 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and we're live here at EMC World 2012. This is day two for theCUBE. SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of EMC World, where we bring you the smartest people in the house, and we've got a long-time CUBE guest and friend. You know, one of the smartest nodes out there, Chuck Hollis, great to see you again. Hey, it's a pleasure, Dave. Always good to be on theCUBE. We love having you. You're one of our favorite guests. Unfortunately, my colleague, John Furrier, is not here today. Oh. No, he had to fly out last night. He's not working on his tan or anything. No, no, no, he wishes, but he's at the HBase conference, actually. That would be a hot conference to be at right now. Well, we had a lot of demand for it, so we've got a simulcast going on. You can see here, if you want to watch the HBase action, go on SiliconANGLE.tv, click on the HBase link. John is there with his chief data scientist, and a lot of action going on. You're becoming a cable network for geeks. I mean, look at this. We're trying. Well, you know, that whole space is just exploding, and we want to cover it. I know. It's kind of funny. It's like where cloud conferences were three or four years ago. I remember going to cloud conferences, and the room would be full of people, and how many people here worked for a vendor? The whole room would go up. Anybody here not a vendor that one guy would raise his arm? And I think we're going for the same thing as well here with HBase who do the whole big data thing. A lot of technologists are interested in this stuff. I think the difference, though, Chuck, is I've not been to the HBase conference, but I expect, and speaking to John and others about the conference, a lot of developers. Yeah. A lot of hackers going, and so it's a real serious alpha geek tech show. Wow. Kind of like Hadoop World. I'd go there and I would be stumped. I'd sit in one of those sessions, I'd go, well, I could follow it for five minutes. Not a lot of suits. Not a lot of suits. Yeah, I probably wouldn't do well here. We were at Sapphire last week with the Cube, and there were a lot of suits there. I would expect so. Yeah, it's a good show. I mean, very elegant, high-end, you know. Just to be clear, when we start talking about big data and analytics, there are what we would call suit shows. I think we've both been to a few of them. Yeah. And what I'm finding is, is that this is a revolution around big data that's not being driven by technology so much. It's being driven by business people who realize, wow, you know, there's wealth out there. There's value out there. I heard a great analogy the other day around big data analytics. It's kind of like the oil rush all over again. One team goes in and does the exploration. Another team puts in the drill. Third team spends a bunch of money to pump it all out. And I'm starting to see more shows, more attendance by business people who just want to understand what the opportunity might be in their environment. Yeah, I mean, and I think that, yeah, it can't help but bring it back to the messaging. You guys started Cloud plus big data. And now everybody's on that bandwagon. So, you know, props to you guys for, obviously marketing's going to be ahead of the actual, you know, delivery, but props to you for spotting those trends. And you basically paved the way for the entire industry. Now, the whole transformation theme's interesting. What we've been saying about this, I want to run up by you and get your feedback, is so Cloud is really the IT transformation and the business transformation is big data. And obviously there's skill sets that have to be transformed to support both of those. Maybe it's a cloud architect. Maybe it's a data scientist. Yeah, right. And so that seems to be another, you know, again, I don't know if it's Jeremy coming up with this stuff or what, but are you, the hats off to whoever doing it because it's spot on what we're hearing from customers in terms of the things that they're thinking about. Cloud, 2012 is the year of the Cloud. Big data, it's not about big data deployments, as you know, it's more about what's our strategy? What should we be doing? How are you going to make money off this thing? Yeah, what are you seeing here? So I think you covered it really quickly. IT transformation is all about IT learning how to compete. And we meet more and more IT organizations that realize they don't have a monopoly on delivering IT services. They reorg around new skills, new capabilities. And the first thing they want is a variable platform to deliver services. That's a cloud to you and me. And I would guess about 20, 25% of the customers I meet right now are actively considering investing in some sort of IT organizational transformation. So we could probably talk about that for the next five years and never run out of people to talk to. The question comes up, okay, now that I've done this, what is the killer use case that I'm going to point us on that creates value as opposed to reduces costs? So much of what we do in IT these days is about taking existing business processes and becoming more efficient, being cost out. Big data analytics for a lot of people is a new source of wealth, a new source of value. And if you're an IT person, the fact that you actually do something that creates a new form of value for the company you work for, that's pretty exciting. I don't know if you've been following what's going on in healthcare, it's just one example. The payment strategies have changed. Medicaid now has accountable care organizations. You basically, a contract to pay $2,000 here to keep you healthy. If you do better, the healthcare organization gets the difference. All of a sudden they need to kind of mash all this data together and figure out what it really costs to keep you healthy, Dave, as a managed care patient. And again, you couldn't compete in this new healthcare market without some sort of predictive analytics about who you were looking care to. Vertical by vertical, I would say maybe five to 10% of the business leaders I meet realize there's something going on out there and they have to start realizing what it means to them and their organization. Yeah, so I want to understand that theme of IT transformations. We just did a big survey at Wikibon. We do it every now and then, we'll go out to the practitioners. It's nice, you just ping them and, you know, we have this- Everybody wants to talk. We have this base of practitioners that love to, you know, share information. You've got a good brand out there. That's cool. And they're members and so we don't spam them. We don't hit them too hard, but so we asked them, you know, which of the following best describes you, where you are in your IT transformation. And two things stood out. You know, some people weren't really thinking about it. Some had just get started. It's a range, right? But the two big vectors were one, our transformation is primarily focused on infrastructure and two was, and they're about the same, about 25, 30% of the base. The second one was really more interesting to me is we're going hard after service catalogs and IT is a service. And those are really the two vectors. There was a lot of smatterings of other things. Yeah, but it's kind of interesting. Even though they say that, we ask them, okay, what do you care most about? People, process, financials, political alignment, those are the things they're dealing with. Most of the business leaders and the IT leaders we talk to, they know the technology's there. They know that it's, it's capable you've done, they see examples around them. And it's a very inward focused discussion of we've got to change the way that we're doing things. Yeah, it's a business model challenge. It's a business model challenge. It's not a technological challenge. Now for us as technology vendors, I was a little sobering to realize that we weren't kind of in the critical path for this. So I'll give you an example. We created a cloud architect certification. I think you followed that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's been very, very popular. And people ask us, you know, why did you do that? Well, if you don't do that, the network guy will build a network cloud, the server guy will build a server cloud, the storage guy will build a storage cloud. I think we've had maybe 4,500 people through that cloud architecture certification. Beginning of this year, we offered a IT as a service certification on top of it, which is basically the heavy lifting around process re-engineering. Cloud's only as good as automation. Automation's only good as its processes. So we think most decent sized IT organizations will need some heavy duty, continual process re-engineering. We've had 600 people through that certification. Very, very popular stuff. My goal is that we create certifications around IT marketing, IT finance, and IT HR, which is not kind of a hardcore tech that you and I have kind of grown up with in the industry. Who would think there would have been demand for a certification around IT human resources? IT marketing, now that's a concept, right? Basically, because if you're going to become a provider of services, you've got to understand how to work those things. It's funny, you look at, any competitive service provider knows how to do go-to-market. How many enterprise IT organizations have a go-to-market group? Not many. Well, you know, I still contend there's a big gap between those service providers and the IT as we know and love it. And I don't know if, I don't think IT has to close that gap completely to compete, but there's got to be. They've got to be in the game. They've got to be in the game. So, for example, our own IT organization did a transformation and I get a rate card for the services I consume. Here's the services for my IT guys. Here's what it might look like from Rackspace. Here's what it might look like in Paramark. I don't think my IT guys are always the cheapest, but they're in the game. They're in the game. And they know my business. They're part of the family, right? Yeah, they're part of the family. So, okay, so give them the hometown. You'll take the hometown, not discount, it's the hometown free providers, know nothing about EMC, our business, how we work, what's important to us. My IT organization does. And as a consumer of IT services, it's worth something to me so they can bring additional value that a potentially an outsider can't. The other thing I want to talk to you about is value. So everybody talks about, I think it was Gartner who came up with the three Vs of a big deal. Help me here. Oh yeah, velocity, variety, and volume. Okay, velocity, variety, volume, how big, variety, the texture and velocity and speed. It doesn't good. I like that. Everybody's talking about, there's a fourth V, I think, which is value. And again, out of the survey that we did, we asked people, what's the biggest challenge you have with big data? And they said, it's understanding how to monetize and get value out of the data. It's kind of funny. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but you have information on the balance sheet. How do you monetize that? We all kind of are familiar with MBA curriculum. We know how to price assets and brand and goodwill. What if you're sitting on petabytes of interesting information? And I don't think there's a good intellectual teamwork out there for saying, well, what's the potential of that? That being said, we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs and larger organizations to say, that's okay. I don't have to wait for the ROI. I'm going to go figure out what's happening in this space. We're ready and willing to make the investment. But I don't think there's any coursework you can go through that will teach you how to value that information portfolio. I guess it's going to be experience, right? That'll be the reference model. People will start to actually put numbers around them and then we'll have the reference to be able to see more of it. There's actually a problem after that. So we're now seeing this in larger organizations that have invested in the predictive analytics. And there's these classic meetings that are happening where conventional wisdom meets cold hard logic. So the scenario is the data science says goes out, finds this great predictive model, goes into a room of people who think they know what the answer is and the interactions between these people and they call this the three phase of data science denial. Phase one is your data sucks. Second phase is your model sucks. And the third phase of those going to work is you suck. And there's kind of a human interaction dynamic because these guys are showing with such powerful predictive capabilities that a lot of people feel threatened by. So there's a dissonance there. Oh, there's a very harsh dissonance going on. You know, I think that's perceptive. So the other thing that we asked for that in the survey and it didn't come up as a big problem. And I think the reason it is because nobody's there yet. They're at your data sucks. Yeah. And they're going to find that that is going to become a real organizational challenge. But, you know, take a marketing organization. I'm not picking on ours. I'm just one in random. And, you know, everybody knows how marketing works and what market is. The data science professional comes in and says, here's mathematical proof. You're doing it all wrong and wasting the company's money. That's not going to be a popular meeting. We're kicking butt. Yeah, we feel good about ourselves. All right, so what are you doing here at the show? I mean, how do you spend your time? The big thing for me this year is we're running our first partner-centric events and we're having our Global Partner Summit. So we have service providers here. We have SIs here. We have resellers. I forget what the number is, but I think Sunday we had 2,000 people. Started Sunday, right? Sunday. And for me, I've been here a long time. I really like to watch the company evolve. I'm so glad that we're bringing our partners together in one place and one time to not only present to them, but to listen to them. And you'll hear it from Joe, you hear it from Pat, you hear it from us for leadership. We are fundamentally changing our go-to-market around partner-centricity. So you'll see less and less emphasis on the traditional EMC direct sales force that we all know and love that we both kind of grew up with and more around partner enablement. In the sessions I'm running with them are interesting. Hey guys, here's where we see the opportunity. Here's what we're investing to get after it. If you want to invest in it too, and by the way it's your choice, here are the kinds of things that we think you ought to be doing that we're doing in our own business. That we're going to value. That we're going to value. And by the way, if you do those things, man, we're going to put you right in front of the engagement in front of our customers. And for me, it's not the usual partner-vendor dance. We're actually talking to business people about how do we all capitalize on this wave of opportunity that's coming down the road and how can we make our mutual customers more successful. Yeah, I think that, well, you've learned a lot, I think, from VMware. And you go to the VMworld conference and you just see the ecosystem. It's all about the ecosystem. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that message is coming through. There's a vacuum now in terms of the large companies. And Joe calls you guys the small of the big. Yeah, the littlest big company. Yeah, there's a vacuum in terms of the partner-friendliness. And you guys have obviously done some really interesting things with Cisco. To me, what strikes me this year, and we were just at Sapphire last week, is the emerging partnership with SAP. I think that's really smart. And it's more than just a, you know, enemy of my enemy is my friend. Well, that doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. And that's maybe how it started. Hey, we should be maybe talking to SAP. What are they all about? I think SAP, as a company, is starting to realize that infrastructure was getting in the way of their value proposition. Always had great software, great business process, great capabilities, but all had to kind of run somewhere. Expensive and slow. Yeah, difficult and needed to be secure. Boy, what if we could virtualize that? And it's very easy if you're a software vendor to sit there and say, well, that's the hardware guy's problem. But the customers have to have both value propositions coming together in a way they can consume. So I think that's true for SAP. I think it's true for a lot of larger software vendors. So I'm getting more calls from, and I won't mention any names, classic software vendors that kind of look and say, you know, our model is kind of done. No longer can I sell the license handed over to the native IT guys and run. I've got to think about more variable consumption models. I think I need to deliver as a cloud. I don't want to be a cloud provider. Do you have any good service providers that you can hook us up with? So when we go to our customer and we sell our value proposition, we can sell it in classic or by the SIP. And I think we're going to see a lot of that from the ISVs here in the next two or three years. Yeah, the other, I wanted to ask you, this is stay on partners for a minute. You were very instrumental in the original VCE, sort of positioning and marketing and strategy. Oh, it was a blast. There was a bunch of us who were very passionate about it at the outset. I go back to some of the blogs you wrote back then. When you guys launched VCE and you basically explained the whole sea change that was coming around. So I'm sure you're very proud of that. And congratulations because it's... It's been a long slot, changing people's perceptions. Yeah, because out of the shoot it was like, hmm. I don't know if I like this. Yeah, what is all about? I've never seen anything like this before. How is it different? It's like the middle of last year then things really started taking off. And then of course EMC, it's getting so large that EMC had to sneak in its 10K, some data. Yeah, we couldn't hide it in the... We analyzed. No, I've never seen you do that before. And so it was enlightening. And then you saw the V-specs announcement a couple of months ago, which opens up a whole new set of partners. You know what the best part about V-specs is? Partner branding. And what I, let me see if I can get this adjusted correctly here. I was kind of pitching the idea of some of our partners who kind of went through what we want to do, their choice of components. We'll take all the infrastructure heavy lifting out and the one thing they all said is and we can put our name on it. And I think this is the first time we have created branded products for our larger partners. And it doesn't really, it's not apparent that that's kind of what partners want. But if you think about it from a reseller or integrator's point of view, they spend their whole life selling things with other people's names on it. And they're saying, well, you know, I can actually get behind this thing. This is mine. I thought that was a pretty cool move. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit because I was the day before the V-specs announcement, I was in New York City. Meeting with the IBM folks on their integrated systems. Pure whatever it is. Pure systems. Pure systems, yeah, cool stuff going on there. But I asked Steve Mills, who I have a great deal of respect for. He's a pretty good guy. If you know him. I guess I do. He's both an alpha geek and a great business guy. So I asked him, I said, what about the brand? You know, what are your thoughts on the brand? Yeah, what did he say? What did he say? And he said, the brand is the brand. You've seen the brand. It's IBM. Yeah. Boom, here at the end. And that works for them. And I said, all right, that's probably smart. If I had IBM's brand, I'd probably feel the same way too. I asked Jeremy about it. And he said, yeah, we have a different philosophy. Yeah. And I asked some of the partners and they said, hey, we'd love the vanity of having our name up there. So, two different worlds. Yeah, by the way, there's nothing wrong. I mean, I love the architecture. I love the packaging. I love the value proposition. But it's one thing to say that you're partner-centric. It's another thing to kind of put their name on your product and your value proposition. I would like to see us do more branded products for our customers going forward. Some of our partners have at least as much value proposition for their customers as any IT vendor would. And I look at it as a power shift from, oh, HP or Cisco or EMC on it is, no, I buy from partner X. This is the brand that I recognize with. So I think you're going to see more of that. Chuck, I want to switch gears and ask about mobility. Again, Sapphire last week, big emphasis on mobility. Obviously in memory, but mobility was a huge theme. Bill McDermott sold us that he basically bought 3,000 iPads early on and Jobs called him up and said, what are you doing? Why are you buying? He should man up. How many employees does he have? Well, there's just like a week and a half. I was pretty radical at the time. And so, and Jobs called him, well, why, it doesn't have a printer. No, we don't want that. So they're really transforming the company. So my question to you is, how do you participate, how does EMC participate in mobility? What does it all mean to you? I know this is the whole VDI thing or end user computing. Obviously, that's an angle. You can back end storage for a lot of mobile stuff, but what does it specifically mean for you guys? Well, here's where we both would agree. We're not thinking desktop anymore. We're thinking mobility. And by mobility, yes, it's nice to think about bringing the legacy environment forward with VDI and make it on an iPad. But that's just kind of a stepping stone to those native mobile applications that we all want and love. So I can't lay out the whole strategy, but you saw a piece in an announcement yesterday with simplicity. Yeah. Okay, we know there's going to be content consumed and content generated on the edge. You're going to know that it's going to want to be enterprise and corporately managed. So it's pretty easy to see how simplicity would fit into a broader storage to bring some of our value propositions. One of our earlier value propositions was round security and that continues to it. I've got to secure the endpoint, got to secure the information in and out of it. RSA has been doing that as well. VMware has been working very heavily on their horizon environment to create kind of an easy to consume enterprise app store. I wouldn't put all those pieces and say, yes, we've got it nailed, but you can start us to see quietly if you look the pieces we're putting together. I can sketch out what the end state looks like. We would like to be able to go to a large enterprise and say, here's a platform for mobilizing your employees, your partners and your workforce. We will let IT empower anybody in the business to build lightweight apps that you can push on an app store, secure, manage, just like you do in a desktop today. And if you do a B2C model, you could use the same capabilities to go off and reach your customers. Part of that's around app development. You saw us pick up a little company called Pivotal Labs that's very good at agile mobile apps. Okay, well, we're going to need some skills of that. So I don't want to sketch out the next five steps, but we're always a company that loves to invest in the transitions. There's this great quote on the screen of the keynote that is EMC is a company that sells disruption. I'm okay with that, I really am on a personal level. And in that scenario at end state, you'd sell solutions, hardware, software, service solutions to that problem. Right now we're ingredients and with professional services, but I'll give you an example. Within our own IT organization, they're standing up a enterprise mobility platform. I as business user can go to it, either bring my own developer or hire one of theirs, create some apps for my part of the business. They've got the infrastructure that publishes the data source, it's wrapped in security, they've got an app store. We haven't quite productized that yet, but we think that most enterprises want to crank out mobile apps for their workforce and their partners, just like we crank out .NET applications years ago. Little early from a big message perspective and pushing our customers there, but I don't think we're any different than any other IT vendor. We know that it's a mobile world. Bill McDermott, Senator at SAP. We have, I like what we got. I think we got a little more we got to go do. Yeah, okay, and unfortunately we're out of time. I wanted to get into developers with you. It flies by, Chuck, when we sit down. We always have so much fun here. The whole developer land grab is really fascinating. Maybe we can pick that up at some other time, maybe at VMworld, maybe at VMworld. Lots of that's the right place between cloud foundry and everything they're doing. Really cool stuff going on. How about Area 51? There's this thing that Jeremy's got going. What's that all about? I'm sworn to silo. Have you been in there? I'm sworn to silo. Have you seen it? I am not going to let any seeds fall. You can't even tell me if you've been in there? No, it was created for the show. I looked around it, but there's been a lot of discussion about what's going on there. I'm saying if you can get a ticket to Area 51, get in there. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a fun show indeed. All right, good. Chuck Hollis, thanks very much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for inviting me. Always a pleasure. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We'll be right back after this word. Thank you.