell phone bill. You go in, you pick out a handset, you say, I want X giga data per month. If I go beyond that, I'm going to pay on a per gigabyte basis. The cool thing we're doing, you know, somewhat, our secret sauce is several years ago, we acquired a software that allows us to convert measurement to billing in real time. So our partners and users, like your cell phone bill, they can go into a portal, see how much they've used, see how much that's translating into their cost on a monthly basis. And it's really an exciting time for us. You know, Doug, how much are customers benchmarking that against, say, public cloud as an example? Like you kind of said, there was traditional kind of capex, you buy depreciated versus that on-demand world of the cloud. That's the comparison. That's what they're looking at. But especially for customers that, you know, they want it on-prem or they want their team to have their hands on the assets. That's a big consideration. And, you know, there's some other financial aspects about the way public cloud costs perform versus a capacity now like product. So there's a lot that goes into it, but, you know, we're there to support our partners and have those conversations with their end users so everybody understands how it works. So, John, you've worked with EMC for many years now with the Dell piece coming in now. You know, what does this mean for the channel? You know, Dell and EMC both have had, you know, changes in how they deal with the channel. You know, what's the vibe? What do you hear from your peers? You know, what are some of the conversations you're having? Yeah, I would characterize it as there's a certain amount of anxiety for folks who don't really understand the integration. I think David did a great job during the keynote sessions to help folks really understand the fact is between EMC and Dell, it's truly the best enterprise products company on the planet going forward. I think from a, what I'm hearing from our partners is that it's an opportunity, right? It's a bigger opportunity, a bigger slice to the pie that they would otherwise wouldn't have access to. So, so far at the show and folks who've heard the keynote message, I think they're much, I would describe it as there's a certain level of anxiety that's been addressed and now it's about excitement and that's what we're seeing. All right, great. So, you mentioned some of the executive means you have. Give our viewers that couldn't make it to the show. You know, what are they missing not being here? What's the Avinette presence, the booth, the floor sessions? I think if folks were at our booth and were able to see a couple of the solutions that we were developing, they would see our Iceland SD Edge solution that's part of the press release. What they will also see though is unity with cloud array punching out to a public cloud, right? So we're trying to make the conversation of hybrid cloud computing and an EMC context real, right? So if you think about it, it was talked two days ago, we've got it functioning live real time in the booth and it's a powerful message for us from an enablement perspective because what we do is we take what we do at our booth and then we use it for the rest of the year to train our partners, right? To how to get the conversation going. So we've got cloud pools, cloud array, cloud boost, all interacting with a public cloud and in fact, you can get access to those clouds via our Avinette cloud marketplace. And that's pretty exciting. Yeah. So Doug, I'm curious, when I think about some of the financial models, one of the big shifts I've seen in the recent few years is refresh cycles tend to be reduced. If you say public cloud, what version are you running, what thing do you have that doesn't exist? Do you run on theirs? Any commentary you can give on that piece of it is how the financial tools help customers with keeping up on the latest technologies. I'll say that over the last probably 15 years, there's been a decrease in the number of fair market value leases as the product that people use to manage those refresh cycles, largely because the soft cost content had continued to rise. With what we're doing with capacity now enables our partners to support their customers to manage those refresh cycles a lot more effectively just because of the way it performs as a financing device. All right, so John, sometimes we come into these shows there's a little bit of buzzword bingo, you know, software to find this, you know, super hyper converge that. Sure. You know, what have been some of the things that have come to the top of mind conversations you've been having kind of from the technology standpoint. I know you made some new announcements, but which things are becoming real in your world? So I think hyper converge is real. It's now very real and we're very excited with VxRail. I think in general there's been a big market adoption. I think you've heard that from the EMC executives. Yeah, Wikibon's tracked that for a few years now. So, yeah, we're pretty excited. I think the next market opportunity that is being spoken about now that represents the opportunity over the next 12 to 18 months is just that software defined. I think there's a lot of buzz, a lot of talk, but it's about how do you get those solutions to be consumable in an easier method, right? And that's where Avnet's looking to add the value of bringing those, whether it be from an appliance perspective or through a cloud consumption model. Yeah, a term we've used a lot over the last year or so, it's frictionless. So, Doug, any final things you want to say about just the way that the consumption model can be reduced, especially sounds like financial things, customers must have, do I really need to learn all these? Do I need a full night financial advisor to help me with this? That's the challenge. They're hearing of all a variety of models in the marketplace. And the reason why I'm having so much fun in my job today is I'm out there helping them understand what the challenges are, what the red flags are, the things to worry about, and helping customers standardize on a single contract that could essentially cover everything in their data center. All right, John, want to give you the last word, big takeaways from the show, bring us home. Thanks, I would say that the biggest takeaway for our partners is the fact that with the Distributor of the Year Award, it validates the work that we do, and it validates the fact that our partners are growing faster than the marketplace. And if you're not an AVENET EMC partner, you ought to consider being one. All right, any name change you have to have to the partnership with Dell Technologies going forward? No. All right. John and Doug, really appreciate you coming, showing in, and congratulations again on the Distributor of the Year Award. We'll be back here getting close to the end of three days of live coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE.