 Hi, this is Stu Miniman of wikibon.org here with SiliconANGLE TV's continuous coverage of EMC's VSpecs launch and joining me today to talk about the channel in VSpecs are Colin McNamara from Nexus and Don Hoppick from Ingram. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. It's your first time in theCUBE. This is where we look to extract information and share it with the audience. First, Colin, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what brings you here? So my background, 15 years in technology from a range of networking solutions, storage solutions, virtualization. I direct the data center practice at a company called Nexus, an integrator. What brings me here today is we've been working together with EMC and Ingram to kind of productize a lot of these spec-based solutions and been very excited about how VSpecs can change our business and change our customer's business. Great, Don? Don Hoppick, I've been with Ingram Micro for 14 years and I lead our data center storage business unit. It's our advanced computing division and lead a team of 30 people that are focused on this market. Okay, so you're the distributor and Nexus is one of your bars? That's correct. How long is the relationship going on there? About four years. Four years now, I believe? Yes, four years. Okay, great. So Colin, Colin, let me throw it back to you. You've worked with Cisco UCS for quite a long time. Absolutely. Can you talk a little bit to kind of the evolution that you've seen and what does this announcement mean for how you deliver products to customers? Well, it's kind of interesting. You know, it was actually me and Scott Lowe were the first people outside of Cisco to get briefed in on UCS and it signaled a change in how every Cisco partner went to market. It used to be about route switch and phones. But it really triggered an evolution of this multi-manufacturer product set that had frankly a bit of drama in the compute space. So how it's changed over the past couple of years, you know, VC company came out and tried to answer a problem of how to productize a solution to make it simple, consumable by the channel sales force as well as the customers. Obviously there's other manufacturers that create similar solutions out there. What I'm really excited about with the VSpecs launch is it provides a middle ground. You know, over the past decade and a half of helping customers design their Cisco technology as well as other storage and systems technology. We've really centered around the reference architecture. Have a centered point of discussion allows us to say, okay, we know this works for this amount of users to this scale. Let's take this as a starting point and add in new requirements. You know, VSpecs allows us to continue selling and designing solutions in ways that we've all been comfortable with selling. So just to follow up on that Colin, it sounds like you really started from the network side of things and expanded into a full data center offering. Is that fair? Yeah. So has your kind of network methodology had an impact on how you design things? Well, oddly enough, engineering is engineering. Okay. Right, so simple thoughts like drawing things, planning, capturing requirements and designing to those requirements I think are our core tenants. There's been a notion, especially before 1999, 2000, I think voice over IP put a lot of network engineers in the position of having to learn uncomfortable and different things. And that trend has been continued over this past decade with server storage virtualization, big data and analytics. I think that, to answer your question though, I take a lot of the fundamental skills I've learned in network architecture and design and apply them to system storage and virtualization architecture and design. Great. So, Don, could you comment on kind of EMC's maturity in the channel space? They've been a long way in four years. All right. And a couple iterations of rules of engagement have helped and ultimately it's best for their business. I think that this is going to be truly a launchpad for the year of the channel like Greg mentioned, Greg Ambulos. How much engagement did you have with EMC from the V-SPEC's architecture? We've been working with them for approximately six months and ultimately we did announce Ingle Micro V bundle, which is reference architecture last year in May. So we worked with that same core group. This is kind of phase two as far as we're concerned. We helped prove out kind of a beta type phase. So it's technically been going on for about a year and a half. Good, Colin. Did you want to comment on EMC in the channel? You know, it's been an evolution. So I think every EMC as a storage vendor is incredibly relevant. It has great products, a wide range of product lines. In the past, I had the direct model and now for EMC to be successful in the long term, I believe they have to really partner with Cisco. Now Cisco's success has been hinged upon their channel model. They have to make that turn and over the past couple years, it's been hard for EMC to do it, but they're making very tough strides. Sometimes baby steps, sometimes large steps like V-SPECs. So Colin, it's my understanding that Nexus really focuses on Cisco for the compute standpoint. Does Ingram don just do Cisco or did you support multiple compute platforms? You support multiple, yeah. So I guess one of the questions I have looking at this announcement is, Cisco was here, they were on stage. Do you have any kind of thought or feedback as to where you see the other compute platforms fitting into this architecture? Well, Ingram micro supports multiple compute platforms, but at the same time I agree with Colin and how EMC needs to leverage Cisco. That's a key. Well, in my opinion, if you look at, what's the problem we're trying to solve here? We're trying to decrease the time to market, lower the risk of design and frankly, make sure that what we design with our customers or manufacturing partners in our vars actually works. And if you look at the Cisco solutions with the virtualization partners as well as with the EMC, it works very well, right? So anything that can help drive the discussion to that, I think it's good for everyone involved. Okay, great. One of the other things we talked about a little bit earlier off camera was really, maturity of how fast we can get these solutions to market, how we design them. Colin, could you share a little bit of, how do we go from gathering those customer requirements to implementing fast? What do you see going on in the marketplace? Well, there's been a move in the market to reference based solutions around server storage and virtualization. It creates a less confusion in the design cycle. Anytime you can distribute information and educate everyone involved, whether it be the customer, the manufacturer, or the VAR on to, here's how things plug together and we know that it works. What it provides is a centered point of discussion where when you come into a design meeting, you're not arguing about how theoretically things could go together. You're saying, okay, we're gonna use this as a starting point. Now we're gonna capture all these requirements and really get to solving the problem quicker. For a VAR it solves problems of shortens the sales cycle. And for the customers, it solves a very specific problem of making sure that the infrastructure that they design isn't a science project. Okay, so yeah, absolutely. A key trend in the marketplace. EMC's playing a strong role here. Others in the market are also delivering these solutions and competing in this marketplace is really gonna help everyone. Absolutely. So, Don, where does the distributor's role, how has your role really changed with kind of these new solutions versus what you did maybe just a couple short years ago? I think it validates our role. Okay. We still do what we do. We support our partners. We're aligning our strengths with our partners and making sure that we're listening to the voice of the end customer and trying to solve those problems. Okay, what's the effect been on your staffing of Ingram? With this announcement? Yeah, I'm saying just over this trend of convergence. Is the skill set changing, the relationships to the vendors, where you add value into the chain and where you charge, is that affected? Sure, yeah, we're adding more and more value. We're investing more and more in this. I'm just a little, like, where's the new value that you gain from this kind of technology? Well, for example, with our Ingram Micro Training Academy, we do Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware certifications for our customers and for our partners and their customers. Are you, in your training, do you kind of cut across silos for some of these converge solutions? That's something that we've been looking to do with VBlock and obviously there'll be an opportunity here. So we're looking at, can we provide certification training, another level of partnership with VSpecs versus right now, the barrier to entry is very low. Okay. Colin, did you have a comment on that? Yeah, it's interesting. You talked about the cross turning of engineers. What's necessary to deliver a solution today is not having the best storage guy, the best virtualization guy, the best compute guy, the best network engineer, the best voice engineer. To be able to deliver, you know, VDI VXI is actually so much interest and actually movement with our customers right now. If you want to change the way the person experiences a phone that is video that does virtual desktop, you change their endpoint experience. You have to have engineers that can design across the spectrum. So a lot of the investments that I made Nexus has been making in our staff, and we have 464 employees, 250 of which are technical, has been sending many swarms of engineers to training to become bilingual, to be aware of these cross platform solutions. Having a partner like Ingram with their training facilities and their support has been key and critical to our success in this. And I think it's key and critical for a partner to be able to utilize to sell V blocks, to sell V specs, but really to solve the next problem that our customer is trying to solve right now. So Don, last question I have for you is, do you see this as incremental revenue for what you're doing? You've done some of these pieces. How does this help you grow your business? I think there's going to be incremental revenue because it helps us to penetrate the customers, our customers, our partner's sales force, and get more people that are focused on attaching to what they know well. So where their strengths are, they can pull along more opportunity and solve more problems. So Colin, my final question for you is, this is first iteration, kind of 1.0 V specs. What do you see as really the white space in the marketplace? What's the opportunities to kind of mature this solution? What are customers telling you that they need to be able to adopt technology faster and be more lean and efficient? Well, right now, are the discussions from the customers supporting a couple key initiatives? One, bring your own device, the ability. If you look at the partners that EMC has chosen in here, there's a wide range of partners that can support this. You know, the other side of it being that VDI, VXI play, what I was talking to Wendy at Cisco about this, what I'd love to see evolved out of this is a larger reference architecture which takes into account those components on the end. The network and wireless connectivity in the middle. Because reality, we always have to remember the solution isn't just the thing in the data center. It's everything that's necessary to solve the problem. So I would hope to see these reference architectures expanded to take into account the entire solution necessary to deliver these. Okay. Any final notes, Don? That's good for me. Colin, do you have a random sports thing for us to talk about? I'd say boom goes dynamite. All right, so Colin and Don, thank you so much for joining us. We will be back shortly with SiliconANGLE TV's continuing coverage of EMC's V-specs launch.