At this week’s EMC World 2014 Conference in Las Vegas, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE broadcasting live, welcomed both David Frattura and Sean Wedige. Frattura, the Senior Director in the office of the CTO for EMC and Wedige, who serves as the CTO over Global Enterprise Solutions for Rackspace. Host Dave Vellante began the interview by asking Wedige to share his thoughts on what has happened in the industry since his last appearance on theCUBE at the EMC Partners event.

“The last year has been incredible in terms of adoption of public cloud by our customers,” Wedige stated. “The public cloud, they are realizing, is not for everything. They want the flexibility of a hybrid solution. It’s been a fast moving year. We are solving customer problems every day.”

Next, Vellante turned the conversation to Frattura to discuss the relationship between EMC and Rackspace, and how that partnership drives the overall EMC business model.

“It’s a great relationship. We look at how EMC and our technology can help enable the industry,” Frattura stated. Rackspace, with their presence that is able to focus across the full spectrum of clients from small startups to large Enterprise customers, allows companies using the EMC solution to leverage the partnership to help them meet their needs.

Early on, Rackspace found footing when they were able to simplify the process of finding co-location space. But Wedige states the true value provided by Rackspace has been, and will continue to be their ability to provide deep expertise and their patented fanatical support experience.

How do you support cloud?

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After EMC CEO Joe Tucci brought up Amazon in his keynote this morning, Vellante stated it was obvious that public Cloud, and AWS specifically, was making an impact. “How do you approach Cloud,” he asked Frattura.

Frattura began by saying that he, personally, doesn’t find any fault in looking at specific Cloud offerings for specific needs. “We recognized early on that the view of running to a particular architecture model will only support a small portion of what our customers need,” he said. “That is a problem because you have to live with what you deploy on today.” He goes on to state that larger Enterprise and government clients, among others, require a more tailored and diverse set of architectures to build upon. “Hybrid is a core fundamental piece for us,” he explained. It’s this offering that will counter the AWS and Google models of trying to drive software cost down to zero. “We have to service a range of needs and must find mechanisms and means to deliver to customers in the paradigm they exist in today.”

Wedige joined in by stating that not every Cloud is created equally. “Our differentiation is that we run in OpenStack,” he said of Rackspace. “It’s part of the open source community. Plus, we possess the expertise to provide service to our customers that will differentiate us from public Cloud offerings and from our competitors. That is where our value proposition is.”

Frattura doubled down on the commitment to the open source community on behalf of EMC. “Almost everything you will hear is about our view toward openness,” he stated. “That’s a key philosophy for us. We believe in open ecosystems and we think it is healthy for the industry to have many options available that ultimately drive innovation.”

For this and all other re-broadcasts of SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, feel free to visit the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel.

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