Praveen Akkiraju, CEO of VCE Company, LLC, is very optimistic about his company’s future under the EMC umbrella. After being acquired in October 2014, Akkiraju said that life isn’t very different.

“I think what EMC has allowed us to do is, they have left us alone in a lot of ways,” he told theCUBE during EMC World 2015. “Because I think they recognize that we have a winning formula. We have the trust of our customers. And we have been able to create this market and be able to provide leadership and thought leadership in this marketplace.”

Consolidating the convergence structure under VCE

But the acquisition of VCE was part of a bigger shift at EMC, Akkiraju said. “So what EMC has really done is they’ve consolidated all of the convergence structure under VCE. So they’ve brought the VSPEX, VSPEX Blue products, under VCE. So now we have sort of a unified strategy and vision for the market for convergence structure. They’ve also consolidated the global solutions team, [which] essentially is where you have solutions like the enterprise hybrid Cloud, and Big Data, into one team.”

In the past, according to Akkiraju, VCE focused on classic tier 1-type data center use cases and workloads, such as exchanges and other classic data center applications. But the company and its customers knew something was missing.

“Now, with the strategy of blocks, racks and appliances … we have the ability to go after and tell the full story,” Akkiraju said. “So I feel much better now from a broader competitive perspective — there’s no other player in the marketplace today that has that comprehensive a vision, and the experience, and more importantly, the trust of the customer.”

Evolving in the marketplace

Since VCE already has that advantage, how has the company benefited from being part of the EMC infrastructure? Akkiraju thinks it has allowed the company “to be able to think about the market space outside of the construct of three companies [Cisco Systems, Inc., EMC and VMware, Inc.] and the products and technology of [those] three companies. For us, the vBlock is going to be our flagship platform … However, now we’ve created this separate category, which goes after a different space … [allowing] us to bring in the power of EMC’s technology … and go after a different segment of the market. And I think that’s the evolution.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out wall-to-wall EMC World 2015 coverage on theCUBE.