VCE CEO Capellas: VCE Best Of Breed Beats Single Stacks From HP, Oracle, IBM

VCE Chairman and CEO Michael Capellas Wednesday told several thousand solution providers at the Cisco partner summit that his company's best of breed VCE cloud building blocks will win out over what he characterized as the single stacks from HP, Oracle and IBM.

Capellas, whose VCE company is primarily funded by Cisco and storage giant EMC, said VCE is positioned as a best of breed provider rather than what he called a single vendor approach.

With a slide in the background positioning Oracle, IBM and HP as "single-stack" and Cisco, EMC, Intel and VMware as "best-of-breed," Capellas said: "Oracle, Exadata, Exalogic single stack all the way down. IBM CloudBurst, Tivoli down through (IBM) Power (architecture) and X86: single stack."

As for HP, where Capellas was president for six months in 2002 after HP acquired Compaq, he said: "HP Proliant, I might know a little bit about this, OpenView, Opsware, Mercury (Interactive), Insight Manager, single stack going down."

The VCE model, in contrast, said Capellas, is "absolutely the leaders in network topology" with Cisco providing the networking and Unified Compute System foundation, adding best-in-class storage from EMC, best-in-class virtualization from VMware and best-in-class processor building blocks technology from Intel.

"We will use those capabilities to provide these frameworks that build out a cloud engine…and keep you always refreshed (with the highest performance cloud technology)," he said. "We will be the best at every layer. We will couple the layers together and this [architecture] will be the leader of the cloud environment."

Capellas predicted a "flight to quality" around cloud deployment because customers are demanding that the infrastructure be fail proof. "While it is all interesting to say we will build it from the lowest cost components," he said, "the reality is we will look to the companies who are the leaders, companies like Cisco who have been in the foundation who everybody trusts, along with our partners VMware, EMC and Intel. It will be quality because it is mission critical."

Capellas predicted a battle for cloud infrastructure supremacy with majors vendors all fighting it out in a bid to dominate what he called a $50 billion market over the next three years. "We will all fight it out for the next three to five years to deliver the promise of the cloud," he told partners. "You will see these stacks become more virtual, more vertical and we will deliver those stacks more and more with the ability to go turnkey on those stacks. We intend to be the innovator and the pioneer."

Next: Capellas Urges Partners To Take The Lead In The Cloud Revolution

Capellas' keynote address comes with VCE launching a major channel offensive. The company was relaunched two months ago with a new name, discarding the Acadia brand, and a new channel-based business model. This move was in response to a channel perception that Acadia was difficult to work with, opening the door for a more channel-focused NetApp to ironically gain share by partnering closely with Cisco.

Capellas, for his part, urged partners to team early with VCE to become an early adopter offering market share advantage in the fast growing cloud solutions market. "This is an unbelievable opportunity for all of you to be able to lead this (cloud revolution)," he said. "We are here to help you to be able to add high value services on top of this. Market transitions are the time when share is given. We are just excited to work with you."

"With this infrastructure you don't have to know or care where the physical layer is, you are buying capacity on demand," he told partners. "You are rolling it out. And you don’t have to have the IT department spend all this energy thinking about how to put the pieces together."

Capellas told partners that the benefit for customers from the cloud computing revolution will be dramatic with a new era of rapid application development and deployment. "The benefits are incredible," he said. "Just think about your customers. You no longer have to do any (software) release management, any configuration management, you can deploy capacity when you need it when you want it."

Capellas predicted that about 80 percent of the cloud deployment will be private clouds hosted inside the firewalls of businesses with the remaining 20 percent public clouds coming from the companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. "The difficulty for the public cloud is that it assumes that all applications have a single quality of service," he said. "Good luck if you are trying to run mission critical ERP on a public cloud. It ain't going to happen. Good luck if you are trying to differentiate applications performance."

As for how quickly the cloud revolution will transform the information technology industry, Capellas predicted that cloud converged infrastructure will be widely adopted in just 18 months. "Within 18 months we will think about cloud as the foundation of how we deploy applications," he said.