 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage. We're here at the EMC V-specs launch. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Terra Gallery, great venue. We're here with Prasad Rampali and Greg Ambulos. Prasad runs EMC's Solutions Group, and Greg is a longtime EMC-er, a longtime executive with the channel. Both of these gentlemen gave keynotes this morning, and so welcome to the Cube. Thanks, David. Prasad, you've been here before, Greg, you're a newbie, so we'll go easy on you. Okay, great. So Prasad, I want to start with you. Listen carefully to your presentation, we just had Jeremy Burton on. He said, we wanted this announcement to be more than a white paper, and that's what you think of when you think of things like this that are proven and tested solutions and reference architectures. The result is a white paper. What's the difference between V-specs and the traditional sort of white paper reference architecture? Yeah, that's a great question. V-specs is really a total solution validation approach, and we are looking at really doing two specific activities from an engineering standpoint. The first is ensuring interoperability at all levels of the stack, all the way from our storage through the compute, through the hypervisor, as well as the networking components, right? And we do that today for large enterprise, which is what the ELab is all about. But what we have never done is take that asset that we've been deploying for the past 15 years for large enterprise to the channel, and in many ways it's shifting that core asset with this engineering discipline that's proven and aiming that squarely in Greg's business, which is new, right? So is it a new methodology, a new technology? No, from the validation or interoperability standpoint, it's essentially aiming it in a market that we have never done before. The second point is the integration piece, which is the interesting part. This is where we are looking at specific use cases, and we are ensuring that the appropriate integration elements from the networking component, from the storage component to the management component with the application are implemented in such a way that the customer meets their specific needs. This aspect of integration obviously requires development, API enhancements from our storage, full understanding of core technologies that the networking guys are enabling, like Brocade, on their IP-based fabrics, and tying with even applications like SAP that are more orchestration aware today with things like LBM, which is their landscape visualization manager, where we can say, hey, we can connect with the application layer directly and enable fast cloning, as an example. We can tie with the networking component and enable some aspect of offloading of network bandwidth tied to certain aspects of the workload. This intelligence that can be manipulated at all levels of the stack is a new game that we are going to be getting into in a big way at the integration level for VSpecs. And we believe we can do that because we have the support and frankly a lot of excitement and interest from these six partners that I spoke to today. I tweeted that I felt like this announcement was more innovation and packaging, and I guess what you're adding to that is methodology and other capabilities of knowledge transfer and knowledge capture, than it is invention. Is that fair? Yeah, I think it is true. I really think it starts with the end customer and as Greg will tell you the requirements that the channel has are many. And to codify those requirements into a set of reusable solution building blocks, as I said, requires significant innovation. You can take the high disorganized entropy of unmet needs into saying, okay, I'm going to have a finite set of building blocks that will meet those needs. And that is what my team is trying to address with our ELabs, with our VLabs and the core developers and engineers who are working with this with our technical partners. I want to come back to that, I have a number of questions, but I want to go to Greg. Greg, I watched carefully the VBlock announcement in 2009, and there were a number of channel partners. It was at an analyst meeting that you guys unveiled it. And there were a number of channel partners there. And they were excited on the one hand. And then I remember a discussion about, hey, should we do this as a single skew? And of course, all the analysts said, absolutely. That's really the way to go. And I remember some of the channel partners saying, I'm not so sure about that. And then subsequent to that, you saw some of the channel partners come out with their own versions, with more showhace, with more. Maybe a different server vendor. Hey, we resell Dell servers or IBM servers. We don't want to do UCS. So VSpecs appears to be a response to that. Is that accurate? And give us a little color there. Yeah, no, I think you're spot on. VBlock has its place. And you're right. It's a single skew, single management, single support. But if you look at the opportunity that's at hand in the marketplace, it's just VSpec addresses a good portion of the market and VBlock addresses another portion of the market. So from our perspective, we have the best of both worlds. We have the VBlock offering and we've got the VSpecs. Our partners want choice. And this is what came back to us time and time again. They might be positioning HP servers or IBM servers or Dell servers, and they might be brocade, not Cisco, and they want that flexibility. So what Poseidon 2 put together has really been music to their ears because now it's going to provide them the flexibility that they need to go out and address their requirements for their end user customers as they build out their infrastructure for the cloud. Yeah, now, Mark, I don't know if you can pull up that figure one. So Greg, you're right. It's an enormous opportunity. We just recently quantified the converged infrastructure market. The TAN, by 2017, we pegged at 400 billion, and it's enormous. And essentially, it makes sense when you think of it. First of all, you have 400 billion. You crazy, Dave Vellante? Well, it encompasses all servers, all storage, all networking, all management software, the services around that. And so, I don't know if you can see this, but. I would bet you that VSpecs probably addresses a bigger portion of the market then. Yes, absolutely. So the green here is the legacy roll your own. The red is what I would call reference architectures, and the blue is single skew, which is really only today VBlock and Exadata. And maybe, I guess, Avnet resells a single skew of flexible, but the red here is what I call the reference architecture. That's the opportunity. So it's probably today five or six times bigger than the single skew. And that kind of makes sense, because people want heterogeneity, and it sounds like you're seeing the market the same way. Exactly. And in Camely, the other big benefit is that we're getting closer and closer to our technology partners. So if you look at that market opportunity, naturally, we want to be able to work in a collaborative manner with our technology partners to go out there and capture that opportunity. So with a partner community, with our technology partners, this is really, to me, a key solution set that I think is going to be very, very relevant with the marketplace. Well, that's another interesting angle here. I think it might have been Jeremy who talked about competition, co-opetition. You got Cisco up there with Broke, you've got Dell, and IBM and HP sort of playing, maybe not playing nice, but playing in this announcement. You're including them. And I'm sure they're happy to be included with the channel. So it's a strange world we live in from that standpoint. But Prasad, for you, that's great, because there's more complexity. That means there's more demand for your services, right? And frankly, to your point, there's a tremendous switch of cycle of innovation. Because as Greg said, as we include these six leading light partners, with each one of them, as we are getting into these deep conversations in the solutions stack, there is a very significant opportunity to look at, where are they innovating in the networking space, if you take Cisco as an example? And how can we leverage that innovation as part of the private cloud? I mean, they are working on things like network security. They are looking at enabling wide area network bandwidth optimization for hybrid cloud use cases. How do we leverage that as part of our implementation in this respect solution use case? And so as we get these technology giants together to collaborate, I think this innovation is going to just go through a spiral that we haven't yet seen in the channel. So I'm very excited about that. Prasad, we first met last year at EMC World. We had you on theCUBE. And I knew Todd Pavone, who sort of helped get the proven solutions group off the ground. And I asked you, where do you want to take it? And you just talked about scaling the group. And I thought about that a lot. I said, OK, how does that work? And here's an example, I think, today, clearly. I want to come back to the point you made about codifying all that expertise. How do you do that? How do you capture and do you capture expertise from the channel, from the field, codify that, bring it in and bake it into these solutions? How do you do that? Well, today, we are just starting to be honest. But we clearly are recognizing that as we meet our end customers, both in large enterprise and especially the channel, which is much more heterogeneous and diverse, all the way from SMB to the commercial segment, we will need, frankly, an end user database. And we are constructing that. And what we are looking at is creating a templatized view of those requirements that tie to use cases. And more importantly, I'm reorganizing my team around a set of development activity that's tied to solution building blocks. There's only so many ways you can architect a storage management interface to a third-party orchestration environment. But you don't need 10 groups to do that. You need one group to do it. And as we look at specializing around these building blocks, we think that we can standardize and, frankly, we can get the high-fidelity discussion between customer and us as a developer going on in a channel that over time will be very rich. And that requires us to have partnerships with these six leading lights with Greg and what he's doing in the front end of the tip of the spear, engaging these customers together to create this kind of cycle. So exciting times. Simplification all the way back into your organization. So Greg, I want to come back to you. I'd be remiss my partner and co-host, John Furrier, is the channel's guy. And he always says, for the channel, it's about making money. So talk about that a little bit. I mean, what's the channel, what's their reaction to this? Obviously, it's very positive. You saw them up on the stage. But how do they go to market? How do they profit from this? So I think, great question. As I mentioned on my presentation, partners really, just like EMC sales organizations, they go out there and they try to solve customer problems and issues. And they're very, very good at positioning solutions. So when you position a solution, typically you're addressing that challenge. And if an user customer sees value in that solution, they're less likely to try to take a part and pull apart an overall deal. So number one, when partners position an overall solution, they have a lot better, more flexibility, and they have a better chance to get an increased value for that overall solution versus a point product. Number one. Number two, as it pertains to v-specs, even though the recipe, we call it the recipe, so to speak, has been created, there's a lot of still service opportunities that are available. Because even though we have some sizing parameters, the partner still needs to go in there and finalize the sizing. If they want to do any type of application deployment, we have the v-specs lab, they can go in there and they can basically work with their end user customer to determine which is the best way, the most efficient way to deploy an application, and then naturally want them to do the implementation services. So not only addressing the business need and positioning overall solution, which is going to give them a little bit higher value with their end user customer, now there's also a lot of services opportunities that go with it. And despite all the talk about simplification, again, we got it covered here at Wikibon. We did this study. The number one biggest slice of the pie for converged infrastructure is services. It's still well over 40% of the opportunity. So even though you're converging, I think you've got to, IT departments have to do this just to keep pace with data growth. Without a doubt, and I think the other thing here too is like, our job is to, we want to go on through, we want to penetrate the marketplace. So with v-specs, now we have the branding, so now we're going to provide that umbrella. We're going to provide that marketing umbrella that the partners are looking for. So to me, they're going to make additional service capability, I mean margins and higher margins selling a v-spec solution from my perspective, but also now with the branding, they're going to be brought into a lot more opportunities. Gentlemen, I wish we had more time because there's a lot of, there's a great discussion and we can get into some of the pricing and some of the concerns about lock-in. We'll cover that throughout the day. But Greg Amulos, Prasad Rampali, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you guys. And keep it right there. We'll be right back with Cisco and Wendy Barr, who's an executive in the channels group at Cisco, so keep it right there. Great. Flash memory is a hot topic these days in both the consumer and enterprise markets. And the prevalence of flash in the consumer world on our mobile phones, tablets and laptops is beginning to drive down the cost of the technology across all markets. Forbes magazine declared flash to be 2011's technology of the year. Another say that flash is the future of the data center. In 2008, EMC CEO, Joe Tucci, predicted that the one thing that will change the storage industry more than anything else over the next 10 years is the advent of flash technology. With EMC's recent launch of the new VF Cash hardware and software solution that leverages flash technology and intelligent caching software to dramatically increase throughput and reduce latency, that prediction appears to have come true. Today, we're doing the launch of VF Cash. Everybody's really excited. Obviously, a little bit of press leaks over the weekend and people looking forward to the new product, the performance capabilities it gives. We got early morning rock bands. We got a little bit of cartoon character fun. And it's good. And I think the marketing's innovative and I think the product's innovative. Reaction's been great. You know, press analysts and bloggers in the room, which has been great, but the vast audience is really online. We've had about 3,000 people online. Just a lot of good talk about how this is a compliment to EMC technology, to VMAX, to VNX, compliment to fully automated storage steering, just taking our leadership of flash just to the next level. It's really great. Flash is going to transform the look of the data center. In the same way as the consumer experience has been transformed by Apple utilizing flash technology, I think the enterprise experience is going to be transformed by flash and EMC is going to be driving it. So VF Cash is basically taking this exciting new flash technology and moving it into serving an intelligent wet. We marry that flash storage closer to the CPU complex with an intelligent software layer that determines what data should sit in the server closer to that CPU. If you think about it, flash is over a thousand times faster in terms of IOP capabilities. The performance of a persistent memory, right, in a thousand plus X, right, is really a game changer for many of our customers. But now if we move it close to the server, we're able to make yet another enormous jump in terms of latency, as well as bandwidth and IOPs per gigabyte. So it really is exciting from our customers from that perspective. They get the performance with intelligence, but they also get that protection that they demand in their mission critical application environments. It's a continuation of the EMC flash story that we introduced in 2008. When we first introduced flash drives in the VMAX platform, 2010, we introduced fast, we introduced VNX fast cash. This is another step in that progression. The code name for VF cash, it was Lightning, and what always follows Lightning is Thunder. So we pre-announced today Thunder, which is essentially server networked flash. So something that's shareable, something that's scalable, still on the server side, but something that can provide literally millions of IOPs to multiple server applications. That's coming next. Let's say it's EMC's commitment to innovating in the core business. We challenge ourselves, we question conventional wisdom and we're not afraid to come to market with disruptive technologies. That may have some impact on that core business, but if we don't do that, then we're not gonna stay ahead.