 Okay, welcome back to EMC World. This is exclusive coverage, SiliconANGLE, exclusive coverage to theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. We have a many-time CUBE guest. Prasad Rampali is the Senior Vice President of EMC's Solutions Group. Prasad, welcome back. Thank you, glad to be here. Yeah, so this is, this is, I don't know which EMC World it is for you, but I've lost track, but a couple anyway. Yeah, definitely a couple and we've been on others too. Yeah, so the last one was Sapphire. That's right, that's Sapphire. So you've had some time now in your role. We've talked a number of times with you about how you wanted to advance the vision of the whole Solutions Group and bring some of your knowledge and discipline and process to that. So let's give us an update on where the Solutions Group is at and what kind of impact you guys are having. Yeah, thanks for asking the question. I mean, I didn't lob that one to you, but like I said, almost two years ago, right? The focus of the Solutions Team has been to shift left, work very closely with the business units, and work very closely with technical partners, the ISV ecosystem, and create those integration points of incremental value, right? That drives some unmet needs into a solution space. And so that's what we've been doing, working with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and now increasingly the service providers and ensuring that in the way they're looking at meeting their specific use cases, we are tying our storage as a seamless part of the stitching fabric through this mechanism of integration building blocks, right? Yes. And so we made some tremendous progress. I'm pretty thrilled to actually report that we've got a number of customers who are very happy with the solutions we've provided. Yeah, good. So talk about, you know, we've been talking about the services angle for three years. We actually started the services angle.com blog a while ago, and when no one was really talking about the service, we've talked about the disruption in services in the past on theCUBE. So I've got to ask you, currently right now, the conversations here at EMC World's clearly business value, right? So that's, you know, check the box, transformation, rah-rah, all that's good stuff. But really the other conversation is faster time to value with cloud, it's incremental proof points, where in the old days it was, you know, roll out a big project plan, and then bang, it was installed. Now it's like, there's little checkpoints where you can actually see the proof points faster. So that requires a lot more rapid engineering. So I got to ask you, it's also, it's getting more complicated too as the transformation architectures are being re-shifted and re-casted. So what are you guys doing? What's the update on EMC side? I know you've had some engineering centers, what other things are happening within EMC to try to make the proof of concepts and the engineering of these solutions faster? Yeah, great questions. Thanks again for asking that. I mean, you guys are, we're pretty comfortable here. Try to put you in the middle. So, we've been working on creating a value prop, really attacking this whole time-to-solutions thing, right? So we've established a core infrastructure which is called the VLab. And the hands-on lab out here is really one specific example of that. And what it is, is a distributed infrastructure for demoing our solutions. And we want to be able to have customers have self-subscription or even partners and say, hey, I want to look at how Vplex does active-active data center replication on a VMAX. Well, we have that capability on a demo cloud as part of a service manifest method catalog. And you can come in if you have the appropriate access and click into those specific use cases and actually see that to your own satisfaction. Now, it does more than that besides just a webcam. You can actually interact with it. You can implement certain configurations and see how it works. So the service catalog thing is obviously important. You got automation, all these kind of things that are hard to just roll out in a demo. So I actually have those capabilities. So I want to ask you, what's kind of turned key now? What have you guys abstracted away from a complexity standpoint around the services besides the catalog? And two, what other new high-level services do you see happening that are on your radar right now? Okay. So in the service provider space specifically, we are looking at services that these SPs need. And the top of mind service that always comes up is backup as a service. Increasingly, a lot of data is going to the hosting environment, the hybrid cloud, or even the public cloud. And the question then is, okay, how do you enable various use cases on backup? Backup from a remote site to a central site that the SP might have. Backup from a end user environment to a SP environment. So we have these various use cases. In all those specific scenarios, we do need to create a very reliable, scalable backup as a service capability. That can be, by the way, monitored and measured and metered for appropriate billing purposes. So it's not just implementing backup as we would for data protection with our RLMAR data domain capabilities in the enterprise, but take it to the X-ray art on cross hybrid cloud use cases as well as the core essence of monitoring, metering, and billing. How does that affect your ecosystem? And again, that was the other thing that's come up again and again. The industry and the ecosystem, both technically and on the business side, relative to your provider's solution providers out there. Well, I think it's actually opening up the ecosystem in ways that we hadn't envisioned because a lot of the integration that we now do is no longer with the traditional Oracle with RMAN for backup in the enterprise, as an example. But looking at the Telstra's and other service providers who have their own context of their operating environments that we need to now integrate into. So in the case of this particular service provider, we have seven or eight different data centers where we are deploying this backup as a service capability. And it's not just sufficient to do it at a one data center at a time. We have to create this backup grid, if you will, that is a core middleware service that has resiliency and failover between these backup environments and operates like one capability for this SP environment. So that's kind of very annoying with this. Son, I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about your business. I mean, every business leader has their metrics, right? So what kinds of metrics have you instituted in terms of measuring the success of your operation? I mean, you're not a P&L, right? So how do you measure the success either both internally or externally? Well, that's a great question. Solutions and their measurement has to force with some level of inspection and measurability in the tracking system which starts with how you kind of win a deal with the sales force, right? So we are tying our top-line impact with enabled revenue influence, okay? And we are actually embarking on this notion of sales campaigns that are going to be entirely solutions-based. And for each of these solutions campaigns, at the time of the particular deal or the sale, we are going to be tracking the specific use case and the specific play, which is our solution that was accountable for that design. So we have a direct method of tracking what the solution play is and then tying that back to how many of those did you make. And VSpecs is kind of the poster shell for us. VSpecs is entirely a solution implementation in the channel. And just in 2012, we had about 1200 solutions that were implemented as part of our designments. And we've completely exceeded any goal that we had. We had a $30 million design goal for 2012 and we exceeded by orders of magnitude because we were new, we were experimenting with it. So this whole idea of solution-based selling hunts, we've got a measurement system. We then have the ability to say, okay, what solutions are actually working and should we do something else and so on. So it's an entire system and feedback that really starts with can you measure, inspect, and feedback to the engineering team that's designing it. With such a large customer base, you must have more demand than supply. So how do you scale to meet that demand? Oh yeah, that's a great question because you're right. The portfolio of how you manage solutions is an unending task. And really what we have is the beginnings of what we call a governance structure inside the EMC where we have different business units as well as a sales team that come together and they establish the priorities of what I go build. And I can't say that it's picture perfect, but we are getting there. So our primary focus is in the service provider space like I was saying. Then the channel space with V-specs. And then in the enterprise space, it's really Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. And after that, I'm done. So how about this, how we talk here a lot about software-defined storage and have you started to work on software-defined, Viper-led solutions or other software-defined solutions? Absolutely, Viper is the best thing that happened to solutions. Yeah, how bad. Because you can integrate a lot faster, right? Right, exactly. Time to solution, right? And Viper as Amita was, I don't know if you saw the keynote, but Viper has got RESTful APIs that essentially completely puts the semantics on the type of storage capabilities that can be exposed, whether it's dedupping or replication or whatever. And so instead of me connecting to individual storage platforms and creating plugins to the VM Bears, the Microsofts, and the SAPs, which I do today, I can go to the Viper API and essentially create those same plugins and ensure that it just works, right? Or I'm guaranteed that it just works because Viper is certified to work across all the EMC platforms. So as long as I'm writing to that API, I'm good. So my problem goes away from writing to end different environments to just one, which is the abstraction layer of Viper, and then extending that amount to the context of specific applications and what they need. So what's your experience been so far? Because obviously you've got a lot of experience taking, you know, hardened systems and making them perform, making them cost-effective. I mean, that's obviously an economic component here. What has your experience been so far with Viper? It's new, there's new layers involved. Can it perform as well? Can it give the same availability or better? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it's early days, but if you go to the, you are in the Solutions Pavilion, but if you go to the demo booth for Viper, we've actually worked with the Viper team where the specific VMware plugin that works with Viper has actually done by my team, right? We've also done a plugin for OpenStack. So all things that are tied to context that are unique to different application environments or even the OpenStack environment, I'm the ecosystem enabler for the Viper platform. Now, in terms of your question on performance, it's, if you haven't really deployed this in a large scale, so I wouldn't comment on that, but in our current testing in the lab, it hangs out pretty well. The key part is really time-to-solution. I can't emphasize that enough. Single-click, writing application, integration capability in a matter of hours, if not days, versus weeks. And it's just great. I'm interested in, I mean, the messaging is very strong on software defined and generally in Viper specifically, and I think it's clear benefits for a provider of storage solutions. I'm not sure the customers get it yet. I think they get it conceptually long-term but in terms of how to implement it. Your organization is almost like the bridge between the two. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that this sort of software defined, separating control plane from data plane, a lot of that sort of geeky, although of course a lot of your customers are geeky too. I mean, they like that stuff. You're talking to one dude. But at the CIO level, they're probably like, what is that all about? I mean, why do I really need this? Do you think they get it yet? Or is that going to take some education? And what role will your group play? Yeah, again, fantastic question. I think there has to be an education of what Viper is all about. But it is not exactly a new thing. It's an extension of cloud computing, as it was applied to compute. We are just extending that concept to storage. And as much as vCloud and vCenter enable the orchestration and management of virtual machines, we are enabling the same concept with storage, with logical units, lunch, and storage pools, with appropriate service levels that can be administered through this abstraction layer. So it's the exact thing that VMware has done to compute that we are now enabling with storage. And by the way, we are plugging it into VMware system center, or SAP, or whatever the orchestration of your choice is. I think it's an easy conversation to have. If you understood compute and server visualization, you can step from there to this conversation. You make it sound simple. It is simple in concept, actually. It's an extension of what every CIO is salivating to do in terms of TCO reduction and time to solution. Well, I think when you talk to savvy technologists, there's always some new technology coming down the road. They say, yeah, there's always some new technology coming down the road. That's how we integrated and exploit it. That's the real challenge. The heavy lifting is really the actual deployment of Viper in the context of the application and the legacy environment of the CIO's IT environment. So the technology is elegant. The implementation, the onboarding of the apps, the testing of these use cases, the insurance of performance, especially on data services like object on file that I've talked about, have to be proven in those unique scenarios. And our goal is to enable that with our POC solution centers, with our ELab, and ensure that we create these Lego blocks based on if you're an enterprise, you're running SAP this way, this is the best known method or best practice for how Viper would fit in that environment. If you're a Microsoft shop running Hyper-V, here's how that would work. If you're a service provider who says, hey, I really want to deal with only OpenStack and sender plugins on storage, well, we got that too. So the idea is if I can create these reference architectures by specific environments and use cases, which is what I do today, but not tied with a much faster medium for integration, which is Viper, I would then enhance the experience for the end user. Yeah, it is a big win for you. Now, what's your relationship within EMC with internal IT? We had Vic on yesterday, and of course, we've had Sanjay on before. We'll just talk about that a little bit and then we got a wrap. Right, so Vic and Sanjay, obviously I work very closely with them. We view IT as our first and best customer, so a lot of the solutions that we actually build, we socialize those solutions first with our own EMC IT because we believe that if those guys say, hey, this stuff is not going to go anywhere, we just stop right there. And so we have a joint forum that we have between me and the CIO, and we jointly look at our solutions and our portfolio and we look at them as some kind of a litmus test on should we go forward or not. Now, they don't really implement all our solutions, but we want to get their mind share on every one of them that we invest in. All right, Prasad, listen, thanks very much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Okay, this is theCUBE, our flagship program about the events. I'd like to see them from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break, exclusive coverage from EMC World. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's coverage. We'll be right back. All right, guys, thanks.