 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. We're back, good day everybody, we're here in Las Vegas at EMC World 2014. This is the Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. The Cube started at EMC World 2010 in Boston and it's our pleasure to have David Fritura and Sean Weedage here. David is with the office of the CTO at EMC. Sean is a Cube alum, he's the CTO of the global enterprise solutions business at Rackspace, obviously a company who's doing great things in the cloud. Gentlemen, welcome back. Good to see you. So Sean, you and I talked last year at this event at the EMC partner event, the service provider partners event. So what's happened since then? What's evolved? What's changed? What's come into focus? And what's still fuzzy? Yeah, no, great question Dave. So we're first off glad to be back. The last year has been just incredible in terms of adoption by our customers of our public cloud and our hybrid models, leveraging the broad components of our portfolio via the public cloud, via dedicated open stack. So we're finding customers are starting to realize that the public cloud is not for everything. We've been hearing from our competitors saying, it's all about a commodity, all about a race to the cheapest. But our customers come back to us going, we need that flexibility that a hybrid solution offers. We need the ability to mix and match public resources with EMC and the dedicated portfolio. So it's been a really fast moving year, certainly with all the changes and iterations occurring within open stack and the maturation that's occurred there. So we are solving customer problems across all those platforms every day. So it's interesting to have two CTOs on. Now, of course, CTO these days, the sales guys love to drag you around and put you in front of customers and push a button and say, go, so I can close some business. But there's some things that happen behind the scenes. So I wonder, David, if you could talk about, from your standpoint, the relationship with Rackspace, how does it evolve, how does it start, how does it evolve and what are the objectives? Well, it's a great relationship we have with Rackspace. And we look at how EMC and our technology can help to enable the industry. And we look for partners that most certainly are leading innovators. And with Rackspace, we have a partner that also recognizes that the needs of our customers are going to range from enterprise-grade capabilities all the way through next generation systems. So we don't necessarily believe that a model has to evolve strictly down the path of very commodity compute. We believe that we need to bring our customers or enable our customers to leverage partners that will be able to scale the range of services that will meet their IT needs today and tomorrow. And so when EMC looked for partners in our service provider program, Rackspace was one of the first ones that came, it was very obvious that we needed a partner like them to bring to our customers. And so that's how it evolved, which is really, we recognize early on that it's not just a race to the bottom in terms of commodity compute and storage, but it's a need for market transition. And so we look at Rackspace as really that key enabler for us and our partners as they look at cloud services. I want to circle back to that whole race to zero thing and get your guys opinion on that, but before we do, Sean, I want to talk about your heritage. So why do people buy from Rackspace historically and is that changing? You've got infrastructure, maybe it's on premise. They want it to be in a more secure facility and a more professionally run facility. Is that the impetus? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and how it's evolved. And I'm happy to. There are a lot of secure facilities. 10 years ago, 15 years ago when we started this organization, it was very difficult to get co-location space or provisioned infrastructure very quickly. It was a very painful, difficult process that we simplified for customers. What we've seen is that we very quickly evolved and realized the real value is in providing a support experience, that deep expertise that customers require. So 10 years ago, it was more around how do I set up virtualization for my customers? Now it's, prior to that, it was operating systems. Now it's starting to become how does Rackspace help enable me to go deeper in very specific technologies? Things like big data solutions, things like mobile, things like DevOps and the DevOps ecosystem. So the customers are still coming to us because of the value that our fanatical support experience brings, but the fanatical support experience is evolving and changing to be able to keep up with the challenges in the industry. And the relationship with EMC is with EMC, I call it classic or EMC, I always get confused, but the core EMC, the host of this show, it's not necessarily a comprehensive relationship with the Federation, you have a relationship with VMware, I don't know if you do anything with Pivotable, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely, we've got relationships across all three, but our deepest relationship at this point is with EMC. We do have, we may not talk about it much, but we do manage 35,000 plus VMs on VMware. However, our EMC footprint is massive for our customers. We're using VNX, we're using VMAX, we're using Isilon because customers value the performance, the consistency, and the scalability that those solutions bring, particularly when used in conjunction with some of the versatile platforms like our public cloud infrastructure. So EMC has been a long standing partner of ours, love coming here every year, talking about it and showcasing our mutual successes. So let's talk a little bit about, and David, I'll start with you. The public cloud, which is sort of a euphemism for AWS, I mean it's the leader in public cloud, it's growing very rapidly, making an impact. But you guys are solving a different problem. I wonder if you could talk about how you approach cloud relative to, let's say public cloud, what's different? Okay, well I mean just to begin with, I don't necessarily think there's anything inherently wrong in saying I look at a certain type of cloud for a certain kind of workload. One of the key themes you'll see at EMC is we recognize as we look at the needs of our customers, they really span the gamut of lots of needs from traditional enterprise to building a next generation systems. And what we recognized early on is this view that I can run to a particular type of architectural model as the foundation of what I do in this next generation of IT technology usage, will only satisfy a small portion of what our customers need. If you look at the majority of the people you'll see here is yes they have a cloud strategy, but the reality is they have to live in the confines of the systems and the technologies they deploy today. And that creates a special problem because you just can't take traditional architectures, transaction oriented architectures and drop them on a next generation platform. So when we think about cloud, we believe it has to be a range of capabilities. And in that regard, we believe that IT organizations, large corporations, Fortune 1000, government organizations are going to need a range of services. So we think that if we look across EMC portfolios, you'll see a range of capabilities. You heard VMAX, VNX, ISLON, the ranges from traditional high performance block storage all the way through scale out NAS. The footprint is there for us to take the technology forward into the cloud. And importantly, it's not just going to be a journey of what kind of architectures you have in the cloud, but it's how we're going to bring technology into the cloud. So hybrid is a core fundamental piece for us. So it's not just I have a low cost cloud out there, in AWS they've done great stuff, they've pretty much driven that industry, but we recognize that we're going to have to service a range of needs. And importantly, we're going to have to find mechanisms and needs to bring that technology to our partners that also fits in the business paradigm that our customers live in today. Just can't change overnight. Hi, Sean, I want to get your perspective on this, because it seems like AWS really doesn't have an aggressive on-premise strategy. I'm understanding that they don't use the term hybrid. That's not in their vocabulary. It's certainly in a lot of your customers' vocabulary. And so is that primarily the difference? I feel like the early days of cloud, we're okay, tire kicking, a lot of dev, and then into the downturn, reduce CapEx, coming out of it, a lot of shadow IT, and now it's mainstream cloud. Everybody accepts cloud, but you guys have a different philosophy than the public cloud supplier. So I wonder if you could give us your angle on that. Yeah, so the way we look at that is, when you only have one cloud product, that's your cloud. And with Rackspace, we have multiple products, and we have the ability to be able to mix and match those for our customers. A lot of our customers are coming out of either the enterprise space, want to try the cloud, EMC is a familiar constraint, or a familiar name brand. They know the capabilities, they can rely on it. Other customers are coming out of the cloud space, born of the cloud, started off on these other platforms, and have reached constraints in there, particularly around the ability to scale from a performance perspective, or from a cost of storage perspective. And so some of these large, some of our largest customers are, wins are coming from cloud competitors where they are unable because they have a single platform to be able to accommodate their growth needs, their performance expectations. So the combination of the support experience we provide, but the ability to customize and leverage the various platforms is really the strength of our offering these days. I want to come back to this notion of a race to zero, race to the bottom. When Google cut prices recently created a spade of articles in the media about how this is a race to zero, race to bottom, do you feel as though that's the case for the public cloud only, and not for the hybrid cloud? Do you feel like all cloud is not a race to zero, or all cloud is a race to zero? Help us squint through that. Now, all clouds are not created equally, right? So it's a combination of platform, services, expertise, technology. And so Rackspace's cloud differentiation is we run an open stack. So it's an open platform, open APIs, following very closely open stack community. Our latest, our current version of cloud is very close to the Icehouse release, and we continue to iterate and add functionality based upon open stack. The second piece of that is, while the infrastructure is getting commoditized on the cloud platforms, the expertise to be able to assist customers is where the value proposition lies. Google and Amazon are going to go head to head, and they will continue to push prices down, but Rackspace isn't a different niche, and always has been. Where, such as when we competed with Colocation years ago, that continues to get cheaper, continues to get more commoditized, but the service layer, that experience we're able to bring the customer will continue to allow us to differentiate. Customers are coming to us today and asking us, how can Rackspace help me introduce a DevOps methodology so that I become more agile? How can Rackspace help me manage these new applications platforms that provide more value to me, but expertise is difficult to come by. That is where our value proposition is, and it just happens to ride on a cloud-based infrastructure. And so the, let's talk about open stack from EMC's perspective, because you got a partnership with VMware, Sean. You know, EMC owns 80% of VMware. You're dipping your toe into open stack. You're not certainly not running away from it, nor is VMware. It's contributed to the NYSERA code to open stack. So what's your take on what Sean just said? Well, I mean, I think, you know, the key point from an EMC point of view is our customer's going to have diverse needs. And there are different technologies out there that offer different value and different capabilities. And so from an EMC point of view, we obviously do have a vested interest in the success of VMware, but we also have a vested interest in the success of our customers, and also the industry as a whole. And, you know, open stack is definitely a significant technology, and actually even more technology, an ecosystem out there. And EMC is committed to being a part of that. So you'll see almost everything we do, and you'll hear at EMC World today in this week, is that we have this view about openness. And that's a key thing for us. So the technology that we're deploying in Rackspace today itself is fully capable of integrating into an open stack environment. And that's a key philosophy for us. Up and down the company is openness. And by the way, you're seeing that in VMware, you know, not just in Nigeria, but also even in VMware's integration of their stack inside of open stack. So we believe in open ecosystem systems, and we do think that it's healthy for the industry to have a number of different technologies driving new innovations for the community overall. Yeah, and we have Pat Gelsinger on later this week, so we'll obviously get his take on it. Sean, you mentioned DevOps. I wonder if we could talk about the DevOps culture a little bit. How is that evolving? Why is it so important? And will that, is that hitting sort of mainstream IT? Yeah, it's starting to. I'd say in mainstream IT, it's still, people are still trying to figure it out, still trying to determine what they see or they've benefits. They see the benefits of having your operational teams and your development teams working closely together, faster time to market, but more frequent releases that are easier to troubleshoot. But along with that comes an expertise and a need to have a working knowledge of a set of tools to do automated deployment, to do automated testing. To get better insight and visibility into their applications. So our very cloud-centered customers already get it. The small startup shops, they integrate that from day one. The enterprises are coming to Rackspace and saying Rackspace, you've already integrated this into your organization, into your operations, into how OpenStack is deployed. How can you help us to be able to navigate, not just managing the applications, but a layer of expertise to be able to, that we can take learnings from how Rackspace is implemented at DevOps and bring those into our organization so that we can see an example of the benefits that have occurred, but the roadmap and the path to be able to get there. So it is absolutely a critical piece of what our customers are asking us to provide in terms of a service offering and a support capability. Now how do you guys reach out to developers? Is it, I mean, you've all got your, probably got your reference, EMC has its efforts to you. Does the partnership have any specific, you know, developer outreach efforts or is that something that you can see in the future? So I'd say right now that the biggest outreach efforts are going to be focused around OpenStack. So, you know, Rackspace and EMC are going to be out at OpenStack next week, so we're going to be a great show. We'll continue to grow, excellent, never miss the plug. So that is the main emphasis for how we reach out and connect our developer communities. You know, over time as the software, as a storage and the infrastructure becomes more software defined, I can see that the need to go and develop better, go to market activities to be able to cater to those needs, but right now it's predominantly on the OpenStack side. I think just from the health of this activity to begin with, and it's important that we have open collaboration and probably the strongest thing we can do together is actually drive OpenStack as a whole and in the industry to accelerate its acceptance and, you know, this is, you know, absolutely important to us. So we look at it as, you know, a key partnership activity with Rackspace, which is to help this ecosystem take off. Excellent. As Sean said, OpenStack next week. It's in Atlanta. We will be there with theCUBE broadcasting keynotes and broadcasting guests and I hope to see you guys down there. Excellent. All right, thanks very much gentlemen. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're live. theCUBE from EMC World 2014. We'll be right back.