For Prasad Rampalli, the link between EMC’s products and its solutions services is clear. “I think the solutions market is the ultimate implementation of value on our core platforms. So if we do our jobs right on our platforms, solutions demand should be insatiable,” said Rampalli, EMC’s Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering. EMC, like the IT industry as a whole, is in the midst of transition. The company is embracing two emerging technologies that are increasingly intertwined: Cloud computing and Big Data. That means Rampalli’s solutions division has its hands full helping EMC customers move to virtualized environments and embrace data processing and analytics on a massive scale. EMC solutions customers, Rampalli said, have two main priorities and it’s his job to address them. First, customers want to know how EMC’s products and solutions will impact the bottom-line as it relates to running the business. Second, they want to know how EMC will improve the organizations standing within the larger enterprise. “My job is to … drive solutions that are easy to consume and easy to scale,” Rampalli said. “The goal of what we are trying to implement from a solutions standpoint is make it dead simple to implement, not give [customers] a bag of parts.” To do that, EMC has aggressively pursued partnerships with well-known technology heavyweights. “I think innovation for solutions is going to happen with very deep partnerships with the key industry players in the enterprise,” Rampalli said. In early May, for example, Rampalli announced EMC was deepening its ties to Microsoft to make it easier for customers to virtualize Microsoft applications and Windows environments. “To fully maximize the benefits of virtualizing Microsoft environments and applications and get one step closer to achieving a cloud model for maximum efficiency and business agility, EMC has combined its deep knowledge of Microsoft technologies and virtualization and new EMC product integration with Microsoft System Center to drive simplicity of management,” Rampalli said at the time. Speaking to Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier a few weeks later at EMC World 2011, Rampalli said EMC is also working closely in a joint-lab with SAP, another important EMC partner, to address specific challenges around application virtualization and Big Data analysis. He hopes to replicate and extend that model to other partners. Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv “There’s only one way I know how to solve these issues and that is to go deep with a partnership with the Ciscos or the SAPs or the Microsofts, and really have a joint lab innovation environment and knock them off one by one,” Rampalli said. “Our goal is to establish an R&D lab in Silicon Valley and look at innovative, new usage models [for EMC’s products].” EMC also must “shift left,” he said, to create game-changing solutions at the beginning of the product development process. “We can’t have solutions as a wrapper after-the-fact, after we’ve already launched our products,” he said.