Hatem Naguib, the executive in charge of managing VMware’s VCE-associated relations with EMC, Cisco and the joint venture itself, hopped onto theCube to share his unique angle.  Naguib talked about VSPEX and drew a broader picture of how converged infrastructure and virtualization are shaping enterprise IT.

Naguib started off by sharing a bit of insight into how the VCE alliance works: in summary, a lot of joint marketing initiatives going on between the backers, and even more development. VMware in particular has been working on centralizing management as it ties in with vSphere, the hypervisor at the center of Vblock.

Afterwards he expanded on the cloud as a whole, and its role as an enabler to make technology previously unavailable to people outside the IT department accessible. Social media, mobile and big data are the three big trends he named, with an interesting continuation to this line of thought.  Naguib explained that from the enterprise point of view, the need to deliver these new capabilities is changing the focus from deployment and maintenance to optimizing the business value. And this is what VSPEX is all about according to him.

The premise behind EMC’s latest widely-covered product launch is to deliver a pre-configured architecture that addresses all that by eliminating the setup process. At the same time, VSPEX also introduces added advantages on top of this (such as support for multiple hypervisors).

The head of VMware’s part in VCE noted that, while companies need the means to accommodate this new paradigm, the adoption of the tools is often slow. The reason is that a bigger necessity comes in the form of having to keep an enterprise IT environment secure and available at all times, a schedule in which an upgrade doesn’t fit in all that easily.