 at wikibon.org, here with SiliconANGLE TVs, wall-to-wall continuous coverage of EMC World 2012. And we're going to be talking to a bunch of service providers here in this afternoon. Joining me is Matthew Yeager, CTO of CULT. Came from across the pond all the way over to Vegas. We did, it was a nice 13 hour jump from Heathrow to Las Vegas. So what I always get excited about is there's people that I've known through the Twitter. The social media channels, Matthew and I have known each other for a while and the first time we met each other in person was two minutes ago. So here we are in person. Kind of like to share those conversations that we've had through social media and talking online with our broader community so we can kind of extract the signal from the noise. Really understand what's going on here. So wikibon, we really think there's huge opportunities for the service provider market. Really is kind of the new channel and especially if we look at converged infrastructure in general and storage specifically, service providers are playing a really large part of that. So here on theCUBE, we like to use sports analogies sometimes. So in the States here, we say for baseball, convergence I'd say, converged infrastructures, kind of the second, third inning, we're kind of getting in, the pitchers hopefully loosened up. So do you have a better sports analogy for us than where we are with converged infrastructure? Wow, okay, that's a really good question. I came over, when we were coming over, we had 13 hours, so obviously there's a lot of time to do something. But I watched Moneyball. So it was myself and a few other people from Colt that came over to EMC World. And I watched it once, not twice, but three times in a row. I was just, I was so blown away by that. We love Moneyball. Actually we've had Billy Bean himself on theCUBE. There are very few kind of sports people that I would want to go and actually meet in the flesh. But Billy Bean is absolutely one of them. Anyway, I went and we were talking with people inside Colt on the plane. You really need to see this. And they all had kind of the same feedback. But I guess the analogy from our perspective around service providers, I think you're right. The sports analogies do work because they tell you an awful lot about the culture that you're in. Not just the customer culture, but then also the market culture. With inside baseball, not to take anything away from American sports, but the reality is that you've got the two to three innings and you can kind of be rubbish the entire match and then you get to the end. And even in Moneyball, you send your big lumper up and there's two outs and whatever and then he comes up and he whacks one over the fence and the bases were loaded and all of a sudden you win. I don't think it's terribly realistic for the service provider community to believe that that analogy would work. So the analogy that we tend to use, certainly with inside Colt, it's probably more along the lines of rugby, the scrum methodology. If I don't pass the ball from one to the other, there's no way for me to score a try. How do I put my folks on the pitch to score a try? The other analogy that we tend to use a lot is cricket. England have beat Australia now several times in the ashes and really when they started winning and we hadn't won the ashes for a considerable period of time but when they started winning against Australia it was because they had a proper end to end strategy on how they were going to win those test matches and there's three to five test matches in a series. Each test match goes five days. I think there's a lot to be said for any sport that has a T interval and lunch. But you know they- Well rugby has beer, right? Rugby has beer. You can't do anything pretty much with football anymore. There's no beer, there's no alcohol. But you have to have a proper strategy and you execute against that strategy and when you start listening to the guys that won the ashes originally in 2005 give or take, they had been preparing for two years before they actually went to Australia and they were able to pivot whenever something happened during the match that maybe they weren't quite expecting. Because they had that strategy and probably more importantly they trusted one another properly as a team. They were able to pivot very quickly and react to whatever the Australians were up to. So I think from Colt's perspective we believe that certainly with inside the service provider market or community probably the best thing to do is to have a platform, a structured platform that is skeletal that isn't kind of the fully baked thing. Service catalog, ingredients that can be selected off the shelf and then constructed to make a product. So that you can kind of react to the customer's needs in a very, very agile way. I think agile methodology has been something that's been around for quite a while with inside the software industry, very well known, but go into the average service provider or the average service community and start to talk about scrum and they don't even know kind of where to start. So our sports analogies I think tend to be along the lines of what would happen if I took an MBA and a geek and I kind of crossed them, crossed the DNA. What would that look like? And that's what we'd be looking at. Okay, so Matthew, definitions are something we often struggle with in the industry and CTO types sometimes have a tendency to be very broad. So I'm wondering if I can put you on the spot here. Service providers, what doesn't mean to be a service provider and can you keep it in a tweet format or at least kind of a short, what is a service provider today in the mission there? Okay, can you give me two tweets? Go, all right, I'll do you a deal. The first tweet will be about service providers in general, the second tweet will be about Colt's journey. The first tweet would be service will always trump technology. Service, the clues in the title, service provider. So we used to have resellers and then I think customers cotton on to the fact that you weren't really providing a huge amount of value. You didn't make anything. So there was value added in the bar? Well, but what simply putting margin on top of something that you don't make and delivering it more quickly than someone else, one could argue that's not really value add. Service provider, and it's going to be different by the way in each vertical, in each country. But I think from my perspective, if you had to put me on the spot, I would say the clues in the title and anybody that isn't properly providing service absolutely has something to worry about. The tweet that's very specific to Colt would be our evolution is very much along the lines of evolving from a product and partner-centric organization to a service and customer-centric organization. What that means is people are asking me, does that mean that you're going to move away from VMware, you're going to move away from EMC and go to more open-source things? The partnership with EMC, the partnership with Cisco with VMware is even more important than it was yesterday. But is it a supply chain relationship or is it a proper partnership? And defining that and kind of working through that is a lot more complicated than the sort of thing. So Matthew, last week EMC made an announcement on their VMAX for service providers. Can you tell me about your and Colton engagement on that and what you think it really means for the industry? I think, yeah, as you know, we're a part of the actual announcement. You're in the press release, I believe. We're in the press release. And initially you kind of think, well, great. So we're in the PR and people see us as forward thinking and hey, that's all goodness. We learned, I want to get the number right. I think it was something like 66,000 page hits on that in the first 12 hours alone. So you kind of think, okay, we must be on to something here collectively if people are, you announce this thing and you think, okay, it's not overly profound. It's VMAX for service providers. But actually, the impact I think for SPs and certainly the impact for customers, we see much more quickly than I ever anticipated. Our customers wanting to transform and evolve their internal IT infrastructure, their internal IT department to behave more like a service provider. They don't have service catalogs often. They don't have a lot of orchestration, OSS, BSS, metering. These are all things they would like to do, but then when you start to look at individual products, VNX, data domain, Avamar, you know, these products, how do you then take those products and then fit them into a service catalog? How do you fit it into a price per unit? Becomes really, really complicated. On the other hand, if you then have VMAX SP. So, you know, my own personal opinion, and I'll probably get shot for what I'm about to say, but I think you've known me well. Nobody's listening. Nobody's listening. Nobody's watching my tweets. Just a conversation we want to share the information. So my parents will be upset, right? I believe that the marketing team, on both sides, you know, we have a part to play in this as well. I think the marketing teams watered down the announcement a little bit, and I'm not entirely sure why, because I think the announcement was absolutely about a partner for the first time listening to its customers, to its partners, and saying, yep, we get that. We need to open up the platform at an API level. We need to properly provide price per unit. We need to properly provide analytics on your consumption, predictive analytics, and so on and so on and so on. So almost, we want to give you a platform that allows you to start to think about what a private Amazon would look like. So for us, you know, we had approached EMC, you know, I approached them better than nine months ago and said, this is what we're thinking of doing. Fully expecting them to look at us and think you're really off on one. And in fact, they had been having very parallel conversations internally, so they were able to connect us with Robin, Brom, Fidel Maruso, you know, people that, you know, I kind of expected I'd get a call in a couple months and they were onto us within kind of 24 hours. Well, what do you mean by that? And some things we've needed slight kind of course corrections, and frankly, some things have been complete 180s through an iterative process of then speaking with our customers and saying, if we collectively did it this way, what would you think? How does this positively solve some of your business issues and provide the services that you're looking for? So I personally feel that the announcements around the SP platform and what EMC is looking to do, not only important for the service provider community, but in the long term will be absolutely critical to the enterprise community as they start to transform themselves internally to behave more like internal service providers. So great points there, Matthew. One of the things we look at enterprises today need to be able to kind of be more agile, look more cloud-like or like a service provider of their own organization. One of the big questions that comes up is when I think of really the web scale deployments or even most people think service providers, the immediate reaction is commodity. Commodity hardware, you know, kind of, you know, Google, you know, has, you know, just GFS is very specific, most enterprises don't look like that. And, you know, service providers have varied architectures. So, you know, where is the differentiation in the marketplace? And, you know, why does VMAX play into that? That's not something that kind of comes to mind, typically. Okay, that's a good question. I think, you know, if you kind of step back, I believe, you know, we were a very open partnership. You know, you have to be, my grandmother used to say you can be married, but you can be right. And we decided that with EMC we wanted a marriage, but we weren't quite sure what that looked like. So, we needed to not be right and just be completely open and transparent about what we thought. And one of the first things we said was you simply cannot take enterprise product and try and retrofit it for the service provider community. And that's in the initial tranche. I think most people look at VMAX, you know, enterprise class storage. And the immediate thoughts are expensive, expensive, expensive. What we're finding though is that as it's kind of evolving, I think people are starting to understand enterprise class, enterprise class storage, enterprise class cloud really means that it has certain attributes, has security, it has data mobility, it has price per unit elasticity. So, I do believe that EMC is evolving the conversation to the positive that VMAX isn't just this really expensive platform. There are service providers, Google, Amazon, Apple, iCloud. There are people that invest a significant amount of revenue and being able to take pizza boxes or take their own servers. The problem with that is that if you look at Google and Amazon just as two case points, they have spent a considerable amount of money and time to develop their own grid architecture. The only way you could really think about doing that is if you had grid software that allowed you to take pizza boxes and make them behave as a contiguous whole. Yeah, the white paper, the data center as a computer that the Google guys wrote, I think it was six or seven years ago. They've been very open and transparent about how you would do it, but to properly commercialize that software, I can't see Amazon or Google anytime soon, turning around to me, you, the service provider community enterprise and say, hey, do you know what, here you go. Here's some open source software so you can create your own grid. So you've got to be able to solve the problem in another way in the first instance. The barrier to entry for us, the amount of R&D that would be required to physically start to think about swinging for the fences if we're going to use sports analogies, is considerable. On the other hand, you could turn to your partner in EMC and you would say, look, this is platform VMAX SP, it's got scale out capabilities, but there's always a but. I don't want to consume Atmos, Isilon, Data Domain. They're products to you, they're products to the enterprise, they're attributes to me as a service provider. So open it up, API, allow me to talk to those things up and down through the stack, if you will, through the API. Allow me to consume based on a profile. I don't want to buy DAE shelves and I just want to consume based on whether you call it T1, T2, T3, Gold, Platinum, Bronze. Don't really care, but I want to consume based on a profile and attributes and not the other thing. So is it perfect? No, but I absolutely believe that it's no hyperbole. EMC is by a country mile, well ahead of its competition. I don't see NetApp, I don't see HDS, I don't see IBM, HP, no one is thinking this way at present and it's not for lack of us contacting them and trying and having these conversations. Okay, interesting. So I've talked to quite a few service providers, most of them are very multi-bender on how they do things. So Colt, very bullish on the EMC relationship. Good to see Matthew, appreciate you joining us. Helping peel the onion a little bit about the changing phase of the service provider market. Look forward to seeing more as this evolved and as always connecting with you. So we will be back with EMC World continuous coverage on SiliconANGLE TV right after this.