 Okay, we're back live here at EMC World 2012. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and talk to the smart people who can find, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Michael Dillatory, who's with SunGuard as VP of product management for the recovery services side of the business. Now, people might think of SunGuard as a disaster recovery company. I think you're sort of evolving into more of a availability company. And that's been, the big theme of this show is transformation. You guys have been through quite a transformation. So anyway, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for making some time. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, so EMC World, is this your first EMC World or have you been to many? No, so I've been with SunGuard for a couple years now and so I've come to EMC World every year. This is a great opportunity to meet with a lot of customers. We're a big EMC customer, service integrator. So we work with EMC at a number of levels. So this is a great show for us. You guys are a big time early adopter, I understand. You bring in a lot of technologies early, you beta test them. Yeah, so we were actually the first service provider user of Vblock and we've actually architected a lot of our cloud solutions, both on the production side and then on recover to cloud on the Vblock infrastructure. Yeah, that's been sort of a quasi game changer. Maybe it uses that term. It's kind of overused but it really has changed the industry quite a bit. But so let's get into your business a little bit. Talk about where your focus is, what your responsibilities are and then we'll get into some of the services and some of the trends that you're seeing. Okay, well my focus as head of product management for recovery services is I'm really responsible for two areas. So one are IT recovery solutions and then the other are work area recovery and worker recovery solutions. And so we look at it as not as a one-size-fits-all approach. Different environments have different needs, different availability objectives and they're architected on different technology so we have to supply a range of solutions to solve those customer needs. So there's a lot of talk about cloud, hybrid cloud seems to be really catching on. Whereas a year ago, our data showed not a lot of people were really pursuing it. Now that's changed. So what's your, what's Sunguards cloud strategy? Well, so our cloud strategy really breaks into two areas. So I'm not going to focus on as much on our production side. So our enterprise cloud, which is really more a place to run dev tests, to run production as well. So it's enterprise grade architected on top of VBlock. So you're going to have the reliability and the availability you need for enterprise grade applications. Then you're also going to have the protection based on Sunguards history of being that recovery expert, leader in the recovery industry, to be able to run enterprise grade applications. On the recovery side, from a cloud standpoint, we really approach the market as I said, from different customers or different places in their cloud migration. So the various things have been virtualized, various things are still physical, various things are running in a SaaS model and a hosted cloud model all over the place. And so it's not a simple environment. So a lot of people think cloud always simplifies IT and sometimes it actually makes it more complicated to make all of that available against the business needs. And so that's our strategy of really understanding what the customers are doing in production and provide tiered heterogeneous solutions to solve those availability objectives. Yeah, that's an interesting point you're making, Michael. I mean, at certain use cases and certain levels of mission criticality to put that infrastructure in, let's say, the public cloud is expensive. And so we really have to be careful about, hey, we got to go to the cloud. That kind of thinking is really a trap. It's alluring, but there's a lot of gotchas, right? Yeah, no, there's a lot of use cases where cloud makes sense and there's a lot of use cases where, well, public cloud makes sense. So there's a lot of use cases where private cloud's going to make sense and there's a lot of use cases where just virtualization makes sense. So we're seeing customers not move ubiquitous, just everything to the cloud. They're keeping some things in physical systems and the Unix environment, the mainframe environment, it's not going away. We're not seeing that. And so as you're deploying cloud, you still have to maintain that and make it all available and that's what our solutions do. That's really one of the biggest changes that we're seeing is that people are really starting to realize that those physical interdependencies are still needed and you need creative solutions to solve those use cases, in addition to getting the economic savings for those systems that make sense, for those applications that you're going to move to the cloud. You mentioned, we've talked about Vblock, there's also this move toward so-called reference architectures that basically are proven, but they have a lot more choice, different hypervisors, different communication systems, networking, different storage, and so forth, certainly in different compute. What's your take on that? There's a spectrum of a converged infrastructure. One's like any color you want as long as it's black, the other is a lot of choice, but there's trade-off. So what's your take on that for me? I'm so, as Sun Guard, it really is all about choice. So from a recovery services standpoint, customers are going to make decisions to optimize the uptime and effectiveness of their applications. So they need to focus on keeping IT out in the forefront and helping their business grow, helping their business reduce costs. And they're going to make certain decisions on how to deploy cloud. And I think these open architectures are really helping them do that, right? It's helping them make that dollar performance trade-off that they need and that customization that they need for their specific apps because organizations are very different. So while the Vblock definitely adds a lot of value and we've seen it with the reliability in the uptime, we're also looking at the open architectures as well to solve the specific application use cases. So talk about, as an old saying, backup is one thing, recovery is everything. Talk about what customers are pushing you towards from a recovery standpoint, whether it's RPO, RTO, how is the cloud affecting those business requirements? Well, the expectations of RTO and RPO have just compressed dramatically over the last five years. The expectations of what it costs to do disaster recovery and application availability has also dramatically changed. And so, but we're still seeing that the difference, there is still three specific tiers that you're going to see. You're going to see the mission-critical business. These are the crown jewels of the company. You're going to see the business-critical applications and then you're going to see everything else, basically. So a lot of people want to talk about multiple tiers, but I really think there's just three. And what's new with the cloud is more customers are willing to put their mission-critical applications both in the cloud and then recover to the cloud as well. So with that RTO or RPO compression, now even going to always on, going to under one hour, that's really the biggest change, is that now they're starting to look at doing the mission-critical apps in the cloud. And you're specifically talking about outsourced cloud, right? Yeah, so outsourced and sourced. So you have to think of Songard as two separate things. So we provide production services, which of course you have to outsource to be able to use it. We're a service provider or a hoster. And then from our standpoint, for disaster recovery, you could be in a hosted model, a service provider model with an IT outsourcer. You could be doing it yourself and you could be SaaS. We provide solutions to SaaS providers, the IT outsources into the customer's environment themselves. And so, but as you said, that you give pieces of that disaster recovery to us or you can keep pieces. So a lot of customers are keeping their mission-critical applications in-house and fully dedicated environments and then move everything else to Songard to get the economics and the reliability that outsourced recovery as the service solutions could provide. Michael, how do you handle the diversity of processes within your customer? You guys have a lot of customers. I don't know how many, but it's a lot. You've been around for a while. Yes, sure. And I'm sure there's commonality, but I'm sure there's also a lot of diversity in terms of how they handle security, how they report on incidents, how often they want to audit and how do you juggle all those different requirements and map them and align them with what you offer? I mean, obviously you want to have a repeatable, replicatable model, but your customers want customization. So there's a lot of, so I think it's very similar to how you think about IT architecture just in general. There's the kind of the open model where you have these different customizable modules that you can pull together and then you have the kind of one-size-fits-all. We are definitely not one-size-fits-all. In our history, our legacy has required that we bring different solutions that you can tailor. So you tailor the solution, it's maybe 80% done, and then you customize the 20%, and then you can fit different things together. So different customers are going to be running different applications, they're going to have different criticalities. So the same business, so you could have a retailer here, a retailer here. They're running very similar applications and they could have a completely different view about the criticality of their applications. They could have architected it completely differently and our solutions really work with anything. So we have professional services, consulting services that we wrap around it to plug them into our very open, very customizable and solution-oriented infrastructure and services. So there's also a lot of talk at this event and other events about big data. EMC kind of, actually SiliconANGLE started it years ago and then EMC picked up on it. I sort of joke, but it's sort of true, but so how is the big data, the whole people talk about the volume, the variety, the velocity, we've added the fourth V, which is value. How is that changing your business generally? And specifically I'm interested in the network requirements that you're seeing. So the network requirements with big, so one, it's not really my area of focus terribly, but big data with the network and what Sungar's trying to do is Sungar's trying to provide reference architectures, kind of a big data in a box, if you will. Leveraging the best-in-class technologies that EMC and others bring to the market with their acquisition of Green Plum and really deliver that in a service provider model. So most big data implementations are in the do-it-yourself model and since we're the service provider, we want to bring best-in-class technologies, best-in-class reference architectures to the forefront to make it kind of plug and play for the customer so they can really grow into a big data solution. They don't have to do the big bang investment. They can test it, see business value, and then scale as they grow. Yeah, okay, so I'm inferring from your comments that that big data trend hasn't permeated into your sort of recovery side of the business. No, not necessarily. It's really a very different use case for the data and so one of the things that you could think about, though, that we're starting to explore is different uses for data once it's off-site. So as you said, data protection is paramount. You have to have the data off-site. You have to have it in a secure location at the right recovery point objective and to know that it's going to be recoverable data. But then once you have it there, there's different things you can do with it. You can obviously do application recovery, which is a bread and butter. You can do dev test. You can do analytics on of that data. So a lot of the customers are now asking to say, how do I multi-purpose that data? How do I multi-purpose that second copy to say just so I just have one network pipe as opposed to many network pipes for the different use cases of that data. So that's some of the things that customers are bringing us into now. But how do you make that, how do I multi-purpose the use of that data so I don't have to ship it multiple times? So let's see, break out your telescope, maybe not the telescope, break out the binoculars. Let's not go too far. Let's look ahead, you know, two to three years. What do you see as the big changes that are coming in your business and how should customers be preparing for them? So some of the big changes that we're doing is really being able to worry free, guilt free, be able to outsource disaster recovery, be able to outsource your enterprise applications to our cloud, to our services. So, you know, so SAP hosting services on the cloud, Oracle hosting services on the cloud and you just don't have to worry. So, you know, and always version one of the technology, the customer's still going to have to do a lot for themselves. Version two of the technology, less and less, right? It's just behind the curtain and you don't worry about it. So as we start deploying these technologies, get more comfortable, customers get more comfortable, they see the use cases that it works, they see the stories that, my hope is that we'll be able to take more from the customer and save them more money so they can focus on their business growth and just, so one, saving them more money by just plug and play as we get these architectures, these reference architectures more baked and have basically less for them to do and then save more money. And the gate today is maturity, it's security, it's management, all of the above. It's kind of all of the above and then a lot of it is customer comfort. So as, you know, if you look at the virtualization market over the last however many years, right? They would just kind of toe-dip into it, right? They do the file system, they take the low-hanging fruit that made sense and then they started running enterprise apps on it and then they started moving it to the cloud so it's just a migration and as this develops, it's just going to, people are just going to get more comfortable. All right, Michael, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspectives, Michael Dillatory from Sunguards. John, we're wrapping up day three here. We've still got a ways to go though, we've got Howard Elias coming on, we've got David Goulden, so. Yeah, president and the CFO both coming on theCUBE. It could be exciting to get their perspectives. Actually, David Goulden. Good, so keep it right there, this is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage. We are theCUBE, we are live at EMC World 2012, we'll be right back.