 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here at EMC World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. This is our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal of noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante and ask us if Jason Kustapas, Senior Director, we're close to you. I'm just going to say senior vice president. Keep coming on theCUBE brother, it's going to happen. Senior vice president of workload solutions. Congratulations on your promotion, you're paying for yourself. Don't tell my boss, don't tell my boss. Welcome back, good to see you again. Good to see you guys too. I'll see the solutions where this all bakes out, right? At the end of the day, implementing and making the traditional infrastructure more efficient and creating a new cloud native environment is all about putting the solutions together. That's not EMC, not just Dell, it's other vendors, it's everybody. So what's going on in that world? Is it on fire, is it disrupting, is it positive? What's going on? Yeah, I mean the big focus for my team is the workload. So like you said, it's not just about the infrastructure, the components are important, but what do we run on top of it? Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, new databases like NoSQL. My team's responsible for integrating those and putting those to work on those converged platforms. Talk about the database piece of it because it's not so much the database anymore, it's the data traversal. It's the data sharing is a big theme we're seeing at all the shows. Okay, at Oracle, I got my SQL, whatever the database is, it stores data. But it has to be decoupled from apps and it has to be shared. That seems to be the table stakes. Is that something that you guys are focused on and what does that mean for the customer? It is, it's a great point. I mean in the past, if you looked at EMC and other technology companies, we used to build solutions very focused on an individual workload. So we would take a particular storage array, a particular database and build a solution. Most of the customers we talk to, if they run one workload, they run another. They run Oracle, they run Microsoft. If they run Microsoft, they might run a NoSQL database. So what we've been trying to do is transform how we build solutions, not just from buy to build, which is what Chad talks about, with blocks, racks and rails. But then how do we go from one workload to multiple workloads on a single system? So like you said, we can actually take advantage of the information in those databases, consolidate it and share it more efficiently. What you used to have was silos of for each of those workloads and applications. So solutions obviously is where it's at. People don't want to just buy boxes. They want to buy solutions. The market has shifted. Obviously the whole converged infrastructure thing changed everything. Yes. Let's take a look at the couple of opportunities. So one is obviously SAP. We know who you compete with in the SAP world. SAP's not an infrastructure provider. It's your traditional competitors. In Oracle, it's a lot different since the Sun Acquisition, Oracle has now said, all right, we have an appliance for virtually every use case on the planet. The way in which you solve customer problems is different. You come in with a value proposition that says, we're going to be essentially a horizontal infrastructure around mixed workloads. So talk about that a little bit. Can you give us some color, data, indications, how much of your business is mixed workloads versus sort of single workloads? If you can give us something. And then how do you compete in that one? Two angles to that. I mean, the first is probably 90% of our customers that we've talked to when we've done surveys and things like that, the run makes workloads. It's very rare to find a customer that runs all one workload, all Oracle, for example. What you touched upon was consolidation and standardization. Everybody wants to standardize infrastructure. I don't think any CIO would argue with that. They want to have a consistent way to standardize infrastructure. I think the debate in the industry is how do you standardize at what level, right? So you mentioned some vendors are standardizing at the workload level. So if you think about Oracle, right? They have a full stack hardware software, the database, the application, what they call a red stack, right? Then you have other vendors that approach it from the hypervisor level down, right? Our view right now, and you've heard this week, is we think standardization is important, but we think that given the fact that most people use mixed workloads, open flexibility to that is also very important. So not necessarily having to engineer the hardware around a database. Keeping that flexibility is really, really critical. So, I mean, Oracle's an interesting case. It's sort of a new animal came up. We look at Oracle Marketing, the marketing says we are going to shut out our competitors, like EMC, we're not going to allow them to take advantage of certain features. When you talk to the technical people, you remember we were interviewing John Fowler, and I asked him about that. He goes, look, we're pretty open, you know? The competitors have their techniques to work around that. So how do you approach that? When a customer says to you, well, Oracle's not allowing you to take advantage of things. How do you respond? I think that the short answer is if you look at the database that you could run today on a V block, a VX rack, or a VX rail, and the database that runs inside, for example, Oracle Exadata, it's essentially the same database. There is no technical difference at all. What Oracle brings to the table is within some of their hardware, they have certain features that you can use that might offload some things. But in the vast majority of cases, those features when we talk to customers may not actually be providing value, right? So I think the short answer is, look, there is no different Oracle database as an example. They don't have two databases on their price portfolio. They have one database. They might just make slight hardware modifications. Well, this is what I tell customers all the time. I said, look, if you can't take advantage, for example, of hybrid columnar compression and whatever, then so what? If there's a feature there. So you have to trade off the ability to exploit those features with the ability to leverage your infrastructure horizontally across your application portfolio. And that essentially is your crux of the way. You're touching on a huge point. Things like compressing and de-duping the data and other things. Do you want that done at a workload level or do you want it done at an infrastructure level? We have this, I was talking to a customer yesterday about this here. Yeah, it's an interesting conversation. And if you do it at the infrastructure level, one of the benefits of that is if I choose to run a different workload in the future, I'm going to get the same benefit. So if I think about ExtremeIO, which we've integrated into the VBlock 540, which is just the converged platform option of ExtremeIO. Compression and de-duping, all those functions operate across any workload you choose to put on that system today or tomorrow. Now if I had gone the different route and said well I want to use Microsoft row compression and page compression and I want to use Oracle Advanced Compression, you can do that, you can certainly use them. But when we've looked at it, it's A, the benefit is higher or as good or higher to do it in infrastructure. And B, you're taking that effort and workload off of the CPU and the database. And you're letting the database drive the performance that it needs. And that's the most important thing we see customers wanting is they want that database to drive their application, drive their transactions. And certain things like compression and de-duping and other things can be done as efficiently if not better at the infrastructure level. So why not let it happen? There's really no reason not to. Jason, the big theme here is modernize, which is interesting. I love the concept because it really fits into both worlds. Optimizing the traditional and then doing the cloud native emerging stuff and using all those technologies. But it requires a playbook that's just not out there. I mean, so we heard Chad up there saying, you know, give a demo in two seconds, but also there's other stuff happening, being agile is great. Even Jeremy Burton said, hey, there's a new way to, you know, re-platform the enterprise in a positive way. Where's, we're, share with the folks what the playbook is and what are you guys doing? So what are you offering customers? Because the number one challenge that we hear that we keep on community is, where's the playbook? Because it's horizontally integrated. I mentioned the database stuff. Yeah, I'm doing Ddupe. I get down and dirty with Ddupe. Now I'm like, wait a minute, I got an architecture for data or I have an app, three package analytics and a vertical app. These are solutions, not point technology. So where's the playbook? Yeah, the playbook starts for us now. The big shift over the last year for us has been from building your systems to buying results. So right now we're pivoting our solutions roadmap to be block, rack and rail systems, integrated engineered systems. What the output of that is for the customers, we'll give them the full solutions guide and implementation guide that either we can help them do ourselves or they can do themselves. It's really up to them. A lot of customers we talk to have big investments and experts. They have a strong DVA team. They have a strong systems team. They want to be able to do that work, but they want it on a standardized converged infrastructure. They don't want to have to put all the pieces together, but they still want to be able to use our guidance to do that. In other cases, they want us to come in and do it for them. But the big shift has been, not doing standardization and consolidation at the infrastructure level with that openness versus picking and choosing a bunch of different components. Do you guys provide that playbook, or do you have recipes or reference architectures? We do, yep, and one of the newest ones we've actually released this week is a mixed workload solution on the VBlock 540 all flash system. So what we did is we took a step back and as we said, most of our customers are running Oracle, they're running SQL. If they're running SQL, they're running maybe SAP on that. We built a full system of Oracle, Microsoft and SAP on the same VBlock system running all flash, tested out all the scenarios, all the snapshots, OLTP mixed with OLAP, mixed with Test Dev on one system, all the compression and Ddup and benefits and others, and stress tested it beyond what probably 90% of customers, 95% of customers do, and documented all of that. And we document the architecture, we document the DBA best practices. From what I've seen, nobody's done this yet. If you go out and you look at, they've done it for single workloads. You can go look at an OLTP Oracle solution. You can go look at another solution for SAP HANA, but very few have taken all three workloads together and this is something new we've just published. Well, and I think that the bottom line is we can talk about the technical nuances all day long, but it's about the outcomes. That's right. Integrated solutions. Right, and so the question I have is what are those that when you sit down with a customer and you start with the outcome and work backwards, what's the outcome that they're looking for? Yeah, the primary outcome for them is they have an application workload, they're trying to get that workload live and they want to understand, they know what it means to the business, they want to get it productive and keep it performing as fast as possible. So our view is the simplest way to get there is a converged infrastructure or a hyper-converged infrastructure. Take that off the table and then it's quantifying the speed to value of that application. And that's something we can help them do as well. And again, not having to do it one workload at a time, starting to funnel more of your workloads into less infrastructure components, we'll get that time to value to happen much faster. In our last minute, I want to get your thoughts on it. I'd like you to share, take a minute to share, what you guys are doing at the show, what's the big announcements, what's the big focus here this year at EMC World 2016? Sure, you saw the native hybrid cloud, that was a huge announcement for us. Very big effort, extends the EMC enterprise hybrid cloud work that we've done. For my particular area, again, it's the first release of an all-flash converged system for mixed workloads. And it's just the beginning, we're going to do a lot more in this space. We've done some work with you guys around total cost of ownership of mixed workload, all-flash systems on the VBlock last year. So this is, you guys were really ahead of the industry, I think, in terms of recognizing the TCO of that. We've started to productize and solutionize that. And that's what we're going to continue. That's interesting too. Dave's team's working on, with Peter Burris, our new head of research, on putting a valuation technique around TCO around data, data capital, which is a whole nother pioneering area. Because again, it's not the database cost, it's what's the value of the data, moving the data, and David Floyd was talking about that earlier on this morning. So again, the TCO equation is super difficult, as this shift happens. It is, and we want to keep working with you on that. I think we have a good start. Awesome, Jason, thanks for sharing the insights. It's all about the solutions. At the end of the day, it's an integrated world now, multiple workloads, real-time data, data sharing, no more silos. This is theCUBE breaking down the silos here at EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the history of...