 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMCworld 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Welcome back to EMCworld, everybody. This is theCUBE. I'm here with Stu Miniman. My name is Dave Vellante. Praveen Akaraju is here. He is the CEO of VCE, Praveen. Great to see you again. Absolutely. Great to be here. Thanks for coming on. And big day yesterday. You were part of the keynote. You made the highlight reel today, I saw. Looking good up there. And life as part of EMC now. Yes. Give us the update. How are things? Yeah, you know, well, you saw a little bit of what we were up to over the past six months since we came into EMC, you know, on stage yesterday. It's been, you know, in a lot of ways, it's been just kind of keep the focus, keep going. V blocks continue to evolve. You know, the business continues to grow. But you know, I think as we talked about yesterday, we do see the convergent infrastructure market mainstreaming and evolving, right? And what we announced yesterday really was how we see sort of the future structure of the convergent infrastructure market. And being in EMC really allows us to kind of take that broader lens, if you will. Yeah, Praveen, before we take it to the tech, I'm wondering if you can comment on the big news of the industry in the week is John Chambers, after 20 years, is stepping down as CEO. He's going to be executive chairman. You know, Chuck Robbins is now involved. You know, just personally, you know, you work for Cisco for many years in VCE. What's your take? Yeah, that was great. I mean, I know Chuck for a long time. You know, he's a great guy. I mean, he's a couple of things, right? He's extremely well connected to the customers. You know, he ran commercial for a while, then he ran Americas before he took on the global sales role and then his new role. You know, what I always found with Chuck was, you know, for a sales guy, he was very technical, right? So we used to have a pretty good engineering conversation. So, you know, I'm pretty excited to see him in that role and I think we exchanged some texts in the morning yesterday and, you know, it should be a fun ride for him. Well, I don't know, Chuck, but I said the same thing. I said, okay, so sales guy. Yeah. But, you know, Chambers is a sales guy. Yeah. We have deep respect for technology. You're saying Chuck the same way. Oh, yeah. You know, we would basically talk about product architectures and things like that. When I was back at Cisco, I used to run a couple of companies and, you know, he would challenge me when I say, well, why aren't you selling my stuff? Right. Well, tell me, why is it better? So, really, I do think he brings a unique blend of, you know, obviously execution in the field, but also pretty good in-depth understanding of technology, which I think, you know, Cisco clearly will tap into as they transition now. It's a pretty major transition the company's going through and the industry's going through. So how has life now that you're part of EMC changed? I'm sure from a customer standpoint, you know, they're not seeing any big difference, but what has it done in terms of whether it's your strategic plan, your operating, you know, mode? Maybe give us the update on that. Yeah. I mean, I think, really, I think what EMC has allowed us to do is, you know, they have left us alone in a lot of ways. Because I think, you know, they recognize, you know, we have a winning formula, right? We have, you know, the trust of our customers. And, you know, we have been able to create this market and be able to provide leadership and thought leadership in this marketplace. So what EMC's really done is they've consolidated all of Converge Infrastructure under VCE. So they've brought the V-specs, the V-specs blue products under VCE. So now we have sort of a unified strategy and vision to the market for Converge Infrastructure. They've also consolidated the global solutions team. Essentially, is where you have solutions like the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and big data into one team. So we think about, really, the evolution of Converge Infrastructure horizontally in terms of, you know, different instantiation of hyperconverged and different platforms, but also vertically in terms of different pieces of infrastructure integrated into the stack. So that's kind of, you know, the way we've evolved, if you will, from a thought process perspective being inside EMC. We've spent a lot of time at EMC World every year talking to the solutions group. So I wonder if you could talk about kind of the difference between a solution and productizing something that. I think I see, you know, with solutions reporting to you, people underestimate the difference between what was the IBM Red Book, which was a great tool for, you know, a long time in the industry, versus, you know, something that I can just deliver easily and fast. Like what you've done with VCE. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, our genesis wasn't that solution's sort of, you know, space, right? We started off, when VCE did, initially started off, it was, you know, let's kind of put this recipe together and maybe, you know, we can execute as a reference architecture and see how, where this goes. What we found was, well first, it was, it's extremely hard to, you know, deploy solutions at scale in a consistent manner unless you, you know, start to build a lot more rigor and process and a product around it, which is how the We Block essentially came about. So, you know, I think when you look at what the solutions team's doing, I mean, they do, they abstract tremendous amount of complexity. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, I'm sure you guys have done the double click on it, right? I mean, it brings together the entire VMware stack, the connectivity to the cloud, even things like firewalls and being able to bring all of that together and get a customer to have it on a We Block, get up and running, right? In 28 days once the infrastructure's installed, that is revolutionary. So, it's a lot of heavy lifting. It goes back down to the fundamental thesis, which is, it is about simplifying the complexity in the IT environments, right? That then unlocks speed, it unlocks efficiencies, it unlocks cost savings. Without necessarily ripping in your, and replacing the processes around it, I mean, you did a lot of work on this with David. So, yeah, we've more than double clicked on that, didn't we still? Yeah, absolutely. And the other big thing I see now is your announcement this week, I wonder if VCE was a separate company, would the VX rack actually be a V-specs because it might not fit under the VCE umbrella if it was kind of external today. Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that obviously being an EMC has now done is to be able to kind of think about the market space, right? Outside of the construct of, you know, three companies and the products and technologies and that three companies, right? So, you know, for us the V-Block is going to be a flagship platform. It is what we're going to make our bread and butter on every day of the week, right? And that's going to continue to be a Cisco architecture. So we're going to get the latest UCS, latest Nexus, incorporate that with EMC and VMware. And now we've created a separate category, which, you know, it goes after different space. It's a, you know, white box architecture, completely software-defined, allows us to bring in the power of EMC's technologies, and the scale I owe, and the Federation technologies from VMware, and go after a different segment of the market. So I think that's the evolution. So, in thinking about what's going on in the marketplace, you can't not look at what's going on with hyper-converged. Everybody's talking about software-defined. What's your strategy there? What's the play there? Tell me about that a little bit. No, I think hyper-converged is, you know, it's a great value proposition of the customer, right? It's super simple, you know, it's very compact. You know, you just kind of roll these things and go. Particularly if you got like, you know, a hundred, kind of drop one of these. It comes up, self-manages, gets the applications up and running, right? So when we think about it, I think, from our perspective, we have seen a lot of hyper-converged deployments in parallel with V-blocks and data centers. That's sort of the state of play, if you will, today. So V-specs Blue is our sort of entry into this marketplace. It leverages Evo Rail. You heard Pat talk about it. We talked about it yesterday. We have a pretty robust roadmap on that. You know, capabilities coming as well as, you know, working with our partners to really simplify the go-to-market. So early days of that product, but, you know, our goal is absolutely to establish a premium hyper-converged appliance. And then the racks essentially brings together the engineered system concept and the experience, right, to build data center-scaled systems with the simplicity of the hyper-converged billing blocks. That's really where we saw a market opportunity. I want to ask you about management orchestration. You guys made some investments, you know, the last 18, 24 months. Absolutely. And that was really your first sort of homegrown product. Yeah. Talk about the importance of management orchestration. How much of a competitive differentiator is that for you and why is that? Yeah, no, management orchestration is critical, particularly as we go into, you know, some of these more, you know, scale-out type architectures, because we need to be able to, and Pat said it well today, right, we got to automate. Right, you have to automate the ability to provision the infrastructure, to manage the infrastructure, to get telemetry out of the infrastructure. Right, there might still be a human element to kind of decision-making, right. And in some instances you might trust that, but I always think there might probably be an element of human, you know, element in the decision-making. But you want to really dramatically simplify the ability to roll out and scale this infrastructure. So, you know, when we originally started this journey, we started with a vision product, which essentially was more about telemetry, getting information, you know, flags, policies, right, utilization rates and such like, and plugging it to vCenter, so you can click on a vBlock and see what's going on in it. So what we're now doing as we evolve into the extracts is, we're going to take vision, a lot of great IP there, a lot of good experience on roadmap, and plug it in with some of the other intellectual property that EMC has developed and acquired over the past couple of, I would say months, right, to build a truly, you know, comprehensive management orchestration system for hardware. Right, there's another management orchestration system at a, you know, at a, we realize at a, you know, UCS director level, what we're talking about is a hardware infrastructure management program. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about vScale, because I look at what happens with vScale and it actually helps for me, I mean, eventually I think the vision should be pulled together, I've got vBlocks, I might have those extra compute and storage nodes and I even hyper-converged, whether it be the vSPEX or the VXRack, and it can pull all those together, turning it from products to a platform that's extensible. Absolutely. You know, this is our long-term vision of a unified data center, right? So the first instation of vScale is storage capacity, so when our customers came to us and said, hey, I love the vBlocks, but you know what, if I want to add more storage, I got to buy a new vBlock and that's a problem, right? So vScale allows you to be able to add more storage capacity to the existing vBlock as you go. So that was the first phase of vScale. The second phase of vScale is to enable sort of scale out of vRacks, right, vXRacks we saw yesterday, those thousand nodes. They're going to be connected to that data center fabric and Cisco Nexus 9000 is a great fabric switch for us to be able to do that. The third phase is what you were talking about, which is mixing and matching these into what we call a unified data center. So I think that's the journey we're on. Again, the goal is to kind of create the right architectural constructs. You know, the management orchestration, the data center fabric, right, the different pieces and puzzles of convergent infrastructure to be able to build that unified data center vision. Let me talk about the brief time we have remain, just a competitive landscape. You guys, and actually, you know, I correct myself, I always say you guys in Oracle were first, but really Teradata was kind of the first, a couple of decades ago, but you in Oracle, different strategies, and then everybody sort of else came into the marketplace. You're leading, the numbers show that. Talk about the competitive landscape. Where do you win? Where don't you win? What's your comfort zone really? You know, I think when we were sort of in the past life, I guess, free this announcement we made on Monday, you know, we were very much focused on you know, a classic data center, tier one kind of use cases and workloads, right? Customers would look at the V-Block and say hey, here's a great foundational building block for my SAP transformation, for my ERP, for my exchange, right, the applications that you're used to in a classic data center. And we would basically, the hyper-convert space was something that we never really paid a lot of attention to. We knew there was a lot of, you know, attention and traction in that marketplace. EMC had just announced respects blue, right, but that was an area that we had, we hadn't really sort of really thought through a lot. So we knew, customers would come to us and say we love the fact that we have this building block in the data center, but you're missing a piece of the puzzle. So we would explicitly stay out of those markets. So I think now, with the strategy of block stratum appliances, now we have the ability to go after and tell the full story, right. So I feel much better now from a broader competitive perspective. There's no other player in the marketplace today that has that comprehensive of vision and the experience and more importantly, the trust of the customers. So, you know, when I look at it competitively, we have a lot of competitors in different, I guess, spaces in the blocks, racks, appliance space. Nobody's got all of them, right. So I feel pretty good about where we're going to be positioned. Coming to theCUBE, it's always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World 2015. We'll be right back.