 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We're going to do a drill down and do a spotlight this segment. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm George, my co-host. Hi, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Josh Kahn is here. He's the vice president of Solutions Marketing at EMC. Josh, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Glad to be here. Good to see you. We were just talking about the, you know, a lot of really good action here. Congratulations. Thank you. Now, it's been a great show. We've got more customers and partners than we've ever had before at EMC World. And, you know, I think one of the exciting things here this week is the amount of really important topics that there are to talk about where our customers are leading the way in the organizations they work for. Our partners are leading the way with those customers. And EMC can play a big role. And I think it's a great opportunity for us to talk about what's going on. We're leading the way with those customers. And EMC can play a big role. Josh, Jeremy Burton was on earlier this morning on theCUBE. And we always like to get into the whole marketing because he's such a great marketer, as well as the product side. But one of the things he's always said is I want to make sure things are clear from a messaging standpoint. And then obviously the entertainment side of the here is great. Obviously education is always the case here at EMC World. So really, really well done on the messaging and the story. And one of the comments he mentioned was we want our customers. This is Jeremy Burton talking. We want our customers to know what we stand for in the messaging. You're involved in that. Solutions marketing, you have professional services, not services like SI, but you have channel partners. So it's a lot of messaging that everyone needs to know. One flag, what is that flag? Because you're involved in that. And what would you share with folks here? Yeah, I think the important thing is helping the entire market, our customers, our partners, and everyone understand just the complete breadth of EMC. And when you start to talk about something like that, it gets increasingly complicated, right? I mean, anything that's broad is going to have a lot to cover. And so the important thing is being very precise about how EMC views these big trends in the market and exactly what role we want to play. And I think it's, if I were to say there's one thing that's the most important about it, it's distilling out to the simplicity. I mean, you know, the hardest thing in the world is making something very simple. And in the world of technology and some of this emerging technology, it's very complicated stuff. And you guys have a lot of things going on under the covers. You've got four companies, four brands, and a lot of stakeholders, even internally, not just customers, you could get lost on the weeds. How do you up level that? You know, I think it takes a long time, and it takes a lot of energy. And actually one thing I'll tell you is it also takes an executive leadership team that really believes that it's a priority. And when you take somebody like Jeremy and David Goulden, for example, you know, David had the kickoff general session here at EMC World this week. A lot of people might not know it, but David himself and Jeremy himself spent, I would say, probably over 40 to 50 hours each on refining exactly how they wanted to talk about these very complicated topics. And it's just a desire to distill these complicated things into a very simple and understandable message. So Josh, let's talk about the scope of solutions marketing. I mean, it's big. It is, yeah. Just talking about the complexity. So what is the scope of the sphere of solutions marketing? Yeah, well I think a lot of times there's a desire to get very product centric in the technology world. We love our technology, we love our products, we think they do very cool things. But at the end of the day, what customers are really trying to do is capitalize on opportunities and solve problems in their business. And so solutions marketing is really about thinking about that customer opportunity or that customer challenge and putting the complete spectrum of products, services, technology, know-how together to enable them to succeed. And so that's oftentimes the right documentation, the right guides, the right benchmarks to scale and scope things in a way that makes sense. And also thinking about how they fit into the environment. The technology is great, but if it's not in the context of all of the other things that exist it actually may not solve the problem the right way. Yeah, we had Prasad Rampalian before too and you guys have always done a great job of sort of putting forth whether it's a reference architecture or some proof points and so forth. They're great customer freebies. I always tell the customers go access those things because companies like EMC make big investments and they're one of the best opportunities. Talk a little bit about, you guys have a lot of partners here. Let's talk a little bit about VSpecs and how that fits into the solutions, how people are receiving that, how it's evolved since, you know, a year ago when you guys announced. Right, I mean it's actually pretty amazing. We launched VSpecs a year ago and in the first year the success of VSpecs exceeded even our own expectations. And I think there's a really simple reason for it. It's the flexibility that comes with VSpecs and the choice both in terms of our partners and our customers. And so what we wanted to do, we believe in three paths to the cloud is the way we describe it and the first of those paths is the way people have always done it. It's taking a bunch of products, best-of-breed products, putting them together. And in that model you could pick exactly what you want to deploy and it's great in terms of flexibility but on the end customer there's a lot of work that has to be done to certify it, design it, deploy it, upgrade it. So that's why we created a Vblock with Cisco and VMware in 2009. Vblock is converged infrastructure which comes out of the box, ready to go, takes a lot of the burden off the customer to do the design and configuration deployment. But a lot of the configuration is pre-decided. Any color you want as long as it's black. Right, exactly. And so with VSpecs we wanted to come back from that a little bit and say, we think there's a place in the middle. We think there's a happy medium where you can get a lot of the simplicity benefit by moving some of the configuration, some of the proven aspects into it but also allowing for a little bit more flexibility in terms of hypervisors you might want or different aspects of the configuration. That's what VSpecs is. So for our partners, they can walk in almost any customer environment and have a solution that works for that customer. And the partner's able to add their own value to it and deliver something that's ready to go much more quickly. Yeah, so that was kind of the promise you made a year ago. It feels like you feel like it lived up to that promise. I mean you've shipped some well over 2,000 systems, right? Right, and we have hundreds of partners who have signed up and hundreds more that are starting to get going. I actually saw one VSpecs this week. It's an Avnet VSpecs that was very, very cool. It is a ruggedized mobile VSpecs. And so it's on wheels, completely submersible. So you drop it in water. It'll continue to operate. It has its own air for the cooling and circulation. So if the air outside is dirty or dusty, you don't have to worry about contaminating the components inside. And you can actually unplug it and it'll move itself on battery power from place to place. So I mean, I bring it up because it's a great example of the kind of innovation that our partners are putting into this platform. We certified the config, but then the partners took it to the next level and really built a real customer solution. And militarized it. Yeah, I mean, you could do a lot of things with it. I mean, you can imagine scenarios where California, we have a lot of wildfires from time to time. I mean, there might be scenarios where you've got people deployed in that kind of a scenario where you want to be able to move compute out into a field location and you need something that's ruggedized. So what's next for that? So you had VBlock, okay, right? The channel was clamoring for more. You gave them the choice. You've now ramped that up. What's next for VSpecs? You know, I think for VSpecs is to continue to support our partners in extending what a VSpecs can do. We built VSpecs Labs and launched the VSpecs Labs because, you know, I think if the trend in the technology industry is teaching us anything, it's that there's a lot of innovation out there. And the more you can open up your, the EMC or anyone's ecosystem to the innovation that's out there and the partners and the customers, the faster it's going to evolve to meet needs. And so we have VSpecs Labs now where partners can bring their configurations into our lab. We'll give in a VSpecs proven logo and make it a certified VSpecs config even if it wasn't invented at EMC. So I think that's a big effort for us is extending the reach, extending the scale and also continuing to support our partners and expand the number of partners who can deliver VSpecs. Yeah, one of the things you hear a lot about from EMC is that the TAM, expanding the TAM, you're always trying to go after markets that are big and trying to focus on markets that are growing faster than the overall market. That's a consistent theme that you hear. Now how about you guys? I mean, you talked to a lot of our customers and partners. I mean, you're at a lot of these events, a lot of industry events. I mean, what are you hearing about VSpecs? Well, here's what I'm hearing. One is channel partners and people in the field that are actually moving the product with you guys like the channel conflict resolution you guys have, clean messaging around the channel conflict. But they understand that there is a direct relationship with EMC, so there's a nice clean rules of engagement. So that's one positive one. The other one is gross margin. They love the gross profit message. So on the business side, they see EMC moving to a cleaner product portfolio where they can wrap higher gross profit services around it that they can deliver. And so getting that has been a much, they've seen progress in the ease of implementation, the ease of understanding, I guess it's training or whatever it's what you guys are doing. But that's, to me, that's kind of a nuance and no one really talks about. And, you know, Dave. Well, let me weigh in too. So what I hear from customers is we can't afford anymore to do non-differentiated heavy lifting. So anything that, because IT is so labor intensive, we just don't have the resources anymore. So anything we can do to reduce that labor content, that labor activity, we want to consume. On the channel, actually, I hear sort of interesting. The channel has historically made a lot of money helping with that non-differentiated heavy lifting. But they're seeing, with the whole Google effect and Amazon effect, that that world is coming to an end. So they're having to transform their services to John's point. They're, initially I think they were reluctant and now they're saying, wow, this great margin opportunity is here. For those that can respond and move quickly. And the ripple through effect to the customer is business value that they can create higher up the stack. And that is sort of the flow of value that comes from whosoever idea it was to create this stuff all the way to the customer. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, the evolution of the service model and the kinds of services that our partners are providing is going to happen. And there's going to be partners who embrace that and get in front of it and start adding value on top of and around the growing level of convergence that we're seeing or the growing level of pre-integration. And the great thing for the partners who've embraced it is the services that they can offer actually have a lot more business value to the end customers. And so, I think, as you point out, starting to evolve that service model is really important. So we're talking about TAM expansion before. One of the things we had Brian Gallagher on before, he was talking about, as well as Rich Napolitano, talking about Vplex, adding that in. Now there's a component of their solution with V specs that adds in Vplex as well. Is that a TAM expansion? Is that just a more competitive feature set? How does that fit? Yeah, that's interesting. I guess the way that I think of it is the growing need for continuous availability is just a fact of customer environments. Nobody is willing to accept anything being down anymore. When you want to do email in the middle of the night, if it's not available, you're pretty frustrated because you're already up in the middle of the night. And so, Vplex is a capability that we can put in front of pretty much any storage infrastructure to make sure there are no outage windows that we have to deal with, whether that's for technical failures that we didn't anticipate or maintenance windows. We have the ability to put the data in two places at once and keep it active and go back and forth with zero outage time. So the framework that I think about it from is really addressing the customer need that's growing and growing. And I think Vplex is doing a great job of that, which is what we're seeing in the Vplex business, which is great. All right, Josh. Well, listen, thanks very much. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Congratulations with all the hard work coming to fruition. And the program, the V-Specs program, we were actually there at the launch. Yeah, I remember. And covering it. And the tightening of the messaging, I think that really, everyone knows this kind of complicated stuff going under the hood, but I think really you guys have done a great job of crystallizing it for everybody. Thank you. In a clean way. Thank you. So props to EMC as they transform. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break. This is theCUBE exclusive coverage from EMC World Day 3 of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be right back.