VCE, the converged infrastructure venture between EMC and Cisco, has come a very long way since inception. In five short years, it had transformed from an underdog fighting an uphill battle to a definitive market leader, recently confirming to have surpassed annual revenues of $1 billion in 2013 on the back of rapidly accelerating global demand for its Vblock “data center-in-a-box” modules.

Much of that growth is being accounted for by European enterprises seeking to capitalize on the continent’s recent economic upswing, Nigel Moulton, the CTO for VCE’s EMEA unit, highlighted during an interview on theCUBE at EMC World 2014 earlier this month.  The recovery is proving to be a catalyst for converged infrastructure sales.

“Europe is hot right now. It went through a period, not too many years ago, when people were questioning the validity of the single currency; it’s gone through go that,” Moulton tells SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante. “At the macroeconomic level, you’ve got a number of the European countries now plowing ahead, so there’s an amount of confidence that growth has returned to the European market.”

The European Union is unique from a go-to-market standpoint. The federation has some 28 member states,  Moulton notes, each with their unique cultural DNA that has to be taken into account when dealing with a prospective customer. In particular, CIOs’ stance on privacy and security tends to vary from one country to another, which raises the need for VCE to have a finger firmly on the pulse of public opinion across European nations in order to understand organizations’ data management requirements.

While central, addressing cultural barriers is but one of the factors dictating the vendor’s product strategy. Competition is another, however while Moulton recognizes that his firm must  keep close track of rivals at all times,  he doesn’t see the converged infrastructure balance of power changing any time soon. Traditional EMC competitors such as HP are still playing catch-up to VCE, he explains, while emerging appliance vendors like Nutanix are for the most part targeting smaller segments that the storage vendor has historically not been too interested in.

The network perspective

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As VMware’s networking partner and second largest financial backer,  Cisco also has a say on matters concerning the company. The data center connectivity giant is using the venture to drive adoption of its Application-Centric Infrastructure vision, or ACI for short, a unique spin on software-defined networking focused on bringing programmability to all corners of the corporate network. According to Moulton, the architecture is key to his firm going forward.

“Their ASI technology is something that we are looking to embed firmly inside the Vblock. And if customers today want to take an option around the newest Cisco switches then that is something we are able to integrate into Vblocks right now,” he says.

Pulling a software-driven abstraction layer over the network has a number of compelling advantages, Moulton notes, including simplified provisioning and reduced hardware requirements. It also changes the game for security, allowing admins to shift their attention from individually managing firewalls, gateways and other components to enforcing business rules across the entire environment.  That can go a long way towards driving operational efficiencies and, just as importantly, makes it easier for organizations to achieve the delicate balance between security and flexibility.

“When you bring those two dichotomies together, cloud becomes the obvious platform to build it on because it gives you the agility and the speed with which you can roll out mobile applications and it gives you the sophistication with which you can secure the end-point boundary,” Moulton explains. As a result, private cloud computing has emerged as a primary use case for Vblocks, which he boasts are helping CIOs around the globe align their priorities with business goals. The modules are also gaining traction among public cloud providers seeking to better compete against AWS.