 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube. Covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. We're back everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Steve Chambers. Josh Kahn is here, he's the Senior Vice President of EMC Global Solutions. Josh, welcome back, good to see you again. Thanks, good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. EMC World, just when I think you guys can't hit, you know, new heights, we got the roar this morning, the beast, things were shaking, always good fun in those keynotes and hopefully some good news too, you know, I mean, some exciting announcements today and you know, hopefully people enjoyed it as well. Yeah, so you've got, you've got relatively new role. There's a new organization, a lot of organizational changes, you know, kind of internal plumbing I know, but maybe start with what you do in these days and what the solutions group is all about. Yeah, so I run the Global Solutions Organization. So what we do is we take the products from the Federation and from EMC and we design customer outcomes and then we engineer those outcomes to give our customers a jumpstart on getting the results they're looking for. One of the big changes was VCE is now part of EMC, you're part of Provene's organization. That's right, yeah. So that's kind of cool, a lot of solutions around converged. Yeah, exactly. What's new there? So we took, when VCE came in, we took the Global Solutions Organization that I ran, it's about 500 people and put it into Provene's organization because there's really a lot of synergy between the deployment of converged infrastructure and the deployment of the solutions on top of it. So take the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, you know, the fastest way to deploy the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is on a Vblock and you know, the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution is basically a bunch of software we've written to pre-defined service levels and automate the provisioning and configuration of those services. So it gives IT organizations a way to have their own sort of internal Amazon-like cloud. You do it with the solution my team's built on top of a Vblock and you can get it into your environment in 28 days or less. I think that's good, right? Because for the longest time, everyone's been having to handcraft hybrid clouds, have a collection of things. It sounds like your team's moving to almost like a skew for a hybrid cloud, right? You know, it's going to be a productized hybrid cloud because it doesn't have to be different every time, I don't really think so, right? You know, there's going to be dials and is that the direction you're going? That's exactly the direction, right? We want to make it as turnkey as we possibly can. Drop it in, it's up and running. Hey, you need more capacity. You know, add another one of these. There's lots of things they've done in the VCE architecture to allow more modular expansion of components so you can drop in the first VBlock and get up and running in a hurry. If you need more file-based storage, you can actually put file-based storage independently without a lot of compute or with less compute under the same control. So it's not only quick to get up and running now, the expansion is much easier and you still get that simplicity in the VCE experience over all of it. So what defines a solution? Is that an EMC? So we really have, I would say we have two different kinds of solutions. One that we do is a reference architecture. So that's where we're going to take a bunch of products. We're going to put them together and we're going to document how you deploy them, how you configure them, performance criteria, sizing guides, and we're going to put that in some kind of a white paper and deliver it to customers and partners in the market. That's a reference architecture. There's other kinds where we're actually going to define the outcome and write software to create that outcome and we call that an engineered solution. So solution is a word that can mean a ton of different things that they get. A lot of times when solutions become in vogue, people stop using the word product and start using the word solution to mean the exact same thing, but we mean really two very specific things. Reference architectures to help you deploy and be sure that you're going to configure it right and then engineered solutions that'll give you 80% of the answer right out of the box. So when you look at the market opportunity in those two broad categories, how's it break down? Is it bigger market for reference architectures? Because you get, I guess in theory, more flexibility? You can kind of do more things with it or is there a bigger market for the latter? Yeah, I think a lot of it, the way I look at this has much more to do with whether you're talking about kind of a discrete application or a fundamentally new architecture. So if you look at a hybrid cloud, that is a totally different way to deploy IT, to run IT, to operate IT. And so for that, you really do need, there were a lot of gaps. People were trying to build hybrid cloud, spending two years and millions of dollars not getting the answer. So we felt like if we wrote a little bit of code to fill in some of those gaps, we could really get that outcome. But there's other things that I would call a discrete application. So if you're going to deploy Exchange, for example, you're buying Exchange, you're going to buy the hardware and you're going to just kind of deploy that. End user computing actually, very similar, right? It doesn't take a totally new architecture. You need to buy the BDI platform and some compute and storage and get it deployed kind of on a standalone basis. So reference architectures are great for those really discrete transactions, discrete deployments, discrete use cases. Engineered solutions are great for the fundamentally new architectures. So how do you decide what to attack? I mean, everybody's got a limited budget. You have a big organization, but not unlimited budget. So how do you figure out where to go first? So a lot of that has to do with the Federation Steering Committee and it comes straight from the EMC squared strategy, to be honest. I think there's a belief that we've had for a number of years that cloud and big data and social and mobile are fundamentally changing the industry and they're going to create winners and losers and in the tech industry, we think that the two of the places we really need to invest are enabling our customers to build hybrid clouds and enabling our customers to build data lakes because we think big data is another big factor. So it really comes, I guess I would say, from the market but also from our top level EMC strategy on how we read the market and the things that we think are the most important for us to invest in. Is there a bit of a risk in this as well, though, because the more you do for customers, the more they're relying on you and that sounds like a great thing, but if you're shipping them a working hybrid cloud, then are they going to then ask you to run it for them and then you kind of get pulled in more and more? Do you see that? Yeah, so I guess what I would say is, Just kill me with that problem. Sports analogies are terrible, right? But I think we're kind of like, give me the ball company, right? We want people to count on us. I mean, we're powering and have always been powering some of the most important applications in the world and that's a position we want to be in. But what I would say is, yeah, absolutely. Some customers look at this and they say, hey, give it to me, I'll deploy it, I'll run it. Thank you. Others say, hey, I'll buy this stuff and put it on my site. Do you have managed services that can come run it or maybe they have a partnership with someone else that they want to run it as a managed service? And some people want to deploy it off-premise. And have it managed as an outcome off-premise. And we're seeing all of those models. We're working ourselves to provide more options and we're working with partners to provide more options. We really believe in choice. Sorry about data lakes a little bit, brought that up. So when we look at the market, you see about 40 plus percent of the revenue, the spend in big data, let's call it, is on services. And you say, wow, that can't be sustainable, right? And it's got to be a solutions guys, you know, Greenfield. Yeah, it's exactly right. Talk about the solutions you're building around data, data lakes, what you're doing with Icelon, what customers are doing with them. Let me learn more about that. You're exactly right about how this works, right? I mean, in the beginning, you get a new concept and you apply a lot of services to get the outcome. And then you say, oh, hey, 80% of our deployments have this common factor, let's engineer that. And that becomes the basis of the engineer solution. Clouds are way further along, right? We've been at it for much longer. Data lakes are much newer. So we launched our Federation Business Data Lakes solution at the beginning of the year. We are in directed access now. So we've got a handful, or actually a few handfuls of customers that we're working very closely with to make sure, as you say, we cut our teeth, you know, in a way where we can really focus and make sure we can support them all the way through. And there's a few things. So in that case, we're taking EMC storage and we're taking the Pivotal Big Data Suite virtualized on VMware and Cloud Foundry to build the applications on top of this data lake. So that's the foundation of our data lake, those Federation products. And then the engineered solutions work we're doing has three pieces. The first part is the platform manager. So that is a way to automatically deploy and configure the right analytics platform with the right storage and get that all set up, your data lake instance. Later this year, we'll add some data ingest capabilities and some data indexing capabilities. We'll also add a data governor, which will enforce data policies and make sure that people can only get access to the data that you want them to have access to. And we'll put a data and analytics catalog on top, which is the self-service engine that data scientists and analysts will be able to use to go get these environments themselves. So I wonder if I can ask you a question, maybe help us a little bit. So in our business, we have infrastructure, cloud, which is kind of infrastructure, but it's more than infrastructure. And then sort of big data has largely been this island, a dupe sort of off to the side. Do you see those worlds coming together? I mean, you guys started, the cloud meets big data, but are they starting to come together? You're building those data lakes on top of cloud or people saying, well, I kind of want them to stay separate. What are you seeing there? Yeah, so virtualization offers a lot to building a data lake today. There's things that are very complicated in deploying a data lake that a mature virtualization platform like VMware has addressed. And so I think- Because it's resilient. Yeah, it's resilient. It's got things like metering, it's got things- Tons of services. Tons of services, monitoring. I mean, it's a very mature ecosystem we're running just about any kind of workload. So today a lot of the data lakes that we see are being deployed that way. They're being deployed in a virtualized environment. Our Federation Business Data Lake is deployed virtualized not because we felt obliged to include everything in it but because it really was becoming the best practice in terms of getting all the functionality that we needed. I do think over time, you'll see the data platforms. I mean, big data is an interesting space because open sources is a big factor there and you're seeing a lot of Cloud Foundry, for example, is an open source project. Pivotal has Pivotal Cloud Foundry. There's a lot of investment going into maturing those platforms as well. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how the big data and the data lake space evolves as we sort of continue to see the evolution of things like Cloud Foundry and the role that they play in data lakes. All right, Josh, we just got the break sign. I'm sorry I got to go but we really appreciate you coming up. We were chitchatting too much before you came on but it was good to catch up. Yeah, it was, it was great. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from EMC World 2015. This is theCUBE, right back.