 Okay, we're back. We're here inside theCUBE, siliconangle.tv and I'm actually tweeting right now on my Twitter account that we have a secret CTO now live unfiltered opinion here at EMCworld right now on siliconangle.tv. So you go to that site, you're here now and you're going to, we're going to go dive into a format that we've done on the blog. Okay, I'm joining my co-host Dave Vellante from wikibon.org where we've done some segments in the past on our blog where we've had people come to us anonymously who work for, you know, really big companies either government, financial services or something where there's sensitivity around them and explaining who their name is. But they wanted to give an unfiltered opinion about trends, products, companies. So we have here our special guest, secret CTO, secret chief technology who will share with us his opinion on what's happening with EMC, EMCworld and separate the hype from reality. I'm John Furrier, siliconangle.com's founder and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and Secret CTO. I just want to start off by asking you a just a high level question. So you've been an observer of the storage industry for a long time, you're seeing a lot of changes. A lot of, you know, the traditional companies, IBM, HP, EMC, NetApp, they're under fire. There's a new model brewing. You're seeing a lot of these internet, you know, giants like Google and Facebook, they don't use products from these companies. They're starting from a clean sheet of paper. What's your take on all that? And what do you think about the changing landscape of the storage business? The storage business is rather industry because if you think about industry as a whole, the different types of organizations that are out there, whether they're small, medium or they're enterprise class industries, the storage landscape actually aligns very closely to those sex of industry where the products that are available from some of the smaller startups, the higher risk that they're willing to take are not what most enterprises are willing to take. So most enterprises are willing to sacrifice innovation for stability and longevity of an organization. Hold on, if I can interrupt, sorry, secret CTO. For the folks watching, the camera has blurred because the identity of this individual would like to remain anonymous. So it's not broken. So sorry, go back. And I really thank SiliconANGLE for that anonymity. But there are, going back to what I was saying, I mean, if we look at the startups, one of the things that you have to take into effect, if you're going to bet on a new technology, is that it's not going to be there in two years or it's going to be purchased by one of the bigger fish. And again, it may not be there a year after they purchased it. So you have to kind of take the value of innovation and marry that with the value of big business. If I'm running a small shop, I want to be very agile, I want to be flexible. I got a much smaller, tighter budget. I cannot, I don't really have a five-year horizon. My business is probably maybe a two-year horizon. So when I look at two years out, hey, that's my event horizon, I'm good, with my technology has changed by that. By the way, I like to call that the horizon cell phone tax, where you're actually getting a new phone every two years. But technology is that much, it's almost disposable. And storage is one of those interesting areas where it's not necessarily disposable. Take for archive, archive. We've heard today, hundred-year archives, the healthcare industry, most banking industries have 10-year-after-you-lose-a-customer type. Secret, so secret CTO, tell us the reality in your mind that you walk around EMC World today and EMC's laying out really good messaging. Cloud means big data, it's very solid. We've been very complimentary of Jeremy Burden and it's impeccable messaging. But the marketplace is not at that yet advanced. Where are we right now in your mind's relative to the reality of this stuff? Cloud is, I'm hit with cloud all the time. And originally, when the cloud hype came out, I was one of the first people that came out and said, cloud is just another way of saying we're outsourcing you. Because we're moving it from outside my organization to somebody else's organization. Therefore, if we look back historically, it's an outsourced operation. Now, cloud has had to change so that they don't have that stigma of the outsourcing, which I think is very good. And because of the initial hit that they took from a security perspective about how do I get my data over to you and how do I depend on you to secure my data as the way I would secure my data, which really isn't my data most of the time. My data is really my customer's data. So my customer depends upon me to secure their data and now I'm going to depend on the cloud to secure my data, which is really their data. So when you think about it end to end that customer data is sitting out in the ethereal land I think that the industry has done a really good job of at least addressing that and recognizing that and making much greater inroads at enterprise level organizations to... So what you're saying is they've throttled down the rhetoric around cloud Washington. Okay, they talk about non-core stuff putting it on the cloud. You're referring essentially to that, right? Throttled to dialogue a little bit in the rhetoric to not compromise the integrity of the mission of cloud. So yeah, like, you know, if I were to go to a Google or whomever out and at most that cloud service, right? I'm actually, for the longest time, I didn't like what the message was. Give us all your data, we'll handle it for you and we'll only charge you back a little bit. If as my organization has a good IT service model and an IT service catalog, I already know that I have those services well-defined. I have my operational recovery services, I have my disaster recovery services, I have my archiving services. Now, at what layer do I want to let the cloud into those services? Do I need them in my core IT infrastructure or is there selected data? But the thing with selected data is now I have to understand my data before I hand it over to the cloud so that way I don't actually move core information that may compromise the cost. So where are we with those tools? Because that's going to require, essentially a whole nother management paradigm for metadata of metadata, right? So, which is new, right? So it's a whole new construct around data. Data about data. Well EMC actually, I think, has a very good overall product set for that. They're acquisition to Kazian, which actually went and did classification of the unstructured data, the documentum product line so that they, you know, you have a combination of, not only a repository, but a way to inspect and determine what of the unstructured data should be there. The other interesting thing about this is structured data. A lot of organizations have a lot of structured data. Some heavier on the structured than the unstructured, but I would say that any organization that they believe that they're very heavy unstructured and they don't have much unstructured, doesn't realize where the unstructured data actually lives and probably lives on people's notebooks, desktops, inflate out at the edge of the environment where it's not managed, so therefore it's not counted. Secret CTO, you just mentioned Kazian as sort of a one area of strength. What about the weaknesses that you see within EMC? Talk about that a little bit. EMC, I think, has been a little bit behind on their storage virtualization story. I think it's a great story inside the box. I really think, and I'll go as far as saying, I love to be maxed. I like the way that, and I'm not gonna use tiers of storage even though that is the buzzword and that is in essence what it is, but to be able to have an area that we actually have high performance requirements, standard service requirements, low IO requirements all within the box and letting a policy actually determine what is necessary and what is not necessary to move up and down or just like being left right in the middle. We heard today where 15K drives that have been the staple for the industry is now actually being squeezed out by flash as well as SATA, but it still has a place because it's that standard level of service that may provide the right level for the majority of it. Now you step outside that and you try to virtualize multiple arrays. I think EMC is playing catch up. That's a Vplex it's all about, right? That is what Vplex. And so have you had experience with that and you have a critical assessment of it? My engineers have had some experience with that. The report that I got back from the engineers they felt that it was a very good product for what it did at a very small scale level. It'd be perfect if we had say maybe an array from Atachi or from IBM, an array from EMC in our test lab that we really didn't want to have a skill set to manage those individual arrays, but yet we could throw that to Vplex and let Vplex deal with it on a small enough scale. The report went back for the enterprise to say do this for the enterprise and by the way, bet your bank.