 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of EMC World. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and I'm joined by my co-host. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Bill Richter is here. He's the president of EMC's Isilon division, relatively new president. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. Thanks for having me. It's our pleasure. And you guys have been getting a lot of love from the senior management at EMC. Tucci's been talking about you guys, David Goulden. And it seems like Isilon is just this super-charged piece of infrastructure that EMC acquired in. And it's really become a fundamental building block of the company's strategy in a lot of areas. Big data, even the software-defined storage piece, it must be excited. Oh, we're incredibly excited. We're incredibly excited, Dave. You know, EMC had a very clear acquisition strategy around Isilon, and it was incredibly simple. It was, you know, there was a whole in the EMC product portfolio around Scale Out NAS. And on the Isilon side now, you know, I was part of the former Isilon leadership team pre-acquisition. And you know, we had an absolute undisputed best-of-breed product for the Scale Out NAS world. But what we lacked is the global brand and global scale that EMC brings. And by putting those two things together, that was the strategy. And two and a half years, like I'd say, it's absolutely paid off in space. Yeah, I mean, you know, like I said, you were there as, you know, pre-acquisition. You guys went to startup, you funded the company, you went to IPO, you were doing great. And then all of a sudden, there was a run on storage companies. And then you guys said, you know, the double exit, and it was fantastic. So what was that like? Ah, look, it's been an incredible ride. You know, when I joined Isilon in 2006, I think we did around $50 million of revenue. And you know, we just announced, or EMC just announced that in Q4 of last year, the combination of Isilon and Atmos together as a kind of a combined product portfolio reached the billion dollar run rate. And now that's a huge milestone for any technology company. And you know, it's been an unbelievable experience. What I think it demonstrates though, is that when customers see a technology that's going to add value to their business, when they see a technology that's going to improve their ability to scale, their agility, that's going to make their life simpler, they gravitate to it rapidly. So I'm going to ask you about the current state, because obviously two years ago is at an EMC event here. And Suja was in the briefings, the executive influence of briefings. And I said, you know, you guys are more like big data than Green Plum. This is when they just bought Green Plum. Yeah. Because we were seeing in the field that you guys were getting these huge orders on hyperscale. Yep. That's when really people weren't parsing out big data being Hadoop versus kind of like large data sets. So how has it changed since then? Now, obviously you guys, I saw the positioning map yesterday that Goulden put up two days ago. Clarify the positioning of Icelon. Visa V, what Pivotal's doing and what the other storage is doing relative to the kind of big data or fast data, however it's being called. Sure. Yeah, and this is pretty simple. I mean, what Pivotal's doing in Green Plum is much further up the stack from us. So you should think of their initiatives are all around how to analyze that data, how to gleam information out of it, how to turn it into business value. Icelon's all about big data infrastructure and you can't get to any of that stuff, stuff higher up on the stack unless you solve the infrastructure problem. So actually the way that the products are organized at this time is pretty complementary. Yeah, so give me a taste of what you're seeing now on hyperscale outside of those kind of clients. Actually, tell us what were the main reasons why they were going to Icelon to begin with? The big consumer, high web scale companies. And then what the hyperscale and the enterprise requirement looks like and what their needs are. Yeah, sure, John. So if you go back to Icelon's original value proposition, it was very clear. We, as we look forward to the future when we founded the company, the view was that one day the amount of unstructured data and file-based content would grow to such an unprecedented amount, they would just break traditional architectures. And that was the founding vision of the company. And our view was if you solve that problem by re-architecting a storage solution from the ground up, from a blank sheet of paper with that specific design need in mind, you'd have a big advantage in the marketplace. And that's what happened out there. Some of these web-scale companies, some of the specific verticals that had this problem first about 10 years ago, it happened just as we saw. Their traditional architectures were breaking, they weren't able to scale their businesses and it was just slowing them down. So as they saw what Isilon's architecture could bring to that problem, they quickly gravitated to the solution and the rest is history, we had a lot of success. But something more recently has changed. Big data has spanned and fanned out across not just a few discrete vertical markets, but virtually all enterprises. Big data has now gone to the heart of Enterprise IT. And at the same time, Enterprise IT itself is becoming a big data problem. So what do I mean by that? General archives, home directories, file shares, these things have grown to multiple tens of petabytes for some of our customers. So traditional IT has become a big data problem and big data has become an enterprise IT problem and really those worlds have collided together and that's what our value proposition is all about today. And fairly fast too on an accelerated pace, only like you're talking about a handful of years. Yes, you have to pick your bets early, right? So we started developing our 1FS 7.0 operating system, it's codenamed Mavericks and I know we're going to talk about that later with Nick Kersh, our CTO. But that release was all about the recognition that these worlds were colliding and we had to bring the best of breed value proposition of ISLON which was all about hyperscale, unbelievable performance, efficiency and most important of all simplicity to the classic IT use cases which are around availability, reliability, data protection, disaster recovery, security and that's what Mavericks does. Has the IT guys been caught off guard and by that shift you just mentioned because that's happened for them, it's pretty fast. They've been buying storage, chugging along, taking inch by inch, yard by yard, unlike the web scale companies. So now this big data problem that they have is upon them. What do the CIOs tell you when you have these conversations, are they just buying gear, are they re-architecting? Give us some insight and color around the environments. Yeah, you know, the CIOs in a real pinch today. So not only are all their traditional applications and workflows all of a sudden scaling orders of magnitude more than they were before, they're being asked to meet all these brand new demands around data analytics, cloud based workflows, mobility and here's the real challenge. Their budgets are hardly growing. So they're having, in many cases that's right Dave, they're shrinking. And so the name of the game is transformation. The only way you can do more with less is by transforming the way you do business, transforming the tools that you use and Iceland's all about that. And then most importantly, picking a vendor that understands this transformation is going on and is in the business of helping customers through it. And I think EMC has absolutely demonstrated that we understand this and we're here to help our customers. Talk about the balancing act that the, now let's pop down to below the CIO guys in the trenches doing actually the work and laying out the architectures, you know, architectural fidelity on one hand. You got this new modern infrastructure they got to manage on the other. And the old days was scale up commercial software and you know, scale out open source has kind of shifted that on extreme, extreme. So obviously Google on one end and then you got the enterprise hardcore on the other. Talk about the balancing act between scale out, scale out versus scale up and the role of software plays in that. Well, you know, EMC is clearly a best of breed product technology company. So, and what I mean by that is, you know, we've consciously chosen not to make a one size fits all product and then tell our customer that no matter what your challenge is, you know, there's one solution for it. You know, I think what you've seen at the conference here over the last couple of days is that we've made huge investments in going out and either organically developing products or going out to the marketplace and acquiring the best tools for the job. And so there, yes, there's a place for scale up. In fact, it's alive and well and that business is doing really well for us. There's also a place for scale out. There's also- They're not usually exclusive. Not at all. And look, you know, there's a little overlap over some of our EMC products, but we, I'll tell you, given the choice between having product gaps and product overlap, I think we would much happier with overlap. But there's a place for every one of these products and our commitment to the customer is to have the right tool for the right job and then give them a common experience around management, giving them a common experience around the commercial relationship that we have with them. And then most importantly, giving them a common experience around the service experience they have. It's really one throat to choke when it comes to EMC. How has the flash impact affected you guys? Obviously it's in the industry. We've seen that a lot in the industry, but now with EMC having their own flash initiative, can you just share color on what's going on internally around Isilon and the flash group? Is there interplay there? Is there overlap or what's the- Yeah, well, I mean, you know, so first of all, the world of flash is changing the industry. And Isilon now, for I think the last four or five years now, we have incorporated flash into our products and I think about 40% of the storage nodes that we sell today go out with some amount of SSD. And in some cases, they're 100% SSD. Now what we see around the rest of EMC is obviously a huge initiative for purpose-built flash arrays, both on the storage side and on the server side. And I'm really pleased to see that we're investing the technology. As I said earlier, this is a best of breed play here and it's always the right tool for the job. There is a whole set of applications and workflows and many of them next generation that are being built assuming a flash-only storage layer. And Xtreme will do great, Xtreme IOR storage product there. They'll do great in that world. And then what remains to be seen and there's a lot of work being done in the lab today on this is, you know, what can we do together? How can we string all flash arrays with Isilon solutions and some of our products all together to provide an integrated solution to customers because, you know, that's what customers really want. And as I was saying before, it seems like Isilon is a fundamental component of EMC's old software-defined storage strategy. Talk about that just from a business standpoint. You know, what does that mean? You know, why Isilon and how did that come about? Well, you know, if you had gone back three years ago, EMC really did have a little bit of a hole in its portfolio around scale-out NAS. And if you think about this- You didn't have one. Okay, you said it, I didn't. And if you think about what's happened in the industry, you know, if you had gone back just to the end of the last decade, I mean, scale-out NAS was still in its early stages. And just in the last three years, it's gone completely mainstream, right? Now customers have adopted our products for all of the classic value propositions around scale, performance, ease of use, simplicity. That simplicity was key. And, you know, the reception's been great. But something else is happening now. And as part of having kind of a best-of-breed product portfolio, customers are saying, look, I've got a lot of these different storage products. Help me automate more, because the burden on storage administrators and CIOs today is still having to find the right products and then aligning them to specific workloads, workloads change over time in unpredictable ways and then figuring out how to re-architect storage architectures underneath, even if you are using best-of-breed products, becomes really difficult. And I think that, in part, that's what our Viper release this week was all about. It's being able to give customers a brand new level of automation to help them manage a bunch of heterogeneous storage solutions in an efficient and simplistic way. Yeah, and, you know, in hearing, you know, getting brief, for instance, from my salon prior to the acquisition from EMC, you would see, you know, you guys did very well in specifically in certain industry segments. And it seems like, obviously the growth is enormous. Whatever, a couple hundred million at acquisition and now you're on a billion dollar run rate. And you're seeing new use cases. As you just mentioned, I was talking to a customer the other day, talking about an Oracle environment, talking about data protection use case. And other industries were now seeing it evolve into, you know, this whole software defined space. So it seems like it's a very versatile platform and it seems like you hit it right. While you have competition, like you said, the 1FS and the global namespace piece really exploded, you guys. So from your perspective, where do you see this going? What's the potential? You guys always looking at, you know, the total market, always trying to grow faster than the market. Clearly you're doing that. How far can you take this thing? Well, look, we feel like we're just getting started. You know, we went to market in our early days in a very focused way around a few discreet verticals and really we went to where the data was. That's where the big data was back then. And today we've seen big data proliferate across all industries, all vertical markets and any enterprise, even at the SMB level, right? And so, you know, the organizations that are buying our products are just attracted to, you know, the incredible ease of use and the ability to scale. What happens is we start at customers in a very discreet opportunity. It might be home directories. It might be just general archives. Something that's, you know, very large and they want to get out of the business of having to deal with a complex infrastructure underneath to manage the data. And they purchase Isilon. But then something special happens. The users around the organization see how the products perform and they start advocating that their own workflows be put on Isilon. And that's how, you know, we end up with many of the use cases that you just talked about. It happens organically with our customers. They find it, they try it, they like it, they buy more. So, how are you spending your time these days, Bill? I mean, what are you focusing on and what are your sort of personal, you know, goals for the division? Well, we've, it's a very exciting time for us, right? You know, we really believe that the world of big data and the world of enterprise IT have collided. And we're out there with our 1FS 7.0 release as the product to help solve that problem. But at the same time, there's a brand new set of demands that are just over the horizon. And in fact, for some customers, they're right on their doorstep today. And that's all around mobility. It's around data analytics and it's around cloud. And so personally, I'm spending a lot of time with my organization thinking about how that transformation is going to manifest itself. You see, this is what Isilon's heritage is all about. You know, we did it very early on in the world of just raw big data. We just did it again in this world of big data meets enterprise IT. And we know that we have the capability of doing this again in this brand new world that we're just on the dawn of. And so I'm spending a lot of time with my organization and it's a lot of fun doing this, talking about how we can help our customers make this very next transformation. And as I said, this one's going to be harder than the last couple of ones. This one is, we're going to have to pull this off while we're going to have to pull this off while helping our customers not just spend more money but save money. And that's different than before. Excellent. All right, Bill, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you on. I'll see you, what a pleasure being here. I really appreciate everything you're doing. Okay, Bill, this is theCUBE. Be right back with this spotlight on Isilon. Kicking some butt here at EMC World. Amazing track record. Inventing the future. I'd like to hear about those problems. We'll talk more about that. Be right back after this short break.