 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We're here live at IBM Edge 2015. This is our fourth Edge. Phil Schamburgers here is the director of technical delivery of proactive solutions. Phil, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you again. So Edge, another Edge. That's right. We spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. We storage folks, don't we? That's right. But it's a good show, good action. It's not just storage this year. It's more diverse, a lot of power, a lot of Z, a little middleware action, some thought leadership. What's your takeover role? Well, I'm happy to be here. We sell a lot of the IBM portfolio. We have a power heritage. It's nice to be able to get both technologies in the same conference. We brought a lot of our folks down here. It has been split before, so it's kind of like, it's fun to mingle with others because I cross over to both brands from a technical perspective in sales. So when did you start picking up power and working with? It was 18 years ago, we were doing a power. So it's been a large part of our business over the last- Big commitment. Several years. We worried there for a while? Like, hmm, where's this all going? I think it's more, I worry more today than I've ever had in the past, because, you know, there's- Uncertainty. Yeah, there's uncertainty for power, and I think that our investment hasn't decreased, but a lot of our clients are looking at greenfield landscapes, x86, cloud, and without having a real solid cloud provider for power, it kind of slowed the growth in that sense. Well, now you've got power for soft layer. That's right. And open power, that's got to really excite you. Yeah, I mean, the Linux workloads, I feel like, you know, getting them on power, you have to love it to run it on there, unfortunately, so a lot of it is going on x86. So we hear a lot about, you know, transformations and proactive, you do a lot of storage, sell a lot of IBM storage, other company storage as well, but really strong partnership with IBM. What's happening in the storage world? A lot of shifts, flashes coming in, you know, tape's not dead. What, give us your take on this. Well, we have flash for everything. That's kind of been the message that we brought to our clients, and you take all the pressure off your typical storage infrastructure from a disk perspective if you move into the flash space, and it takes a lot of guesswork out of a lot of what our clients have been doing. You know, provisioning was an issue for clients because they had to figure out raid types, spindle types, all these different things that flash now, and just makes it a lot easier. You have a pool of fast storage, it'll handle any workload on the planet, and it just makes life a lot easier for our customers. So you need less of it to service the application. Absolutely. It's going to draw less power, it's going to be less space. How about this idea of serving copies out of flash? Are you seeing clients do that? In other words, everybody's copy creep. You got a copy for your data warehouse, you got a copy for your test, a copy for your dev, a copy for your backup, a copy for the replication, you know, your test guys and your dev guys are using data that's out of date. Are you seeing clients service those different use cases with the same physical array, if you will? Yeah. You know, this may be a little plug for Actifio. You know, they brought copy data management onto the scene and really, I felt like they coined that phrase, but you know, if you look at their value proposition, that really works well with flash because you're talking about having a primary copy and serving it out to all those locations, but the cloning technology of data providing a read-write clone, you know, NetApp used to be the best at that, but then you look at these other technologies, even in like the IBM B9000, you have that software stack where you can provide a read-write copy to any one of the applications, but essentially it's still using the same primary storage, and flash is the best for that because the service level is so high, you can run a lot of workloads in the same footprint. So, storage, you know, it's storage, right? Used to spin, now it smokes fast, it's great. How do you differentiate, you know, from the competition? What do you bring to clients that's a value that they perceive as value? Well, you know, as a, we kind of, we're a trusted advisor in the space. We know a lot of lines of storage. We've seen it, have a lot of experience. You know, our company's 18 years old already, and we've been through all the different storage types, you know, started, I started Sand Technology in 2000 working with Fiber Channel Sands and disk subsystems and shared storage. And I, you know, we provide a depth of knowledge and we've made investments in, I guess you would say, human capital, make the right hires, hire the right people to grow your business, and it's really, I mean, year to year, our growth has been phenomenal, I think it's because we made the investments ahead of time, not only in the people, but in our facilities. We have data centers with test and dev equipment that our clients can use, and then we also can bring that on-premise for them to do proof of concept for both flash and sand volume controller, virtualization. So we have that equipment. I think that's provided us an edge as a business partner for making those the right investments to help our clients out and be very quick to deliver. If they say, I want to test this and I have the other vendors' equipment sitting here, we're able to bring it on-site and give the other vendors a run for their money. So you say you're growing, you're growing fast, which the market's not growing fast, so obviously you're gaining share. Yeah. And talk more about what you attribute that to. I mean, you see the financials of all the large storage players, you know, IBM included IBM saying, hey, we grew 2% in constant currency. 2% is not like meteoric growth, but your experience, very high growth. Why? Well, the data growth has been extremely large. I have to say internet of things because I have a coworker that, we've been trying to define that and we laugh at it all the time. We're like, well, it's the internet of things. Let's bring all this data in. But that growth has not stopped. So we turn around and, but flash is the shiny new penny. Everybody wants to look at it. And it's exciting for us in the storage space because we've just kind of had the same old, same old, you know, XIV is a good space for us still. And I would say that is the easiest storage on the planet to manage. And that's why folks continue to use it and the capacity is very, very high on a single, you know, single floor tile. And so those, those areas of growth, it's the, the flash is hot and everybody wants to talk about it. So that makes life interesting. And I think our growth has really came from all those conversations. Even though the sales cycle might not turn into a flash opportunity, it's given us a chance to interact with customers and see where they're going. So Phil, one of the things I found interesting at the show is, you know, storage, we spend, we tend to spend way too much time talking about speeds and feeds. And flash is great. It's much higher performance, you know, the power and cooling are phenomenal. You know, CapEx, but it's the real, you know, opportunity to, you know, transform the business. If you look at what flash can do and I can, you know, really improve test dev, I can create new business lines. At the show, you know, we've been hearing IBM talk about how, you know, analytics and, you know, leveraging flash can kind of transform the business. How's that impacting how you interact with the customers? You're trusted advisor. Is it more, you know, I know it's got to be much more than just, hey, which is the best box to buy. So how are you, you know, changing that consultative approach? Yeah, and speeds and feeds, I'm actually kind of, I'm past that now. You have to learn we're in a sales situation that speeds and feeds don't matter anymore and there are tons of flash products on the market that will do the job. And I think IBM engineering gives them a little bit of a leg up, so that's nice. But then having such a breadth of software products that IBM has in systems, like you said, big data, that's an area where, you know, analytics is a service and those types of conversations. We start to talk to the line of business about what their needs are because the infrastructure now is pretty sound and very fast, very highly available. But our conversations, we dabble in cloud too, all the time, every conversation goes there. Why would we buy this system when we can put it in the cloud? And the typically goes on to what's your bandwidth requirements, how are you going to get the data back to your users? And that's why the hybrid, you know, hybrid storage, hybrid compute is going to be kind of the future of this technical world. Yeah, and I'm wondering if you talk about kind of the storage buyer and the storage user. You know, that world's changed a lot. You know, I've been talking for years about how, you know, we need to get out of our silos, but unfortunately we tend to build new silos. Virtualization kind of is a new silo. Even converged, if it isn't the platform for everything, it can be another silo. So, you know, what's the dynamic you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, the engineers on that, we're trying to always fix operational inefficiencies. Hyper-converged or converged should do that, but you have to be an awesome technician to understand all those technologies. You typically have a networking guy and a compute guy and a storage guy, and to bring that all into one human being is very difficult. So those guys are few and far between, but so the data center isn't getting a whole lot more simple. But I do like the hyper-converged model because it takes a few aspects out of that. You know, and unfortunately it's not a big storage play, which is a big growth area of ours, but you know, we're not standing still. We're innovating, we're pulling in the right resources to grow our converged and hyper-converged environments too. So actually, I kind of like it's not a storage play because convergence, we found that storage is the stickiest component of convergence and therefore it tends to be the driver for it. Hyper-convergence is really about changing those operational models, and therefore it's, you know, really it's an infrastructure play, not, you know, so much a storage play, so. Yeah, I met with a client yesterday about this same topic that I was talking, he was saying, well, what about this software-defined data center? What am I supposed to do? What am I trying to understand? I said, well, what are you, first of all, you have to define where your issues are and what you're trying to fix. And you know, I said, are there operational inefficiencies? He's like, well, we're gonna do this Oracle project with some flash and took us six months to get an Oracle Rack Cluster built, and then it came back and they blamed it on the storage team. But the, you know, it's just acquisition of hardware and configuration, and then, you know, at the very last minute, you're like, wait, we have to have storage. And so the storage guys get put under pressure to bring that up to the front, and something that might take 10 minutes has been, you know, might sit out there for two months, so. So how's IBM doing as a partner for the converged space? You know, and you look at, they've got, you know, all the pure family, you know, Pure App and the Pure Flex working with Lenovo, and now there's pure power that they announced this week, and you know, they don't have a hyper-converged solution today, so what's the conversation you're having with IBM? How do they help you do your job? Yeah. It's a, that's a bit of, I feel uncomfortable. You can see it in my body language. We're not at an IBM show, just tell us what you're thinking. That's right. The, I think that there's something missing there. We do have a power heritage, so we understand the technologies of a power-converged solution. Do we under, the other thing is, do we have a use case for it? And with the, again, X86 Greenfield is another shiny penny in the technology world, and it meshes so well with your, you know, S3 and Azure and all the different cloud providers, even SoftLare. If you're, you know, you have to love power to move into a power-converged environment. So I feel like IBM does have a missing link there, not having an X86. And I mean, I'm not a big fan of the divestiture to Lenovo. I really feel like that. That took a lot of wind out of our sales because we had great success with the Pureflex system. There might not be a lot of partners that did, but we sure did. And so I, you know, I miss having that capability. But we're still a great partner with Lenovo and we're pushing forward in that space. Well, I mean, let's face it. A lot of partners freaked out about that. I mean, there's no good timing. At least they did it in the first quarter. So it wasn't, you know, the biggest quarter. And yeah, the reasons are clear. IBM wants to chase profit, not revenue. And you know, you got to respect that. But of course, there's opportunities there that now go away. Absolutely. From your standpoint, so be it. What about some of the challenges that you're seeing with customers, maybe some of the mistakes that you see customers making? What are some common sort of missteps that you can help advise customers through? Well, it is, a little bit of it is, if they don't attend events like this, and you know, this is a plug for the big event world, but if you don't attend events like this, you're standing still. I mean, you have to educate yourself. And customers a lot of times are just status quo is the way to go because if I change something, I'm going to break it. And I don't want to deal with the business coming down on me because I stepped up to a new technology or a new methodology that wasn't successful. So customers aren't, if they don't innovate, they're going to be behind. And we're helping our customers be aggressive. And we have consulting services and a network of experts that we can bring into our customer sites and provide them that sense of security that this is going to go okay. And we give them the confidence to step into new technologies and new methods in their data centers. So a lot of customers would say, that sounds good, but it sounds like I got to buy a bunch of services, expensive services to get there. How do you overcome that challenge? Well, I mean, there's value in it all. And we're very efficient as a partner with our customers. We join their team. We try to help them do their job better. We don't replace them. So that's just our method, our delivery method. It's a lot different than some. We're not there to camp out and just, you know, melk it for all it can be. We're going in there to educate them on how they can become better. And now almost all of our conversations are driven to what's the line of business need? Who is your customer? And your customer, the users sitting across the room from you. And you want to provide, you know, you want them to be delighted with their experience when they log into their application and they're trying to get work done. That you don't want them to wait around or be, you know, have issues right there at work when they're trying to be productive. Phil, you make it sound so simple. Yeah, Phil, you actually bring up a great point. I wonder if I can unpack a little bit with you is, you know, jobs, you know, so many people are a little bit fearful things like converge or even hyper converges. Oh my gosh, that's going to, you know, get rid of the jobs. I've yet to talk to a customer that plays these that said, you know, hey, you know, you know, we had so much free time and we did so many things that we decided to lay off 20% of our staff. It was the, oh my God, you know, that big security project that's been sitting on my desk for two years, that new business app that the business team's been asking for me or the thing that they were like swiping a credit card and the Amazon bill was getting too much for, we can now handle that and either manage it, do the cloud stuff more, pull it in together, you know, do you have any customers that are really, you know, jumping on this and, you know, really driving that next opportunity? Well, we try to show in our business case to a client, we'll show that there's operational efficiency, sometimes it can reduce headcount and you try to put that in as your cost justification, but realistically, there are people that are sitting there and they're swamped and they do get a chance then to maybe actually kick back, go to an event, innovate, learn something new and bring that into the business to where before, they're just trying to keep, you know, put fires out and so hyper-converged or converged solutions might come in and provide, you know, the bandwidth that they need to kind of get back to real life versus just to work in nights and weekends to put out fires. Yeah, Dave, you always talk about, you know, the CIO's challenge is, you know, they got to run the business, of course, but how do they grow the business and how do they transform the business and we want IT to be able to really move up the stack to be able to take care of that. Well, it's one of my pet peeves when you talk about IT economics is everybody focuses, of course, rightly so on TCO, but it's very rare that people say, okay, hey, we put in this new infrastructure, we're going to fire people. Yeah. I mean, maybe it does happen sometimes but really, organizations, and I love your thoughts on this, Phil, really need to think through, okay, I'm going to be able to do more with less but I'm going to free up time. What do I want people to do with that time? You mentioned, you know, some ideas come out, think about, we all know when we go to these events, you know, when we're not doing 60 interviews a day and we sit back and you listen to some of these thought leaders, you get ideas and you bring those ideas back to your organization. So my question is, how are people handling that ostensibly cost savings, but it's really not cost savings, it's cost avoidance. Yeah. It's freeing up new time. You mentioned- Stretching your knowledge a little bit. Yeah, is there a game share mentality in IT? I feel like there's not enough of a game share. Hey, we're going to save money going forward. So let it give us a piece of the savings so that we can go innovate. I feel like a lot of corner office execs are like, great, drop it to the bottom line, more profit, more profit, more profit. How do you get compensated? If you're a CIO and you cut costs, that might be how you get compensated. So part of that is, you're going to always sell what you get paid for, right? And that, and as CIO is going to sell that to the executives within an organization that, hey, I cut costs, this is how I did it. And sometimes people lose their jobs, but not often. I mean, they're trying to find new ways to get things done within the same organization. And if you're good at your job, you're always going to have a job. That's kind of the way I look at it. But you can't stand still. And you know this, I attended another conference, this was my third one in Vegas this year, geez. But anyways, another IBM interconnect earlier this year. We were there. I sat in and I watched one of the presenters talking about mobile and how exciting is that space? I mean, they had some of the coolest things going on and how companies are coming together to provide. And this is a funny one too, like BlueMix or DevOps and those kinds of things to bring into this mobile space. But I'm finding that most of the C-level executives that I get a chance to sit across from are talking about that space, mobile and security and not so much compute, even though that's where all my knowledge is and that's where I spend a lot of time. I'm starting to transform my conversations into understanding again, business needs and how they can drive revenue and not have to cut headcount. Because if you're growing, that's really never going to be a situation where a CIO is going to try to save money by reducing headcount. There's ways to gain market share, gain customer base and mobile is by far the easiest way to do that if you can figure out how to leverage it. Well, it's like John Furrier says, I've never heard somebody say I want less compute but it's computer enables that innovation. It's not innovation in and of itself. Phil, we got in the hook, we got to go but thanks very much, really appreciate the conversation. Absolutely, great to be here. Keep right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Edge 2015. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back.