 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, we are here on the Cube. We're at EMC World 2014, day two of wall-to-wall coverage. We've had a lot of great guests on yesterday. We've got a full slate for you today. Actually running two cubes for the first time ever, so double the pleasure, double the fun, double the insight from the guests that we're able to bring on from this great event. I'm joined on this segment with my co-host, Steve Keniston, the storage alchemist. Thanks for passing it over there, Jeff. Like Jeff said, live here, Las Vegas, EMC World 2014. Lot of great guests, so let's get started. We've got Brendan Farrell, director of strategic partners for SHI. So Brendan, why don't you help us set the stage a little bit, tell us a little bit who SHI is so we get a good understanding. Sure, absolutely. So we're a 25-year-old reseller, so we play in the space from Fortune 5 to all the way down to the small, in-market customer. Our focus today and has always been on helping customers realize what they own, how to best utilize their assets. And so growing up in the software spaces, what we did, that really leveraged us and put us in a great position as we learned more about the great technologies that are coming out from EMC and other partners going forward. So our focus is and always will be on driving solutions around business outcomes for our customers, whereas we're not married to any specific product, we're married to what the customer's trying to accomplish. Very good, you're here obviously at EMC World. Tell us a little bit about first impressions of the show and then kind of SHI's relationship with EMC. Sure, so it's been a tremendous show so far. From Joe Tucci's kickoff yesterday to the things we heard from Mr. Gould and going into that, it's not going away. We're gonna continue to be asked to do more with less whether you're in IT or any other part of technology. So the fact that EMC is bringing to bear solutions around making that easy and going to the cloud are very interesting things to me. I think the acquisition of DSSD yesterday that they announced is super interesting and it's one of the most interesting pieces I've heard so far is the possibilities of where we can go and when you look at our relationship with EMC, we've been selling an EMC partner for 10 years and a Microsoft partner for over 20 years and specifically around EMC we were helping customers with the transactional side and as our skill sets developed from a sales perspective and from a technical perspective, we've been able to understand again those business outcomes of what our customers want and really strive towards helping them understand what good looks like and trying to make things happen. So our business is a distributed sales force so we're in 24 offices across the country and when you look at that, we're able to take from different verticals or whatever it might be different areas of the country and take best practices around EMC technology that maybe are happening elsewhere. So it's a great partnership for us so far and we're excited to learn more about what's going on this week. Great, so you talked about EMC obviously and then you also mentioned Microsoft. Tell us a little bit about kind of that whole ecosystem, the Microsoft EMC ecosystem kind of what you guys are bringing to the table to these days to really help your customers kind of advance where they are today. Sure, so again, Microsoft partner for over 20 years, when you look at the mid-market space for Microsoft, we're number one or number two depending on what month it is, right? And how much we sold the previous quarter, exactly. So it's a great partnership for us and again it's where we grew up and it's a large portion of our business but again we've always been focused on the application which is if you look at the market and what's been going on people are now coming around to being focused on the application and not necessarily the speeds and feeds of the gear itself, that's always been where we were. So we feel like we're able to help customers in a faster manner because today where everyone else is going, we've already been there and that's how we've been focused for our customers always. So when you look at what those companies are doing together, Microsoft and EMC, I am sequel 2014 is something that's been very interesting to us and to our customers so far. So we had a lot of people that were not necessarily on the fence but evaluating SQL as where it goes with the big data type of transactions that they're looking at and platforms that they're wanting to stand up going forward and some of the things that Microsoft has done around SQL with just straight out of the box on VNX is 3X faster than the next competitor when it comes to a hybrid solution and SQL 2014 itself 10X plus on the transaction side. So that's huge improvements and performance and then on the storage side and reducing the amount of disk that you need, you're talking 45% there. So it's fantastic for our customers and we really are enjoying everything that we're learning about that specific part of the business. I think that that piece of partnership is so interesting in that you got people that have controlled things in their area for quite a long time and seeing that they're starting to even co-develop if you will. It's not the right word but co-develop, co-operate maybe. Going forward is a very interesting thing for all of us. So talk a little bit about, you used to talk to a lot of customers around the field about some of the huge technical challenges or I guess megatrends that are facing all these CIOs with cloud, big data and how are you helping them prioritize? How are you helping them figure out what to do first? We talk a lot about megatrends but you're down in the field with the people that actually have to implement it. So what are you telling them? How are you helping them? Right, so I would say that it's customer specific so everyone has a different use cases to what they're trying to accomplish and when we focus on business outcomes and not on the megatrend itself of big data is what you need to address. So look at things like Icelon and all these other tools. We want to truly understand what the customer's trying to do. So we may go down a pivotal path for someone, we may go down an Icelon path. This new DSSD acquisition is going to be huge for, it immediately came to mind for me. A lot of our customers that we've been talking to, I would love to have flash across the board but I don't have the capacity in that model to do what I'm trying to do. So it's the way we approach it and the things that we hear are the megatrends. I mean cloud has been out there, VDI has been out there for a really long time. We haven't seen so many people adopt that in the fashion that may be the industry thought but flash is certainly where things are. We're having a lot of conversations around flash but interesting data that was shown yesterday in the keynotes is even out to 2017, flash is only expected to be 4% or 3.5% of the market. So it's not going to overtake traditional storage if you will. Our interest again is what's best at the customer level and we're seeing so many different things from the VDI and how flash can impact that again. Using that as an example, because that is a conversation that's been looming for a long time and hanging out there and there hasn't necessarily been all the technology that was needed to help a customer stand up a very large five, 10,000 seat VDI deployment. And are a lot of these around rip and replace old? Is it incremental opportunities because of a new initiative they're putting in place or is it just kind of a marginal improvement based on new technology to do what they were doing before better? Yes. Yes. So it's all of those. Exactly. It's been very interesting in that SHI, we have had a long relationship with EMC, but our mid-market business started in 2008. So I have 5,000 and less employees. That market didn't exist for us. It did, but it wasn't a focus. We didn't have a business unit focused on it. So as we've grown up in that space, your people are leveraging technology because of the more with less thing that we talked about and we heard about yesterday from Joe Tucci, that that's not going to go away. So these people that are growing companies, they have to be able to leverage technology. So yes. Then we have seen a lot of Clarion upgrades. That happens quite often into the new VNX line. You know, it's really all over the board. I mean, we have north of 10,000 customers close to 15,000 customers. So you can imagine the amount of what's going on and how we're helping customers impact their businesses across the board. Yeah, good insight. Brandon, so the queue kind of stemmed from Wikibon.org. We have a lot of industry practitioners. Jeff and I have been doing this for the past couple of days and it's really great to get guys like yourself really have a lot of insight and a lot of knowledge and can really help our customers. So Jeff talked about the big picture, kind of who, what are some of the big things that we're hearing about cloud and big data? But I want to drill down just a little bit. You talked about SQL in SQL 2014 and you talked about big data. You kind of brought that up. Can you help our industry practitioners kind of maybe understand, you know, you think big data, do you necessarily think, you know, at least I do out of the box, do you think Microsoft SQL? And do you think EMC? And, you know, you hear about different Hadoop clusters and, you know, white box machines. But help us put that together and how practitioners might want to start looking at, okay, I know I want to do something with big data. I trust Microsoft and EMC. They're good brand names, right? What's kind of a direction and a path and what do you see? So around that specifically because SQL 2014 is so new, I wouldn't say we have enough at bats, if you will, to give specifics of what is going to be a best practice as a new standard going forward. The things that I'll say that are interesting to the customers we're interacting with and to our engineering team is the fact that it's 3X faster on VNX. That, you know, get 10X the performance on your transactions, 50X on queries. And the fact that it's in line memory, that really puts the customers in a position to do things with Microsoft. Which is, you know, again, to your point, like something I would have never thought of, that's almost the yin and yang, right? Exactly, totally. Yeah, what do you mean? And so it's been tremendous in that Microsoft's really pushing the envelope there and being innovators again, I would argue that they've, you know, they've been really good at what they do, but they haven't been pushing the envelope as much, at least from my perspective. And so it's great to see that they're doing that. I will tell you that, you know, there's so many different tools out there from EMC that putting all of those in front of a customer is not the right thing, so that would not be the approach we would recommend or that we've seen be successful. Really having a focus on the business outcome of what you're trying to accomplish with those technologies is where we always try to start and where we would advise people, because again, you could see all of these different technologies that would be beneficial to your business, but you don't want to go acquire that many technologies when maybe just specifically, you can do some development around, you know, application performance, right? So how do I maximize that with a fast back-end database super fast on Flash or whether it's DSSD or whatever the technology might be? Very good, so, you know, you've obviously had thousands of customers you talked about, what are some of the things you're learning from them about directions that they're looking at with both EMC and Microsoft? That hybrid cloud is going to be the standard. You know, public is tremendous and there's a lot of great offerings out there from a lot of great companies, but hybrid is where the majority of folks are going to land and, you know, just speaking about EMC and Cisco specifically, or it's not Cisco, Microsoft specifically, what's interesting to me in that realm is that they've positioned themselves with Microsoft Azure and SQL 2014 and being able to leverage EMC technology to be well positioned for a hybrid cloud solution. So hybrid cloud is the thing that we're hearing a lot. Again, VDI is something that's not going away only because it's been such a conversation for such a long time. And how do I get my apps to do what they need to do at the rate they need to and as reliable as they need to? Those are the things that we continually hear. Obviously certain things like flash storage specifically come up, but there's not a clearly defined, again, the things that we're hearing, but it's that generation of VDIs not going away, big data, the things that we're talking about. Flash is so interesting and again, this DSSD thing, I think I mentioned it five or six times now, I'm so excited about it because in some of our larger customers that have high transactions and financials, they are so excited, I'm sure, just once they learn a little bit more about what the possibilities are. So, Brandon, we've talked a lot about it from the technology perspective, but from the business guys perspective and the workload perspective, where are the workload opportunities that you see in your customer sessions, some success in your prescribing to your other customers of where they're delineating which workloads where between private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud? What do you see in the market? So, as it relates to cloud, it's a bit all over the place. So, the answer I would give you around Microsoft and EMC specifically is when you look at BNX technology and you can reduce 80% plus, which is a crazy number when you think about it, on your exchange environment, right? So, the amount of storage required to support your mailboxes, depending on how many you have, the amount of data that you have out there and what your archive policy is, you can save 80% on storage. That's a crazy. It's a very real number. And certainly around SharePoint, the proliferation of data that's out there and content that exists, being able to scale that back and have it focused in the right way, the disk that you have or the flash that you have is a tremendous thing. So, I would love to see and expect to see more customers around SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange specifically really make a specific use case around why BNX, that product line is so specific and great for them. So, to give you the last word, we're getting a hook. If we see you next year, what are we gonna be talking about at EMC World 2015? We'll be talking about how SHI is still one of the fastest growing partners. That's a given. Absolutely. Give me something. Good commercial. Yeah, you gotta get one in. No, I think commercial, absolutely. You gotta get one in. I think we'll be talking about how DSSD is starting to change the game. 2015 is gonna be when that is relevant and real, I believe, in the marketplace. So, I think that'll be one of the main things we hear about. I think that we'll hear that a lot of partners have made some serious headway in the hybrid cloud space in just the next nine months. I would expect that to be the main thing. Okay, we'll mark the tape. We'll be back next year. We'll go back. No, we won't do that. They never do that on the news. We won't do that either. So, Brandon, thanks for stopping by theCUBE from SHI. We're here live at EMC World 2014. Wall-to-wall coverage, two cubes, three days. I don't know how many interviews we're gonna get through, but it's gonna be a lot. That's why we had it bringing in Steve to help us out and the full crew, Stu, Dave, John, David, Florian, the whole cast of characters is here. So, we'll be right back with our next segment in just after this short break. Thanks for watching. You're on theCUBE.