Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante caught up with Chris Ritter, a principal systems engineer for EMC, during the EMC SAP Week meeting at the company’s EBC headquarters in Hopkinton, MA. The two discussed virtualization and Amazon Web Services, the other elephant in the room (full video below). Vellante starts the interview by asking Ritter about his role within EMC. Ritter states that his job is to help users realize the best possible return on the integrated solutions that his firm develops and sells in collaboration with Cisco, VCE and VMware. Vellante recalls speaking to EMC chief strategist and Pivotal Initiative head Paul Maritz at an analyst conference a few years ago, when he still served as CEO of VMware. The executive told him that his goal for the company is to deliver software that can run any application anytime with no performance or SLA degradation; an objective that Ritter says has since been met. He explains that continuous software optimization has the infamous virtualization tax so negligible that the advantages far outweigh the cost. He adds that the native APIs included in the hypervisor go all the way down to the networking layer and enable advanced business continuity and parallel work stream functionality. Ritter goes on to talk about virtualization adoption. He says that while the transition from physical to virtual is relatively simple, other scenarios such as migration from RISC-based infrastructure to an x86 environment are more complicated. Most VMware users try to keep their business processors intact, but many applications are rewritten to take full advantage of new functionality. After briefly going the HR implications of adopting virtualization, Ritter addresses Amazon. He tells Vellante that AWS is not suitable for running enterprise-scale mission-critical apps, and adds that private cloud environments often prove to be more cost-effective on the long run.