 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and they extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Sean Wheatage, Enterprise CTO at Rackspace. Great to see you back on theCUBE. Good to see you. Welcome back here, thanks for the invitation. So you're living in the cloud world. Rackspace is big on the cloud. It's the open stack. We've been there from the beginning, watching Rackspace play an instrumental role in an open stack. So there's no stranger to the multi-tenant integration, orchestration, all the buzzwords that EMC's talking about here. It's stuff that was really early on in the pioneers of the cloud of Roddy, going back almost seven years, eight years ago. You hear DevOps, agile speed, all that good stuff. So the goal is to create a seamless experience for customers. What's the goal that we're hearing with Unity? What's your thoughts? I mean, you're here, you're CEMC's announcement on Unity. What's your thoughts? Yeah, we were, so I'll talk a little bit about Unity. We were privileged to be part of the beta program and evaluate that platform as we look forward and some of the things they're doing there. And what we're really seeing is customers coming in, thinking multi-cloud. And how do I integrate what platform is right for me? And it's interesting, two years ago it was all about open stack for us. And open stack is still a very large piece of our business. Announced last week at the open stack, some of the ability to open stack anywhere, right? Third party data centers, customer prem. But we're also seeing an increased interest in choice of platform. So customers valuing rack spaces, fanatical support capability, but now able to layer that on top of an Azure or an AWS or a Microsoft private cloud. And so it's really opened the door to us to be able to leverage that expertise to help customers make the navigation through the cloud. Where has the bumps and bruises been on this transition to a multi-cloud? Because it's clear we're hearing that, right? You're hearing EMC with the enterprise hybrid cloud, which is basically on-prem legacy native hybrid cloud, which is basically DevOps, which is the world we live in. You guys are seeing a lot of advances. We've come from a place and now we've got a future ahead of us. What is the bumps and bruises on that journey? Because that's what customers want, a seamless experience. It's been interesting to watch. Couple years back it was all AWS, right? So it was AWS versus open stack. And it really, AWS made everybody raise their bar in terms of what their capabilities are. VMware platforms, Microsoft platforms, Azure. Some companies have done well with it. Some companies have had some other challenges in terms of trying to evolve their capabilities to meet the demands of IT as we go forward. The biggest challenges we're seeing is there's a lot of noise still around security, right? How do I ensure that the platform is secure? And we've pretty much gotten past that. We have some really advanced capabilities we can do in public cloud and in hybrid clouds that exceed what we've traditionally been able to do in the enterprise that the enterprise could do in their own data center. So the security conversation's becoming less of an issue. Now it's becoming a, what's the right platform for me and for which applications and how do I manage all that centrally? And that's where Rackspace comes in. We've been able to provide an assistance, that expertise on demand to help customers navigate their way through, design and operate clouds at scale. So how is your business shifting? You think of sort of the early days of cloud. You're selling gigabytes or terabytes. You're selling mips. How is your business shifting? Obviously you're still selling infrastructure but you're adding value on top. Can you talk about that value and how that is affecting your business? Yeah, absolutely. So the value in Rackspace has always from very early days been the fanatical support. And what we're seeing is in this cloud transformations, cloud adoption, that expertise is becoming even more valuable to our customers. We believe that the platform is less critical in terms of value prop than it is the support capability, access to expertise on demand. As you go in and you look at an AWS and the amazing numbers of products that they have and capabilities and then you go and try and find talent to run that for you and help you architect and build that talent's not out there. So Rackspace, we're able to bring that talent on, develop it, get them up and we see more challenges and more issues and more opportunities in the cloud in a month and most enterprises would see in two years. So we're able to have that expertise. So it's really helped us reinforce that value proposition but allowed us to decouple that from the infrastructure. So with Wikibon, we've been writing a lot about cloud, not as a place to put stuff, but cloud as an operating model. And in talking to our customers, it seems like they want to shift the IT labor component to higher value places, whether it's apps, they're digital transformation. And that requires an operating model mindset shift. The problem is, as you point out, they don't have the skill sets to do that. So they would come to Rackspace and say, okay, help us get that operating model to where we want it to be. Because, and so describe the outcome there, whether it's more agile, supporting digital businesses and unpack that for us. Yeah, it's really different by company what they're trying to solve for. But quite often it's either address time to market or give me better alignment with the business or be more responsive internally. And so it varies in terms of what the output is, right? So a lot of our customers are coming to us very early in their cloud adoption going, we're going to start with some non-critical workloads. Can you do an open stack private cloud to help us do rapid test and devs, start doing dev ops to start adopting that? We have others that are going, we have cloud native applications. We have the capability to do the development, we understand the business case, but we don't want to deal with the infrastructure. So we're able, and I'd say in the third scenario, is we have customers coming to us and going even beyond that saying, we want to shut down our data centers. We have an exit plan in two years, we want to be out of these data centers. How can you help us choose the right platforms? We want to be out of that infrastructure layer. We want to be concentrating on business analytics. We want to be concentrating on development. We want to concentrate on being more responsive to the customer. So we come in, we allow, free them from those challenges around patching, security, monitoring, running a data center, hiring talent, swapping out hard drives, and really allow them to focus on those high value activities. And they also want risk management too. They don't want to bet on one cloud, right? So how do you walk them through that? So if I'm that guy, I'm like, hey, I've shed the data centers, glory days, right? But then if I go to say Rackspace or Amazon or anywhere else, I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. How do you address that for those guys? It's interesting, we have, so we have a couple of different types of customers coming in. Some are already very opinionated about where they want to go with a cloud. And just know, from prior experiences, they need assistance to be able to navigate that or to be able to manage inside the operating system where they can't do it. We have other customers coming to us and going, this is what I want to solve for, what is the best platform or platforms? And so we have a professional services and some of my teams, the architect teams sit down with the customer and go, what are you trying to achieve? What are the priorities? What are the goals? And then we match those to the various clouds. And because we don't have a bias towards one particular platform, it allows us to really explore and challenge the vendors and the customer in terms of their expectations. Where's the promises broken over the years? I mean, we just saw this earlier in the marketing area with the total customer experience, certainly in social media, all these new technologies. There's been a lot of promises. I've heard from more customers say, if you'd just be honest with me, because we want to go on this journey, there's a leap of faith, there's hope that the parachute opens, right? When you jump out of the airplane, so to speak. Where do you see the industry over committed and over promised and didn't deliver? That customer should be aware of, at least be careful. I'm not saying that Rackspace is over promised, but I mean, in general, that's a fear that people have is, I love new tech, but just be honest with me. I think that it's a great point. I think the biggest area is my cloud will solve everything for you. That is the one that is the most dangerous. Go all into my cloud, it's going to take care of every use case you need. That is the biggest challenge we're seeing out there. Customers either outgrow the cloud, certain workloads don't work well in that cloud and are looking for options. And they got to really engineer. I mean, it's really an engineering opportunity. It is an engineering opportunity. I mean, companies that are looking to go to the cloud, you don't want to underestimate. There are changes that are going to have to go on. You can't just take a legacy application off the shelf, cram it on the cloud and expect it to be performant or deliver what the results you're looking for. Well, to your point, the success of Amazon has been hard to miss, but the strategy is sweep the floor, get everything out of your data center into our cloud. And that doesn't work for a lot of organizations. So okay, so that is why so many people are saying, we want to change the operating model because that will affect our business and create an outcome that we're looking for. So I want to ask you a couple other points. One is the EMC relationship. How is that evolving? And your take on Dell EMC, but before we get there, just a relationship with EMC narrowly and then broadly Dell EMC. We've had a long relationship with EMC. EMC's, VNX, VMAX, Isilon, they power a lot of our more critical solutions for our customers. We've been very fortunate to have a great account team, great relationship to senior executives, great visibility. You know, our participation in the Unity beta is a good example of us collaborating to look at the next generation platforms to see how those fit into our infrastructure. So the relationship with EMC is great and we continue to flourish there. As far as the EMC Dell relationship, we are big fans of Texas based companies. So we're looking forward to having them in our backyard. On the surface, it looks like a very good fit. We've had a lot of deep conversations with the service provider groups, giving us insight, looks like a great fit in terms of sweet spots, how they're looking at things, was actually just in listening to Dennis Hoffman talk a little bit about the strategy between the organization. He's awesome. His pitch is phenomenal. Always a great presentation. Always learn something and always get amused. So it looks great, right? It's going to really come down to the details, but it looks like they're putting a ton of thought and energy into where they have overlaps, where they have challenges, how they address that and how they get past that. So I don't have a significant concern about that in terms of the plan and vision. It's the execution, it's two very large companies coming, you could say more than two, coming together and trying to figure out how to plan. And a lot of talk about IoT, obviously. Edge, what do you guys see? Is it real? Is it impacting your business? What's your take? It is impacting our business. We had a customer, I'll give you an example, we had a customer in the Briefing Center this last week. They're doing IoT company there, working with Fortune 500 organizations, receiving their data, streaming the data off devices and applying analytics inside of our environment. Talk to another customer that is doing online environmental controls and predictive management of HVAC and those type things. So we are seeing that more and more. It's still early, we've been forecasting and seeing this coming for five years. It's still very early, customers are still making their bets. We're expecting to see more growth there. Sean, thanks for spending the time coming on theCUBE and talking about Unity and also Rackspace, really appreciate it. I want to get you to the final word though on this segment is talk about what you see, the work that you guys have to do. As CTO, you're looking at over the horizon, you get the 20 mile stair, you got stuff in front of you, you got to manage. What's your priorities? What do you see the things that you guys have to do? We have to continue to attract and develop our talent to be able to serve our customers. Fanatical support is always going to be at the core of what we do and that is a day to day commitment to our customers but also to our rackers on how we do that. So that's always going to be first and foremost. On the technology side, we have got to help customers be able to better integrate solutions between platforms. You've got Azure Stack coming down the road. You've got OpenStack Public versus Private. We have to be able to wrap tools around those to help them meet their business needs and provide a better integrated experience for them. And I'd say the last one is there are emerging technologies on the horizon, Docker, microservices. We have to figure out which are the right bets to make for our customers that will really deliver them value and not just be part of the hype cycle. Awesome, great feedback, great insight. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE at EMC World 2016. We'll be right back. Looking back at the history of...