 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm back. I was just meeting with Joe Tucci and Mike Capellis in an analyst breakout, and I got some good information I'll share with you in a moment. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of EMC World, and we're live here in Las Vegas. We have a good friend, Dave Cahill, from SolidFire on. We met SolidFire a year ago at EMC World. The CEO, Dave Wright, popped out of Rackspace, conceived and founded SolidFire to be exclusively focused on the cloud service provider market. It's an all-flash array focused on the cloud service provider market like no other company. Most companies sell flash arrays, all-flash arrays, sort of broad set of use cases. SolidFire is uniquely focusing on the cloud service provider space, and we're going to get into that with David Cahill. David, welcome to theCUBE. Good to be back. Good to be here. Yeah, so you moved to Colorado. A lot of interesting personal stuff going on, and it's great to see you doing so well personally, and it seems like SolidFire is really making some progress. You guys are, as I said before, uniquely positioned in the cloud service provider space, but so, why don't we get into it? Maybe give us the bumper sticker, because you can maybe add some color to what I just said, and then give us an update on where we're at. Yeah, sure. So guys that are building large-scale, multi-tenant clouds, it's a unique customer set, and the last year has done nothing but validate that for us. We've been in early access with a handful of partners and our cloud service providers in that regard, and continue to expand out that program now, and it's as evident now as it was then that this customer set has unique challenges around scale, around automation, around performance, and around efficiency that you don't traditionally see in the enterprise, and so we continue to be laser-focused on that customer set. Large-scale, multi-tenant clouds, and there's plenty of them being built. Yeah, so where are you at? You guys are going through your beta program, and kicking the crap out of the thing? Kicking the crap out of the system. We are heads down, charging towards full GA later in the year, but the purpose of the early access program really is to get some select cloud service providers to beat the crap out of the system, and let them continue to evolve the services that they're going to offer based on the solid-fire system, and make it a better offering, GA both from a infrastructure standpoint, but also from a services standpoint, because these guys are advancing the way that we think about the cloud. Cloud 1.0 was, let's move your data to the cloud. Cloud 2.0 is, let's move your apps to the cloud, and so that's a mindset shift which requires evangelism on the part of the cloud service provider to the end customer, in addition to the infrastructure, right? If you crack the code on the economics of high performance in the cloud, you open it up to a much broader application set. Yeah, so, so actually Dave, I want to see if we can call an audible here. So are you hanging out here? Are you got something to do after this? So we are, I'm around. So Sanjay Murshandzani who's the CIO of EMC, we're going to lose them if we don't bring them on. I realize now, look at the schedule. You know, I take off for 20 minutes, everything gets behind, so if you wouldn't mind, I want to bring, take a quick break, I want to bring Sanjay in, interview him, and then bring you back, and then pick this up. Would that be okay? All right, so listen, keep it right there. We're going to come right back with Sanjay Murshandzani, CIO of EMC, we're right back. The cube is this conceptual box, if you will, and we bring people inside of the cube, and then we share ideas. The cube is a comfortable place. It's a place where people feel happy, and are happy to share their knowledge with the world. And we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer. Okay, we're back. And this is the segment with Sanjay Murshandzani, CIO of EMC. Now Sanjay's been on the cube a couple of times, and really has been leading EMC's transformation efforts internally, so the company's not just talking about transformation, it's actually transforming. I was at the CIO event in October, EMC-CIO event. Sanjay really keynoted that event, and was the sort of highlight at that show, working with a number of EMC-CIOs to help them understand how EMC was transforming. Sanjay was a really, first of all, welcome to the cube. Thank you, good to be here. And so that was a great event. It was EMC's first real effort to bring together CIOs, and EMC used you as a showcase, which is smart. You guys are doing some internal transformations, but there was a lot of interest around what you were doing. Obviously, a lot of talk about infrastructure transformation, but also new metrics and things like that. What did you take away from that event? Well, you know, the whole thing is that people want proof points. The whole thing today is about proof points, and we've been on this journey first in virtualization, then we moved that to cloud, and we've now incorporated obviously big data into that, but nobody builds infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure. You want to drive value out of it, and we translated value for the business, for EMC as a customer internally, around agility, speed, time to market. And there's been a shift in the way our internal customers think about things, because it's all about, hey, give it to us faster. It doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate, but give it to us quicker so we can work together and get it right. So we've built out our cloud, and now we're working through the layers on top of that cloud, if you would. So things like platform as a service, true business intelligence as a service, connectivity between our infrastructure and our legacy applications, or if I have the liberty of building our new applications, how do you do that? And then on top of all of that, these devices, we're adding thousands of these devices a month into the network. How do you bring a true user experience and give our users productivity outside of email on this device? So that's what we took away, that customers were interested in these layers. So when I hear something like BI as a service, I think I get excited, as a business person, I say, can I get access to a self-service BI portal? And actually begin to interact with data without having to call up an army of IT people. Is that the vision? Is that you actually doing that? Right, right, and right. So. Talk about that a little bit. Yes, we should. It's actually very exciting because it's the first layer of value that we're adding directly on top of our cloud infrastructure, right? So the number one area where you have rogue IT or shadow IT, whatever you like to call it, is some form of business reporting. So users will say, IT can't provide me my reports fast enough, or IT can't provide me the reports the way I want them, or in the format that I want them, or as frequently as I want them. So it's usually shadow IT, usually, a big percentage of it, is around some kind of reporting system. So, what we decided to do was, we built the cloud infrastructure, we've got the capabilities, we've got Green Plum in place. So what we're doing is we're creating as much of this data that our internal customers want access to, give them one version of the truth. So you take away the noise about where is the data, and instead spend time on two things. Helping our internal customers build the skills to do the analytics the way they want it, and give them data scientists as a service, as a human service, to really enable them, because we see the data left to right, nobody else does. All elements of data within the company. So we give them data scientists as a service, and we'll give them skills around tool sets that they want to use a Microsoft reporting tool or SaaS or something else on top of the Green Plum platform. We're enabling the platform, we're enabling some competency around the tools, and we're enabling data scientists with subject matter expertise in the data. And then our internal customers can go off and have a nice day with that information any way they want it. So how do you deal with the issue of credentials? Like who gets to see you, which data? Well, obviously we put business rules behind all that. So our security office is involved, and we are now tiering the data based on access, based on profiles, et cetera. So all of that has to come together. So it's not an all or nothing formula. We're bringing best practices into play and making sure we're there. Those are things that you understand how to do in a traditional world, right? And if it's rogue IT or shadow IT, that now comes into the picture, so you have better control over that stuff. Yeah, so we actually just, you mentioned shadow IT, we just did a survey on IT transformation. One of the questions we asked is, what percent of your IT budget or organization's IT budget is managed by a centralized organization, and only about, I say only, about 38% said 100%. So more than half had some kind of shadow IT and about 20%, had a 25% of the spend or more going to shadow IT. It's a real, I mean, and let's be honest here. With cloud computing, stuff that was in the arsenal of IT for years is out in the open. You can get access to the credit card to the same amount of infrastructure in a drop of a hat that my IT guys need. So it's just shadow IT's gone out of the dark corners of the organization, right into the open, into the cloud. It's okay. And so it's a whack-a-mole syndrome. So we were saying you got to either embrace it or get out of the way. And so the pitch that my leadership team and I are making to our organization is we have to be the brokers of value. It's not about authorship. It's not about where it was built or where it was written. It's about how soon can we add value to the business? And we have to be the brokers of value, all right? And it's not all about, hey, if it wasn't written here, it isn't good enough for this company. You've always been very forward thinking about that. I mean, shadow IT freaks out some people. Oh, we got to pull it in, but you're like, okay, fine. Now, I want to tie it into the messaging that we're hearing at EMC world. So it's IT transformation, transform IT, or sorry, it's transformation, transform IT, business, and then yourself. We've said, okay, IT transformation, that's about the cloud, new cloud infrastructure, cloud business as well. The business transformation is about data. Unlocking data, finding data value. And then self, obviously, we make cloud architect, maybe design. That's a big piece of what I'm going to talk about tomorrow. So is that a reasonable way to look at what the messaging is and how that maps from a practitioner's perspective? And I'm trying to squint through, okay, how much of that is marketing and how much is actually implementable? So you've talked about the cloud transformation internally at EMC, IT as a service. How about the data piece? You're talking about BI, self-service BI, but how about even going beyond that? Are you actually getting into that point where you're leveraging that, are you able to monetize that value? Great question, by the way. And there's lots of nuances to that question because when you chunk something down to saying, IT is about, transforming IT is about infrastructure. Well, transforming IT is about infrastructure, self-service, automation, cataloging, and creating the capability to present IT as a service. If that makes sense. My goal is to break down the big black box of IT into little black boxes of IT so customers internally can pick and choose what they want, at the price points they want, and at the service level they want. And I present that up in as much of an automated service catalog as I can. Now, that is transforming IT. There's a lot of process transformation alongside technology transformation and the you is human transformation, which I'll get to in a minute. Once I've built that, what do our internal customers want? They want big data. We talked about big data. They want anytime, anywhere computing capability. So if you've got that sleek little MacBook Air in front of you or the latest Android device that has showed up at your door or an iOS device, they want to be able to compute anywhere they like on any form factor, any screen, anywhere. We have to render that. So for us today, mobile is an opt out strategy. So you have to tell me explicitly that you don't want mobile when I give you a solution. It's automatically opt in. Two years ago, it was the other way around. Well, I mean. Okay. Now, how do you do that? You do that based on the fact that I've got a cloud infrastructure and I'm building mobile capabilities on top of that cloud infrastructure to expose elements of that data, manage those devices, create that user experience on top of that infrastructure. Security apps, the whole line yards. Logging, monitoring, authentication, you know, so on and so forth. And so how do you do that? So that's really transforming the business. How they use it, how they consume it, what they want to do with it, et cetera. Set differently. So transform IT, transform the business is, transform IT was building the factory floor, building the production line. It was all about IT. Transform the business is all about the business. This is where you're building the widgets you want off that factory floor. Transform you is what gets the least attention, but it's probably the most pivotal thing in all of this is the bits are going to be just really cool bits on the data center floor unless somebody knows what to do with them and really dry value with it. And so for me, the focus of my leadership team and myself is not so much just about the architectural roadmap, but it's bringing the thousands of people that are involved with IT, whether it be our own people or partners that help us, along with us in this journey, in a way that they're showing us the way. I mean, I could come up with this best roadmaps, somebody's got to make them happen. Yeah, and I think you're hitting on a really important point that, you know, the people piece, we always sort of ignore that. We talk about the technology, but you know, well, when you look at the spending that goes on in this industry, the vast majority of us are people, which, you know, on the one hand says, okay, that's important, we're investing in our people, but we're in a labor intensive IT economy and that's stifling innovation. You've talked frequently, as have your colleagues, about the 70-30 mix, 70% goes to running the business, 30% goes to innovation, but decades of infrastructure, investment and silos have really stifled that innovation. And so you got to attack the process and the people problem, or else that's not going to change. Which leads to that. I mean, trust me, that's what it is. Yeah, and so in order for us to move the industry forward, you know, Paul Meritz talks about getting deeper into the business integration. You can't get there if you're stuck in all this IT infrastructure, right? You sort of bring the first five minutes of my presentation to my keynote. But that's exactly true. You know, we say 70% is lights on 30%, 25%, 30% is innovation. It's not even innovation, it's just new stuff compared to old stuff. Yeah, it's not maintenance. I mean, yeah, that's the binary call. You need to get beyond that into true innovation and that takes a lot of effort. And people are so stuck in, I got to get this done. I got to get this out. I got to do this work around, I got to triage this problem that the technology and the processes are so institutionally complex. The business has gone this way, IT has continued to run this way because we haven't had time to move this way. I think today, and I say today, I mean, the period of the technology that we're in is the technology lends itself to agility. The business is open to how it needs, and open and welcoming to how it wants to consume the technology, good enough, iterate, agile, and it's up to IT to adapt at this point to say I'm willing to bring those two things together and really change how I do things for the business. Does that make sense? Yeah, and it does, especially when the context of the IT services discussion we had earlier, and we talk about, you said binary, it's either you're maintaining or you're doing something else. I think when organizations, if you can present IT as a service, can start to really align with their objectives of their, and treat it like a portfolio. Run the business, grow the business, transform the business, and maybe align it to business unit and really start to make IT a much more fundamental part of the strategic plan and the operating plan, and that's what excites me. Listen, I had one more question for you, and I've been hearing a lot about Propel. I heard first, a couple months ago, we heard more about it last week at SAP Sapphire. You did? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Joe was just talking about Joe Tucci, so, you know, I know- You was talking about Propel? Yeah, he didn't use that word, but he talked about- I asked him about SAP, and he said, hey, it's going live soon. I heard it's going live this summer. July 5th. July 5th, okay, great. So, what's that all about? Okay, so, you know, as, here's how I like, I like to think about it. For a few years, we were building out infrastructure, and it was a drive for efficiency in the business. So you, it's what I call, you know, when you start trimming the fat, but you got to build back some muscle. And the muscle we were trying to build back was our cloud infrastructure, and applications that took us into the future, right? The business wasn't slowing down their plans because I couldn't keep up with them. They were going just as fast as they had to go, driving shareholder value, creating new markets, new products, getting and doing the things they had to do. We were working with 10, 12 year old legacy systems, like every other company in our class, grow fast, grow globally, acquire companies. You're just trying to tread water sometimes and just stay afloat. We made a conscious call two and a half years ago to revamp our core systems, our line of business systems. No different than a retail bank pulling out their core retail banking systems and backend systems and putting in new ones. The ones they've used on a main frame for 20 years. Very trivial. But we didn't just stop at the app layer. We're completely building out this line, a new line of business solutions on what is essentially an EMC VMware RSA and partner friendly technology. So it's SAP on the top at the app layer, Vblock architecture, we've used in the spring frameworks, Gemfire, all of the other products, the middleware products that allow us to move into the cloud from VMware all built on a V, run on everything V. So the only thing that we're bringing over over 12 years is data, that we're spending a lot of time transforming. So they're ready for big data and the database physically. Everything else is brand spanking new. So at every layer of that stack, we are transforming IT, the business and ourselves. I mean, if you want to encapsulate the theme for this event, we're living it. July 5th, my team's been working for the last couple of years, the last couple of months have been torture, as you would imagine anything of the scale. You know, we close the quarter, we turn on the lights the next morning and we're in a new system and we got to take our users through it. So, you know, the team's done a stellar job but we still have a little bit ahead of us. July 5th, you'll be on the beach, but Sanjay's team, as IT, always pulls the shorts off. We don't get a long weekend, we don't get a probably a very long month actually. Sanjay Merchandani, one of the best CIOs in the business. We had Oliver Busman on last week, another real innovator, so I really appreciate your perspective. Hey, thanks, good to be here, as always. All right, keep it right there, and we'll be right back.