 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Welcome back to theCUBE here at EMC World 2015 in Las Vegas. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage with two sets here. My name is Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host Steve Chambers. We're with Wikibon. Read all our research on wikibon.com. We have a new CUBE guest on for us today, Matt Oostveen, who is the VCE CTO for Asia-Pacific Region. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. All right. So Matt, you've had an interesting background. You've sat on our side of the table as an analyst, and now you're really a field CTO for VCE. What brought you to VCE and what your role there? You know, one of the great things about being an analyst is the great visibility that you have of what's happening within the industry. I'd been covering infrastructure for the best part of seven years and then moved into something of an oversight role where I had a broad perspective of what was happening. And it's very rare you see a company like VCE doing what it is doing. It was growing very quickly. The conversion infrastructure market was very new, it was very exciting, and especially when you compared and contrasted that conversion infrastructure market with what the rest of the hardware market was doing, you know, there was a lot of declines. So there was this one gem that really drew me across to the organization. So Matt, you know, I often say, I've never had a customer that came to me and said, you know what will solve all my problems? Convergence. Convergence is what's holding me back for everything doing it. It's simplicity that they want, there's new experience that they want. But here in the States, at least, that convergence term has been beaten into us and hyper-converged is the new buzzword. I'm curious, the customers that you're talking to, what's the conversation starter? Is convergence part of their, you know, IT speak out there? Or, you know, how does the conversation start? You know, I find the conversation often starts when a customer looks at their own data center and identifies some of the key challenges that they're having with it. And I think there's a lot of commonalities between Australia, a very mature marketplace and what you see happening in the United States. Customers look at their data centers in Australia and what do they see? They see a whole lot of problems when it comes to silos, and a lot of them are having some genuine issues when it comes to the operational costs. There are some organizations that are running very close to the sun when it comes to the amount of OPEC spend that they have. And they need to radically change the approach that they're having. We look at the operational cost and the amount of expenditure going into keeping these lights running towards keeping the people within the data center operating that infrastructure and something's got to change. And I think if we have a look at some of the intersecting trends at play, the sheer growth that we see in data volume, the numbers of servers that are exploding across data center floors and sitting on top of that, the amount of virtual machines, that's a big problem. And I think the way that we're architecting the solutions at the moment, the way that we're architecting our data centers, it's starting to lose fidelity. It's starting to granulate at scale and we need to alter the way that we're approaching that. And that's something that really resonates in the Australian marketplace. So it's very interesting this morning we had a customer on stage talking about how they're a VCE customer, which is great, but they resisted being a VCE customer for some time. They said, well, we didn't want to get locked in. You know, we felt we'd be tied into a platform, so we put it off. But then he said, we added up how much it was costing us to handcraft our own systems and then we went with VCE. And is that a common story you hear? Do people resist at first? You know, what do you see when you talk to customers? People often ask me, what is your biggest competitor? Who is your biggest competitor? The expectation is that I'm going to nominate a cloud provider or I'm going to nominate an infrastructure provider. I would say that the number one competitor we face is internal IT. It is doing it yourself. There is a mindset that has been in play for decades now. Going back to the 1980s, the way that we've been integrating our infrastructure, whether it was the mainframe, whether it was a mini computer, or whether it was this x86 world that we're in today. People have been coached and trained to do things a certain way. And there are hallmarks of that. There are ways that we can measure this. There's these great pieces of research that we see floating around that show the amount that we spend on our innovation versus the amount that we spend on our operations. And depending on the analyst firm you talk to, it's probably 70, 30, 75, 25, or 80, 20. And for as long as I can remember looking at this, that needle hasn't barged. And the needle hasn't barged because there is that ingrained mindset that we can do things better. I think what the value proposition is from a VCE perspective is that we can liberate these technical resources that have been focused on what really are many of the tasks and have them focused on business outcomes, on having them working more closely with the lines of business. Something we know is becoming more influential. And therefore having a positive output as to the end state of how an organization wants to operate. And I think people who have been aware of VCE for some time, I'd say. I used to work at VCE many years ago. They might still think it's just about a V block. It's just this static block that's un-configurable, doesn't variance. Well, that's not really the case anymore, is it? And I think VCE have got an ever-growing range of solutions. And solutions is the word I've heard a lot recently from VCE. Can you maybe tell us a bit about how, you know, the different things you can get from VCE these days and maybe we can get onto the solutions a little bit after them. Okay, okay. So many questions packed in there, Steve. Firstly, I think it's fair to say that VCE owns the converged infrastructure market from an end-to-end perspective. And let's run a really quick taxonomy over the top of what converged infrastructure means. What flavors does it come in? We see that block-based architecture that you're talking about. And of course we've made some announcements showing that we're moving into this rack-based, this hyper-scale, hyper-converged offering. And of course we've got the V-SPEC's blue appliance-based approach as well. But really what we're also talking about is moving to a world that's far more automated and a world where we can start to deconstruct those silos I was just talking about and a world where we can start to spend a lot less on our operations. Now, in order to do this, what we want to do at VCE is start to layer on top of the foundation that we provide, which is a platform or a converged infrastructure with some of these solutions that you're alluding to. And that's about factory-integrating software, things like the V-Realize Suite, software-defined storage with Viper, as well as of course the software-defined networking capabilities that we've got with NSX. But doing this in a factory-integrated fashion and then layering on top of that more services around enterprise hybrid cloud. But the point is that we're able to now provide customers with a factory-integrated service as much as possible so that we can expedite time to value, that we can provide our customers with the fastest possible on-ramp for providing an infrastructure and software and services solution to solving some of these critical challenges. I'm wondering, just follow up on Steve's point here. In the early days, I used to think V-Block, it's only VMware hypervisor. While every V-Block shifts with VMware, as we say, most people have VMware, few people have all VMware. So if I look at a V-Block, I can have other hypervisors on the V-Block. I can also have physical, talk to lots of database customers that aren't doing it. And I look at the V-Block and the new V-X racks that you announced. It's one of the core strengths. I understand if customer wants all VMware, and I'm sure as a federation company, you love them to buy the full federation solution, but there's that choice and flexibility there. So I'm curious in Australia, is VMware just so dominant that they're not doing Microsoft and all can get KVM or I don't still have applications on physical? Yeah, so look, I think I'm always cautious in giving absolute answers. We don't live in the childish world of absolutes where it's always going to be one particular hypervisor and one particular type of technology for a customer. We need to provide the customer's choice and we need to open up certain aspects of the platform so that they're better able to run particular workloads, particular applications that are fitting to what their organization is trying to accomplish. So was this always the plan or could some mischievous commentators out there think, well, it's ever since the kind of Cisco, EMC brought VCE more into the federation, as it's called this time. Have these changed happen since then or have this always been the plan? Look, I think neither. I think that the plan is always based upon what customers tell us and what the marketplace is doing. We want to architect solutions and we want to give the right type of options to the customer base so that they're able to better meet the demands and challenges that they're being faced. So it's certainly not predicated upon machinations of what's happening between certain organizations. As I said, mischievous, of course, not me. But VCE, definitely as you saw the keynotes this week, they're what I would call a first class citizen in the federation. They're not this mix of three companies. They're very much a prime part of what EMC is trying to do with the federation. You could see them, in fact, I've heard, I want to see if you agree with this that people have seen you as the, I don't know the convergence word, things are starting to converge around you. So when people say, well, why not put the pivotal suite on V-Block? You know, it seems you're kind of at the center of everything. Somebody feels like now you're in EMC. Yeah, I'm definitely going to agree with that statement. I like to say to the customers and the marketplace out in my region is that what VCE does is we transcend the individual elements that are contained within the V-Block. We stand above storage, network and compute and we bring that together. What we want to do is have an infrastructure platform that's tuned to the task of the challenges that are being faced by the customers, not just today, but also tomorrow. And I think that's one of the reasons that we are at that center point, that pivot point for what's occurring within the federation, because it is a fantastic platform to build these more sophisticated deployments upon. I think in a few people, you know, when they've seen the presentations here at EMC World, they've been looking at the V-Blocks, which a lot of people are familiar with. They saw VXRack. I think a lot of people are interested in that. There's been much debate about which workload goes on, which workload and I think the answer was, you know, it's not as black and white as tier one here and tier two there. You know, it could be more complex than that. I think, you know, one of the comments I've heard multiple times from some customers here as well, you know, when they look forward, they think, well, which should I buy? A V-Block or a VXRack? Will VXRack, will that replace a V-Block? You know, there's that kind of, you know what I'm saying, as soon as you introduce new product, people will look at where it's going to fit. So, any kind of clarity or guidance on if I listen to a lot of the presentations that have been occurring over the last few days, I think one of the hallmarks has been this discussion around platform one, platform two, platform three, which is an IDC taxonomy for viewing how we're moving into this more interconnected world. Essentially, I think what IDC is trying to say with this third platform is that we're trying to smash together supply and demand and remove as many roadblocks as possible. What that means is that we're going to have a lot of microservice applications, a lot of small IT services that are going to interconnect these little pieces of supply and demand that we have. Perhaps a marketing department that wants to better reach the customer base. Perhaps it's the finance department that wants to interconnect with a taxation office or auditors. So, there's this whole suede and this whole world of new applications that are going to be written and they need to be built upon a different kind of infrastructure. I think that describes the platform three that we're seeing. Now, some use cases are going to be really well suited for this new VX rack offering that we have and some other use cases, some more standard traditional, I suppose that the worlds of the SAP Oracle and Microsoft packaged application view of the world sits really well within the Vblock range. So, Matt, when I think back to the early days of VCE, the message was kind of the private hybrid cloud and we're going to help you build that. But when you talk to most customers, it was they helped me deploy virtualization easier. Today, we're starting to talk about third platform. I heard microservices there, the data lake and things like that as a technologist and the CTO and the field talk to the customers. Where are they in that journey? How are they embraced and understand? Steve and I would always say you talk to 10 customers and they'll tell you that they've got a cloud but none of those stories match at all as to what they've got. So, what's the conversation you have? What are the new things that you're helping them with and what are they really doing today? I think we have a tendency in the IT industry to overuse some words and hybrid cloud may be falling into that category. Here's what it means in the field from the discussions that I have with the customers. It means that essentially customers have on-premises infrastructure, they have off-premises workloads, but the CIO is rather pragmatic. What they want is an environment that is seamless and they want the ability to be able to maneuver a workload based on the best characteristics for running that workload. Maybe it's cost, maybe it's latency, maybe there are some other characteristics that wrap around that. So, what I find the discussion and where the discussion has at from a maturity perspective is one of cold, hard pragmatism. How can you, Mr. VCE, help us enable this type of environment? And how can we better connect with public cloud services which obviously we want to be able to deploy some types of workloads on but how do we have that working as a homogenized single system? All right, well, Matt, we're gonna have to leave it there. Appreciate you digging in, giving us the non-U.S. perspective on some of this. Got a bunch of customers of VCEs coming on next. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this quick break.