 We're back here live at EMC World and this is day two of our exclusive three-day coverage of Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the event, extract the sealant from the noise. I'm joined by my co-host in this segment, Stu Miniman, of wikibon.org. And our guest is Kent Christensen from Datalink. Kent, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Top of the morning here on day two, and this is just day two. We've got another day to go. Pat Kelsinger coming on, Joe Tucci hit the keynote, Paul Moritz. EMC's proud and to say we're doing things a little bit differently. We've got four brands, data fabric, they're creating a lot of opportunities. So talk about Datalink and what you guys are doing and delivering the cloud because the mission is still the same, the market's changing, the dynamics are changing. We saw software defined networking hit the scene last year. That's changing a lot of stuff. That's data fabric with big data, security equation still is important. All those things in play, you're out there in the front lines. Talk about Datalink and some of the things that you guys have with experience in the cloud across the board. Well, I think one of the things you see when EMC's mentioned a number of times, ten years ago they were a storage company. As were we, we've had to go through this transformation ourselves and become a full data service provider, even a cloud services provider if you would to our customers. The buzzword or the theme around transformation we see is very real. They realize now more than ever that IT organizations need to go through transformation and our role is to help them do that. Best of breed technologies, people processes and help them meet their business needs. It's always been our role. It's just much more acute these days. What's your take about EMC world this year? Now we're day two. We're getting starting to see some of the onion get peeled back a little bit yesterday. It was a great preview. We had some amazing guests on the cube. But what's your take on EMC world here today? Obviously you're seeing, you know, the arrow, you know, in the keynote that's been putting a lot of wood behind many arrows. What's your take? I'm going to share with the folks out there who aren't here on the ground. What's what the vibe is here and what the major trends that they're really water skiing behind? Well, it's a huge conference. One of the biggies for us certainly. I think 15,000 plus people here. A lot of technology flying at you. A lot of it is things that are coming down the road. So as we look at things like Pivotal and some of those other initiatives, those are things that we're getting ready for. If we step back and look at cloud, those are things that we've been doing and executing on over the last couple of years and looking at how those have improved. So a lot of information to take in. So Kent, you know, this is part of our spotlight on looking at kind of converged infrastructure for the mid market and SMB. Right. So we're looking at kind of the cloud marketplace here. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, what is your mid market customers and going down to the SMB? You know, what does cloud meet to them and how does convergence fit into that? Yeah, that's really where the rubber hits the road. So, you know, we've seen in our enterprise customers the urgency to go through the transformation. And in the large customer, they might have a very sophisticated IT staff and we'll play a role to help them go through that transformation. But they typically have had the burden of putting together architectures themselves. As we go down into our mid market and commercial customers, they've really have challenged us and almost demanded that we help them do this, that we lead this transformation with them. They recognize they don't have the skills across servers networking and storage and clearly converging those solutions into unified architectures is something that that a lot of organizations are really seeing the value of. All right. So, you know, how has that kind of V specs rollout, you know, been in your perspective, you know, what's customer adoption and what's your experience been? Well, V specs is great. It was announced, I guess, about a year ago. And, you know, we have kind of been working with a lot of customers without being able to call it V specs, where we were helping them put EMC storage in VMware and Cisco together in solutions. V specs came out and really gave us a lot of assistance a by branding it and saying we can call it something. So the work you're doing with this customer is a V specs architecture, and then putting a lot of resources behind it. So the validated designs that they've done both the EMC with the backup and the Cisco validated designs are a great starting point. Somebody who says, Hey, I'm looking to roll out desktop or I'm looking to roll out private cloud, they don't have to start from scratch, they can go and say, Hey, there's all these resources have been put into this design data link, you know, we're depending on you to go deliver it, which is great. That show you know that allows us to add that value, not just to the customer, but to the EMC channel. And they realize that hey, we've got this we've got integrating these things together design delivery support and aligned with the customer. So it's really, really been for us a really good thing. Okay, so so one of the values of kind of the reference architecture of V specs ring is that flexibility. Can you walk us through, you know, how many different solutions are you only selling EMC with Cisco and VMware or you know, what do you offer? No, that's a great point. So one of the things V specs did that that wasn't in the portfolio prior to this to give you the flexibility. And we report on these publicly. Many customers are ready to say, Hey, I'm going to go through this transformational flash of white light and bring in this new architecture and drop it in and we're going to port stuff to it. Many others though, maybe at least half need to migrate into it, they need to use existing processes and resources and they can't just turn a light switch overnight. So they may have a another vendor servers. Do I have to switch server vendors in order to get most of the value that I would get out of a V specs architecture? No, if it's an x 86 server, we'll show you the pros and cons of that versus something else, but we can leverage that. So between wanting to migrate in it and use existing assets V specs provides that flexibility to be able to do that. Okay, I'm wondering if you can tell us is this more than just kind of simplifying a virtual deployment? Or are we really getting to more of a cloud model in a private cloud environment? We think more and more we're truly delivering private cloud models aligned to the customer's business. So they may not do that all on one day, but we're putting out essentially a blueprint to how they get there. A lot of times that starts with something like a V specs architecture. I always look at that as the foundation for the cloud. And then they start defining the services they want to deliver the things that they're repeating. We use things like, you know, CAC and other tools to help orchestrate and automate that V specs solution and then align that with their particular customer environment, which takes you from I think in virtualization, we went and said, if I deploy virtualization properly, I will save money. And we have kind of crossed the line to say, if I deploy private cloud properly, we will make more money. We'll do things more rapidly, we'll bring on customers more quickly, we'll end up generating more money for the organization. And that's pretty exciting. Ken, I want to ask you because obviously the cloud journey has been one of those things that EMC's been talking about for a while since we've been doing the Cube. There are a lot of different paths to the cloud with V specs in particular. What are you guys seeing out there for the use cases? I mean, because there's different categories of customer bases from SMB, small, medium sized businesses to large growing companies. Absolutely. I mean, what are the couple of paths that people take in your experience? You know, from the EMC path to the cloud, get it all at once in a unified solution, V specs being kind of the middle, build it yourself. You know, so people are taking all of those paths. But you're right, there are one of the things that we say about cloud is I can't come down and dictate to you what your cloud should look like. I need to listen to you about your business and understand. So examples that we brought in a customer last year, their environment was, you know, they were providing services internally and processing and things like that and they needed DR. And they were going to identify things, especially in their AppDev group that they wanted cloud services on. Another customer that's in here this year is a service provider. They're providing services to their customers that happen to be hospitals and they needed, you know, the same discipline in their back end. They needed the same automation, the same ability to deliver consistent services, et cetera, to their customers. So two different examples. If I were to stereotype one thing that a lot of people are getting a lot of traction on is dealing with the AppDev group. So in most organizations you can go in and they're trying to get their arms around transformation. You said, well just think about the relationship between yourself and your AppDev group. They might be going out and creating their own little shadow IT organizations and trying to figure out what to do. If you really understand the services they're needing, there's an opportunity, a real near term, provide value to them, to provide value to the organization. And that's a real common opportunity. How are they managing that? Because obviously that's happening. We know a little bit of shadow IT is going on. In some cases there's more than others and obviously it's not endorsed officially. But it is tolerated in the sense of, don't put anything sensitive out there. When you talk to customers and people, they're just trying to solve a problem, right? They're really trying to solve a business problem. So how do you have those conversations? I mean, welcome us through the day in the life of that kind of conversation. Well, I think to help. So I agree with that. I think the C level is going in and saying, well I'm going to tolerate this because these guys, let's say the GapDev people are generating revenue and whatever it takes to get their job done more quickly, there's an urgency to take advantage of cloud to help it drive the bottom line and things like that. The IT organization kind of sees that happening and they become compliance officers and they realize that data is getting out in places that aren't there's not proper discipline around this. And there's a gap right now. The gap is that if I don't deliver a service that meets their needs, they're going to continue to do this. And so that's the opportunity to talk to really both sides. A lot of times you have both teams in the room and you say, we understand what you're looking for to get your job more quickly. We understand the gap between if it takes four weeks or even four days to get that. What if we could get that in four hours customized to what you need as opposed to going out and buying a generalized service? We heard from Joe Tucci and Paul Moritz here on Day 2 of the Keynotes and they're making a lot of references to Google, right? Google scale. They mentioned Google file system. You know, a lot of the, you know, under the hood kind of details that a hyper scale company will do. Now, not everyone's going to build their own cloud. They kind of said people want to build their own clouds. Yeah, on the high end, if you're an absolute, you know, financial institution, you need to control everything. Maybe you'll vertically integrate like Google, but the majority of the market's not going to do that. They're going to want to customize some cloud. So how does that affect? I mean, that's generally accepted. One, do you agree? If you don't, let's talk about that. But if you do, how does a customer get their arms around? Okay, shadow IT validates the approach of development. Now I got to rein that in. And I don't want to build my own cloud. I want to do some things, build, but not build a full scale cloud. Right. So I think there's maybe two different challenges there. One of them is the Google scale and the big data that we just talked about with the pivotal initiative where how do I handle 30 tailbrights of data streaming at me? And I think how we do that and commercial likes that is TBD. A lot of that is custom work within the organization within the marketing department to find their data. As far as getting the value of cloud within the organization, they've been doing the right things. They've been virtualizing most of that with VMware. They've got storage virtualization. They got a networking team. We just need to kind of bring them together and break down some of the political barriers so that they can focus on delivering the service. It's not a major overhaul. It's a tweak. It is. It is a journey. It is the journey and they're most likely already on that path. And we're just like saying, OK, here's where it can be, you know, out here six months or three months or a year. And let's just make sure that we're focused on delivering that value and focus on delivering that value to the organization. We could drill in a second. You talk about kind of the silos. When I look at convergence, one of the biggest challenges, you know, technology and organizational are tough, but they go to market. If you look at some of the solutions out there in the market, there's a little bit of the struggle as to, you know, how do we work with the channel on this? Of course, you know, you've lived this. So, you know, EMC is not listening right now. So, you know, tell us, what are they doing good and what do they need to do better? Well, I think, you know, EMC has announced themselves where they had what they called the storage Nazi, and it was a very direct model, let's say 10 years ago. And what they've done recently with things like V-Specs is they've said, you know what? We don't need to to control everything. We don't need to have complete control over the account and we recognize as the partner adds value. So V-Specs really said we're going to depend on the partner add value. We're really going to supply the storage and we're going to end the reference architectures and we're going to depend on the partner ultimately to add in the networking and configure it to the customer's environment and the virtualization and things like that. That's really a huge olive branch to make sure that that is a very channel-friendly approach. Yeah, so does data link take advantage of kind of the co-branding effort of V-Specs? Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, I think, you know, I was talking to Gil from V-Specs. Yesterday and probably the number one thing the EMC can continue to do is push that brand and continue to do what they're doing in reference architectures, etc. But that brand helps us go and have a very quick conversation with a customer that says, how about a V-Specs architecture? This is what it looks like. And we get from piece parts, which is the old school. You know, if EMC was having a campaign on storage and Cisco was having a campaign on networking and now servers to bringing that all together. And that's just a rallying point. The brand of V-Specs helps us rally around the solution and move further down the road. Right. So if we look at kind of that SMB and mid-market space, is most of the competition for V-Specs still kind of the builder-owned or some of the startups and some of the other big vendors that are getting in that space, like, you know, Dell, I think, have done and done in the mid-market and that app competing against what V-Specs is doing in your in your experience. I think in the enterprise, there's a feeling that I have to own this architecture and I've got a large staff and I got multiple people that cloud in their title, etc. And so there's a little bit more of build your own. But I see that breaking down very rapidly and then starting to look at converge. I think in the mid-market, you have more of an immediate realization that, boy, I could really use help. And we see this day after day that as we bring a customer in and we show them, you know, this is what you could be doing and here's what you have and here's how we can help you get that. They start to realize that, wow, I was trying to deal with multiple partners. I was trying to deal with this guy on Monday and this guy on Tuesday and put this together. And I realized, and this is where the value of V-Specs helps an organization like us where we can put the whole solution together, that they see the value and we can deliver that value and we've invested in that. Some of the challenge, you know, we talked about silos and change and transformation and it's hard. The challenge is that might change something they did. They might have been buying VMware from a server provider in the past. Maybe it was Dell and they realized, well, Dell's not going to lead me on my journey to the cloud. They're just going to sell me ESX. I need somebody that kind of, you know, can put together the complete solution and architecture for my organization and help me get there. So, you know, that's the challenge for, it's been a challenge for us to grow. I think it's been a challenge for the different partners to recognize that and certainly for the customers to break down, you know, their organizational barriers. Ken, my final question is we're getting wrapped up on time here but great, great content. EMC is not, has a reputation with Channel. Obviously, they've historically had a very aggressive sales force and they've had a little bit of rub in with some of the channel. We had the channel guys on earlier and the fog is clearing and they have a good sense of how they're segmenting their channel with direct on their named accounts and then also their channel partners. So, what is your experience with the channel and with EMC? What's your report card? How would you talk to the folks out there to kind of give them, I always say, the new Polaroid picture, but to be modern, I'll say, a new Instagram photo of the EMC channel? Well, huge progress, right? Now, I think they announced 50% of our sales go through this channel moving towards 60%. That's huge improvement over, you know, three, four, five years ago. VSpec's huge improvement over, hey, I'm going to actually bring you into my account and we're going to be dependent on you to be delivering this complete package of services while I'm just applying storage. So, is the controlling EMC, that's huge? Can we grow? And the trust, they got to have trust join, sales calls, good trust relationship. Absolutely. So, I think, you know, we've been very much embraced as we come into the various offices and say, here's what we can do with VSpec, we can design, we can deliver, we can support, we can manage that. They're like, great, you know, that's a unique partner experience and we can leverage that. Can we do more? Absolutely, right? I always say the formula is very simple on the channel, pass, shoot, score, no conflict, are people making money and are you accelerating growth? Right. And that, you know, and more margin for the partners. And ultimately, you know, if we can jointly have our customers realize this transformation, when they go through this, they're customers for a long time because we've done a very good thing for them. Okay, we're here with Ken Critson-Cinema with Data Link. We'll be right back. This is the Silicon Angle theCUBE spotlight segment here. We'll be right back with more coverage from day two. Just kicking off day two here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with our next guest.