Jamie Erbes, VP of Product Management and Marketing at VCE, stopped by theCube during Sapphire Now 2013 to discuss VCE’s continuing development of the Vblock with hosts John Furrier and David Floyer.

John Furrier opened the discussion by asking Erbes for an update on VCE’s activity on the product standpoint. In the past few years, VCE has been transitioning from a software-oriented company to a product company. While the Vblock 300 and 700 series have served VCE quite well in the market, they are now setting their sights on applications. “As we went into the data center, saw the complexity there, saw the application landscapes, we quickly realized that the infrastructure really had to adapt to and accommodate the kind of applications that we’re running,” Erbes explained. So VCE is also moving toward another product category called “specialized systems,” and the first offering in this catalog would be SAP HANA.

“That’s a HANA appliance that’s designed and made for execution and support delivery of SAP HANA,” Erbes described, “We find that it’s a great experience for customers in that we’re able to offer the VCE experience as a whole, as far as our total value proposition, in the context of the mixed workload systems that we sell, as well as HANA, right alongside it.”

Having interviewed some of VCE’s customers previously on theCube, Floyer described how a common need would be reducing complexity and cost in SAP environments. How exactly does VCE go about making VCE an easier fit into those SAP environments? “It really starts before the customer engagement,” Erbes answered. From the onset, the high degree of physical engineering that goes into VCE products like Vblocks ensures their consistent fabrication in factory. “Having a quality and consistent build from factory that lands in a very predictable way is the right starting point for any kind of application implementation project.”

Simultaneously, VCE is also working on a logical build. They communicate with customers about the application landscapes and portfolios that they expect to run on the Vblock, size the Vblock accordingly, and set the appropriate configurations, in terms of storage subsystem, VMware configurations, etc.

“At VCE, that’s one of the investments that we make,” Erbes continued, “When there’s a purchase of a Vblock, it’s not just the acquisition of an asset, there’s an embedded service that comes along.” This service includes a team of engineers obtaining the latest patches and releases, full-time, and a test harness of more than 2500 tests that constantly assess these new software patches.

“We also have customer advocates and residents. Sometimes customers want people with cloud management experience in their shop,” Erbes explained, proving that VCE’s support doesn’t brake at the purchase of their asset. “We’re able to drop people on-site that live with the customer and perform those changes on their behalf. So some customers really have a hands-off experience with the Vblock.”