 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for EMC World 2015. This is Silicon Angles, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jesse Brash at Evolution One Team, VP of Infrastructure and Operations, Evolution One. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So first before we get into it, tell us about Evolution One. What do you guys do? What's your core job? What are you guys doing here? Just a little overview with the company. Well, I think in a simple way of stating it, it's simplifying healthcare spending. So we offer an array of product lines like HSA and FSA spending accounts, defined contribution for retirement planning, things along, and deliver that through a SaaS solution, allowing our partners to administer over 13 million consumers in efforts to combat the complexity of healthcare today. Noble mission. Obviously everyone is hot on healthcare. I mean, IBM's CEOs like healthcare is the biggest opportunity that they see as a company. Everyone kind of agrees. At the same time, SaaS is the business model of the cloud. So you're seeing that. A lot of people are trying to figure that out. So share with us your learnings from SaaS. Does it disrupt and innovate? What do you guys experience with that? How do you guys organize around that? I mean, how do you take the views? If you're DevOps, is it migrate slowly? I mean, healthcare, you'd love a rip and replace and start all over, but sure, it's hard. So share this, your SaaS approach and what you've learned. Well, I think the power of any SaaS solution is going to be the capabilities of how well you can integrate. Every one of our partners has their own unique needs, their own unique security guidelines and things to help protect the patient or any of the data that we store. The challenges that we have from a SaaS organization is really speed of scale. Obviously, security is at our forefront of everything we do around data and the protection of such. And lastly, you look at just the growth as the more and more requirements are brought forward in the market. How we handle those through innovation and our release of new product offerings in the SaaS that puts more stress on the systems. So not only are you forced with the security and scale issues that any company today has to deal with, but just the innovation that we offer within a SaaS platform grows that two to three Xs each year. I mean, you know, the poster childs of children of SaaS, you know, the sales force, you got service now, we were at their conference a couple of weeks ago, so you get very high growth. You've got to scale out your business. So how do you build an infrastructure that scales out? I mean, obviously we're going to talk about where EMC fits, but forgetting about the products for a second from an architectural standpoint, how does your company approach that? Well, I think our, you know, in the last couple years, our philosophy has been simplifying the management of our infrastructure. You know, outside of product talk, picking the right technology for the right workloads so that each of them can flex or grow independently and not have to worry about, you know, the overarching design or the infrastructure supporting it as a whole. So by taking a federated approach within our solution, you know, whether our certain business services are within this platform or this type of storage is dealing with this workload, it gives our capabilities kind of a complex, but you know, it's a multidimensional capability of scale. So that's kind of a horses for courses strategy, which I get, okay, but the age old debate is, okay, should I homogenize or should I go for the best of breed based on workload? So where should I be homogenous and thinking about that? And where do you apply kind of best of breed and how do you integrate all that stuff together? Well, one of the approaches that we found from an integration standpoint is, you know, obviously picking the right partner and the technologies that they offer EMC. We've also brought, you know, their partner around VCE tools from RSA. So kind of having that approach where it's not necessarily one platform or one solution, but picking the best of breed within each of those areas of that product family. Now each of those product families overlap, but you know, picking the right one for the right workload and having a partner like, you know, around EMC with their product solutions, with their advanced software and their management's tools, being able to help us simplify, you know, kind of the complexities, then when you have a lot of different solutions to manage. So the fact that it's one company is- Well, there's a little one throat to choke there. It's a big factor, you're saying. It definitely is. Okay. All right, so what's happening in your business? You talked about SaaS, you talked about, you know, changes in healthcare. Talk about the changes in your business. We heard this morning about digitization of all these businesses. You guys are on a growth trajectory. Talk about the dynamics of your business. Well, you know, we take apart and we get away from the speed, the scale and security element of the infrastructure. You know, and what our business is doing within the SaaS and what my team's deliver on is, is simplifying our approach to how we manage that so that we can work on projects that are going to help drive those types of activities that we want to deliver, whether that be items that EMC's been talking about the last year around the third platform. You know, we have a very aggressive mobile approach. The analytics and the big data aspect of what we deliver within our SaaS, providing that across our book of business is an area of focus of ours in the next year or two on how we can use our data to help our partners become more nimble and adjust to kind of how the trends are going within the market. So I think that third platform approach, you know, is really where we're driving our SaaS solution towards enablement of the mobile and then making the best use of all the data that we have within the SaaS. So we were talking off camera, you have VC Extreme IO, you got some VNX, Atmos, you got Data Domain. Yes. But it might be easier to say what we don't have. Yeah. We have a very federated approach. We have a VMAX. Yes, we do. You got a VMAX. No kidding. We do. Okay. No, today we don't. Okay, so that's not a strategy yet. Anyway, for integration. Well, we took an approach of the last three years kind of aligning our goals from a foundational level up. So as we've re-port our foundation to host our solutions, we've worked towards recovery as an integration between our two data centers. You know, we could very easily go with some of the advanced features which I would consider third phase type activities where we had to fix some of our plumbing before we start talking about things around Vplex and software defined data center speed. Do you tap EMC services or you're pretty much doing it in-house? Oh no, we leverage EMC services not only through kind of our architectural committees. I mean, the SES, the architects within EMC are considered team members within our company. So quarterly meetings aren't just where we engage. The semi-annual business reviews is not the traditional EMC approach. I mean, we have daily, weekly conversations with our team. Almost every one of our projects and technologies have some sort of service offering around that. Whether it be VCE services to help upgrade our core infrastructure or advanced software professional services to help us refine SRM and how we manage the system. And how are you using Flash? I wonder if you could take us back to everybody who said Flash is going to change the world. Flash is going to change the world. It sounds like it's changing your world. Definitely. Take us back to when you brought Extreme ION. So last year we were at a kind of a crossroads as we were looking at our production data center and making the decision, do we continue down a VMAX strategy which our secondary DR and corporate environment is all running predominantly VMAX. And really it was an opportunity to see the advancements in which the data protection suite was coming forward. The advanced features that they were going to roll out in 3.0 and 4.0 to really put Extreme ION in a place where we could really put that as our single block array within production. So this year we've deployed a Vblock 540 and we're running all Extreme ION. Now, we did mention some other storage lines so we're not running everything there on Extreme but the right workload fits well. It's our application and our database that running on SQL Server. Talk about the costs involved. I mean, talk about storage, tiering, SaaS, you got to be agile. What are the alternatives? If you wanted to go outside with competition of EMC, what would be like the alternative cost? Because you got to be nimble, you got to handle integration, you got workloads, you got healthcare, you got payments, all cutting edge stuff on one end but yet blocking and tackling on the other. What's the cost, the hidden costs that are solved that people might not see when they look at something similar? Well, I think the hidden cost is obviously the speed in which you try to adopt any of those items because while we're reinventing our infrastructure from the ground level up, we still have operationally the support of a software as a service solution to close to 13 million consumers. You know, and just picking the right cadence and training was a big area in working with our operations teams and retooling our engineers to kind of cross-platform manage a lot of these systems. That was a big cost in how we, you take your traditional storage admin and now you're asking that individual to kind of manage across that software element of the complete solution. No matter what type of storage array or compute or networking. So that was a big, we probably underestimated that hit to how the culture of our infrastructure and our ops teams were going to handle the change. How do you manage the complexity of the different platforms in a way that keeps operations from being disrupted at the same time providing the value? Well, while it seems complex from the outside in, from the inside, I think we've simplified. We're no longer having to worry about your traditional tiering design or worrying about file storage. We've compartmentalized our approach to how we handle IT and we've enabled things like in leveraging Atmos, for instance, the Atmos API and the advanced solution so that we can kind of wrap around that even to our development org found rewards to enabling a platform for content storage. But having then the right tools when you have a single partner in selecting the best solutions across that, the management is, I think in a simple, becomes a little more simpler. You know, while we federate out and it becomes more things to manage, the responsibility for that vendor to provide you a cross-platform tool to manage across those, those devices is a key cost driver for making that. Outcomes, business outcomes, what can you? It's been an eight. We've seen from 40 to 50% improvement in a lot of our core offerings just with some of the storage that we've in place. Obviously Extreme MyO and that's workhorse and beast earlier today on what that can deliver for database technologies and your traditional web applications. But we found as well the ability for us to bring features to the marketplace, just out of the box things that EMC provides with their solution set where we don't have to write our own code to those features. But these are improvements and services that you can monetize, is that right? Definitely, yeah. Okay, we got to go. I want to give you the final word. Since EMC created this roadmap, share with other potential customers what they could get out of re-defining their storage infrastructure with EMC. Well, I think every solution provider is going to have their best to breed in competition. And I think EMC's product grown immensely from the story of how they're tying it all together with security and management. You can't find that in other technologies. I mean, everybody's going to have something where they want to attack a certain point of that portfolio. But really what's changed in the differentiator for us has been the culture within to partner with us and help make selections versus just turning around and handing us a quote and asking us to buy more discs. It's been more a holistic approach to IT. And that's been a complete difference that I haven't seen any of their competitors be able to deliver. Okay, Jesse, thanks so much. Just you Brash, the VP of Infrastructure and Operations Evolution One EMC holistic approach, not just pushing gear and boxes. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. You guys have a real innovative business model. SAS is the preferred approach in this cloud era here at EMC Real 2015. We'll be right back with more on theCUBE after this short break.