 Bonecutter, who is a partner at Accenture. He runs alliances at Accenture. Rocky, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks. So Rocky and I are going to talk about technology. But before we do, Rocky, you got a great name, Rocky Bonecutter. Rockwell Bonecutter, some people call you the Rock. But so what's the heritage of the name? What's the background? Well, Rocky Bonecutter is a good name when you're 40. It's not a good name when you're a 12-year-old schoolboy. But nonetheless, the heritage of the name is actually Hessian. So when King George III went to fight the revolutionaries in North America, he actually outsourced a lot of that fighting to German principalities. So my grandfather, seven generations back, his name was Nachenhauer, which is German, for I think bone cleaver or neck chopper or something, right? But it comes from a long line of butchers. So he ended up coming over here, got captured twice. The Bonecutters are not a very elusive bunch. And then once the war was over, he just kind of deserted and figured he'd make his hat in Ohio, so we've been in Ohio ever since, for seven generations. Oh, thanks for sharing that with us. So now you were telling me off camera that you compete unbeknownst to you in the Bracketology of Names. Yeah, I wish I could give these guys a plug, right? But I found out two weeks ago that I'm in the name of the year contest, which they essentially start out like those college basketball brackets, and I'm a number nine seed in those brackets. I guess the contest started two weeks ago, but you can go online and vote for Rockwell Bonecutter. Google best name brackets or something, that is fantastic. Well, so we're here at EMC World, and maybe not as, it's quite as interesting as that background, but it's pretty interesting. A lot of business going on here, a lot of partnership themes today. Of course, cloud meets big data, that's the big marketing theme of the event. And the first part of that cloud is really evolved from last year's event, EMC World 2010 in Boston, where you're the journey to the private cloud. Customers really started to hop on that journey this year, and of course Accenture always is a company that's been on the hot trends, whether it was client server, SAP implementations, and I'm sure cloud is a big theme for your CIO customers. So I want to talk about that, talk about what your relationship is with EMC, and how that all goes to market, but start with the cloud. What are CIOs telling you about the cloud? Where are they in that journey? Well, I think that a lot of folks are still kind of asking the question as to what is the cloud still, right? I mean, that means a lot of different things to a lot of different folks. I think that the main thing I've seen come up as part of the cloud, both private cloud and external cloud, is just the buying habits of our clients. So CIOs, VPs of infrastructure, they want to buy business outcomes now, and they're a lot less interested in necessarily all of the underlying technology, but they just want it to work, and they want to be able to buy it by the drink, they want to be able to buy capacity as they need it. And that's been the real driver from a buyer habit perspective, and that's why I think that some of the products that have been introduced recently around Vblock with EMC and Cisco and VMware's partnership, I think that product is gonna really be a game changer in that space to where clients can now not have to necessarily think a lot about the testing, a lot about the integration, a lot about all of the complexity in their environments. They can be able to take this in and kind of turn key, be able to put in solutions that are kind of pre-tested, the Vblock SAP solution, the exchange solution, these are all products that have been kind of already put through the ringer and we're able to provide to our clients from a systems integrators perspective with a lot less drama than what probably we had to do 10 years ago, right? So let's talk about some of those business outcomes in more detail. So drama less, I'm kidding, I heard simplified. Now what's the CIO want from that business outcome that you guys can deliver? Well, I think a lot of things come from that, right? I mean, one, in this terminology, it's gonna get so overused a bit, but from a technology perspective, it kind of gives you a single throat to choke, doesn't it? I mean, it enables you to implement a solution that, again, has been pre-tested, predefined, run through the ringer again. And if there's an issue or if there's integration burp, which from time to time is always gonna happen, you've got a single group with Vblock that you can go to in order to resolve it, in order to get attention to it. And for a systems integrator like Accenture, it just makes our job a lot easier, right? We can focus less on the underlying complexity of the interdependent infrastructure pieces and really get down to the job of looking at the application and the business outcomes of those applications and focus on that. So, Rocky, in that single throat to choke metaphor, you're the choker and VCE is the chokey? Well, it can be in some cases, right? In some cases, we can be running an environment as an outsourcer that is operating on Vblock technology to where that single throat to choke for the client. And in other cases, when the client buys it and implements it as part of the coalition, then the coalition's a single throat to choke. So, yeah, both ways. So, how is that concept of Vblock, for those of you who don't know, Vblock is a single logical block of infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, you put it in and it services applications across the application portfolio. How is that changing organizations and roles within the organization or is it? I think it is to a certain extent. I mean, the biggest thing that I think that it does is it accelerates the take up of virtualization across the infrastructure, whether that be virtualization in the storage space, virtualization in the server space. It enables companies to kind of onboard virtualization programs with a lot faster pace than what they've been able to do in the past. I think that's what's going to be one of the main, one of the key results of the Vblock technology. So, talk about virtualization and Vblock, talk about virtualizing mission critical or maybe even business critical apps. Say SAP and Oracle, some Oracle. We've, at Wikibon, we've just done a study. We said that the vast, but the preponderance of Oracle applications specifically by 2015 will be virtualized despite Oracle's less than sometimes supportive goal of virtualizing applications with VMware. Of course, Oracle VM, they would love to virtualize those but it's not as a robust platform. Our users have told us that time and time again but despite that, the vast majority of applications will be virtualized. But there are those pieces that won't be. Where are we today in that journey and what are the drivers and what are the barriers to that adoption? I think it's actually surprising. I think that if you would have asked me five years ago how quickly the uptake of virtualization would be, I would say it would have been a lot further along by now than what it really is. I actually think that there's a lot of organizations that have virtualization programs that have been underway for two, three, four years and they've probably got really 30 or 40% of the value out of it. Accenture's done some research as well in this space and one of the things that we found is that if you look at the total value that organizations have gotten out of virtualization relative to what the ROI was supposed to be, in most cases it's not even measured. And then when you can get underneath the underlying data to understand what the cost takeout's been, it gets kind of spotty, but we're showing around 30, 40% recovery of the investment. So a lot of the low hanging fruit for virtualization I think was taken up pretty quickly on initial employment, but that hard stuff around the applications like SAP, like Exchange, those are the ones that presented a lot of challenges. And that's what I think is so great about the Vblock concept and the technology is that that product's already been tested with Exchange, with SAP, and we're able to deploy it very quickly and get the results that in a lot of cases our clients have spent one, two, three years trying to achieve and still struggling to do it. We're going to be at SAP Sapphire next week and we were there last year, we had a couple of customers on that were virtualizing SAP, but the big thing there is different than what you get from Oracle is SAP was totally behind it and a key part of their marketing strategy. You heard a lot of support there and the CIOs told us that that's really important for them to make sure that the ISV is behind it. With this inevitability, hopefully more ISVs, I mean most ISVs are, I think Oracle ultimately is quietly sort of tacitly supporting it. But what are some of the barriers? Is it the ROI? I mean, you're saying people don't measure it, I mean the ROI of virtualization is enormous but that's infrastructure virtualization, right? Now you're talking about the applications. That's right. And I think that the reason that the low hanging fruit's been the easy one is because when you think about the applications that the CIOs are most concerned about and nine times that attend their next on the line around is gonna be around email and it's gonna be around their ERP implementations, right? So those are the ones that are the most risk intense I guess for lack of a better way of saying it. And I think that's why it's been slow to, I think it's been slow take up to get virtualization into those production environments. I mean, now we're at a place I think where virtualization is pretty common in most environments in one form or another. There's a lot more comfort today in virtualizing some of those mission critical applications than what there ever would have been, again, even 24 months ago, 36 months ago. And to kind of bring it full circle, I think with Vblock technology, I think that one of the key selling points of it is the fact that there's a lot less complexity to it. It's a lot more turnkey and it's already been tested. You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about specifically about Vblock. I mean, I think of Accenture as a company that is technology agnostic, right? I mean, that's one of the value propositions that you bring to your client base, but you mentioned several times, you're talking about Vblock, obviously there's some successes there. You're not the only service provider that's talking about Vblock. What's changed there? Why sort of the affinity to a particular technology where historically you wouldn't have had that necessarily? Well, I mean, I think that the thing from an Accenture perspective is that, we can certainly be agnostic, but we are paid in many cases to have a point of view and in certain instances, in certain situations, we believe that the Vblock is the right solution for our clients. There's other solutions, there's other scenarios where maybe it's not a complete Vblock technology, maybe it's other technologies that come into play as well. It just depends on what the business drivers are and what our clients are trying to achieve. I think from an Accenture perspective, being agnostic is certainly a selling point in certain consulting engagements, but in other engagements, this kind of goes back to the buying habits of our CIOs and the VPs that we deal with in the application and the infrastructure space and even on the business side, they want to buy solutions. They want to buy a business outcome. In some cases, they're less interested in a high-falutin, strategic kind of perspective as to the pros and cons. They just want something to buy that will work that they can turn on and they know it's going to be integrated, they know it's going to operate, and going to give them the results that they want. And in those situations, Accenture will step up with a point of view. And in many cases, Vblock is one of the products that we have an affinity towards in certain client situations. Well, I think there aren't a lot of choices. I mean, I've gone on record saying there's really a two-horse race here between EMC and HP as guys going after that sort of single logical block of infrastructure. I mean, IBM can do it, certainly Oracle if you want to buy the entire stack and they've got their solutions. But as a concept of bringing together compute and networking and storage, really those two companies and the combination of VMware, Cisco, and EMC obviously very powerful. But it was just sort of worth noting that there's been a lot of affinity toward Vblock block and we know about the renowned pipeline and so forth. So I think that's a real change that we're seeing in the industry. And I just think it has a lot of legs. I don't think it's a flash in the pan. I think that's right. And the other thing that I would say is that if you look at all of the industry consolidation that's taken place over the last five, six years, really longer than that last decade, to your point, there's a lot of kind of, it's really gotten cut in a lot fewer as to where you're going to go in and be able to provide a turnkey capability. And I think to a certain extent, that works fine depending on, again, what situation you're walking into and what business problem you're trying to solve. But in a lot of cases, and I would even go so far as say in most cases, our clients are more interested in what the best of breed solutions are and how do you knit those best of breed solutions together as opposed to having to select a single vendor with one key to turn and accept the fact that you've got a couple of best of breeds, you've got a couple of middle of the roads, and you've got a couple of emerging technologies that are all knitted together and you're trying to make best out of it. Sometimes there's less risk in that, but in a lot of cases you get less quality. Maybe you get less ability to be able to dynamically provision or to, you know, change, you know, a specific architecture. If you're a company or if you're from a business perspective, you want to move to it, you know, with agility to, you know, to meet a market demand. In a lot of cases, those turnkey solutions don't offer or afford you the ability to do that. So companies like ours, and Accenture specifically, you know, we like to look at what are the best of breed solutions, how do we as an SI knit those best of breed solutions together, and I think that's what drives us to, you know, kind of select from an alliance's perspective who are the vendors that we're going to place bets on that support what we're trying to do for our clients. This is interesting, this concept of best of breed comes up a lot, and you know, the best of breed is in the eye of the beholder. I'd be interested in, from a company that I do consider technology agnostic, well how do you evaluate best of breed? Right, because the startup is going to say, well my technology is, my widget's better than EMC's, it's new and it's hot, it doesn't have all that, you know, legacy infrastructure around it, but you know, financially they might not be as strong or the service might not be as good or the ecosystem might not be as strong, so what are the dimensions of best of breed that you guys consider? Well I think that, to your point right, best of breed depends on the given situation that you're trying to solve, there's no real kind of one key, you know, fits all locks, but what I would say is that, from our perspective, we look at alliance relationships in a short, medium and a long term kind of window, and you've got to weigh a lot of different factors to determine if something is, you know, use the industry definition of best of breed, right? What's the scalability of it? How proven is it in the marketplace? How quick can you get ROI out of it? How well does it integrate with your legacy systems and the like? What is the footprint that's out there today? I mean that's something that, you know, like it or not, you've got to factor that in. And so we look at it from those different angles, and then, you know, it's kind of a growing, you know, every six months, my team's revisiting the technology that's out there, whether it be in the infrastructure space, the application space, or the productivity space, to kind of sort through, you know, where do we want to place our bets, and what are some of those new disruptive technologies that are coming down the pike that we're gonna kind of keep on our radar? And in some cases, you know, helped, you know, as an SI and being a big SI, you know, in a lot of cases, we've got the ability to help some of those game-changing technologies really make an impact in the marketplace very quickly. And so, you know, we take that responsibility very seriously, and so, you know, like I said, you know, about every six months to a year, we're kind of re-taking a step back, revisiting, and then trying to select, you know, who do we think is the best partners to bring those technologies to the forefront? You don't want to have to refresh your portfolio every four months, right? It's just too unproductive from the beginning. It's impossible. To me, folks trained, you build delivery assets, all of the quality material, I mean, a lot goes into, you know, delivery methodology that, you know, you just can't continue to switch products every three or four months because new bell or whistles come out. So, just trying to balancing that with making sure that we don't get behind the, you know, as our chairman likes to say, you know, you kind of keep one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, and that's that balance is what's kind of difficult sometimes, but what we struggle to do. So, strive anyway. So, VBlock is on your short list of best of breed, right? That's clear from the statements that you're making. Is that right? Yeah. And so, and if a customer says, well, but I don't want this piece of VBlock, can I have this piece? You can't crack open the VBlock and put that piece in. So, you'll just integrate, you know, somebody else's solution in that case or how's that all work? Well, I mean, it just depends on the given situation, right? I mean, the, for the most part, I mean, the VBlock is the Cisco VMware EMC stack. There's other products that are out there today. There's other products that are emerging that are gonna give, you know, flexibility to what that architecture, I think, will be able to do and how it'll be able to be implemented. But in the short term, I mean, from a VBlock perspective, we look at EMC, Cisco and VMware as, you know, kind of the cornerstone of that technology. Well, you gotta be impressed with the investment that EMC has made. Tucci talks about, you know, the, let's see. I guess he said 24 billion over the last eight years in R&D and acquisitions. That's a pretty big number and 900 employees at VCE. I mean, clearly EMC has seen this opportunity of convergence and said, we're going for it. We want to be a leader there. Like I said, I think personally right now it's a two horse race. We'll see if others jump in. But I think it's a multi-billion dollar business that these guys have hopped on. And actually worked incredibly fast given the three company, the three headed monster, you know, throwing even Intel into the mix. It's actually quite remarkable that they've been able to pull this off. So, you know, we'll see where it goes from here. But I would predict that EMC is going to maintain the lead as long as it continues to invest and innovate there, which is, you know, good news for you guys and your customers. Yep, I think that's right. But, okay, my last question for you is, as you look out, you know, you're seeing cloud, you have this cloud big data intersection, you know, what's your, what's your telescope telling you? We're going to be here, let's say, let's keep it short. We're going to be here, let's say next year, EMC, is EMC World 2012. What's it going to look like? I don't know, I've learned not to forecast the future. I always end up looking that kind of side. Who would have thought big data would have been a theme here last year, right? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that mobility is going to be, you know, going to be top of mind for the next year or two, if not further out. I mean, the ability just to move seamlessly with one device and walk into a room and another device have it and walk into a room and another device have it and walk into a different country and it have it. I mean, I think that that's going to be kind of where the next kind of corporate initiative is going to be focused on, is just getting into the mobility side of it after they get the data concerns and privacy concerns, security concerns kind of washed her, but that's just, that's one fellow's opinion. Well, I think you're right. The end user device is changing everything, changing the dynamic, the way in which we interact with IT infrastructure. So excellent, Rocky Bonecutter, Accenture, appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing with us your perspectives. No worries, thank you. All right.