 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE and we're here at EMC and the Executive Briefing Center in 42 South Street in Hopkington. EMC has a huge customer event that's been going around the world and bringing in customers and bringing in SAP, bringing in consultants, third party service providers and sharing their vision of transformation with customers and collaborating with customers peer to peer. And we're here with Terry Breen, who is the Senior Vice President of Global Strategic Accounts at EMC who kicked off the meeting today. Terry, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, nice having you here. So thank you, tell me about the event here. Give us the low down, how many people, what's it all about? Well we had about 200 customers over the last three days and what is an opportunity for EMC with our partners being SAP, Cisco, VMware and VCE to sit in the room with our customers and talk about how do we help our customers transform and how does the power not only of our company but all of our partners bring together capabilities, solutions so that we can help our customers bring SAP into their business faster, more effectively and actually in a lower cost. So what are the big initiatives that the customers are talking about in their transformation and how are they transforming? I think there's really two, there's a lot but I think there are two that dominate the day. They think the first one is really taking Han into the enterprise. It's a good topic, Han is very hot around analytics, around SAP, it's very important so I think that's the first one. The second one is really around taking SAP to an x86 in the cloud to really drive the operational costs of SAP down and leveraging some of the innovation that we're doing from an infrastructure perspective. So those are really the two that dominate. Now talk about the role of the third party service providers, I mean they obviously like SAP because it's a complicated environment, they've made a lot of money over the last several years. How are they shifting, how are they responding to things like virtualization, to things like HANA? What's their game plan? When you think about SAP, you think about these service providers that are like us, they live and die by infrastructure and hardware and software. And SAP is such a dominant piece of application in the enterprise space, it consumes an awful lot of service provider capabilities so they're all looking at ways that they can build their infrastructure from a service provider perspective that optimizes the way SAP is running. We're working with the SPs to make sure our hardware and software supports them optimally, we team with them and then we take it to market with SAP. So what they're doing with us is providing our customers with an option. Can they host it inside the customer's four walls? Perfectly fine, can we take it outside and host it within a service provider's walls? Absolutely, so we're trying to give an option to our customers. So you obviously fly around a lot, you're global in your title and tell me, what are the main pain points and initiatives that you hear from customers that they're asking specifically EMC to help with? Well I think the couple of things they're trying to do is obviously we like to drive cost down, customers are always interested in how do we optimize the use of capital. I think too, what they're trying to do is figure out how do we use our technology to make their business more flexible, make them a little more nimble in their stuff. And also they're looking at how do we not just be a company that brings pieces of technology but how do we bring other pieces of technology from other companies and applications together so that we have solutions that address their problems. I think we've gone past the day where each of us as technology companies could be in there talking to a customer only about our piece and we have to come in and say with us and other partners we can solve a better problem for you. So that's a really, we're focused on. Well and you guys have made fast friends with SAP, I mean Oracle's acquisition of SON really changed that dynamic and I mean certainly you guys are doing a lot internally at EMC IT but it seems like the relationship at the senior levels particularly Tucci and McDermott and Schnabe but also in the field and everywhere in between has really started to come together. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah and I would only go a little bit we're word on fast, I'm not sure it's fast I think it's been going on for a while I just think we continue to invest in it and obviously SAP the alignment of their vision and their direction with us is very, very close so we work very, very close with us. I think from an executive executive there's a many to many relationship that we spend time, we were in down in Newtown two weeks ago, several of us the executive over from both companies spent an entire day together we're only working on those two campaigns I was talking about, one around x86 migration as well as HANA to the enterprise. So there's a lot of time being spent between the two companies and I think once you start doing that then results start coming out at the end of the pipe. Now talk a little bit about cloud you're seeing Amazon get very aggressive into the enterprise, are CIOs embracing the cloud they're certainly embracing the private cloud aka virtualization but are they really ready to take that next step and go to a more of a service led model are they transforming to that degree in your view? I think the answer is all over the board however I would say every CIO that I've faced with has some sort of cloud strategy. Now where it's all over the board is how far are they down that path? Are they science project or are they moving a lot of their business or are they moving some of the business all over the board but I do think as we look down the road my personal view is we will always have some architecture that's going to stay traditional we're going to have some that's going to stay cloud but private within the four walls and we're going to have some architecture that's going to go to the cloud and it's going to go outside public and I think most of our customers we're going to see have all three of the checks and all three of those boxes the distinction between companies is what percentage it's in each of the three boxes. Terry I know you're busy and I got to run but thanks very much for stopping by the Cube really appreciate it. Thanks for coming by. Take care okay keep watching everybody we'll have more from the EMCEBC we're here at 42 South Street in Hopkinson this is Dave Vellante this is the Cube.