 Okay, we're back here at EMC World. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the silver from the noise. Three days of exclusive EMC World coverage. This is day three. We're down to our last segment and then we're going to do a wrap up. So stay with us. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Bill Reed is here. He's the senior director of platform strategy for EMC IT. Works very closely with, for, I guess, Tony Pagliarullo, who has been on theCUBE a number of times. Kate Parsons and Mike Harding. We had them on theCUBE a couple weeks ago talking about project propel. So both of those guys work for you and your team. Kate is a peer of mine and Mike is one of my director before us. Okay, great. And so you guys made this whole project propel happen. We want to talk about that a little bit. It was a very exciting time last summer, I'm sure. You guys did not take July 4th holiday. We were working the weekend, yeah. So why don't we get right into it? I mean, tell us about project propel, what that was all about, and what it's doing for your business. Sure, propel was essentially the re-architecture of our ERP platform. We were replacing a very legacy Oracle ERP system and replacing it with an SAP system. The ultimate goal for it was to enable EMC for the future, for the next 10 years, basically. And we wanted to lay the foundation for all of the business transformations that had to happen within the manufacturing and the finance business units within EMC. We did that leveraging VCE technology, the Vblock, and we virtualized 100% of the stack of SAP. Our goal, as you said, was last summer, July 4th, and it was the culmination of a 27-month program. Yes, oh, that's pretty amazing. Well, how's it going so far? I mean, you guys have implemented, obviously you have some metrics that you've been capturing, what's it look like? Indeed, we have. We just finished our third quarter close and everything for EMC is measured in a quarterly basis. First quarter close was last September. We just finished our third right here in March. System is performing fantastically. Happy to say that from an overall system, metrics and CPU utilization standpoint, peak periods, heaviest days of the quarter. The system is actually operating only about 25 to 30% CPU utilization. So we know what we've laid as a foundation that we can grow on for the next several years. So, okay, so you purposefully over-provisioned just to have a little bit more headroom? We did. But isn't that a no-no? Ha! In many cases it would be. I think if we felt that the goal eye was the end of the program and that was it, we would definitely have been more conservative. But we've already been laying out the next two to three releases on the program to figure out the capabilities that the business at EMC is going to need. So we knew that we wanted to start conservative and build on top of that, rather than having to go through a major technology refresh only a year and a half post-go live. We hear a lot from the marketing folks about the affinity between VBlock and SAP. We certainly talk to SAP folks. We've had a number of them on. Folks from your lab, Hongquac. Guys like Ralph Lindenlob from SAP who we've seen at this show. Talk about that VBlock affinity with SAP. In the early days, a lot of application heads were nervous about virtualizing SAP. And CIOs maybe wanted to do it. Certainly infrastructure, people wanted to do it. But the application head said no. You guys had a top-down mandate to do that. We did. But does it mean your application heads weren't nervous? So talk about that little dynamic. Yeah, we still have, at the end of the day, it's still protection of a revenue stream. We're global IT supporting an EMC corporation with 20 plus billion dollars of revenue each year. So we're still measured by success in real dollars. But at the same time, it was an evolution of a virtualization story for us at EMC. We've been transforming our data centers really since 2003, 2004 timeframe. So SAP was really the culmination or the pinnacle of the virtualization story. We didn't start with SAP, we evolved to SAP. So by the time we started our program in the spring of 2010, it was a no-brainer. It wasn't a question of whether or not, if it was a matter of when we were going to go live. And we knew we had a very short window of 27 months to do the entire program. So for us, it was full steam ahead. Let's ensure that everything we're doing from a system standpoint on the V-Block can enable the business to transform themselves and get out of the way so that the business can focus on their business processes and the business transformation. Did you go through the typical business case for project propel? Or did you, sort of because it was, you were so constrained on capacity, you just said, all right, we just got to do this. Did you talk about that a little bit? It was a bit of a no-brainer that we all knew we had to do it. I think what we had to pull together was a little bit more of the facts and the data to talk about the duration, the scope of the program, and the change management aspects to ensure that we had everybody on the same page, to ensure that what we were doing in July of 2012 didn't have a pocket veto, or folks that weren't really fully engaged or fully on board, to ensure that we had those who were responsible, as well as informed on the same page. To manage that risk, any out-of-scope expectations? Absolutely. As opposed to just sort of a financial case. We did, and one of the key pieces that you just kind of touched on there is we had a very rigorous change control process to manage the risk. We knew what we had to do for the July 2012 Go Live, and that meant that from a top-down, Joe Tucci and his executive operating committee needed to see the extensions that we wanted to put on SAP, zero core modifications, very small number of extensions that we had to put in to support EMC's business practices. And we were very strong about staying to that core vanilla, stay SAP, stay vanilla on SAP. Right out of the box, right out of the box. Bill, I want to just drill down on things that Sylvie was talking about before we came on, but you're a walking use case machine, meaning that you guys have done a lot of things internally. We've always talked about that because you guys do a lot of stuff internally within EMC, that leads to market, and that goes from Sanjay, you know, Marcinani's been on, now Vikas was on earlier. So share with us some use cases. We had the VCE guys on, and they're a classic and an early adopted market where it's really big deployments, you got a little V block, you got some SAP stuff going on there too as well. But what can you share in terms of reference architectures that you guys are baking out? Is there any new updates on key use cases and reference architectures that you could share that are getting almost turned key to the point where, you know, support teams and sales guys can go in there and really roll that out? Yeah, I think one of the big things that we've taken away from this is, it's actually two-fold. One within the core SAP landscape, the virtualization of the database, the data itself. A lot of customers shy away from the data tiers. There's vendors out there that say it's not supported, it's not manageable, you can't scale to the levels that we've gone. I think we've proven that with a lot of headroom and a lot of growth for the future, nothing to shy away from in that space. We've proven that it can be done. We found some best practices around the layout and the builds that I think we've given back into the EMC and the VCE teams to take forward to their customers and support them in doing that. And the second space is another emerging technology, the tier three of the application development that we've been hearing about here at EMC World with Pivotal, the application integration. We recognize that SAP wasn't a single entity in the data center, but it had a fleet of other applications that needed to send or receive data from SAP. We created this concept that we call our application integration cloud using the core technologies within Pivotal, the spring libraries and the gemfire caching and the capabilities in that space. That is now something that we're talking a lot with customers about to say, can you do this in your data center? Is this something that's viable for you? Allowing cloud to cloud messaging rather than the old traditional brick and mortar point to point EAI patterns that you might have seen that were always congestion on the network and heavy traffic patterns. How are those conversations going? Where's the stage of those conversations? I think the conversations are quite enlightening to a lot of customers. There's a lot of space in there for customers who want to build with proprietary tool sets using heavyweight enterprise service buses. We like to think of the concept as the cloud infrastructure or a cloud messaging bus so that we can think about how we can have point to point communications outside of our data centers. So as we start thinking about the core monolithic application that is SAP, maybe we can start breaking off components and putting it into a bursting model, into a hybrid cloud or even a public SaaS solution as we look out to the future. Let me ask you a question. I know we're tight for time. We're going to do the wrap up the long, long, long day here, day three of our coverage. Kind of a step back question. What have you, what was the biggest surprise that you've seen in your project that you've worked on and other work where you've literally fallen out of your chair or taken big pause, good or bad around, wow, this is going to be impactful. Something that you might not have seen that has transformed, that has materialized in front of your eyes. I think some of the aspects of just the delivery is something that jumps out at me right away. In the past, we would have had to have a very large project team in the infrastructure space to build and deploy these systems to support, in our case, nine landscapes of SAP to help that 27 month life cycle. In the past, we would have had as many as 25 infrastructure resources building it. With the virtualization with the VCE and the VBlock in the converged infrastructure components, we're really doing that with about seven infrastructure resources. And most of those are part-timers. So a fraction of the size and the scope of what we had in the past, total cost of ownership and operations after the fact is far simplified as well. Wow, that's impressive. What kinds of things would you do different if you had to do it again? I mean, I know it's sort of a cliche question, but I mean, seriously, thinking about it, I mean, if you had to do it again, what kind of things would you do different or what kind of advice would you give to somebody who wants to do this? I think one of the bigger challenges that we had was staying in front of the business, staying in front of their needs. The traditional model of, we went in with the assumption that we might need about six or seven landscapes to support the 27 month program. We came out of it with nine and actually a 10th transient environment that we spun up during one of our final cutovers just to do some POC testing. So I think if another customer was thinking about it, I jokingly say, never underestimate the process team's ability to create a need for a new environment. So in that space, think about how quickly you can manage and how quickly you can deploy an environment, setting up templates, setting up best practices, setting up a model that can turn you into more of an IT as a service practitioner rather than a reactionary type of a service function. So thinking about that, I think is one of the key components. Bill, we got to wrap up, but I want to get you to the final word here. What is your impression of EMC World? Just off the top of your head, share with the folks out there who aren't here. What's the experience, what's it like? What are the key notable things that you can point to and share with the folks out there from your perspective? I think we're seeing in a lot of the keynote breakouts, the emergence of the application and the data being the center of the universe. In the past EMC Worlds, we've been talking a lot about how our storage systems can support it. The development of IT as a service and now ultimately the tier three applications in the cloud transforms a lot of what we're thinking about. Our discussions talking about SAP at EMC World is something that may not have been so popular in the past. We're getting a lot of traction out of that. Thinking about how we can manage and support our applications in the future. Bill Reed here inside the cube. I mean that's really awesome and you just summarized basically how we feel as well. The application centric world, infrastructure is code. This is what's happening. It's really an amazing time right now. We're going to reflect inflection point. It's fantastic. This is EMC Worlds, exclusive coverage on the Silicon Angle. We write back with our show wrap up after the short break. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back. Thanks for having me.