 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC Redefine VCE Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing Brocade Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade Welcome back Jeff Rick here at EMC World 2014 We're going wall-to-wall with the Cube We've got two cubes, three days, I think seven hosts I don't even know how many we have all together So as you know we go out to the events We extract the signal from the noise We get the smartest people in the room We get them on the Cube And this is the fifth year that we've become into EMC World It's actually the start of the Cube A number of, what, 2009 I guess If I do the quick math in my head So we're really excited to be here And I'm joining this segment by my co-host Steve Keniston, the storage alchemist Thanks Jeff, it's great to be here Live in Las Vegas, 2014 As Jeff mentioned, you know, we like to go out into the audience Bring some of the smartest people to come out And talk to you, our industry practitioners So today joining us on the Cube is Rafael Merowitz AVP of Data Center Technology Services For Presidio Jeff, just for our clientele How about we, Jeff, I'm sorry about that Rafael, just, can you help us set the stage Just for folks so they help us understand Or you can help us understand who Presidio really is Yeah, so Presidio is a national systems integrator We EMC second largest reseller in North America Largest VCE reseller in North America We're also one of Microsoft's largest partners We were recently awarded, actually this morning We were recently awarded the Converge Infrastructure Partner of the Year from EMC We are a full integrator We provide professional services We also sell product And we provide solutions to our customers Whether they be private cloud solutions Public cloud or hybrid cloud solutions Congratulations on your award That's pretty prestigious Thank you Appreciate it So tell us a little bit about What you've seen here at EMC World You know, we've been here a few years You're a Cube alumni that on the Cube before Tell us what you think of the show so far I think the show of the year is great EMC is clearly moving in the direction of Software and hybrid cloud Which is something that Presidio is obviously Very interested in And something that we've been selling And implementing for our customers For quite a few years now And you brought up the fact that Part of this award was for Converged Infrastructure So we're hearing a lot about Convergence and Converged Infrastructure Give us a taste or a flavor Of the Presidio's definition And kind of what you see Your clients are asking from you And how you're kind of helping them down the path To get to that convergence So the multiple solutions that Presidio has come out with You know, we look at reference architecture from EMC We also leverage Vblock as well We've also come out with Something called Presidio Managed Cloud Presidio Managed Cloud is essentially A product that Presidio developed from the ground up Where we can manage the full private cloud And hybrid cloud experience for the customer So if the customer wants to move workloads Between private and public cloud We can provide our expertise around that And we also provide the expertise That we will manage That Vspecs or Vblock solution On an ongoing basis And provide the customer's support For that solution Sir Rafael, is that a total solution Software hardware and services? Yeah, so software hardware and services And ongoing support as well And ongoing support So obviously there's a lot of buzz In the marketplace with public clouds Right, and should you have your stuff In other clouds Talk a little bit about how cloud technology Is evolving in a private cloud And how somebody like you guys with expertise A broad kind of data set Because of a lot of customers Are bringing some new technologies New innovations from the data center perspective That would tell people Hey, we've got a better cloud Than you could potentially manage yourself Because that's always the knock, right? Could somebody else do cloud Better than my guys can do cloud? Right, so Presidio, we start off Every single engagement with something called The strategic engagement framework The SCF framework is something That Presidio has developed internally Where we consult with our customers And we get buying from them Before we actually move forward In selling them a solution And also implementing a solution So when we look at it One of the examples I can give you is You know, we had a customer that Was very interested in moving to Office 365 We went in there, we did an assessment And we came up from that assessment Saying to the customer that They weren't ready to move to Office 365 Because some of the applications Required on-prem exchange And what ended up happening with that customer Was a staffing customer They ended up buying a v-spec solution For the Microsoft exchange environment So when you do that assessment What are some of those other kind of key Indicators that you guys uncover That either the customer didn't really Know about or didn't understand the importance of Or maybe were just under the surface That they didn't really think through When they're coming to somebody who's more of an expert So there's a few things, right? When you look at it, security is a big piece Defining recovery point objectives Recovery time objectives is a big piece of that And also, you know How much money is a customer actually going to spend Over three to five years If they're looking at alternate solutions So application integration is important I think the SaaS market today A lot of customers have moved a lot of the applications To the SaaS-based solutions But when we look at pure public cloud solutions Where customers are looking at moving virtual machines To public cloud and moving workloads In between public and private cloud Presidio really looks at those applications To actually understand if those applications Can be moved to public cloud Because not every single application can Also EMC has developed something internally That platinum partners like Presidio can use And we leverage that collateral For assessments as well So you mentioned something pretty interesting As your clients, you know, it's not necessary That they go down and every particular application That they have is ready for the private cloud Can you take us through some of those things That you help your clients through A decision-making process And kind of the steps you go through To kind of get there And then what is it about that Is it tiering, you know Maybe they have tier one applications In tier two and other considerations Like protection considerations Take us through that process That your clients go through Yeah, so, you know, our customers today Typically you'll go in a customer Where they have all on-prem And some of them have Leveraging AWS and VCHS For public cloud But the majority of the applications Are on-prem And they're looking at leveraging Public cloud a lot more I think the first thing that we need to do When we sit down with any customer Is understand why they want to actually Leverage public cloud Or move the applications From private cloud to public cloud Oftentimes it comes down to The economics There's not necessarily the agility Because Presidio also Can provide customers with Something called a COD solution Which is capacity on demand Where they always have enough capacity And their end users will never ever complain So when we sit down And we sit down with customers And we go through application by application Tier one, tier two, tier three applications We need to understand What their business continuity is For those applications Typically tier one Mission critical applications Microsoft applications today What we find on mission critical Where they share point, sequel, exchange And we've had customers That have actually moved Back from public cloud Where it's Office 365 Or something else Back to on-prem Because Microsoft didn't really Have their SLA requirements And when there were outages There's nothing that they could really do So we sit down with all of our customers And we speak to them about all of that Oftentimes C-level executives Systems administrators Even network Networking engineers And our customers need to be part of those meetings Because it's not just about Storage It's about compute And virtualization and storage So you brought up a really good point That I'd like to drill down on Just a little bit One of the questions I was going to ask And you answered it was So what are some of the reasons behind Why I want to go to the cloud And I think one of the things you said Was it's economics I want to be able to do this Get some better economics Now I've read a lot of stuff on the internet Between blog posts and that sort of thing What are you seeing? How do you rationalize What's the right thing? What's the wrong thing Because I think our practitioners would like to know Okay I'm hearing the economics story And I'm reading a lot of things to say Maybe the economics isn't right But I'd like to make sure I make the right decision I think the right decision is I think it's probably five things That play into it Security is important Disaster recovery What type of What type of uptime do you expect For your application And also tied into that Is the whole backup and recovery Piece as well Often times when you move to a public cloud Provider they're not going to provide you With any backup and recovery Servers and if they do You have the mercy of what The bandwidth that they provide in you And sometimes you can't even back up Your applications fast enough I want to go back to your kind of assessment Documents I think that's really important To define the path How they really thought through all the things Are you doing like a hardcore ROI As part of that process as well So journal strategic engagement Framework not just ROI But also TCO as well Because I think when you look at The return that the customers Going to get over the next three years And also how much it's going to cost them That's probably the most important piece And public cloud Prices have dropped dramatically And continue And continue to drop And the truth is also When you look at it Even on-prem infrastructure The price of on-prem infrastructure Have continued to drop as well So you can factor that Into the equation as well But I've seen customers That have moved significant workloads To public cloud And three months later They shock by how much it costs And then they look at it and move it back But even within You know it's an internal Managed private cloud Where is the money Where are you finding when you go through this assessment That's getting them to make the move Is it tremendous ROI Is it just a lower total cost Over time Where are the economic benefits that you're uncovering So there's a few economic benefits They don't have to get their Systems administrators Manage their private cloud every single day Those systems administrators Can be freed up to do other things That are more important to the business Right? I think a lot of customers When I speak to a lot of customers They're tired of managing infrastructure On a day-to-day basis So the cost of that is significant And through our Presidio managed cloud offering We have orchestration Automation layer on the top So what we do is go to a dashboard And basically Provision the virtual machine And if there's an issue They can call us up And we continually monitor the hardware And software So it's almost like insourcing It is like insourcing Because you're an outsourced provider But you're managing a private cloud Inside their infrastructure And then how many of these things Are you managing across your infrastructure To 5,000 managed services customers The Presidio managed cloud offering Is a new offering That we've come to market with Again, it's around Cisco EMC and VMware And What workloads predominantly? You're going to look at workloads That are average of About 300 vms But we could scale it to 5,000 vms If we need it Any showcased giant ones that you like to talk about We have a few customers That have Used our capacity on demand model Where Very, very large Telco Where they had an issue Where they had sprawl And a lot of customers had sprawl Public cloud sprawl Where their developers were going out of the public cloud And Presidio came up With the capacity on demand solution To prevent IT from going outside Of the organization And the developers The number one complaint from the developers Was basically That IT could not provision infrastructure fast enough And they were waiting a long time Which is why they go to Amazon In the first place The delay in getting something spun up So I can get back to work So the capacity on demand model Basically says, alright That is ready That is not utilized And you're only going to pay for it Once you actually utilize it So a lot of our customers Have seen benefits around that And continue to see benefits around that Alright, excellent. So let's shift gears a little bit It's been a long time since you've been on theCUBE I guess we scared you or something I don't know, Stu, we're blaming you So you've been coming to these shows for a while What's exciting about EMC World 2014 Why is this an important moment of time Because what I've seen You know, I still remember going to VMworld in 2008 And at that time I believe it was Paul Moritz was In charge of VMware and he got up And started talking about cloud computing I think the reality is 2008 Look that up guys, it's back in the truck The reality is, six years later A lot of customers Need a hybrid cloud environment And I think EMC Is positioned in the market To deliver that Because of the software stack that they have And also some of the hardware That can leverage public And private cloud Can you tell us a little bit about What you see as some of the opportunities When it comes to EMC Their emerging technologies And what you do today with Microsoft Yeah, so on the Microsoft side EMC Has a very, very tight alliance With Microsoft When you look at not just the Hypervisor, the Hyper-V But exchange, as I mentioned SharePoint SQL There's integration with a lot of EMC products For example, RecoverPoint, AppSync Networker, Microsoft module And some of the other EMC products Very, very tightly aligned With Microsoft In fact, even if you look at That's right, they were showcasing it yesterday Xbox Live The entire Xbox Live environment Runs on iPhone And a lot of customers today Microsoft applications Are mission critical 10 years ago customers didn't really Care if exchange went down Today, if exchange goes down And they can't get email, it's a big problem And the increase In Even when you look at the increase In sales sizes On the SQL side And even SharePoint forms Customers are using SharePoint A lot more than they've ever used before I think EMC is very, very well positioned In their market to continue to Succeed, not just providing Customers with on-prem solutions But also Cloud solutions like VCHS You guys helping your customers Take those services to marketplace Well, Rafael, thanks for coming back to the Cube Hopefully it won't be another Four years before we see you again Congratulations on the new offering Hopefully that'll go well for you Again, exciting times It's good to get a little historical perspective Six years ago talking about the cloud And even then, we're still Early days, right? We're still relatively early days I'm Jeff Rick, we're in the Cube We'll be right back with our next segment From VMworld 2014 after this short break Thanks for watching