Praveen Akkiraju, the CEO of VCE, gave a comprehensive update on the company’s evolution and current strategy, to theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante in a live interview from EMC World 2014.

“The first time we spoke was at VMworld 2012,” Akkiraju said, and “our goal was getting to a billion dollars. We blew past that milestone in 2013.”

Currently, VCE has a $1.8 billion run rate. “The value proposition of Vblock has been accepted by the market and we are accelerating the deployments of Vblocks.”

Commenting on the market opportunity, Akkiraju mentioned $2 trillion invested into converting to converged infrastructures. “For our customers we are the safe choice,” he said, noting over 800 customers, and 2000 Vblocks deployed.

“The first thing is, in the cloud era, one of the fundamental principles is you accept a certain level of standardization, in order for you to get the benefits of the cloud,” Akkiraju explained. “We want to standardize for the best in class compute, networking, and storage. We also believe that you have to maintain a level of integrity in your standards in order to deliver.”

Current & future strategies

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Asked how the company expands the TAM, Akkiraju said there were two different aspects to their strategy, the product aspect and the services aspect. From a product perspective, VCE initially wanted to simplify deployment by bringing together compute, network, and storage.

“We realized customers want an ability to deploy a full data center solution, not just a product,” Akkiraju explained, and started to integrate certain applications, SAP, infrastructure as a service, etc. “We now get more of the customer spend in terms of the datacenter infrastructure that they want to deploy.”

The future strategy is to go from a scale up to a scale out infrastructure, as Akkiraju said “our vision is to basically create a shared infrastructure product that can support any application stack.”

On the services side, “we took a huge step in 2013,” Akkiraju said. “Services for us grew almost at 100 percent last year,” representing 12 percent of the aggregate bookings and revenue. “Our vision is to go from creating a best of breed infrastructure, to a company that simplifies the journey to the cloud.

Asked how they were scaling the organization internally, Akkiraju said that during his time as CEO, the company doubled the team, approaching close to 2000 employees in 12 countries. “The number one aspect for VCE is our people,” said Akkiraju. “We are creating the new DNA,” comprising networking, software, storage to create the future skill set.

“The opportunity for us to enable that journey to the cloud is profound, it is the biggest challenge our customers face,” Akkiraju stated. “Customer experience is what dictates our strategy… our real primary focus is to maintain that customer experience, as we assimilate new technologies,” he said, explaining that this all happens while delivering the value proposition.

Explaining why EMC World is an important event, Akkiraju said the much debated transition to the third platform consisted of various steps. “Converged infrastructure is the foundation that third platform is going to be build on,” he concluded. The conference’s comprehensive view on data in the cloud is what makes it unique.