 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events that strike the scene from the noise. We're here. I'm here with Stu Miniman on this segment because Dave's out at an event. Stu, welcome back. And our guest is John Treadway, Senior Vice President for Cloud Technology Partners. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Well, good to be here. So you're watching all the action out there. Cloud's exploding. There's an acquisition out there today in Stratus. Dell picked up a boutique firm that's doing some cloud consulting. We know cloud scaling with Randy Bias. A lot of these cloud providers are somewhat trying to hit that tipping point. Some are selling. What is the state of the business? I mean, honestly, you know, in your business, there's growth on the services side, but the big whales are coming in with their consulting service. We had EMC talking to cloud service. What's the landscape? I mean, is acquisition a sign of consolidation or just that's a random data point? Yeah, no, I mean, it's actually pretty interesting. It's, we're so early in these, in this market. I mean, so early. I don't think people really have an appreciation for how early we are. We go into clients all the time and they say, oh, I've got a private cloud over here. And they don't. They have infrastructure with virtualization on it, no automation. And if you can't get a VM in five minutes, how do you call it a cloud, right? So people are just starting to make the investments in the infrastructure. They're barely thinking about the applications at this point. So where things are happening is more on the edges, like all new innovation that happens from the edges of the business in to IT. So the things that are going on in IT, the investments, it's just picking up now. So when Stradius gets bought by Dell, and by the way, love those guys and congratulations. I think it's excellent for them and it's great for Dell as well. But it's really early and there's going to be more players in this space. There's going to be more things going on. And I hate seeing good companies go off the market before it's really matured enough. So we were at Opistax Summit and we were talking about it earlier with Ben right now. But there's huge demand. Even the EMC's just putting their toe in the water is really getting to this transformation conversation. And there's always the bloggers like us and the researchers that we've been trying to stay ahead of the curve, maybe a little bit forward thinking. But UBS was just on theCUBE here talking about, hey, you know what, we are all in. The R&D's there, we are investing, and you can talk about big data, data-driven infrastructure, and it's there. So the question I have for you is, on the growth path right now, where are we from an investment standpoint? What is the most acute focused area for most CIS? So a big focus still is in the infrastructure and it is picking up. So I think we're at that stage where it's accelerated, things are moving really quickly. Again, it's still early. There's tremendous amount of work that needs to get done before it's there. The next stage is really going to be on the app stage. And so at Cloud Technology Partners, so we build strategic cloud-ready, cloud-native applications for clients. So when they're doing their next strategic application and they want it to be able to be run in any kind of a cloud environment, be secure and be scalable, we're doing that. We're also building people's clouds, right? So we're doing on both sides, the infrastructure and the applications. And so we're starting to see a shift where people are starting to think more about the applications. This is where things like Pivotal One and PaaS and Cloud Foundry, that kind of stuff is starting to come along. And we're getting a lot more conversations in our enterprise clients around the platform as a service space. And we're even building tools that we're actually getting ready to launch into something called Passlane, that is actually a tool to help you migrate your applications onto your particular cloud platform. Is there any particular trend that you see that's really lifting all the boats in terms of the consultancy? I'll give you an example on the OpenStack. My Moranches has had huge success by basically being the shop to go to for back up your truck and give me some OpenStack, right? So that's one data point. Do you see others? And what's your business sweet spot? And we're definitely doing that same type of work. I mean, we're getting a lot of OpenStack work and we've been doing that for a while and built a nice OpenStack practice. So, you know, Moranches and Cloud Technology partners are kind of the two go-to guys in that. We're also, as I said, on the application side, that's a whole nother area. People are kind of backing up to us and saying, okay, you know, we have this heritage. A lot of people from our team came out of the Cambridge Technology Partners' Days doing client server and application development. So we know absolutely- You guys pioneered a lot, you guys did a lot of work with telcos and service providers. Sure, and we're- You know that business. We know financial services, right? So we know UBS. We know all the clients in that space. I've done a lot of work on Wall Street in the past as well. So, we're seeing this next transition, this application transition. And the issue is that people are taking their existing applications today. And if you try to take your whole portfolio and try to move it to Amazon, it won't work. It's expensive. Too many requirements. Too many requirements. It's too hard. The licensing model, the applications weren't built to run on Amazon in the first place. They were built to run on- The hornestness of complexity. Yeah, well, and we built the architecture for today's applications in the 90s during the internet boom, right? So the architecture for tomorrow's applications is on the cloud. And so those new cloud-native applications, it really changes the architecture, the way you build, the way you think about them if you want them to run well. So people are migrating mostly to private clouds for their existing application portfolio because that most looks like a traditional IT architecture with all of the pieces. But new applications are being built out to public clouds. So John, could you talk to us a little bit about how you're seeing your environment and vendors competing against Amazon? Amazon, there's so much focus about how much cost we're going to save. I think David Litzicum actually said, for every dollar you spend in AWS, you're going to save between three and $10 that you might have spent traditionally on the infrastructure and the upkeep of that environment. So how do you compete with that? Is it the application breadth that you can do that you can't do in Amazon? What's the story? Well, so you've got lots of different, Amazon is being compared from a competitive perspective with lots of different categories, not all of which really apply. I actually don't think OpenStack and Amazon really compete, but they do in some way because OpenStack is a supply technology to things that compete with Amazon. But I don't, I mean, it's really interesting. How do you compete against Amazon? Well, first of all, don't try to because they're out innovating, they're out investing, they're out scaling everybody at this point. I mean, Google's going to compete with them in rack spaces and we're good friends with them as well and they've got a lot of good stuff. So on that level, people have lots of options. But traditional IT applications that were written that you want to move into a cloud today to get the benefits of a standardized platform, service catalog, model, all of the things that you want to see in a cloud, they won't run on Amazon like it was just talking about. You want them actually in a VMware environment, in a private cloud, inside your data center because you can control them better. So how do you compete with Amazon? You go for the apps that aren't really good for Amazon and won't be ever probably good for Amazon. Yeah, so you talked about VMware there for a second. We were talking off camera before about kind of OpenStack versus VMware because well, I'd agree that OpenStack might not be competing head to head with Amazon. If you talk to most partners of OpenStack, getting rid of that VMware license is one of the reasons that companies want to go to OpenStack. You see many of the open source projects are really to fight licensing. It's against Oracle, it's against Microsoft and now VMware is in that same category in many ways. So what does OpenStack mean for VMware and where do you see the fit for each of these environments and is there a future together? Yeah, well you have to look at it from the various layers, right? What OpenStack does is get rid of the need for VCloud, not VCloud directly, right? Which is not where all the money's being spent with VMware. The money's being spent in the hypervisor and the tools around that, vSphere, right? The vSphere suite. Well that competes with KVM or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Also competes with Zen, so the Citrix-Zen stuff. So really what you're getting rid of is actually the VMware licenses you get rid of by going to Zen or KVM or Hyper-V, right? The next layer up which is the VCloud director piece, that's what's competing with OpenStack and we do see a lot of VCloud director in our enterprise customers, especially in financial services. But even there, they're saying okay great, we're going to do this cloud and it's going to be on VMware and we're going to use VCloud for that. Then they say, but we want to start planning our next cloud. So let's talk about OpenStack, right? And some people are going to OpenStack right away but it's all that automation layer of the actual orchestration of the virtualized environment that an OpenStack is providing. We're here with John Treadway, who's Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners here live on theCUBE. I got to ask you the question. It's not everyone's mind, well, on my mind, everyone's mind. Around services and consulting in general, you mentioned Cambridge Technology Partners, but we lived through the client-server revolution. A lot of people made a ton of dough on that. I mean, you looked at all the consulting firms. I mean, it was a gravy train, huge deployments, SAP rollouts, Oracle rollouts, I mean, great business. And that's, but now the trends are shifted towards shorter accelerated deployments, shorter proof of concept. So it's shorter, faster, more economically in favor of to the clients. You agree that's the new consulting model? I do, I do, by and large, by and large. Yeah, I wouldn't have called what was done in the past always old and slow, but I hear what you're saying. Considering the kind of needs requirements to roll out. So it is, it has changed quite a bit. And when you're building the infrastructure as a service layer and the platform as a service layer in an enterprise, that's a big problem. Oh, it's different, right? Now when you go to build the applications, there's, remember now we have software as a service and the services model around that is very much quick hit, get in, get out, get the implementation, maintain it and modernize it. So the question is it might be the same length, it's just different execution. It's different execution, it's shorter, it's more agile, so you have shorter cycles. You actually get things running more quickly. Time to value faster. Time to value faster, but over the long haul, there's still a ton of work that you just need to keep doing. The good news is that you get to very advanced functionality very quickly because you're leveraging the agility that Cloud brings you, but then you have, and then you can continue to invest to actually move those applications forward. So the client's benefit to the client. It's absolutely a benefit to the client. Okay, so let's go back and kind of look at IT. So we've been saying earlier that, you know, IT has had a lot of years of consolidation and now there's a huge investment opportunity on there and they got a tool up. They used I coined the term IT IQ where they've been kind of almost, not, I don't want to say dumb down, but they've unskeleton crew and a lot of outsourced stuff, help desk here, Cap Gemini's running this, and all that stuff's going on, right? So now all of a sudden, boom, they got to turn up to heat. A lot of people are saying, I'm not going back to the well to the older guys. I don't want to just call Cap Gemini, but you know, you got Accenture and a bunch of guys out there and the ones who don't adapt will die. That's classic. I got to ask you though, a lot of that has been coined, I'll run your mess for less. Right, that's the only outsourcing. As was coined earlier, outsourcing kind of deals like the EDSs of the world to now more transform your business. That's right. You guys are in that transform your business category. Exactly. So talk about those conversations, okay? Because we don't really want, that whole legacy stuff's gone. What is the conversations you're having around, we want to transform your business and then how does that go? But it's interesting, you bring up some of the, there's legacy vendors, there's legacy consulting companies, right? Accenture made, it's marked through the whole client server world as well. And what we're finding is that by and large, there are a few people in a lot of those organizations that can talk cloud and some of them are pretty intelligent about it, but the breadth of their organization is not very cloud knowledgeable and not very cloud savvy. So when you get into actually working with the clients and looking at them from the standpoint of what are you going to do? Who's going to advise you about what type of cloud capability you need to deploy inside the enterprise, right? What we're finding is that we get into a conversation with a client and it's game over in five minutes because everybody in our company, all we do is cloud. All we do, it's like when Cambridge came out, all they did was client server, they specialized, right? So that specialization makes it easier for us to compete and win. It doesn't mean that- You get reference architectures you have. Yeah, a lot of IP, yeah. Yeah, a lot of services IP, reference architectures, designs, deployment templates and patterns for different types of cloud architectures. So we can get there really quickly and we can talk about the strategic issues. So I mean, one of my clients, which is a major bank, I had several conversations with the chief operating officer of a top 10 U.S. bank over what cloud will do for their business from a strategic perspective in being more agile and serving their customers, right? It was that important that we had four one-hour blocks with one of the top guys at a major bank. And then you got to dive deep into the weeds when you talk about compliance. Well, compliance is another one and it's very interesting because Infosec, other than dealing with the attacks and all the distributed attacks and the state-sponsored attacks, other than that area, Infosec is being bled pretty badly with the rest of IT. And so we do find a lot of our clients have, they're modernizing their infrastructure and they're putting the automation in, but they can't automate the Infosec components. So the analogy I use is they're driving really, really fast around a hairpin corner, right? Which is blind and there's a tree in the middle of the road and they don't know it yet and when they hit it, it hurts and that tree is security because they don't have the processes, they don't have the automation and they're not thinking about Infosec in a truly holistic way from a cloud perspective. So we do spend a lot of time on that when we're defining what a cloud should be for you. Do you have to get into the conversation around Infosec with virtualization, network virtualization and all of that? Network virtualization, how do you extend your endpoints out to the public cloud? How do you secure that? How do you deal with data and data and motion data and RAS data encryption? And you had Andy Brown on earlier from UBS and he's a really smart guy, right? They're doing some very interesting things but we work with some financial services customers that are putting data into the cloud, into public clouds but they're doing it under IT governance, right? So it's encrypted, it's salted, it's hashed and it's actually, they can do some very interesting things and it's very secure if you do it the right way. You have to secure it at the application and data layer, it's not really about whether the cloud is secure it's whether your application is secure. Okay John, that's the last word, we're getting the hook here. John Treadway, Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners, check them out, they specialize in cloud. Roots from Cambridge Technology Partners, premier firm in Boston area. You guys have some good folks over there, congratulations. This is EMC World, we'll be right back with theCUBE after this short break.