 We're back here at Dell World 2012. This is in Austin, Texas, Dell's second year. This is silkenangle.com. It's theCUBE, our flagship program. We've got the events extracted soon from the noise. Day two, we've been day one yesterday, all day interviews, getting all the action, digging deep into Dell. Exciting transformation for Dell. I see they're not standing still. Michael Dell was on theCUBE yesterday, talking with us candidly about his long-term vision and investing in the future. And we're going to explore all that today about this transformation, this new modern era. We think we were the first to kind of report on that silken angle in Wikibon. And it's here. It's happening. It's building out. It's transformation in a whole new way. It's changing IT, changing the world. So it's exciting. I'm John Furrier, the founder of silkenangle.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at wikibon.org. Go there, check out all the free research. We just laid out some stuff on software-led infrastructure. Just did an analysis today. Just did the site on Dell's shift from component and device manufacture to really software-led and services. So check that out. We're here with Dante Orsini, who was the senior vice president of iLand, rock and cloud maker and cloud provider. Yankee fan. They say that Rivera's going to be ready for opening day, which is bad news for all of us Red Sox fans. But Dante, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you again. Are you a Jets fan? Actually, Giants fan. Giants fan, okay. Well, that's good. I live in Dallas. You pick winners, right? Yeah. Okay, so iLand's a winner, man. You guys are doing great. Infrastructure's a service and been growing and really doing well. You got a great partnership with Dell. So give us an update. Yeah, so lots of exciting stuff going on. I mean, you know, we've really, the last couple of years we've focused more on self-service infrastructure. We've done a lot of work with VMware. You mentioned Software Defined Data Center. You know, we've done a lot of work there as well. It's interesting. You know, today we talked about on stage about Dell's active system. And for a company like iLand, you know, we've always been very customer focused, but we've really led a lot of different innovation, right? So to stay on that forefront and to continue to listen to customers and take their needs and orchestrate that into a solution and deliver it as a service, you know, you start to do that at scale, it gets complex, right? So, you know, we noticed that, you know, we're growing really rapidly, but we could be doing a lot better job in certain areas. And Dell's really helped us out there because if you can imagine growing across seven data centers, North America and Europe, you know, we've got a lot of engineering talent, but to scale, we need to really stretch that talent. And we don't want these guys, you know, living in the data center, planning these, you know, data center deployments and scaling them out. So, you know, moving to more of a converged infrastructure is a big work for us. Yeah, I mean, we had Kim Stevenson on just before your segment. She's a CIO at Intel. She's awesome. She's, you know, dynamic. She's wonderful, but she's Intel. They pushed the envelope. And when I asked her one question, you know, this new modern era, what are the table stakes? The CIOs have a lot of legacy. You know, they were, the message is, don't protect the legacy, but protect the future, which is a great message. And that really is legit in my mind, but you got to deal with the legacy. And she said, you know, put a freeze on it and then go invent the new. But I asked her, what are the table stakes? She said, got a cloud is definitely real. You've got to be there. So share with us, you know, let's expand on that. What do you think that means? What does table stakes mean being cloud ready? And she was saying, you know, last year I'm like, okay, cloud, but this year must have, you got to have that ready. Yeah, no, great point. I mean, we've seen it. I mean, we've been doing this since 2007, right? So in the beginning it was follow us, right? Here's the direction. And now, you know, there's this big sediment change in the last 18 months. I mean, let's face it, CIOs in the past, very focused on, as you said, you know, the core infrastructure and not really as open to cloud. But in the last 18 months, that's changed dramatically. So we're seeing a lot of companies that are actually taking a hard look at their actual infrastructure internally and also looking for ways that they can augment that. You know, and a lot of this is being driven from the other side of the house, right? Let's face it, IT is really focused on making sure that you can, you know, maintain availability, maintain security. But that doesn't always fare well for people that are application driven, right? So people that are driven by projects that have to really get new things to market are timeline driven. And we've seen that there's been some disparity between those teams. Those are the ones that are really adopting cloud, right? Because if they have to wait on traditional procurement and IT provisioning and compliance and everything else, you know, sometimes it gets burdensome. So at some point, someone says, you know what? I'm going to look outside the organization. That creates a real challenge for internal IT. So with VMware in doubt, we've been able to basically bring these two sides together to make sure that as organizations continue to focus internally to deliver more of a self-service model for themselves, that they're still going to need some way to augment that infrastructure and to get new things to market. And oftentimes, that's where they're going to look outside. So in the beginning of larger mid-market enterprise companies, they're really looking at us to be able to provide access capacity for things like development, testing. Also, we see a huge opportunity with, you know, labs, frankly, because a lot of companies that are taking software and applications to market, they not only need to develop the software and test the software, but they need to be able to train their internal folks, their external partners, and to be able to take something that's para-virtualized, if you will, right? So imagine nesting VMware. So imagine you've got this vCloud front end, and rather than just deploying, you know, regular OS templates, you start climbing the stack and say, okay, what if we wanted to demonstrate, you know, a dynamic lab environment that was running ESX, for instance. So what if we brought up an ESXI5 cluster, and we also had Active Directory, and we integrated something like VMware Views so we could present a desktop, and then if we had a virtual storage array, we can encapsulate the whole thing. Now, rather than just bringing up an OS template, now I just execute this one V app that has all these components, and that's running virtually on top of. Talk about what that means. I mean, let's just break that down. I mean, you just went geek there for a minute, went deep. Yeah, yeah, sorry. No, no, don't be sorry. No, no, first of all, don't be sorry. This is the key, we love that. So, you know, this is like tech talk for us. So, but let's translate that into what that means of value. Sure. In the old way, what was the picture? What did that picture look like? You know, what was a mess involved in that? And because that is real agility. Yep. Different service levels behind that. Gives a better value. But to do all that in the old way, just break that down. What would have come in jail? Yeah, great, great question. So imagine if you had to support an event like this, and you had hands-on labs, right? Think of the amount of infrastructure that has to be brought to site, right? And you actually, in the old way, you really didn't have a mechanism to make that self-service. It was a lot of guys working really hard, not just on the infrastructure stack, but actually how are they going to present this stuff? Right? And you'd see people get creative. You know, try to basically create a whole bottle of logins and kind of make it round Robin to where, okay, I know I've got say five labs I want to train people on, but I'm going to be able to support maybe 10 of those at a time. So I have a standard naming convention, and then, you know, people come in and what if they want to, you know, do something else? And see the problem is you plan for, okay, we think that these five labs are going to be fantastic. And what happens is someone comes out with something, Twitter goes crazy, right? And everyone focuses on that one lab they want to go after, right? And there's only so many labs to go around. Well, in this type of environment, first of all, you don't have to ship any kit, right? All this stuff can be done virtually, and you can instantiate an entire lab. You can create multiple labs with different subjects and just instantiate them as you need them, right? Kill them as you need them, as you want to, you know, expire them. So we're seeing that that's also happening more in not just a huge event like this, but think of software companies that want to be able to- So it's a labor issue too, and it's a hassle. So ops, labor, build it up, tear it down, or build it up and deal with the power issues. Right, wow, right. Yeah. I mean, basically it's a night. So on a scale of one to 10, 10 being a total hassle, what is your way change? What's the, how would you rate the score card? It's bipolar opposite, right? So imagine creating something one time and being able to instantiate it over and over. Not have to deal with shipping anything, right? And the whole thing being self-service, you know, those types of use cases go beyond, like I said, just a big event. I mean, think about go-to-market strategy, right? So what if I had the ability to actually take my sales force and make sure they had an account so they could engage their customers in a different way? So one core issue that we've identified here at SiliconANGLE is the moving workloads across clouds, agnostic hypervisors and that kind of data layer as well. How does that all fit into that, your equation? You know, that's a great question because we've- Sorry, Dave wants to get a question in there. Let Dave go next. Sorry, Dave. Good interview. So there's a couple things that we're seeing there. You know, we've seen companies that, you know, have actually started because someone in a division found it easier to go to a public cloud company and start to develop something. And if they develop that in a private environment or more of a proprietary environment, by the time IT realizes what's going on, they have a mess because it's hard to move, right? So we've seen that there's organizations that are starting to spawn, whether they're delivering themselves as a software, as a service type play, or whether they're actually brute force labor on the back end that are trying to create this agnostic area so you can take something from AMI and move it into ESX or vCloud, right? And everything in between. And we think that there's a great opportunity there, but at the end of the day, it really depends on the use case, right? I mean, we see people that are using public cloud infrastructures that, if they're looking to test large scale environments, thousands of virtual machines, the variance is way too great because fundamentally, the hypervisor does not guarantee performance. So, you know, we tend to work in the mid-market, the enterprise space with companies that have, you know, rich VMware-based investments. And they want to have guaranteed performance, but they also want to cross that chasm to self-service and make things really easy to consume. Okay, so you're going after homogeneity. That's a fundamental strategy, right? I mean, Amazon's got homogeneity, and it works in that regard. A lot of things about Amazon don't work for the enterprise, but I'm hearing homogeneity. The other thing I want to ask you is hybrid cloud. Now, of course, a lot of people define that in a lot of different ways. I want to narrow the definition and see if you see any indication that this is happening, specifically federating the application. Very good question. I've seen very little of that so far. Not to say that it's not out there, right? And that we see people are trying to get there, but we're seeing really the opportunity here, and just to clarify, you're talking about someone has an application, they want to dynamically burst that and leverage exit's capacity. Yeah, and we're not really seeing a lot of it yet. Right, as opposed to, I got some private cloud stuff and I got some apps in the public cloud, and that's cool, and I've selected those. I've looked at my application portfolio and the business value and the risks, and I've put some in the public and some in the private. A lot of people do that. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's doing that. Well, true, but I think that the other thing that there's a real opportunity with right now is, again, going back to VMware's vision on this, we're seeing adoption here because organizations have an investment, they haven't necessarily, and they're starting to adopt VCloud more and more internally, right? But initially, we saw this as an opportunity to help to bridge that gap between the actual infrastructure and operations teams and the development and application-centric teams that needed access to the infrastructure. So if you think about their strategy, how they're bundling all these SKUs together now, they're making it easier for these companies to consume their software. So what we find is that the internal teams are saying, okay, great, we're going to move to 5.1 and they're focused on that traditional upgrade process. But meanwhile, they realize that now they have things like VCloud Director where they can deliver their own internal private cloud that's self-service, but it takes time to get there. So in the interim, they have the ability to look at this VCloud community, Island and our peers in this space, and they can start to introduce self-service to the teams that need it most. Now, the key is, through some of these technologies, like VCloud Connector, where we're seeing that the business side say, okay, great, my admins that live and die in administration all day long, they have this ability to manage, through the same pane of glass, virtual center, their local infrastructure, as well as the cloud-based infrastructure. So that helps this implementation process because we don't have to retrain behavior, right? So when I talk to IT directors and CIOs, that's big for them. Now, the other side is that they can have complete control over this infrastructure. And through rule-based access control, they can basically create these different applications, if you will, or catalogs of applications and assign them and track them by virtual data center. So it's helping them get there. While their work focused on it internally, we provide that bridge that allows them to get there today. So that's some very good examples and proof points, actually, that Island is providing. Upping the messaging to sort of cloud in general and the benefits of the value proposition that you and John were talking about. A lot of companies that claim their cloud, cloud providers, infrastructures of service specifically, use the same messaging. Now you guys found it in 2007, came out of the shoot, so you're new. So you had this kind of clean sheet of paper advantage. I want you to talk about specifically how you're different from that crowd, the managed hosting guys that are saying, hey, we're cloud now too, or pretty much everybody's got to be cloud. So how are you different specifically? Yeah, very good question. So we originally started in 1995 actually. It was really focused on co-location and IP services. So 2007, we saw the time was right. And we did a lot of due diligence and we looked at our customer base and we listened to them. And that's why we chose to partner with, expand our relationship with Dell, but also partner with VMware on this. So we came to market with a managed virtualization platform. People weren't throwing cloud around in 2007, right? And it wasn't until the last few years that we were moving to more of a self-service model that we were comfortable saying cloud. But I think the difference here is that we've had such a long-standing relationship in this space, not only with our partners, but with our customers to understand what the use cases are and what the needs are, to be able to wrap the technology around those needs. We're calling this customer-driven innovation basically. So we're going beyond just, hey, I want to get access to a quick server and bring it up. Because our use cases in the beginning were extremely complex. We were managing 80 different data centers across North America and Europe. We had people that said, look, I need access to enterprise infrastructure, but I've got compliance requirements where I need to integrate certain types of network. I want to do a direct connection to you for compliance and security purposes. So we started off the bat, not trying to make a simple, easy self-service front end. We focused on what's the requirement and let's wrap a solution around it. So that led us down this path of being able to provide a managed infrastructure for those that needed managed, but also to provide more of an enterprise-class self-service environment. Where I see our areas that we actually differentiate is we've done a tremendous amount of business in disaster recovery. A lot of that is because in 2008, the financial markets took a nose dive, right? Capital budgets dried up and we went to market not only with VMware and Dell, but other partners. And while they were helping their customers virtualize more and more of their infrastructure, a lot of those companies realized there were better ways of protecting it. Because if you go back that far, you see a lot of people using your traditional, either multi-site or they're relying on a traditional DR provider where they're consigning physical space, right? So to be able to work with these customers and define very fluid and dynamic RTO and RPO objectives, we've wrapped a lot of unique IP around that to be able to deliver these solutions. So that's kind of our launching point into these other areas. So I mentioned a little bit about what we're doing from a lab perspective. That originally started off in collaborating with VMware and Dell. Matter of fact, a little over a year ago, Dell was looking to actually train one of their divisions internally at an internal solution summit. And our CTO got together with some folks at Dell and we were actually architecting this lab for our own purpose and to drive better collaboration with VMware out in the field. And ultimately they ended up leveraging that lab environment and we're productizing that today. So pretty interesting stuff. So I want to ask you about Amazon, John, too. Because they were getting very aggressive. We see them at all these shows now. They were at Oracle Open World and they had a big presence at VMware. Of course they had the big conference re-invent a couple weeks ago. I often criticize Amazon about their SLAs but they said at the re-invent conference, one of their executives said, we've never lost a deal because of SLAs, which because I laugh at. You got me kidding me. But nonetheless, Amazon is a force. Even though the Glacier announcement got a lot of attention, they're really going after the enterprise. So how do you compete with Amazon? How do you differentiate? Obviously, SLAs is one. I'd love to talk about that and other factors, whether it's security, compliance, audits, location of data. Talk about Amazon, its presence and how you and your ecosystem and partners are competing. Yeah, very, very good question. So anytime we spoke about Amazon, I love Amazon, by the way. They're doing a lot of stuff to drive more and more adoption in our space but fundamentally different platforms, right? So anytime we've worked with customers that have had experience with Amazon or some other type of hypervisor, it's not VMware based, we often see that there's a lot of things. We start peeling back the onion. It's being able to provide guaranteed performance and high availability. That's a fundamental difference right out of the gate. And that's one of the reasons why we have such stringent SLAs. It's why we work with companies that have to deal with compliance in the biopharma space, the healthcare space, financial services. So the other thing that we see here is that Amazon does a great job of entertaining that side of the business. But what we found is that we have customers that have thousands of instances in Amazon. And one of the challenges they see is that when they go through large scale testing environments, the variance in performance is too great. So the other side of this, imagine you're trying to shoot for a 2% variance on the same workload, but you have thousands of them, right? But imagine that variance being somewhere between 8% and 15%, depending on what's going on with capacity. We're on the opposite of that spectrum. Our customers that work with us in the dev testing arena, they need to know that when we provide resources that they are actually going to perform the same every single time. So totally different obscenance of the spectrum. And a lot of people think that working in an enterprise class cloud infrastructure is going to be more costly than an Amazon. And I got to tell you, our pricing is really aggressive. So we've never lost a deal on priced Amazon. So the other side is SLA. So when you touched on that and it's in our business, it's critical. We've got to be able to provide transparency, but also we also have to be able to provide people a different type of SLA that focuses not just on availability, but performance. And that's where we're differentiating. Can you talk about what you look for in partners? I mean, Dell, obviously a partner with Dell. Dell's got its own cloud offerings, you know? So how do you feel about that? What do you look for in partners and why Dell? Yeah, great question. So Dell's always been there for us, right? So we were leveraging Dell prior to moving into this whole cloud arena prior to 2007. They've really taken an active interest in our organization to help us grow. I mean, today we announced a joint offering where Dell's storage customers have the ability to actually replicate as a service to iLand. This is going to be sold by Dell. And this is just a result of working with them out in the field over the last couple of years. And they wanted a simple way to really provide a secure form of backup and recovery for their customers. So we're starting with this extensible platform. We've done this for years and right now we're starting with Equalogic. But there's all sorts of other technologies that snap right in there, right? So it's been a very unique relationship for us. And when they did announce that they were going to cloud, it wasn't a surprise. I mean, we knew this was coming, right? So there's a huge market here and we've actually had a lot of co-operative, if you will, right, together with Dell. So I think together we continue to collaborate. We're going to always find other areas that we can innovate and drive unique solutions to market. What do you make of the OpenStack movement? You know, I think OpenStack's unique. Our CTO has got a lot of good friends that have worked on that. These good friends with Richard from Rackspace. I look at what Rackspace is doing. I think it's great, again, great for the industry. I really don't run into them a lot out in the marketplace, but I think I've got a lot of admiration for what they're doing. Yeah, well, we've written. OpenStack's not ready for primetime, but now everybody's hopping on the bandwagon. EMC just joined. EMC just joined, right? So OpenStack is becoming that developer framework. I think it's going to be, move from being a marketing gimmick, Dave, to much more, hey, let's consolidate DevOps and let's get this developer community wrapped around some real meat on the bone, relative to, you know, SDN, obviously drives that agenda aggressively, as does, you know, some of the cloud trends. So awesome stuff. Yeah, yeah, good. All right, Tante, well, this is a great guest. Really appreciate you coming on. Awesome seeing you again. And welcome back any time. I appreciate it. Thanks, Dave. This is theCUBE, our flagship programming, right? Extract the signal from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.