The Power of Partnership – EMC and Cisco

This week at Cisco Partner Summit, Cisco is again demonstrating why they stand alone in their ability to partner well with an incredible variety of technology and go to market partners. Congratulations to my good friends at Cisco on another exciting partner event and on their new product announcements.  Cisco has grown and nurtured an amazing partner eco-system that is helping customers with their IT transformation journeys.

The unique relationship between VCE, the Converged Platform Division of EMC, and Cisco created and has led the rapidly growing converged infrastructure segment. Through the unparalleled success of Vblock Systems, VCE’s annualized demand run-rate is more than $3 billion. The large percentage of our business associated with repeat purchases is positive proof that customers are realizing the key benefits of VCE converged infrastructure – increased business agility and simplified data centers. But in a fast evolving technology industry, solution providers need to constantly innovate and adapt. One of the fun things I get to do is engage in regular strategic and long-term roadmap and strategy discussions about the VCE converged infrastructure portfolio and the technologies that comprise our offerings with senior leadership at EMC and Cisco. The creation of the VCE Vscale Architecture and our hyper-converged RackScale VxRack Systems are examples of collaboration between the Cisco and VCE teams in meeting the needs of some of our largest and most important joint customers.

Our success today and in the future is bright:

As a long time VCEer, having been here from the early days, I am every bit as excited about our future as I was the day I started. What has made the job more exciting is that over the past year, VCE has become more integrated with EMC. As CTO, this has enabled me and my team to develop new converged offerings that weren’t possible before.

We can meet and address more customer use cases than ever before. What remains true is Vblock will remain exclusively based on Cisco UCS servers, Nexus networking and ACI technology. Additionally we feature Cisco Nexus switches in VxRack Systems and the VCE Vscale Architecture.  Our mutual customers depend on our technologies to work well together as we jointly have delivered products which operate in some of the most critical data center environments in the world.  The customer expectation, and our commitment to customers is that we, as industry leaders, will work closely together.

As a former Cisco employee, I understand their culture and strategy around partnering.  Cisco places a huge premium on partnerships to deliver customer choice. This strategy positively impacts the level of commitment to VCE’s success that is evident in every level of the organization from CEO Chuck Robbins to everyone in the Cisco field sales organization and is why we have been so successful.

The future is bright and I am excited for the customers that we together will serve!

About the Author: Trey Layton

Trey started his career in the US Military stationed at United States Central Command, MacDill AFB, FL. Trey served as an intelligence analyst focused on the Middle East and conducted support of missions in the first days of the war on terror. Following the military Trey joined Cisco where he served as an engineer for Data Center, IP Telephony and Security Technologies. Trey later joined the partner ecosystem where he modernized the practices of several national and regional partner organizations, helping them transform offerings to emerging technologies. Trey joined NetApp in 2004 where he contributed to the creation of best practices for Ethernet Storage and VMware integration. Trey contributed to the development of the architecture which became the basis for FlexPod. In 2010 Trey joined VCE, where he was promoted by Chairman & CEO, VCE, Michael Capellas to Chief Technology Officer, VCE. As CTO Trey was responsible for the product and technology strategy for Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, Vscale and VxRail. During his tenure, VCE was recognized as one of the fastest technology companies to reach $1 Billion in revenues and one of the most successful joint ventures in IT history. The origional VCE products Trey has led strategy on continue to be leaders in their respective share categories around the world. In 2016 Trey was asked to lead from concept the development of an all Dell Technologies converged product. From that initial concept Trey led a global team of engineers to deliver Dell EMC PowerOne, the industry’s first autonomous infrastructure solution, embedding open source technologies which enable automated infrastructure integration based on declarative outcomes.