 out there, Prasad. Welcome to theCUBE. Dave Vellante. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good to see you, this is my co-host John Furrier. Hi, John. Okay, I think Dave, I want to start it off by just saying that the big news here is the sizzle, the sizzle of VMC World's cloud and big data, but the stake has been this home services solution message. There are people making money out there doing solutions, whether they're consultancies or startups, and it's growing, there's more needs out there. There's a lot of demand. So tell us what your opinion is on that and your angle on the solutions market in general. I think the solutions market is the ultimate optimization of value on our core platforms. So if you do our jobs right on our platforms, the solution demands should be insatiable. And my job is to really make sure that there is indeed the case and drive solutions that are easy to consume and easy to scale. Versailles, you know, it's 27 years at Intel. We were thinking we were going to try to break Pat Gelsinger's record there, but that's quite a career. We had Pat on last year. Pat's been great to us. He's been a guest on theCUBE many, many times. One of the things he talked about was the Intel culture, you know, like the Army, marching to the cadence of Moore's law. And he said, you know, EMC's culture, not so much, but maybe that's changing a little bit. So first of all, what brought you to EMC and talk a little bit about the cultural differences. Maybe the culture shock. No, that's a great question because after 27 years in one company, moving to another company was not the top of mind for me. But as I was looking at where the industry was going from a solutions perspective, it was clear, as Joe said today, that the industry is going through one of those big transitions that happens once in 20 years. And the confluence of cloud computing along with big data was not just a theoretical premise when I interviewed for this job. It was clear that this company, EMC, was on a path to acquiring assets that were going to make that reality. And cloud has been my passion from my Intel days. And the ability to move up the stack from silicon to actually build solutions was a huge opportunity I couldn't pass. So that's why I'm here. Yeah, Intel is such a fundamental component in the cloud. EMC is just NVM where I bet the farm on Intel. And so now you're a current role. Let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, basically you take these industry solutions and it could be third-party products, EMC products, put them together and then demonstrate how they work in a real-world customer environment. What does that do for a customer? I mean, obviously it reduces some risk and maybe speeds up deployment. But what do customers tell you about that? Customers care about two key values, right? One is, hey, is this going to make a big shift to the value that I serve my business with? And second is, is it going to make a substantial shift in my bottom-line cost of running the business? And so the goal of what we are trying to implement from a solution standpoint is make it dead simple to implement, not give them a bag of parts and make the cost of integration so hard that we don't go anywhere. And each of these projects becomes a man of the program. Secondly, it's got to be changing the game. It's got to be a game changer for the business that the solution's intended for. So if you take FSI or you take oil and gas or healthcare, can we take the collection of our products, be it a green plum, be it a VNX storage environment, or be it our security capability, or be it our content management with Documentum, and can we stitch them together to create a total solution that makes a huge difference? That's what we're trying to accomplish. Yeah, so you do obviously do a lot of stuff around SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Solutions, a lot of the traditional enterprise apps. Have you started? I mean, I'm sure you started, but when will we start to see, or can you give us some examples of these so-called big data applications emerging in terms of proven solutions that you can actually point customers to? Yeah, we are in the early days, to be honest, but a lot of what I'm seeing, and this goes back to even my own days as a guy who used to run Intel IT, is the refactoring of the core ETL environment from the OLTP environments, the refactoring of costly, you know, multi-million dollar notes that run the analytics environment into commodity hardware, and enabling massive scale-out parallelism in the compute model for analytics. And so we are absolutely seeing the implementation of use cases for analytics that leverage that technology. The big enterprise applications are not moving there overnight because of the inherent nature of the mission criticality of these environments, and the inertia of moving from legacy to the new environment. It's complicated. It's complex. But where we see opportunities is emerging usages that have been hard to crack from an analytics standpoint. So if you take the FSI community, a key focus is can we enable real-time risk management as part of portfolio and risk on the trading floor? So here you have 30 to 40 million messages a second of market data streaming in, and can you leverage that market data into meaningful analytics that say, hey, based on this, our risk portfolio has got a shift based on the nature of the bits of data coming in. That is massive ingestion of data, real-time information, translating from that data to making decisions on portfolios. The question I have for you is, obviously the Intel background is stellar environment for dealing with massive change, Moore's law, for example, Dave mentioned. We're living in a time now where the real-time web or real-time internet mobile and web is really, really relevant. Cloud is scaling. It's a system. It's an operating system. So we've always admired Pat Gelsinger for that systems view. And so you have this infrastructure operating environment going on. That sounds a lot like Intel to me, except it's not a chip. So can you give us insight into how you build those solutions, how you look at that? I mean, can you? Well, absolutely. I think the notion of the data center itself having a lot of analogy to a computer with the core platform, the BIOS, the operating system, has a means to establishing simplicity and abstraction on which you run third-party applications is not a far-fetched idea. In fact, that's what we are collectively doing with VMware and EMC and Cisco in many ways. At the compute platform layer with VC and Vblock, we are converging the compute network and storage to a much more simplified model. And above that, we are driving the abstraction of a set of orchestration for management of these resources and implementing applications with ease directly by end customers through this notion of self-provisioning, right? So taking that concept into a broader implementation through third-party applications, enterprise applications is very much the focus. I live in Palo Alto, California, where the sandbox of Silicon Valley is in my backyard. I live there and I love living there. It's one of the best places to live and it's innovation. So that is enabling a lot of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship at big companies to build on that abstraction layer mentioned. You guys are enabling that. How are you guys looking at that? I'll see big data announcement today, something that we've been talking about. But that's an explosive market, the software, this new mobile apps, Facebook apps, enterprise apps, the consumerization of IT, it's happening. Absolutely. You had a censor on earlier, I mean. Tell us what's happening. Well, the way we are looking at it, and I'll give you my solutions perspective, is I think innovation for solutions is gonna happen with a very deep partnership with the key industry players in the enterprise. So our goal is to establish basically an R&D lab in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley and look at innovative new usage models. And let's just take the hybrid cloud as an example. The hybrid cloud has got two or three key challenges. One is how do you enable this notion of cloud bursting? When you have a peak demand, can you essentially elastically increase the compute of resources on the public cloud and run your application without a blip in the SLA? These kinds of usage models have known issues on network latency and bandwidth, known issues on identity management, and the implementation of a policy-based orchestration that has full visibility both on the private side as well as the public slide of all the resources. And there's only one way I know how to solve these problems which is to go deep with a partnership with the Cisco's or the SAP's or the Microsoft's and really have a joint lab innovation environment and knock them out one by one. So that's what we're going to go do. So we're here with Prasad Rampali who's the Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering at EMC. We're talking about what we call proven solutions. What EMC refers to is proven solutions. Prasad, what's your vision for this group, this initiative which started a number of years ago and I think really started off as okay, we EMC have to be in the business of proving out these solutions and you had to earn your way into the minds and hearts of customers. It's a lot of hard work as you well know. And so I feel like you've sort of gone through that phase successfully. What's your vision for the future of this group? Well, thank you for asking. That's a great question. So I've been with EMC now for six months and we're launching what we affectionately call as Gen Two of the solution evolution. And Gen Two has got three key parts. The first is you can create solutions all day long but you have to have the ability to scale it across the thousands of customers very quickly. So how do you establish a scale model from the time you create a solution through the direct sales force, through the indirect channel in such a way that this penetration model is moving at six six times the speed is a key focus for us. The second is shift left and the idea here is for us to create game-changing solutions, we can have solutions as a wrapper after the fact when we have already launched our products. We have to be in situ integrating. What was that one again? The second one? The second one is shift left design in solutions with our platforms. And the idea here is we want to integrate our platform capabilities with third-party solution frameworks very deeply at the time of launch, not six months or two years after the launch. And that would require a completely new development model with our products, very deep partnerships with key ISVs and technical partners. Like SAP and so forth. Like SAP and really change the game on some differentiated feature. Let's take SAP and as an example. Do you have a joint lab in Santa Clara with SAP, right? That's the... Yeah, today we do, yes. But we want to take that to a whole different level but today it's mostly a showcase kind of environment. We want to take it to an R&D joint development environment both here as well as perhaps in Waldorf. And we want to be able to demonstrate integration points between SAP's landscape management and the application level all the way with visibility to the intelligent storage system and how we enable that level of policy-based management that could be happening at an application layer that SAP cares about but the infrastructure just adapts to it through that level of integration. So that's the third, so scale, shift left and... And the third one is really solution R&D. When Todd started this organization about five years ago clearly the focus was to enable sales. And I think he did a fantastic job. I'm building on that and saying, hey, let's go shift left. Integrate solutions with our core products and differentiate features. And even go two years out where really look at the next big technology inflection, right? Flash is viewed as the technology inflection for storage today, what's the next big one that's coming? And really preempt that if you will with appropriate solutions that could be tied with that R&D process going forward. Yeah, I think that's a great vision Prasad because I would imagine it's very difficult to take a quote, unquote, proven solution and then scale that as you say. So customer says, well, that's not me. Okay, can you do that for me? And can you then now become one offs? How do you scale that? And so if you can crack that problem, that's game changing. And then the other thing is, I mean, I've talked to a number of CIOs, application heads, infrastructure heads about this capability. Generically, whether it's EMCs or IBMs or whomevers. And the infrastructure guys love it, right? Because of course it's their job. It's going to make my job easier. It's going to lower my risk. I'm going to get stuff in fat, that's all, I get that. CIOs, they tell me, well, it's good. My guys like it. It doesn't really make a difference to me. And then the application heads say, well, it's somebody else's problem. So this notion of scale and shift left and the solutions R&D, that starts to appeal to a much wider audience. And I think it's a great vision. You know, I'm terribly excited by it because I think with this recipe, if it takes off in the next three, four years, we can produce game changing solutions that perhaps will be as important as our own platforms and will drive differentiation both in terms of top line revenue as well as bottom line gross margins. Hi, Prasad. This is very interesting. Prasad Rampali, Senior Vice President of EMCs, Solutions Engineering Group. Somebody that we've really focused on a lot. We've advised our clients in the Wikibon community to take advantage of these offerings. They're some of the best freebies in the business, right? A lot of them, most of them, maybe all of them are free, which is fantastic. And of course, the idea is it leads to other sales. Why not? But they really reduce the risk. They speed the time to market. They help you share best practices. And it's great to see the investment and Prasad, I love your vision. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing. Thank you for having me.