 of Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back to Las Vegas. Here's to continue on theCUBE, our coverage of EMC World 2016. It's a pleasure to welcome to the set for the first time, 17 years at EMC and a first time visit for Beth Phelan, who's the SVP and GM of data protection and availability solutions for core technologies there. And Beth, thanks for being with us. And I don't know what's taken us so long. Yeah, me neither, it's great. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, general vibe of the show, I mean, it's day three, so you've had a good chance to soak in what's happened here. Just what's your take on what you've heard and what you've seen, what you've been a part of? Yeah, I am thrilled with the show this year. What I really like is seeing the whole portfolio highlighted, every single keynote has had topics across all the products and there's so much innovation happening. It's tangible, you can feel it. There's an awful lot to talk about. So like, well in your space then, let's just highlight on that one. I mean, what's exciting you right now? Yeah, yeah. Well, two big announcements this week, one on data domain cloud tier, which allows people to have long-term retention to the cloud. Certainly, you know, very excited about working with Virtustream on that. And we've had a lot of requests from our customers for exactly this capability. They love data domain. They want to continue to be able to expand data domain for long-term retention. This lets them do that in a way that's secure, efficient, and automated. It's really going to be great. Yeah, so what about those discussions when you say customers want this, they come to us and then having to respond to that? I mean, so you could talk about how that's come back and forth and how this product evolved out of that. Yeah, we've been working on this product not surprisingly for a while now. And then once we began working more closely with Virtustream that just fit very well into the whole conversations we were already working on. But what we really wanted to make sure was that we gave customers a chance to take advantage of what data domain is known for, deduplication in particular. And so the way we designed it is the data is duplicated before it leaves data domain, so it's highly efficient. When it's stored in the cloud infrastructure, it's in deduplicated format. It's never rehydrated. And so they get the benefits of expanding through the cloud but in the most cost-effective way possible. So that's been really, really nice. And I was just talking actually to one of the architects and he just feels great now seeing it, having people come and be as excited as they have been about the product. So Beth, they bring us up to speed on the Enterprise Content Data Management piece. Yeah, yeah. So there's the second thing that we did this week. So Enterprise Copy Data Management is an entirely new product developed in-house within the D-PASS team. And what that got started with was we kept on having conversations with customers who were excited about self-service. But what they found was that as they give more and more people the freedom to be doing their own data protection, they were having massive copy sprawl. And at first it sounded like maybe kind of a small problem but the more that we got into it, the more that we learned about it, we found that there's literally billions of dollars wasted with excessive number of copies beyond what's actually needed to get your best in class data protection. So it's going to be just the beginning of the journey. This is the new product, but there's a lot to come. So Beth, we've been here for a few years. So there's some startups in this space. The one that comes to mind to me is Actifio who talked about that problem, kind of all the copies sprawl out there and reducing it back. So why is EMC coming to this now and what's different about your approach? Yeah, yeah, it's really very simple. Our approach is completely non-disruptive and non-intrusive. Some of the other companies that have been doing this for a while, they try and force fit their own structure, require the creation of additional gold copies. We just slipstream into the environment people already have and discover the copies that exist, allow people to set up new protection plans. It's not a separate entity that you have to latch onto the side. It just fits right into the infrastructure that people are already working with. All right, so can you give us the overall portfolio, as customers are looking this, how many times is this a standalone decision? How much is this bundled with kind of some of the other product lines? You mean specifically ECDM or data protection overall? Yeah, I guess both, yes. Yeah, yeah. So just finishing up with ECDM and then I'll go on to the whole portfolio. ECDM leverages Protect Point, which is capability that we brought out about two years ago now for VMAX and more recently for Extreme I.O. And so by doing that, when you bring in ECDM, bring in Protect Point and then also the data ends up on Data Domain for your secondary storage, your protection storage. So the ECDM conversation very quickly becomes a data protection portfolio conversation, which is great. The second piece that I just see more and more is the whole suite of products that we have within data protection, people looking to be able to have what we call a target stack, where they have the same benefits that you look for in a converged infrastructure but in your data protection space. So another new offering we have that we're excited about is the data protection appliance that we've done jointly with VCE and that allows you to have a converged infrastructure for data protection end-to-end, pre-wracked, pre-configured, faster time to value. Another place where we're bringing the data protection portfolio forward. Okay, can you help us unpack us that little bit? Is that like in a V-block, it stands as a separate rack? How do those technologies go together? It stands as a separate rack. It is developed and manufactured by VCE. It is a variant of a V-block. It's not a primary storage V-block but you can think of it as a converged appliance just like a V-block is. The intention is that we'd be able to bring some of these advantages of converged appliances and another way of introducing this type of technology to a broad range of customers. Yeah, so tell me, if I'm on the customer side, obviously the complexities that I'm dealing with are different than what, how do you help me sort through where I got to get to, especially when you have this wide array of products and services and all kinds of different appliances? Yeah, yeah. So a piece of it is doing things like this converged appliance where you're able to buy the end-to-end stack without having to make a lot of micro-decisions. Another thing that we've done in data protection for a while is we offer the data protection suite. So you can buy the full suite of products and then as you go forward, as your product needs evolve, you purchase the data protection suite and you have the full range of products at your disposal. But it seems it's almost like vitamins almost, right? Take it, this is going to be good for you. I don't want to take it. So because you are bringing some people on who have maybe strong attachments to the way things are being done or have been done, you're trying to get them to a different level. Right, right. I mean, there's a lot of conversations that we can have. One thing that people have been really pleased with is there's some things like a DDBEA where you have an opportunity to begin to, maybe it's an initial vitamin, right? To begin to get and see the benefits of having a data protection infrastructure that integrates very closely to your applications, very easy to use, maybe use that in a small part of your environment, see the benefits of data domain, maybe even you bring in a data domain virtual edition, you don't even have to purchase the hardware, you can download it, and then as you become more comfortable with it, you can expand and begin to use more of the portfolio. Right, exactly. So speaking about the portfolio. I have a lot to talk about so I know I'm covering a bunch of things. Absolutely, one of the threads that's been through the entire show is how Flash has been modernizing everything. What's the impact on the modern data protection? Yeah, well, like I said, we just introduced ProtectPoint, which is integrated with ExtremeIO. ProtectPoint also works with all Flash VMAX. And so one of the things that is essential is as the performance expectations get higher and higher and more is delivered with the Flash primary storage raise, data protection has to keep up with that. And that's exactly what we had in mind if you worked on something that ProtectPoints because you need to be able to back up more quickly, significantly more quickly. You need to be able to recover significantly more quickly. And the amount of data that you need to protect is also increasing exponentially. So what you're seeing from us is innovation that allows us to keep pace, the data protection to keep pace with the speed and scale performance people are getting from Flash. That's great. So that's one of the things I hear out in the marketplace is with data domain and everything that you've gotten the portfolio there, data protection has a greater percent of share than EMC traditionally has had in storage. And that's bringing a lot of competition from not only the existing vendors, from the startups, so how does EMC stay focused? How are you doing in that competitive war out there? Yeah, I mean, and you're right, data domain continues as the market leader, 67% of the market share, it's just outstanding. And what we're doing is continuing to listen to the customers and make sure that we are driving new innovation out through ways that they're comfortable with and that we're keeping data domain ahead of the curve with things like data domain cloud tier with data domain virtual edition and now with the data protection appliance. So basically not standing still. We're not resting on our laurels by any means. We're innovating, we have so many interesting things going on, some of it we're talking about today, some of it you'll hear about in the future. It is really, really an exciting time of data protection. So what is the next, if you had to pick out an area, you said this is where we can squeeze a little more efficiency, where you squeeze a little more performance, a little more speed, I mean, what would that be then? Yeah, well certainly performance and efficiency continue to be important, but if I bring the conversation back to the copy data management conversation, what we hear is that customers want a overall view to be able to understand and have more analytical advice insights that help them manage their data protection as part of their core IT infrastructure. So yes, we need the highest performance, the highest efficiency, but we also need to be giving people interfaces and information in a way that's consumable that they can make really smart decisions about their copies and their data protection. Just one more thing I'd add on the keynote, we just gave a hint of the global view that you'll get of EMC copy data analytics. When you think about what customers are doing now and they're protecting storage that's distributed all over the globe, it is much more complex than it was when you had one or maybe two data centers. We need to help customers make sense of that global landscape and make sure they're making the right decisions. And especially as you look at emerging markets too, right? With APAC or China, whatever it might be. I mean, how does that then play into, I'm sure it's what you're talking about here, the regionalization of this and helping people get a grasp on how this applies to their business. Whole new layer of complexity. It is, it is. And as the dynamics of the infrastructure has become more complex, we have to make it simpler and consumable in direct support to let people manage that amount of complexity. So Beth, I want to give you the final word. We went through a lot of announcements, the keynotes. I know you guys have an army of people here. Give people that are watching this remote a little bit, some of the labs, the key sessions, some of the things that kind of special here at EMC World and in your world. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, we're kind of winding down. So we've already had an awful lot of great sessions. We've had some great, asked the expert sessions, what's new in data domain is a great one for everyone to see. And also, it's the full range of the portfolio. We also have Deep Flex and RecoverPoint as additional technology that have a bunch of great sessions happening this week. So I just encourage people to look for the data protection tagline and there is an awful lot to talk about and learn about. And I just can't say again how excited we are and it all fits within that data protection everywhere strategy. All right, well, Beth Phalen, thanks for being here for the first time, not the last time, just until next time. Okay, great. Thanks for being with us. Nice to meet you both. Beth Phalen from EMC, with more from EMC World 2016 here in Las Vegas on theCUBE in just a bit.