At this year’s EMC World conference, attendees are having the chance to network with some of the industry’s insiders and pick through their unique perspectives on the future of EMC’s involvement throughout modern tech work environments.

Bob Wambach, VP of marketing at VCE, EMC Converged Platforms Division, joined Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss some of the changes he’s seen in the market, along with the shift in what customers expect from infrastructure management.

Customer connectivity

An early point made by Wambach in the conversation was that customers are trying to understand’where the industry. He emphasized that by recognizing this engagement on the part of the customer, rather than assuming a passive market, companies can reach much better results on both ends.

Wambach also recognized a higher pressure on providers: “… We’re being asked to be more agile … at the same time, how do you be more agile when your budgets are about the same?”

However, he seemed confident in VCE’s ability to manage this, particularly when looking at the market interest. “People increasingly want Infrastructure as a Service, and that’s something we do very well today, and looking forward, I think we’ll see more of the Platform as a Service as people look for ‘I don’t want to deal with management orchestration … I really want that stuff to just happen for me.’”

As Wambach put it, standardizing things that are labor-intensive, and then automating them “is the journey we’ve been on.”

Racking up and stabilizing clouds

Wambach explored more of those customer expectations. “As you look at customers now trying to set up environments … they’re using new technologies, but there’s not a lot of skills, so they bring in people and they build up a pilot and they get it to work … and it wasn’t built to be sustained, it wasn’t built to be augmented and evolved over time. The people that did it are in high demand, so they go off somewhere, and the customers are finding that even using some of this new stuff, that’s supposed to be an easy way to develop, is actually hard. So I think … this idea of convergence has to work up the stack.”

This was something he felt was increasingly being understood by the customer bases, and not just those who had been through such an experience. “It’s very common now for customers to say, ‘We’re really all in on this,’ because if you do a great job on part of your infrastructure … any further improvements on that are really dwarfed by the mess that’s in the 50 percent that you haven’t touched.”

Wambach’s expectations for the future included a rise in the use of racks to build development environments, with cloud-native workloads poised to overtake traditional workloads, but these expectations were tempered with a realistic look at current work environments. “Today, how you manage a cloud-native environment is actually different … from how we managed, say, an enterprise hybrid-cloud, because there’s really a lot of heavy lifting and brute force involved in managing an enterprise hybrid-cloud that has a lot of different traditional applications, and we can simplify things a lot in a native hybrid-cloud.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE