 Live from the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE covering Structure 2015. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Hi, buddy, welcome to theCUBE. We are back here in downtown San Francisco. This is a special edition of theCUBE. We're here at Structure 2016, the rebirth of Structure. I'm here with Praveen Akaraju, who's the CEO of VCE Praveen. Great to see you again, my friend. So yeah, this is great to be downtown. I'm in your neck of the woods for a change. You were just in my neck of the woods. So a lot going on. I mean, that was about a year ago. VCE came back into EMC. EMC gained full control of VCE, and that really changed your world, didn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we were able to broaden our strategy, accelerate the business. I mean, converged infrastructure is now sort of the de facto way most customers are building data centers. So that's been a great move for us. It's been a very interesting high growth year, as always. Well, you guys started it all back in 2009. You guys, you restarted it. I mean, I go all the way back to Teradata, I kind of started it, but that was sort of decades ago. And then the whole world has gone just bonkers for converged infrastructure and hyper-converged. And so it's put pressure on you to expand your business, expand your TAM. You guys did a $2 billion run rate, so it's incredibly successful. Talk about that expansion, that evolution of VCE. Absolutely, I think as we were talking about, as we came into EMC, one of the things that allowed us to do was sort of break out of the joint venture structure, right? Which confined us to a certain set of technology choices. So at EMC World, I mean, we talked about this as well on theCUBE, we announced the next generation, next phase of our converged infrastructure strategy, which we call blocks, racks, and appliances. And the goal really was to say, we've really sort of taken the notion of an engineered system with best of breed components and scaled it, as you said, $2 billion business. With the advent of hyper-converged, we wanted to basically combine the best of both worlds. Take the hyper-converged building block, take the engineered systems approach, and create a new category, which we call racks. So a combination of the we block, our new category called the VX Rack, and then we're starting to build out our portfolio of appliances in the pure play hyper-converged space, really gives us, I think, the broadest portfolio in the industry. So of course there's not much to be going on lately in the industry, but of course we're talking about the Dell acquisition of EMC was announced, but there's even more than that. So I want to give you an opportunity to address some of the things that people say. So particularly the relationship between Cisco and EMC, it's really started, Joe Tucci and John Chambers, a famous relationship. John has sort of stepped aside. Joe is working out finally, they're letting him go. You came from Cisco. What is the relationship like between Cisco? Yeah, I think it obviously has evolved significantly over the years, right? Cisco was a founding member of the joint venture that was VCE and last year as we sort of merged into EMC or EMC acquired VCE, Cisco retained a 10% equity stake. Now, the relationship with Cisco today is really founded on three pillars for us, right? The first is there is a significant financial interest for both of us, we are a big chunk of what they do in terms of their data center strategy, but also we contribute significantly to the UCS business because UCS, the server component of the VBlock which is built on UCS is a strategic sort of go to market for them. So it's a mutually beneficial financial model for us. I mean, we're growing, as you said, two billion. This year will be well north of two billion and Cisco gets to participate in that. The second pillar is the strategic alignment. We announced the next generation of the VBlock architecture and the VBlock architecture is based on the Nexus 9000 switches and the ACI SDN technology, right? So we announced this in March called Vscale. We just won a large deal, one of the largest deals that we've ever won based on this architecture. So we're strategically aligned with Cisco in terms of what they're trying to do with their technologies and bringing them to market in the fastest way possible, right? And the third pillar is really customers. So both EMC, VC, as well as Cisco are extremely customer focused. Today we have over $6 billion of install base of VBlocks, right? Over 3,000 customers jointly. So the companies Cisco included are very focused on those customers making sure that we can support them, we can scale the business, we can continue to build out the roadmap. So really the relationship with Cisco is no longer on sort of the personal relationship, right? It's really built on three pillars of, you know, common financial interests, right? Strategic alignment and customers, right? So okay, so let's talk about a little bit about the roadmap. So Dell announced it's acquiring EMC, Dell's a server vendor. I have no doubt Dell's going to be knocking on your door and say, Praveen, let's do something. But the conventional wisdom is that Dell will pop out, Cisco, UCS, and pop in Dell. Why is that incorrect in your view? Yeah, you know, I think it's fair to assume as a transaction closes that we're going to be taking a very close look at the technologies that Dell offers. One of the things that's interesting from an innovation perspective is this combined entity is a leader in about 22 categories, right? Of technologies, which provides us a dramatically expanded scope of technologies we can tap into to build solutions. Now as a solutions company, you know, our job is to really go solve the customer's problem, right? And let's go back to the strategy that we talked about, blocks, racks, and appliances. Now the beauty of that architecture, now we defined this in May, well before a lot of this news came out, but the beauty of that architecture is that we have distinct swim lanes for distinct architectures. So we are, for example, contractually committed to Cisco to be able to build V blocks only with Cisco components, right? So the UCS and Nexus will always be a part of the V block. Now, because we launched two other categories, VX Rack and our appliance category, those are areas which are based more on wide box servers, and give us the opportunity to be able to introduce different vendors. So I feel like, you know, with the strategy that we have already in place, we have distinct swim lanes where we can be very successful, mutually successful with Cisco, and in the blocks category, the V block, and we can continue to be able to innovate and introduce newer technologies and leverage what Dell brings to the table in our acts category, in our appliances category. So it actually, you know, it's not an either, it's not an either or kind of decision. For us, it's really an and decision because we have, you know, the ability to incorporate multiple technologies without, you know, derailing what's been a tremendously successful, you know, product. It's classic market segmentation. You got the high end, the mid, mid, ancient in the low end, and essentially it's maybe people who follow Dell know that they don't go up to that high end. That's right, you play to their strengths, right? You play to Cisco's strengths, which is really enterprise class, mission critical, and you play to Dell's strengths is very strong in the small and medium space and in the lower end of the spectrum. And the EMC ethos has always been, you know, more overlap than gaps is better and so that's likely to continue. I want to ask you about something that we heard recently at Oracle Open World. I mean, Dave Donatelli, former EMC, stood up, former HP as well, stood up and basically said, look, we're unique and that guys like, you know, VCE can only go so far up the stack with us. You get database and everything else integrated. How do you respond to that? So criticism. Yeah, no, you know, it's interesting because, you know, converged infrastructure went from, hey, you know, can I, you really need to do this? Can we not build this to today's, it is the accepted building block. So you see wide variations of it, right? One extreme is the Oracle approach, which is basically, hey, you know, we lock you into everything, soup to nuts, including an ancient sort of risk-based architecture that they're built on, to the other end of the spectrum, which is basically an appliance category, right? The hyper-converged appliances and a bunch of vendors over there. The way we think about the evolution of converged infrastructure is you go further up the stack. So what is infrastructure? Infrastructure is everything that you need to run an application. So there are two principles that are important, right? One is infrastructure should be application agnostic, right? Not tied so tightly to the infrastructure, which is the problem we tried to solve in the first place, right? So what Oracle is really trying to do is to say, hey, stay where you are. Because when we created, we see the explicit goal was break down those application silos, create a generic platform, which is the principle of the cloud, a generic platform that's virtualized, that's dynamic, that can support any workload, right? So we think of, so that's our fundamental principle. The second principle is, you know, we have, and we will continue to integrate more elements of infrastructure like the software-defined layer. And give choice in terms of software-defined networking options, whether it's Cisco, whether it's VMware, right? Integrate the orchestration management layers, including vCenter, OpenStack, Horizon in the future, and then be able to go further up. We have a great partnership with SAP, for example, where we have a HANA in solution that we can ship to the customers, HANA TDI, which is extremely successful. We have a solution VMware for VDI. We have a solution with Pivotal for Cloud Foundry for a PaaS platform, right? We also have a solution with Pivotal for big data. So, you know, I think you have the ability to innovate and create a, you know, you have to follow the principles of the cloud, right? Which is essentially, you know, generic, high-performance platforms which can be dynamically allocated to applications. And that's really the way we would differentiate ourselves from the on-campus. Yeah, really horizontal across the diverse application portfolios, opposed to a narrow stack. Okay, last question. I know Vinod Kosla's just about to go on, and we all want to hear Vinod. Oh, he's a great speaker. But, so customers that are concerned, let's say about the Dell acquisition, uncertainty, say, you know, Praveen, maybe I shouldn't jump in. What are you telling those guys? Yeah, you know, I think what we talked to them about is, and as we talked about, our strategy is well-defined. Our strategy gives us distinct swim lanes. We're always going to be, we're a solutions company, we're not a products company, so we basically focus on giving the best-of-bridge solution to the customer. We have a great go-to-market, great alignment, right? Great customer acceptance of the V-Block. We're committed to Cisco on the V-Block, and that'll continue in perpetuity. Vin's basically, there's no time-bound agreement to that. At the same time, we're going to innovate pretty fast in some of the newer areas, like the hyper-convert space, right? Like VX Rack, which is a brand new category, and we have the opportunity to introduce new technologies there, and we have access to a great pool of technology. So, I think, you know, we've been the leaders because we've responded and listened to our customers. Customer experience is what defines VCE. So we're going to continue to emphasize that and focus on our customers, and you know, look, our competition's going to say what they're going to say, but at the end of the day, it's our customers that matter. Well, it's been amazing to watch VCE, Praveen, from Incubate, from this idea, and then, of course, they brought you in for adult supervision and the scale of the company. You've done a great job. So, thanks very much for coming back, and I appreciate it. I appreciate it, thank you. All right, keep it there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from downtown San Francisco at Structure 16. Right back.