 Hot seat Tony Pagli. Tony, you know, if you weren't an IT guy Can you play baseball? Were you a baseball player potentially my cousin was because you got a great name for baseball My cousin Mike Mike Pagli. Oh, no kidding So you're your Yankee fan or it's a lot of boys He is to yeah, but it'd be from this area from the Boston area and play Tony Tony Tony C Tony Canigli arrow boyhood, you know hero of mine and Tony Pagli Rulo sounds familiar Maybe your boys will be felonting But so Tony welcome welcome inside the Cube it's good to see you SAP sapphire big event here I've been telling the audience that EMC obviously is a big customer of SAPs You guys got a lot of SAP deployments in Oracle as well. I mean you guys, you know mission-critical applications and You I think are one of the more innovative IT operations that I've seen I mean a lot of that is you're driving EMC innovations Particularly the journey to the private cloud I mean that's something that your CIO Sanjay Merchandani who we've had on the Cube before and we'll have one later this week Has talked about but I wonder if you could talk about your your journey Sure to the private cloud where you're at and and we'll dig into it a little bit. Yeah So we've been on a journey for a long time. So it's kind of you know, not one of those things that happens overnight So, you know first of all, we've we set a target of a hundred percent virtualization So virtualization is key to get into the private cloud We're a huge believer in leveraging our existing core assets and virtualization has really allowed us to look at legacy applications consolidate onto ERP like SAP and others and You know, but virtualization is only one step, right? So, you know, the private cloud You know is all about enabling the business and driving results. So that's kind of the end state IT's a service as an end state. So virtualization job one, which we've done app tier middleware Database reporting. So you think about SAP not only does it include ERP it includes reporting with business objects And we're virtualizing every tier in the stack And so that's step once once you get to get virtualized great. So what well, you know You've got you drive a lot of benefit you drive Savings with respect to hardware with respect to labor with respect to energy and so forth But again, the the big value add is accelerating our ability to enable the business Right getting capabilities out there in short and time frames. What is the top things you're seeing for that? I mean, honestly, we heard we've been hearing that story for a year from the emcee You guys have been delivering on it emcee world We heard cloud meets big data and we expanded out the services angle component Which is a lot of the integration a lot of the meat and potatoes that you know, it's not always this, you know The sizzle and everyone talks about but there's a lot of proof points there last year we had Tom Peck on talking about V block Where you where are you guys at today with with some of these integration challenges? And what are the top three? Areas that you've learned and see or you're working with your knee deep into can you share that the top three kind of core areas? Hmm Let me let me think through that answer First of all like a lot of fortune 500 companies. We have a lot of legacy Right, you just can't walk away from those legacy applications. So, you know people refer to them as crop locations So the challenge is marrying and leveraging the information and the value out of those legacy applications and combining it with your new platforms It's it's relatively it's less of a challenge to move to a green field the block platform With an SAP or another application and that's what we've been doing So anything net and you gets virtualized and we'll move and we bought into V block in a big way Just because again, you know the value proposition in there is you know ease of it. It's fully integrated, right? You know literally you buy the V block and you could put all your components on top of it But we've what we've also been doing is we migrating those legacy applications to that private cloud if you will key to that though It was integration. So we've been leverage we've um, we've bought in big time to VMware spring framework So the spring integration framework spring batch is a really big enabler and that's something that hasn't been discussed a lot Paul Moritz at EMC world talked last week about the foundry and that really talks about that You know taking applications and then having the ability to put them in the container Hosted internally hosted externally. So the hybrid cloud option, but the integration component is key So sharing information in a seamless secure fashion is huge. So using cloud foundry and spring. Yeah, that's not legacy No, no, no exactly, but we need it to knit the legacy together because again We just can't walk away from these legacy apps as quickly quickly as we'd like, you know The SAP journey although we're going fast is going to take us some time. That's how's the pressure? I mean you work in an organization that Sanjay talks about, you know in Silicon Valley They talk about a dog food and eat your own dog food or as Shmarzo said was on you drink your own wine a little bit less of a dog metaphor But you guys have to you're taking all the new stuff in and you're playing with it You're implementing and that's kind of the culture of EMC It's pretty dangerous. I mean can you share this like when something blew up? I mean, I need to be careful here. I would say that um, what have you learned? I've learned a situation You know, so I've learned a lot so um, you know, um, you know, we've made some some Educated bets if you will everything we do Even if it's cutting edge or leading edge or maybe even bleeding edge We put through a rigorous process So we test we test the hell out of it both from an emcee it perspective and then we partner with the MC Engineering so lots of prep work goes in but as you know, there's always something unforeseen You can't test for everything. So when you move an enterprise, you know mission critical database, you know Say 16 terabytes, which we did 20 million transactions a day onto UCS Virtualized and no one else has done that, you know, there's going to be some things to pop up. So, um, you know that You know, that's one example where we've taken some pretty significant risk But again, we feel like we've gone through the right level of testing and and those risks have paid off in a huge way How do you manage that risk? What's the risk management strategy? I mean the team obviously has to buy into it. You got a culture of people saying, hey, you know, we're Mavericks You don't mind, you know, drinking from the fire hose trying new stuff out That's the hell out of it all that stuff but I mean you got to be prepared mindset-wise and then You got to deal with a lot of curveballs. How do you protect that risk because of certain strategies? I mean it that's always the challenge. How can you take do play with the new stuff and Accelerate that roadmap Well, always you want to have a plan B. So you want a fail-back plan, right? But in some cases, you know, those migrations don't allow for it So I guess as I said before having that top-down Support from Joe Tuchino's team is number one to working with the partners So again, whether it's SAP or Oracle or Cisco or VMware You know, we up from said, hey, these are our goals. They're ambitious We know no one else has done this and you guys will want to partner with us and hold our hand along the way And by the way make investments and they all have so investments in the form of giving us dedicated engineering support During the migration process during the testing and migration process as well as post-go live So those are ways you can mitigate the risk. So one of the simple Risks that I'm sure you guys talked about you're an application guy and a lot of application heads Don't want to virtualize their mission critical applications. You just said you did it with a 16 terabyte database Yes, performance is one area that you're obviously concerned about as an area of risk What did you see when you migrated that database? How did you manage that risk around performance and how's it going? Well, number one is we did lots performance test So we had a baseline of our as is performance from a production perspective We then built out a full replica and then we were a performance test at 30x scale And we saw the results were really good David. I mean that was the thing that was encouraging You know, we were we were running on a Solaris platform That was about five years old and at the time it was state-of-the-art, you know, e25k big honking gear, right? I think about 196 CPUs the You know moving with the Nehalem and the new form factor with UCS It's just you know the clock speed the memory footprint. It has been a giant step forward That's been the key. That's the you know that has been the enabler to x86 is a new Nehalem chip set Yeah, so, you know a lot of people this is actually an opportunity for a lot of customers out there who are running on Maybe non-intel hardware. Yep, or maybe even older Intel hardware to really upgrade And that's a that's maybe a fundamental best practice is make sure you get the hardware right so you can actually Improve performance maybe not on an apples to apples basis All right You could probably tune your performance on an apples to apples basis physical But the benefits of virtualization seem to outweigh some of the potential drawbacks there, don't they? You know without you know at the risk of being Self-serving I haven't seen many drawbacks. It's hard to see the drawbacks David You know if you look at the the licensing model you save money there if you do it, right? But it's so you think about it, right? You know from a Capital investment perspective, you know if we if I was to replace those two, you know UX devices it would have been probably maybe ten million dollars going to you know the x86 platform about two So right there capital outlay and then the full TCO the labor associate with managing it the you know The carbon footprint the electric the electric consumption, you know the data center footprint all less so I think you know, I haven't seen a lot of downside outside of kind of the the Apprehension, you know it folks and myself included our risk averse Yeah, you know and it's definitely that that crossing that chasm Typically to do it you want to see proof points out there and we have you know, so we're you know We're blazing the path. There were no proof points out there You know when I talked to a big partisan said hey show me another Enterprise mission critical system running on this you're right baby. Exactly. We're the first proof point okay, so Tony they talk a lot about the What I call the CIOs dilemma the 70 30 thing right where 70% of the investment goes into Running the business and only 30% of the investment can go into the growing the business or transforming the business And that's been the same mixed year roughly since I've been in this business Do you think that that virtualization and cloud can change that or is that is that a pipe dream? I? think it's a key step to changing it and I would suggest we're We've shifted the dial we move the dial dramatically We're probably about 50-50 now really yeah, yeah, and that's over the last three years and You know in a planful way Again first of all get moving to this virtualized platform your unit cost goes down dramatically David, right? So we're spent so we've got more money so this by the way that that our capital targets haven't changed They've stayed the same so we're you know We're taking a greater percentage and putting it into the business into enabling technologies and abling capabilities like SAP So flat budget and that's something you track you have a portfolio management system Yes, we do To bucketize the investments yep, and you haven't changed the definitions right to know we have no happy They see Joe we're at 5050 right in fact we reduced our capital say that yes We reduced our capital so coming out of and this has been fairly well publicized by our CFO You know Towards the tail end of 2008 with the greatest, you know recession since the depression You know we had a mandate to cut our budget by 20% Virtualization was core to that so we had you know and again You know we had developed business cases that said hey We'll be able to take out this much off x by virtualizing one of the initiatives You know what you may have heard so I do talk about what's called sweep the floor I referenced the crapplications earlier. You know one point. We'd 800 of these So by going you know, we rationalized the 800 down to 400 and then we virtualized, you know 90% of that 400 So what about mobile? I mean everyone's talking mobile iPad iPhone getting the data out. I see you see real big data Virtualization has always been that core enabler for kind of the news the new applications So as you pave over or sweep the floor of the crapplications and you got the budget going into the new stuff Mobile sexy mobiles people can touch mobile mobile opens up a can of it worms, right? It's like security privacy, you know Virtualization of the desktop. How are you handling mobile and what have you learned and what are you playing with on that in terms of that? IT projects, how is that? Right now? I've got my iPad running VDI so VM view and and we can actually Run a lot of our applications off of that today. So the notion is John will provision a user experience You know, so wherever you are whatever based on your role, you'll log in you pull down that secure container You know have the applications you need and so hopefully move, you know, so it's device agnostic whether it's you know A tablet, you know a laptop sitting in some here. He asked somewhere at Starbucks Whatever it is the notion would be you can you know, we'll be to get your unique user experience with the right access management around it So we're already moving that in that direction aggressively. We've I think we've got about 5,000 images out there now Virtual images out there now across the emcee environment. How would you grade the performance? I mean, obviously, you know being self-critical obviously, you know Can you share with us kind of how you feel? I mean what inning are you we in one and then how would you grade yourself? I gotta be careful with that one. I Might abstain from the great now. You know what? I think I think we're in the fourth inning right I think we're about to hit an inflection point, right? So there's new technologies coming out. You know, there's going to be you know some VMware's coming up with a web-based solution You know so no gooey gooey a DLL at all. That's going to be you know, we're playing around with that I think we're about you know the fourth in the middle middle innings And I think there'll be a big step forward just like there was a virtualization a couple years ago It's going to go fast. The other thing in terms of when people think about mobile You know, we've been enabling our content for mobile consumption, right? Whether you know we put we have lots of apps up and you know, you know the iStore the app store You know we take some of our in-house applications and we port them through our own mobile enterprise application platform So you know mobility is you know lots of different variations of it, but to me ideally You know and that because I've an app. I'm an apps guy now. I've run client services before I've run That kind of pretty much every job in it. I'd love to get out of the PC business. Why is that? It's there's no upside. It's just painful, right? There's you know, so you end up dealing with you know manufacturers problems in that and you're right So we fix stuff to but compatibility issues. Yeah, exactly loaded big fat client issues I think we talked about that last year Microsoft being big How about let's talk about SAP a little bit So when you come to a show like this as an IT practitioner, first of all, what are you looking for and and what do you think about what you're hearing from SAP? You know my objective of these coming to these shows is to come away with like two or three ideas that can take back with me, right? So on the on the SAP front I'm most interested in roadmaps. So the mobility you talked about so, you know SAP bought sidebase how they're going to bring those things together and really power You know application mobility because as I said before, you know, the old model used to be you You know, you've had to be the build at your own platform or you go with a third party or go for one of the carriers So I'm really interested in seeing what SAP does there. So I'm going to be pretend attending a few breakouts on that The other thing is just you know connecting with my peers That's just that might be the the biggest benefit of coming to these types of shows and just you know Shear empathy is a powerful thing, right talking about experiences like we're doing now and bringing that back Conversations is that I mean you seem in the hallway. Hey, can you believe that did you have that problem? I mean, what do you talk about? I mean, give us a little snapshot of the hallway conversation Information, you know, that's practitioner information, you know, that's you know, you're that's the inner sanctum here to pay I'll give you a little velvet rope Anything, what's the sentiment is it positive the negative? A lot of its bears and say, okay, you know what cuz you know in spite of the technology and the technology's come a long way At the end of the day whether you're moving to a private cloud or implementing SAP It's about business change and business transformation and that's never easy You know as I like to say this folks my job would be easy if it wasn't for the people, you know The technology is is really is great. It's those business conversations because how do you I teach being consumed differently? You know, we've got folks that are just so much more educated today that back than when I started on the workforce. So you really So so anyway, that's that's you know, what's the number one people problem that you're seeing out there And I see we've we've talked a lot about this how this retraining going on a lot of this new tech with virtualization Application mobility of things that you're mentioning Hadoop we've been covered like a blanket as you know big days now big part of EMC's positioning This is new stuff. I mean, this is not the world's change significantly Integrated skill sets. You got a network guy who's been a network guy for 15-20 years all since like hey You guys started learning application frameworks. That's right. So application framework guys You guys started saying policy and automation Or or business or business capability, you know, I mean I think you know One of my biggest challenges is taking my you know app developers app architects and get them to speak Business lexicon, you know, think about IT as a service presenting, you know infrastructure as a service, you know It's bits and bytes, right? But you know, how do you? expose IT in a way that the business can consume it because quite frankly we're competing with the salesforce comms or the Amazon or you know Or the UIT exactly you an IT or competing with those service providers Absolutely, and we've got to present our value proposition in the same way So re-skilling my organization on the front end to be able to do that is it is probably my biggest challenge What do you look for when you look at the net the IT tech athlete out there the young or Or older relearning new skill sets. I mean, what do you look for? I mean, you know the bring the sports metaphor to it because we've been talking about like the ESPN of tech But seriously, I mean IT is changing This skill sets. What's the new skill set? We say, hey, you know, we're looking for you know Someone who could throw the ball down the field I mean what IT skills that you look for and say that guy's got some potential that that gal She's amazing. Is it the DBA? Is it, you know, all this is changing. What do you look for and say that's talent? How do you identify, you know, it's It depends, right? I mean, I think there's still some skills. They're really hard to come by SAP right so, you know good basis administrators hard to come by so, you know, that's unique I'd say you think speaking of big data, you know, the role of data architect like EMC is talking about data scientists But I think that's going to be a real unique arcane skill. There's not that many of them but data architect That's someone who actually understands the source systems understands business process And so I look for people that really understand business context as well as technical aptitude, right? It's not necessarily unless it's more of a unique situation to get that great Oracle app DBA or that SAP basis expert I'm way more looking for what I'll you know back to your sports analogy the best available athlete I can't get the quarterback in the draft. So I'm going to go for the best athlete Yeah, and it's not necessarily the technical skills that some of the other intangibles and the ability to interact with the business And business leaders are fickle, right? I mean Their business changes and then they want IT to respond overnight. I mean, that's got to be a challenge Yeah, so I have a question on Twitter that came in from someone Martin said what is SAP's cloud foundry strategy? parentheses in case they even have one smiley face I think you have to ask a Jim snobby that question Jim you've been you've been prepared. So there's a good question. We're gonna have a good conversation I think you're gonna hear something about that this week And I'd be surprised if we don't hear what their cloud foundry like strategy is this week whether it's cloud foundry or something I think we'll sing so what's on that to do this you mentioned it sounds like you want to see some Substantive product out of the combination of side base and SAP that's something that we've been waiting for That's I'd like to see yeah Really to try to leverage that relationship. What else is on the the SAP to-do list from a practitioner's point of view? I'm interested in where Hanagos. I think you back to big data. I think the you know BMC strategy, you know of you know enabling big data Integrating that with a handle like solution. I mean, you know, I think there could be something pretty powerful there So as a practitioner, you know You know the in-memory especially as it pertains to BI. I think it's an attractive value proposition and I think I'd like to see is You know, you know SAP You know historically with with BW business warehouse or BWA is optimized around SAP and ECC As I said before, you know, any most large companies have multiple sources of information both structured and unstructured So, you know, you look you know think about big day You want a solution like a green plum that can aggregate that information So I think some you know some combination of green plug with maybe SAP's, you know, HANA for BI could be something there So I'm kind of anxiously waiting. It's not quite there yet, but I'm hopeful But so potentially game-changing from a development standpoint. Yeah. Yes. I think so because you know, I also own the enterprise data warehouses for you in AMC and That's one place You know people can get their heads around all OLTP and you know if it's not the best user experience It takes a little longer say, you know what they know, it's complicated But ultimately it's all about getting the information they need to make business decisions So there's um So that BI is huge value add so to me if you know, so what we do today's model is lots of iteration Heads down development to accelerate that instead of spending two weeks writing a report to add a column If we can expose any information to users and we leverage, you know between green plum and potentially some type of SAP solution And really go to sell BI self-service. I think that's that'd be that'd be a great step forward How far ahead of your your peers you talked about before a EMC's IT very much leading edge I kind of had a mandate from Joe You got a lot of strategic, you know assets in your portfolio that you're bringing to bear How far ahead do you think you are of the typical peer that you talk to and I don't mean that in any kind of You know braggered way I mean it's it's clear you've you've had a mandate to push the risk envelope probably more so than the other guys Is it is it six months a year two years five years? How far out in front do you do you see your organization? Um, I think you know on the curve the maturity curve We're in the top 25% and that's the best way I could say it, you know without disparaging anybody But I do get I talked to hundreds of customers I know I get the opportunity to go and talk about what we've done share and there's um There's definitely some customers that are right up there in the maturity curve But I think there's many that are in the middle and by the way I measure that in two ways one is you know We talk about percent virtualized, you know I think you know Palmer it's talked about mature companies being 40 to 50 percent we happen to be 85 percent But then going beyond that in leveraging it is you know in a strategic way, you know Exposing that capability to drive results in an agile fashion. So I think we're we're right up there Yeah, what are you seeing in terms of I'm talking about you know bottom of the fourth inning with IT But let's talk about you know some of the earlier innings and other aspects like Hadoop Even see us with green measured green plum Client of Perkins just announced they put nine million dollars into a startup data data mirror or something like that And are you playing with Hadoop? Are you playing with Hadoop on green plum? You and how does Iceland fit into all that as well? So not my area of expertise would definitely green plum is in my space Iceland were you know We weren't a large customer of Iceland before we purchased them. We're just looking at Iceland So we you know, we'd like the possibilities Hadoop as well We're just you know looking at it from an innovation perspective any deployments internally just kind of playing just playing Good all right. We're here with Tony Pagli Rulo from EMC's IT vice president Practitioner extraordinaire Tony is great to have you on the Cube always really enjoy your perspectives very common sense Last thing for you For your peers that you talked to wanting to take this journey. What what advice would you would you leave them with? number one, I know I've said this a few times Get the executive commitment number one You know number two have a strong business case and a Plan a good plan a detailed plan and ensure that plan allows for you know rigorous testing Because even though we're aggressive and we're bleeding edge, you know, we go through a you know again a rigorous life cycle management process Excellent, so we Tony we've been watching the journey and you guys have been making phenomenal progress actually probably a little faster than we had thought to be honest with you and We'll keep watching and so thanks again for sharing your perspectives are great to have you on my pleasure. Good. See you again