 back live inside theCUBE. theCUBE is our third year here at EMC World, SiliconANGLE.tv's extensive coverage of EMC World. It all started here at EMC World. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we're here with a CUBE friend, a CUBE alum, Chad Sackich. Welcome back. Dave, John. Congratulations on a new role, big promotion. You're very humble about it, but it was, I think, well-deserved. You've made your mark. I think the senior executives at EMC saw that. But more importantly, and I can vouch for this, the customers within EMC saw that. They know you and they have a great deal of respect for you. So congratulations. That's very, very, very kind. So this is amazing. I mean, it's awesome to see the growth of EMC and EMC World. Isn't the vibe here incredible? Yeah, and you know, we're honored. The CUBE started at EMC World 2010. Yeah. So how do you guys feel like this EMC World compares to last year or the year before? Yeah, so I think that two years ago, it was like your journey to the private cloud. It's like, okay, that was good. That was great. We had Jeremy on and he basically told us, you know, things are going to change, boys. You know, we're going big or we're going home. And we at the time, it was pretty big. It was pretty good, but you ain't seen nothing yet. Yeah, I mean, also it was in Boston when we did the first CUBE and it was, it was a Boston feel to it. Shout out. So it was EMC culture, it was in Boston. And then, you know, we had Tucci on, we were talking about the cultures never, as always evolving. And then since coming to Vegas with the messaging, so tight with Jeremy right now, and so right on and relevant. And plus the execution on the product side, the V specialist and the TC's are all here. So like what you're seeing is a real energized company that's going for it, right? Absolutely. And there's legit relevance to the markets they're going after. So, you know, although the products, David and I always kind of talk about them, the products are evolving. There's some holes being filled through acquisition, organic growth, but EMC absolutely is a technology company. And as I said yesterday, and the HBH conversation seven minutes ago, is that EMC is like maybe the GE and then VMware explodes into a whole nother level. And then these acquisitions will come in. And so we're watching EMC is possibly the next GE of tech. And you know, and look at it that way with VCE and some of the conversion infrastructure stuff. And with big data, whole new sets of solutions. And, you know, Tom Roloff was on earlier talking about, you know, how he's structuring the sales force, or his force was, you know, they got the territories on the sales side, but he's going vertical where they're talking not about IT issues, lines of business. And the language is different. It's like, I want to solve my problem, increase sales, deliver better genome analysis and pharma or whatever. So, you're seeing that kind of dialogue in an EMC geek IT world. So you're seeing, I'm seeing both. I see the blending of the two. And I think it's exciting. And I think 14,000 people is a record. So congratulations. It's definitely reflecting a lot of change and adaptation, right? And I think, frankly, my, I think one thing that, we're not perfect by any means. Not even close on any one of the parts of our business, but we're striving for perfection always. You know, you can see that from the executive team. We all want to be the best that we can be. But the other thing that I'd say is, you know, we're very adaptable as a company. You know, we're changing furiously. I mean, if I take a look at the roughly, you know, three and a half thousand folks in the EMC pre-sales team, our technologists that work with our customers, right? You know, we're pushing them hard to go deeper, further, faster. We did a contest, an extreme certification challenge here. There was one guy, one dude. I think his name's Tom Tolles. He has 20 expert level certs coming into the conference, and here he did five more, right? But the thing that's fascinating to me is, that learning is constant, because like for example, right now, one of my biggest challenges, we don't have enough people, even amongst that 3,500 people within EMC, or if you extend it out to our partners, which is a huge extension of EMC, they're part of our family too, right? There's not enough people out there who know Hadoop, Hadoop Enterprise, can go and talk about Vfabric app director, or Vfabric data director, and how we can help build next generation apps, and use Cloud Foundry, and it's a real trick, right? We're talking to Pat Gelsinger, and one of the things that, another observation to your point, and I want to ask you, and it leads to a question that's relevant to your new role is, the transformation on the product side. So, separate from the structure of the VCs and doing some cool stuff with EMC labs, the product sides are much more integrated now, and you've always been up on the demos, we've known you for doing, showing off the latest technology, how this works and that works. Now you have an integrated product set where you have Vmax working with other stuff, you've got Greenfield, Iceland, now you're talking about open source with Hadoop, you just mentioned that, so I want to get your perspective, as you go out to the field, and you have to go to the customers and to your own force, there's an integrated mindset now, the value propositions are changing, how do you roll that out, and how do you talk to your troops? The first thing that we do is, we create no air gap between us and our partners, so first things first, literally we've got all of the TCs here for our TC boot camp, our conference, our TC conference, we said doors wide open to a partner, so first things first, you get some better scale and leverage and you bring your partners closer, right? The second thing is that you have to have both generalists, which has a negative connotation, right? So people, oh, they're just a generalist, right? I think of it this way, they're more like an architect, they can traverse the entire world of IT, of big data, the whole portfolio, how the pieces fit together, right? You need that, and roughly that's about half of our entire presales community are composed of those types of folks. But then equally important, you have to have people who are deeply specialized, so we have specialization focused around around ISLON and VNX, we've got specialization around VMAX and VPLEX and RecoverPoint and also mainframes, we've got specializations around SAP, around Oracle, around the management and orchestration stack, I mean, did you do anything with talking about Razor and Puppet earlier? Not yet, we're going to answer, I was going to answer that question. How cool is that? Seriously, is that cool? Yeah, it's phenomenal. And the story behind that, I did a blog post on it, I think the story behind the story is actually the cool part, so basically- Talk about that, yeah. There's a guy, he came into EMC 2010, right? And his name's Nick Weaver, he joined the team on the V Specialist, focused on VMware and EMC in this presales capacity. He quickly kind of, everyone's unique, every human is unique. His superpower, right, was the ability to learn super fast and to be able to uberize anything. Uberize became a Nick-ism and we all kind of adopted it, where you take an idea and turn it into something that's way better, right? Not invent the original idea, but take the idea and make it way better. So, he was struggling internally and by the way, he quickly started to touch all of this stuff and we said, you know what, this guy should really be in the office of the CTO. So, we worked to move him into the office of the CTO, where he could have a broader impact across the whole of EMC. And in there, he starts to work on OpenStack, building Clouds with VCloud Director, and he started to get exposed to some of the challenges that we've got. Like, look, if you're building a thousand node Hadoop cluster, like we have, right? You're building a lot of servers, you're constantly building them, tearing them down, you know, applying stuff, and we didn't have a common EMC way that we were doing builds of our infrastructure. So, he goes off and he tries to find something that could take a bare metal server build and automate its installs. There's lots of tools out there, but none of them satisfied Nick Weaver. He's a bit of a perfectionist in a good way. So, he goes off and he starts to build his own thing. And so, he builds an idea prototype called Razor based off of Occam's Razor, right? Trying to cut through, you know, the simplest way, you know, to solve a problem is usually the right one or the simplest answer is usually the right one. And it's this beautiful little thing that allows you to boot a server. It pixie boots, builds a little microkernel, microkernel boots up, connects to the Razor server, and then it builds a declarative object-based model for how that server is defined. Now, it's a fancy way of saying it makes you able to build anything fully automated in like a fraction of the time. So, when Paul Moritz talks about, you know, one administrator managing, you know, thousands of Google? And IT should be the same, right? So, what ended up happening was he developed this thing and people were like, holy smokes, this is really, really cool. What are we going to do with it? Because this is not, I mean, we're going to use it for ourselves, but there's so much more that we could do for this. And we said, why don't we connect it up into Puppet? And so we reached out to the Puppet Labs guys, and the Puppet Labs guys are the ones who build the cloud automation for all of the big clouds. You know, they've been on theCUBE a couple times. Well, we have DevOps section, DevOps angle, a new section on SiliconANGLE now, and we've been covering Puppet, Chef, Ops, Code, all these guys, and automation's been app-specific. But to get into the EMC world, and you guys, you know, it's a validation one for open source. Congratulations to Puppet. But it really, it shows the direction of the versatility of EMC. Like you guys are moving into configuration, management, automation at this nice little layer, abstraction layer between gear and apps. The fact that we now contributed that to the open source movement, and now it's part of Puppet, and the whole story highlights to me, holy smokes, if you think EMC is a storage company, you know, yes, we are the best storage company, but we're far, far more than that. One. Number two, think about the culture that creates an opportunity where a guy can go from an idea and innovation to eventually something that is big enough that it is press release, you know, worthy in like a period of like a few months. That's a culture of fun. It shows some nimbleness too. It shows, you guys are nimble, but how did that all play out? So this literally, what happened to you? Did he bring it to you? Who did he bring it to? Basically the office of CTO started to circulate it within EMC. We reached out to the guys at Puppet Labs and said, hey, what do you guys think about this? They're like, holy smokes, we've been trying to solve this problem of bare metal, you know, automation all, because they were basically taking stuff once systems were booted and up. They wanted something where they could automate the whole stack from beginning to end, and they go, this solution is more elegant than any of the ones that we've ever been looking at. You know, let's partner up, and we're like, hey, cool. So. Dave and I were just talking earlier on the intro segment chat about how, he asked me about open stack, and a lot of these open source movements are not pivoting, because the market's growing, pivoting's kind of a negative term, but finding a center point is Pat Gelsinger said, you know, and we talked about Red Hat, there'll be no Red Hat for Hadoop. And what you're seeing is that the opportunity is that people are trying to find a home where they can put their base camp and grow their business. So for Puppet, they've always been on the app side, open stack, and another one is trying to find a home on how they commercialize the stack, if you will, for cloud. So you can't ignore EMC, right? So EMC's got a lot of customers, they've got a lot of other products. But here's the interesting thing about that story, and it's the dirty little secret of this business, and we all know it, is that we spend an enormous amount on labor. If you look at how much is, if you look at server and storage spending, just server and storage and everything around it, about 60% of it goes to labor. And that's a problem, that stifled innovation. Everybody talks about the 70% goes to maintenance and 30% goes to innovation. That's the reason why, it's going to get all these hardened processes. And so, and people have been afraid to talk about this because oh, my job's going to go, but I think now people realize Joe talks about the waves. We're in a new wave, I've got to catch it, surf's up, I've got to go. And it's opportunity. Yes, absolutely. And who wants to be the person doing server builds? And Google got it right. Yeah, right. By the way, Google's deployment of Puppet is one of the largest Puppet deployments in the world, and the CTO of Puppet came from Google, and by the way, he's going to be on Chad's World Live later at 5.30. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, great. Well, I mean, I think provisioning has always been a huge issue, and getting it right as opportunity, but also if you get it wrong, as consequences, I mean, you know from doing all your demos and integration work, bad configuration management is... I've got a demo, one of the Chad's World Live demos. We've got, let's see, four hours to get it right, is currently not working, so stay tuned. Are you looking for that? You know that. Uh-oh, we don't have internet. You know what's funny? While we're recording this in the background, the Cloud Freaky video has been playing. Have you guys seen that? Which, the Cloud Freaky, is this one here? No, no, it's us dancing. Oh, no, I have seen that earlier, yes, yes. What do you think of those dance moves? This SVP can dance. I'm glad you got a new role. I want to see the karaoke, I want to see the dancing. Of course, we'll be running for the day. You should stick with that. So, do you guys know the story of who's the gorilla reveal at the end? No. So, it's Vaughan Stewart from NetApp. Oh, okay, right. So, check it out. Go online, Cloud Freaky. You'll find it on YouTube. Vaughan Stewart, all right. Can you believe that? Friend or foe? Yeah. That's cool. He's a good sport. That is cool. He's a good sport. So, what else have you guys seen here that you think is cool? Did you like those demos during the keynotes? Oh, they're great. I thought you and Pat were great. I mean, I like, first of all, but him getting in Captain Kirk's chair, the Star Trek thing was, I thought, the best part. And then Pat's reaction to that was pretty funny. I always wanted to do that. Were you guys in the room when it was going or were you here? We were broadcasting. Did you hear the explosion from here? Yes, we did. We could see it and hear it, but it was muffled. I heard people that took, right next to it said they freaked. It was definitely changed there. As George, as we were, because the demo, right, was basically a Hadoop, Green Plum Hadoop running on an Iceland cluster. And we wanted to highlight, hey, look, this thing can run even with distributed node failures, right? We're like, well, look, failing a node is kind of lame, like unplugging power. We want to, you got to zazz it up a little bit, right? So, but then we had this big discussion. It was funny with Jeremy in the run-up the week before where literally we debated for a few hours the question of, very deep, important question of, is it possible to have too many explosions in keynotes? The conclusion? No, no, no. You could not have too many bombs going on. But then we said, look, if we don't give the audience some cue that there's about to be something that happens, people are going to have like a heart attack, right? Yeah, like a blue man group before they throw stuff at you, right? So we built in a little like a forklift backing up, beep, beep, beep into the script so you could kind of go, hey, something's going on, right? So Chad, we have, Dave and I were talking about, we're going to get your comments. You always talk about VMware. We're interested in what's going on with VMware because I'm not seeing a lot of VMware stuff here. I mean, I'm seeing it, but not as much as usual. A lot of action going on at VMware right now, they're in a great position. You know, we're seeing a lot of stuff with VCE, we're talking about VBlock and SAP, just the EMC, VMware, coalition is going great. What's the update on your end? I think you're out in the field. What's the traction? Where are they doing well? Where they need to do a good, better work? So first things first, there's more VMware here than there's been in any year gone by. The VLabs, we've done together jointly. You know, the announcement that we were going to be integrating vCenter ops, vCenter operations, so I shouldn't use the vCops acronym, right? VCenter operations being integrated with VNX's storage analytics, that's a huge deal, right? Like, there's no analog to that in the industry yet. I'm sure others will follow, but people want to get that kind of integrated end-to-end view. And frankly, the hundreds of thousands of customers for VNX's represents a great, you know, entree for VMware to get this vCenter ops in more people's hands, right? And I'm sure Rich didn't mention it in his keynote, but it's priced to have nearly 100% attach rate, right? You know, it's priced to any customer who's looking at a VNX, if you're not asking your partner or the EMC that you're talking to to have storage analytics included, you're missing out because it's basically a very, very, very nominal price. Which is so smart, by the way. Exactly, right? You know, I mean, give them the data and they'll figure out new ways to consume, new applications. Exactly, right now. It's just going to drive business for you. That's really smart. So what's working is customers continue to just absolutely dig vSphere. The vSphere stack continues to be well ahead of the competition. Now, A Hyper-V version three is going to be coming soon and it definitely adds a lot, but at the same time, it's a continuous game of LeapFrog and I, knowing Steve Herrod and the other smart engineering folks in Palo Alto there on Hillview, I can't anticipate them giving an inch of ground to their competitors. So basically, if I could just fall on that. So the problem is, like several years ago, the VMware storage piece was so deficient and so lacking and it was just a bottleneck for so many customers. And the whole industry, VMware obviously included, had to work so hard for that and then the whole VAI thing and now you're seeing the innovation at the tail end of that. We've been talking about this for years. You said, David's coming and here it is. We've talked roadmaps and it's really coming to fruition and that's why capabilities like the ones we're talking about are now available today. View is also, I think that VMware could do more. You know, if I'm sitting as a external party kind of looking in, view five is very, very good. And I think that they need to not lose, it's always difficult as your portfolio broadens to have your field force and your channel and your partners and your marketing talking about the everything, right? View, you know, again, we're using view 5.0 here in the V Labs and there's now a vCenter operations plugin and connector for view, which is really, really sweet. Right, again, all this stuff ties together. You know, obviously that's a battleground where it's them and Citrix for the most part and they're battling it out fast and furious, right? We obviously have to support whatever our customers want. We've got vSpec solutions for Citrix, for view, right? But it's an area where I think market perception and go-to-market is actually not representative of the coolness that's in their core product and they made an acquisition actually yesterday, a small one, to continue to extend out that lead. So you can check it out later if you'd like. But the place where I think the biggest, another place where they're hitting on all cylinders, by the way, is Cloud Foundry and the V Fabric Suite is super, super hot, right? But the question is like, again, how do you commercialize these open, free models? They're winning them hearts and minds of developers, which I think is Paul's strategy. But the one place where I think they're still not firing on all cylinders, and again, I don't think it's a product thing, I think it's a go-to-market thing, is on the management and automation stack. The number of customers who I talk to that aren't using VC Orchestrator, which is free and included, the number of customers that aren't yet using vCenter operations, right? The number of customers that aren't using vCloud Director is disproportionate to how much those things can provide value. Why, what's the gate to the process? No, the brutally honest answer, which we should always give, right? It's awareness. I think it's awareness and the sales force, right? So the customers aren't aware, they keep turning to VMware and VMware's partners going, give me the latest, fastest version of vSphere, and then they aren't basically spending the time to educate them about the sheer coolness that is vCenter operations, that is the whole suite, by the way, it's incredibly rich and they're bringing all that stuff together, or vCloud Director. So what are you seeing out there? So just looking at our little dashboard here about the trending items in our little network day on our vertical engine, or as we call vFinder, our new product, not to be confused with vCenter and vOPS and all that other good VMware stuff. Cloud Foundry just announced a deal with Kinveh, a startup in Boston that we met two weeks ago. Yeah, Kinveh doing platform as a service. So obviously VMware's got platform as a service. We've been having a debate about this as two schools of thought out there in the community. A race to zero value, which is a hosting model, and then added value with software wrapped around it. So you talk about Puppet, that's a little added value, you're adding to your bad metal provisioning. You're seeing platform as a service, there's a lot of demand for platform as a service. What do you hear in the field relative to this? Because what you're talking about is that's where the hybrid cloud action is right now. You know what I think is again this transform yourself challenge for us? I mean, I hear a lot personally from customers. Our field, by and large, doesn't hear enough. And you know why? Those conversations are generally not being had at the infrastructure team level, right? And that's an exposure for anybody who's focused at the infrastructure. It's an exposure in what way? These platform as a service models, many, many enterprises that I talked to at least are looking to both use external PAS offerings, so they want to use cloudfoundry.com, but they also want to create their internal platform as a service that they can use for internal development. Most enterprises have got some common stack, you know, the older versions of it was like the lamp stack, right? You know, Linux, Apache, blah, blah, blah, right? You know, now there's a modern stack versions which are more like the V fabric portfolio of stuff, which still of course has Tomcat server in there and things like that, but they want to develop something internally that's going to sit on some sort of infrastructure. But fundamentally the person who's driving that demand isn't an infrastructure person. The infrastructure person doesn't even know about it. It's being driven out of an app dev team, right? And what I'm saying is we've got, you know, sometimes as the infrastructure player, you've got some blinders on, right, to something that's going on outside your space. We shouldn't, because that's not outside our space, right? But, you know, if it was one of your colleagues, I've seen so many inspiring tweets over the last, did you see this one that I was talking about? It was, I can't remember which analyst it was, but. And what was the conspiracy theory? Well, the tweet, no, the tweet was depressing because it was real, it was not a conspiracy theory. Oh, okay. He goes, I'm on an elevator, and inside the elevator there's an EMC employee and then someone who's just here at the casino. And they see all the signage, they see all the people wearing the stuff, all pumped up, hey, EMC world. What's EMC? And they go, what's EMC? And the EMC here goes, we're a storage company. And you're just like, oh, you know. And the comment was, you need to train your own people about to redefine who you are, right? And the comment back to this question about platform as a service is, our story includes all of those things. We've got answers. Yeah, there's a pathway to that market. There's a gateway to that market. But if we're blinded to it. Okay, so there's a risk. So you agree, you're not a storage company, what are you? We're basically the purveyors of disruption. We're leading the whole transition towards cloud, big data, right? And we're doing that through a full stack of solutions that range from all sorts of stuff at infrastructure, all sorts of stuff at the virtualization layer, all sorts of stuff around the application layer, all sorts of stuff around end user computing and big data and analytics, right? Now, we need to figure out how we can wrap that up into something you can say on the elevator right before the person gets off. But that's who we are. Yeah, you are the future of information technology is really what you're talking about there, but that's a funny story. Okay, Chad, great to have you on theCUBE. We're getting a hook sign here. Chad's World, great stuff. Congratulations on that promotion. Thank you for making time. And we'll see everybody, including you guys, right? 530, Chad's World Live. We've got Scott McNeely coming on at 5.15, so right after that. Oh, forget McNeely. Come on, we got to have Scott on, old friend. We're going to make, he's going to be really a known quantity after he comes on theCUBE. He's going to say, I used to be famous and now I'm on theCUBE. He's a good dude. He's a good dude. We'll be right back with SiliconANGLE.tv's extensive coverage of EMC World Day 3, wall-to-wall coverage, 120 guests this week. CUBE is having a full run summer tour. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.