 Hi, this is Dave Vellante. We're back. We're here at SAP Week at EMC, 42 Cell Street in Hoppington, Massachusetts. This is theCUBE where we try to extract the signal from the noise, bring you the best guests that we can find. Andy Citizen is here. I've known Andy for several years now. Andy knows probably more people than I've ever met in my entire life. Andy, you're very well connected and this is really your event. You're running a series of these SAP events. You must be thrilled that you can get 200 customers in collaborating, talking about SAP, talking about virtualization, EMC, business value. How do you feel? Yeah, I mean, it's been a great week. Let me give you a little history. We started about five years ago out west coast, you know, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, where Cisco was, VMware was, VC, SAP were, we were all out there. And how we started was virtualization and no one was doing it yet. So we started a little lab, put some things together in the executive briefing center out there and my group said, hey, let's start bringing customers around, let's do some collaboration around this. And before you know it, we got things like VBlock coming out. We've got, you know, thousands of customers virtualizing now. We're into the private cloud. We're into, you know, all sorts of hybrid cloud opportunities. Hannah's shown up on the footprint. So this thing has grown over the years. Our event in Santa Clara just a few months ago was our biggest event yet, except this week is actually our biggest SAP week by about two X. And it's not only the biggest SAP week, it's actually the biggest EBC event in history of EMC. You guys have been tweeting all week. I've seen how many tweets around the record there. Yeah, yeah, well, we're making a big deal out of it. It's good. You know, when you have this many customers coming, right around 200, they'll walk through the door in three days, it's not about any individual presentation or any expert. It's about having 15 or 20 experts. It's about having so many customers sharing in the experience. And one thing we do is we don't allow presentations to overrule the activity. And the genders are owned by the customer. The whiteboards have to be used. And our speakers come in and talk about their business. They don't talk about the marketing slides. They come in and talk about their business, how they're engaging with the customers. So what's the conversation like inside the amphitheater? Well, you know what, it's as much for us as anybody. Because if I can sit down with SAP and Cisco in the same room with a customer, and they tell us to do three things, six months from now, that might be our best offering, our best product, our best solution for a customer. So a lot of this is really taking guys that have had 20 years experience, some from Waldorf, some from Palo Alto, sitting with a customer. This worked a couple deployments themselves in getting around that and talking about, okay, what's next? How's things evolving? Do I do this now? Do I do that now? And taking their requirements and applying the generalities. What are the things they're telling you that would... So they're obviously happy. You have 200 customers here. I mean, that's impressive. SAP's here, you got a lot of your executives here. What do they want to see next? What's on your to-do list that customers are telling you? Well, there's the boring in the new, right? The boring is, customers still want to virtualize. They want to talk about private cloud. I say it's boring because we've gotten there. We've gotten over that wave. I was saying a minute ago, riding our own wave internally. We've got a great story at EMC IT. We have a lot of customers that have done it. So many of these customers are allowing them to say, hey, I want my benefits too, right? So they're trying to figure out how do you do that? And in different flavors and different dosing, we have one customer came in, and I'm going to public cloud my whole new Greenfield deployment. Because we don't want to be in the IT business. So it's every range in that. The more interesting provocative is the whole Han area, right? And what part of that do I do now? Do I build my use cases? Do I build out my production environments? And some customers are in the, how do I use it? And some of the customers are in, I'm ready to go to the data center. How do I make sure it runs? How do I deal with the risk associated with this new platform? So you mentioned one customer putting their Greenfield apps in the public cloud. You're seeing that a lot more. We've got a number of clients in the Wikibon community, mid-sized customers that are doing that, and small customers, still selective on large, particularly with Amazon's big push into the enterprise, and you're seeing a lot of test and dev with Amazon. You're obviously seeing them come into your space, guns ablaze, and what are you seeing with that trend, with the Amazon effect, and how are your clients and how is EMC responding? That's a great point, and I would tell you, this one customer is not using Amazon, but a similar partner for their, what I'll call Sandbox and Test Dev. And what we took them through was our velocity program. They want to run it in Germany. They want to have platinum service. They want to possibly run as a service or possibly host part of it. We took them through all our partners that do run in Germany, have platinum programs with us that run SAP, that have it as a service, have it in different flavors. And we have 120 customer partners in that velocity program now. Many of them run SAP. So we have offerings to provide them. Now I will tell you, we have many customers that choose for agility to provision on various clouds today, but when it comes to going time to go to production, most of those companies come back and say, look, okay, now I got to get serious about this. And not only is it a risk thing, but you look at some of those cloud offerings, they're pretty doggone expensive when you put a lot of terabytes on them. So sometimes self-provisioning and working with the traditional providers, service providers and such, actually comes up with a better economical model for our customers. Well, renting is often more and most typically more expensive than owning, but there's a flexibility aspect. So you're saying you're competing with Amazon, essentially through an ecosystem approach. You mentioned your velocity partners. Can they move as fast as Amazon? Can you move as fast as Amazon? That's a great question. So I won't go through all the names, but we have all the change agents, the SIs that we work with, and we have all the SAP partners. And yes, some of these customers, these partners have developed programs that they can roll it out in three, five, 10 weeks for our customers. And what's interesting here is it's not just that we're selling together. It's that we're at the whiteboard. We're at the engineering rooms and labs together and we're building run books. We're making sure that they have better, more flexible and more consumable offerings, which is ultimately about agility. But we go back to a traditional model of helping customers. You think about anybody in the business that's done more to reduce the cost of storage for our customers, it's us. We've spent 20 years doing that. Every year we're getting a better price for them. Obviously, data grows. It works in our favor. We're going to keep hammering you though. They're never satisfied. But we spent a lot of time, think about deduplication, think about all that EMC does to create technology to reduce storage. We're bringing that to the table in the new economy. Yeah, the storage business has a pretty good track record of keeping prices down. But as I say, it's never-ending. Andy, citizen, thanks very much for coming on. I appreciate it. Good to see you. Thank you for coming. All right, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from 42 South Street in Hopkinson, Massachusetts.