 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone here in Las Vegas live at IBM Edge 2014. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder's looking angle. Joe Mykos, Dave Vellante, co-founder wigibond.org. Our next guest is Carl Deshine, who is the co-president of PCD Solutions, winner of the Pureflex Winning Edge Award. Also, we found out a Montreal Canadians fan, which as Bruins fans, you watch us. You know, Dave and I love the Boston Bruins, love all Boston sports except, yeah, although I like to range a little bit, seeing some of them growing up. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Good resist. Bruins and Bruins, that's kind of an interesting thing. I love the Montreal's away uniforms. I mean, they're now their home use. The dark uniforms are by far, Dave, the best hockey uniforms out there. Anyway, welcome to the Cube, thank you. So you're the winner of the Winning Edge. Tell us about the award. The award, it's because of the investment that we did, the success that we did to convert a lot of customers to that new kind of computing approach, the integrated systems approach. So that's for Canada. So what was the driver there? Why, it's not easy for a customer necessarily to say, okay, I used to buy my storage, my compute, my networking separately, and now I'm just going to buy them in one block. It's hard, right? Because they have organizations not set up that way. So how were you able to be so successful? I agree with your point, because within our company it will always say, pure flex is not something that is bought, it's something that has to be sell. So we need to understand the value of the integrated computing, and then tear that apart and put that all together and say, okay, I was going to improve the efficiency for a customer, and that's what we did. Like the first, what we did first, we bought our own pure flex, gave that to the engineer, and they looked at it, teared it apart, and put that back together, did a great report for my sellers to see if there's any possible pitfalls. So this built a lot of confidence my seller and they were able to bring the story on the market and start driving good conversation with customers. Carl, what are the customers, give us some examples. What are they doing with pure flex? What kind of applications are they running, and how are they changing their infrastructure? There's many ways, you can run, most of them runs VMware, so it goes very well with VMware. Some of them even have different type of load. They have UNIX load, AIX load, VMware load, Bermuda Linux, and all in the same frame, same box, same management tool. So that's one of the key. So typically what we'd like, the way we present it to a customer, we're trying to spend much less time on selecting the pieces and looking at more at the end result. It's kind of, let's say a puzzle, instead of looking at a thousand pieces puzzle, your focus is more on selecting the image on the box of the puzzle, so what you aim for, and then you turn that thousand puzzle to a bigger hundred pieces puzzle, and it's much more easier. So what kind of results do customers see? Can you share it with us? What they do when things faster, what they're cutting costs, are they saving labor and reshifting people to other tasks? I wonder if you could talk about the outcomes. As I said, because we spend much less time on selecting the pieces, more time is spent on the real added value, like okay, it takes much less time to do the implementation, so you go faster to put the implementation at the hardware in place, and then you can focus on the software, which is where the real value is, not like the infrastructure. So that's what, so there was some time savings, labor savings, and those people, sounds like they weren't fired, sounds like they were redeployed. Yeah, that wouldn't be a big, that wouldn't go over well. So they're redeployed toward the application. Yes, and they can start the application much faster, and it's kind of, and this is a good step for a cloud, the private cloud or hybrid cloud, or what I would say more, the beneficial things that you expect from a cloud, so it's efficiency, agility, like you can grow faster also, depending on you. So is that the big drive of people essentially trying to duplicate the public cloud within their own private infrastructure? At first when we sold it, no, but you see that's a very good foundation to do it. So now customers looking more and more of doing it has a private cloud. So to deliver good value to their customer. As a channel partner, when you're looking at something like Pure Flex, are you sometimes tempted to try to add in different components and say, oh well, maybe we can use this storage or maybe we could use this networking or are you pretty disciplined about it? I mean, as always, you know, if a customer says, well, I would buy it if, you know, what do you do in those situations? You know, that's the strain of Pure Flex because all of the pieces were very comfortable and brings a lot of value. So instead of spending our time on the pieces line, that's a, oh, I'd rather do it with this storage, let's say. Yeah. We bring back the conversation and then we, instead, we invest our time in best practices and patterns so that we can replicate on an, or the customer can replicate when they do a new deployment. So the time it's spent over there. And for storage, let's say, with Pure Flex because of the V7000 and store lines, if they want to use their existing, they just do it in the organization. So this is great. So that's actually quite unique in the industry. I think in fairness, I guess, Hitachi can do that as well, but IBM is unique in that regard. Now, so I have to ask you, so how are you, or are you at all affected by the Lenovo acquisition? Like parts of Pure Flex, the networking piece, I think goes over, right? And obviously any x86 goes over. So as a partner, what do you think about that? Do you have any concerns? How is IBM communicating to you? Okay. There's a couple of questions. Yeah, there's a lot of questions. And there's a timeframe. So if we go back, I think it's kind of January, end of January, when they announced that, it kind of put a bit of fear into our customers. Like the one that they were just making a decision on doing it, so it slowed down for us, it slowed down our business for a couple of months. Then we're a good reseller, but our main advantage we don't work for IBM, we work for the customer. So what we did, we did our homework to see how comfortable are we with that transition. So, so far so good. It lagged a bit for us, like it put a bit of fud, but now it's back on track. The only question marks still that for us who was a bit more of a pain is the power note, that it's not the power eight won't be available till at least a year. So that's the only cloud, the bad cloud for us. Okay, but there's only so much you can do about that, right, you can't control that. Now, are you also reselling storage or just? Yes, we do, yeah. Maybe talk about that a little bit. What's happening in the storage market? How's that changing? You're hearing about software defined, you're hearing about Flash. You know, a new portfolio from IBM, how does that affect your business? That's, they have a very good line of products now. So typically what we do, we take the technology, we're very good technologists, but at the same times, our added value is more the business. So we take that and say, we try to see what the path technology, if we can take that and bring value to the customer. And there's like, with the new announcement on the V7000, there's the new performance, this is so great, so we got, customer can use that. So Carl, I want to ask you about the customers. What is the critical top three things that they are working on right now? As they transform the IT, there's a lot of innovation strategies that include Flash, Cloud. What are the top three that you see across the customer base, where the most attention and investment are allocated to? We saw a lot of the movement out of the VDI, customer looking, implementing, desktop virtualization, that's a big topic. Typically when we go see a customer, we don't talk about Flash, we don't talk about technology for a sake. Solutions. Solutions, yeah. And VDI would be one. When we see a lot of movement on, sometimes customer doesn't call it Cloud, but they say, okay, we want to be more agile, we want to be more flexible, we want to reduce costs. So to us, equal private Cloud. So that's, to us, to private Cloud, it's more a journey than a project. So we are bringing a lot of our customer to that journey. How about application development? Is that hot right now? And how is that changing? I guess, but we don't do that. So it wouldn't be fair. But your customers are, they're moving fast around that? Yes, and you know what, it comes to my point on the Pureflex, so less time spent on implementing hardware. Even though we sell hardware, this isn't the main thing. Like hardware, it's only the first set. The real value is on the application. So they can have more time to better develop their. Do you focus on any particular application area? Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, VMware? We do a lot of SAP. We do a VMware big time. We do a lot of SAP. SAP, Ana, it's a big thing for us. We have a couple of customers who implemented that. That's pretty good. Do you have expertise there? Specific expertise? Do you get paid a higher margin because you have that expertise, or is that just something you do to drive business? I would say we got more project because of that. So you win more business? Yes. Final question I want to ask you is, what is the biggest surprise that you've had with Pureflex this year? That really shook you up and said, wow, a big surprise with Pureflex. Besides winning the award for the winning edge. That would be the biggest one. The other big surprise was we won against Buster. So that top, the brooms, so that top everything. But I mean infrastructure right now is hot. You can see OpenStack, the cloud. You mentioned private cloud. Has there been any big highlights and surprises you've had? I see more and the customer more looking into integrated systems more and more. That's a new way of doing the IT, a lot or a piece of the IT. So Pureflex, no, it just keep on going the way it was supposed to be. So no surprise, no surprise, it's good too. Yeah, so it's working well. It's working very well. Well, surprise or relief or satisfaction. There was no pitfalls or no pink paint. Well, Dave, as you know, infrastructure's a service or something that's on our mind. Carl, thanks for joining us inside the Cube. Really appreciate it. Go Canadians, well actually Rangers got up two games in the none. No, we'd like to see the games win to make it a series, you know? We don't want to make it that easy for them. They took out the goalie. I mean that's pretty, he slipped and lost his edge. Three series in a row. So same way. He's got to get his blade sharpened. This is the Cube. We're shopping our blade here talking to customers here at IBM Edge live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back here for this short break.