 Welcome back to EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship program without the events that extract a signal from the noise. This is day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is live all day interviews. We've already done 45 interviews. We're out talking to people, we're on the ground, asking questions, getting all the data. Extracting the signal from the noise and bringing that to you. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante here in theCUBE all week. We have David Fleury joining us for our day three kickoff. Top stories here at EMC World obviously EMC's messaging and stories resonating very well with the audience. We've been digging into the crowd data on our side, talking to people in the hallways. EMC's messaging around software defined storage is really, really resonating. We're going to be continuing to dig into understanding the impact of this. The meat on the bone, as we say, a lot of sizzle and we're going to try to understand if there's really steak on the grill here. And we're going to go in-depth on this all day long. We've got a great lineup of guests today. We have all the top executives from EMC, Brian Gallagher, Rich Napolitano, Jeremy Burton, Paul Moritz, and a slew of other great guests. We're going to hear from VCE obviously having great success. But day three is really all about kind of understanding the data as it starts to settle in. The architectures, the story, is it resonating? What's the impact of customers and to the ecosystem? I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, I want to get your take on a couple things. Let's go into the industry news first because one, a lot of big news happening in the storage business and we have David Fleury here as well. Our chief analyst as well, co-founders of Wikibon here to discuss some of the major trends happening today. Day three at EMC World. A bomb was dropped last night in the marketplace, impacting the flash business of which we talked in-depth on Monday, our first day here. And Dave, what's your take? With the big news is Fusion IO's CEO and chairman, David Flynn and Jim White, the CMO, have abruptly resigned and stepped down. Dave, what's your take on this? So David Flynn, CEO and co-founder, Rick White, CMO and co-founder are no longer respectively CEO and CMO. Shane Robison, who was a former HP executive, was running, was CTO, running strategy, is now CEO. He was a board member and is now taking over as CEO. So this is a very abrupt change. Nobody really knew this was coming down. The stock is down significantly. It's down about 25%. It was a little higher, a little down even further earlier on today. So real knee-jerk reaction to news that has got people confused. People don't understand why this happened. In my view, John, David Flynn and Rick White had a great deal of control over the company. My sense is that the board was looking at that, saying, hey, we want to bring some more supervision to this. And now, lo and behold, Shane Robison is in there. Shane Robison, as many of you know, was one of Leo Apatecker's lieutenants and is largely evidently responsible for one of the people responsible for the autonomy acquisition. And so my understanding is he's a strategy guy and really the company now in a lot of turmoil. So John, that's what I know. I don't know what your take is on this. So obviously the news is shocked everyone. We want to get down and just break down. The top story here in the industry is that Fusion IO, a public company, pioneering Flash, doing very, very well, changing the game on scale-out open source and changing the economics and functionality of what Flash can do, of which they are making the moves and forcing EMC and others to have Flash. And that's what big part of the announcement of EMC were all. And the top story is that Shane Robison, a director is now CEO, David Flynn is out and Jim White is out. That's the top story. Rick White. I mean, Rick White. And I did some digging this morning, David. I started checking around some of my sources and Shane Robison actually wasn't Leo's guy. He was there before Leo. He was also there with Mark Heard. He did a lot of good M&A. So he's well regarded at HP. He's not the guy to blame for autonomy in my opinion. I think he was certainly involved and should have pointed out some of the red flags. So he has to own that. But more importantly, he's done some good acquisitions. He had a good reputation at HP as being executive manager, managing other execs. Not sure how much he can lead the troops at Fusion IO. We'll wait to be seen. We're going to talk to Fusion and find that out because they have really, really big opportunity and challenges in getting people to program on Flash. Obviously, David Flynn, we're pioneering that effort. So again, we're not down on Shane Robison, but the shock here is the abruptness of the news. And Dave, I want to, David Floorie, I want to get you in here and ask you, obviously the Fusion IO news is a shock to everybody. Very abrupt, obviously some board dynamics. Stock is plummeting today. What's your take on the news? Well, it is a great shock. Fusion IO have been led by David Flynn. David Flynn is a real engineer at heart. He understands the Flash. He understands what the company was trying to do. He's focused like a laser on the whole ecosystem, which is the software, bringing out the VSL architecture, bringing out DirectFS, the file system. He really has brought the best software stack in the industry by far out into the marketplace. For Flash. For Flash. Just for Flash on a server, even more precise. For Flash on a server, for Flash is an extension of memory. So he's going to be big shoes to fill in terms of the confidence that the Fusion IO customers had in him as a solution maker, in terms of the confidence they had in the building of this solution over time. I want to go to Dave Vellante and Dave, I want to ask you specifically on the impact of the Fusion IO abrupt news of their principle players stepping down. Obviously it was in the dark of the night. Obviously some board dynamics. I want to get your perspective. What does this do for the marketplace in particular? Obviously Flash is one of the hottest things happening. We've been covering like a blanket. You guys are deep in this. There's other players. You've got Violin Memory, Viridint, a slew of other EMC's doing Flash. What does this do for the marketplace? And what should the marketplace be thinking about in evaluating and analyzing this news? Well number one, bad PR, right? This one just talks down this much and that's a mini disaster. Number two, I think that the way this is being spun by the news media is that these guys left. They're leaving, they're fleeing the company. Yet at the same time they're staying on for 12 months on the board. So that's some confusion. I think Fusion IO could have done a better job of transitioning this. So that's unfortunate because it brings the whole market down. You got Violin trying to do an IPO. You got other companies, you mentioned Viridint, who supplies EMC with Extreme IO cards. Numerous other guys that are looking to prop up valuations and then boom, the big whale in the industry just gets nailed. So that's not good. I think it'll recover. I think we need some time to digest this, find out exactly what happened. But the key in my view, and David Floor, you and I have talked about this a lot, is Fusion IO has to get ISVs to write to its software development kit. It needs database vendors and other ISVs to connect into their platform. That is the top priority. And now we're in a situation where you've got now management changes and it's going to be turmoil for a while. I agree with you. The key enabler of this industry will be getting the articles, the Microsofts, the IBMs to write to their particular set of software. Write to their APIs. If they can succeed in that, they have already got it out onto MySQL. But if they can succeed in getting that accepted and the early versions of the software running on that, that's the way that they can really break out and start to get real acceleration into the marketplace. If I was the chief executives of those particular databases, I'd wait a bit. I'm not going to be rushing in there to suggest that I should go with Fusion IO. I want to wait a bit and see if there are other alternatives. So this is day three kickoff. This is theCUBE, our flagship program without the advance extractor, it's got a great lineup. We've got Brian Gallagher coming up next. He's here waiting on the on-deck circle to come in to theCUBE. But we're kind of dissecting the top news. We talked about Fusion IO. We're going to continue to monitor that. And David and David Floria will be digging deeper. We're going to get the story. We're going to find out what's going on there. And we're going to break that down and do a continuing breaking analysis. So go to siliconangle.com and go to wikibon.org and look for the latest analysis from our team on the Fusion IO impact. At day three though, at EMC we start to see that the tea leaves start to show their colors here around what the key announcements are. Obviously the story's resonating guys. It is working. The messaging is solid, it's being well received. But is there stake on the bone? The sizzle solid. Is there a stake on the bone? Software-defined storage is a key message here. And that's the top buzz. Dave Vellante, what's your take? I want to get, get David Floyd's kind of analysis on it. Okay, well so EMC, as we were talking John earlier today, they got the story right. I mean, you go into the pavilion here, customers are lining up at the software, the defined storage booth, the advanced software division's booth to find out what's new, what is this, how can I get my hands on it? How can I try it? So the messaging is right on. It's all about, you know, helping cloud providers, you know, get more facile and even IT customers. Now the issue is, EMC's first, they got the messaging right, but what's there? We saw yesterday a demo, demo, you know, really is not fully baked out. And clearly, you know, these guys got a lot of work to do. So the key question that we asked John on theCUBE yesterday was, are you building this from scratch? Your data management, your volume management, your storage management stack. You can't just spit out a storage stack in a year or even two years. So it takes a long time. So there's work to be done there. The other thing is you got HP, betting on OpenStack. IBM's got the capability to do storage platform. What's NetApp going to do? So others are going to join into this fray. That's the next big battle in the industry. We're pressed for time, but I want to get to David Floyd's last word. David, obviously efficiency, scale, and performance are things that you look at. And obviously with this object store component and other, among other things, what are you seeing in the announcement? So my take on the Viper announcement is that they've got the messaging exactly right. They've got the strategy right. They need to go after the service providers and allow them a platform on which they can build sets of services. And they need to go after the large enterprise customers and get the two things. And I think the end game is that you're going to have mega data centers with the data center of the traditional private cloud data center of an enterprise customer and multiple service providers in that mega data center. And having a common platform that the two can communicate across is going to be a very significant long-term advantage. So I think the long-term strategy is exactly right on. And then just today, for example, listening to Rick... Napolitano? Napolitano. Sorry, I can't get it out there. Talking about his future investments in low-latency stuff and his integration of the VNX stack together with Viper and being able to have a virtual machine out there in the marketplace. For example, on a cloud provider. Those are very exciting announcements. We're going to hear from Brian Gallagher up next. And we like to use sports analogy. So in football, the running backs go north, south, or east and west. We want to hear what he has to say. But quick final word. You got the four horsemen as Dave pointed out. HP, EMC, IBM, and NetApp. The big players. What does software-defined storage mean for all those guys? Real quick final word. So what it means is establishing the future platform. There won't be many platforms available that will succeed. One, two, maximum three. EMC at the moment is in an open stack of the two that have got it and HP is behind it. I'm going to throw Amazon in the mix there, too. And Amazon in the mix as well. Kind of on the fringe kind of poking in. Okay, this is theCUBE, our flagship. That's our kickoff for day three. Wall-to-wall coverage. Exclusive coverage here on siliconangle.com. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with Brian Gallagher right after the short break.