 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Hi, welcome back, SiliconANGLE TVs. Live coverage from EMC World 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Read all our research on wikibon.com. Joining me again for this segment is Aiden O'Brien, General Manager of EMC Big Data Solutions. And we've also got Scott VanValdenberg, who's with SAS. He's the Senior Director of Global Alliances. Scott, thank you so much for joining us for the first time. I'm happy to be here. And Aiden, thanks again. So, Scott, SAS is a pretty big player in this software space. Definitely a name that, from the early days of Big Data, we've heard and Wikibon's written about. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of your part of the organization and your role there? Sure, sure. So, SAS, we're actually getting close to our 40th year in business. We've been a leader in the analytics space and also data management. Wait, wait, there was no Big Data that long ago, right? Yeah, back then it was Big Data. Every year, it just gets bigger. Yeah, we'll get you that t-shirt. I was Big Data before it was built. Yeah, I was with Big Data. So, for us, what was really interesting as we've gone through and what I do in the business is we have a huge partner ecosystem. We have 800 partners within this sphere of IT and systems integrators. What we're really trying to do is helping customers really get through that digital divide of moving through, how do I get this IT and start looking at problems and solving them in ways they've never done before. All right, so Scott, for a company that's been around for a while, I mean, there's huge change going on right now. I mean, there's always the talk out there of that we're disruption and innovation. What does that mean to SAS? How are you guys trying to stay a leader in this space as there's huge big trends trying to disrupt what you're doing? Yeah, so the good news is I think this disruption actually links really great to our partnership. If you look at what's happening is there's this onslaught of data, but these companies are struggling to react quick enough to understand how can they get value out of the data? How can they scale quickly? How do I share information across my different groups in my organizations? And for us, what's really the big bets are anchoring around how do we leverage Hadoop, the Federation Business Data Lake with EMC and making it really simple and easy for customers to drive analytic capabilities and stop worrying about the data but start solving problems? All right. So Aiden, I'm wondering if you can help tie together. I mean, obviously EMC and the Federation does a lot, but they can't do everything by themselves. So how do companies like SAS help put together the whole solution? So you've hit the nail on the head, Stu. I mean, if we think about take advantage of the big data opportunity and it's simplest, there's three things to do. It's collecting all that data, many different types of data, analyzing it and then doing something useful with those insights and what's in fashion at the minute is building these data-driven analytical apps. So as much as you say, we've got the Federation technologies lined up behind that, the Pivotal Big Data Suite, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Extreme IO, VNX, Isilon, all of those different products. But we don't have all of the tools in our portfolio to help customers deliver that value on that business outcome they're seeking. And that's the reason why we actually sort of embrace the third party ecosystem notably with SAS. What's driven the strategic big data initiative here is that we believe that big data is in ecosystem play. So Scott, one of the things we've been looking at is really we talked a lot about solutions but in many ways it's a transition from talking about products to talking about platforms. What are the environments going to use? How can I plug into those? How does SAS think about that? So we think about it in the term we coined as analytic modernization. So there was a great article written by author and professor at Babson, Tom Davenport, who wrote Competing on Analytics. And he described the transformation journey for customers who were analytics 1.0. We're doing traditional analytics. I had my data warehouse. I have divisional and department teams working on this. Analytics 2.0 were the big data. I have my separate systems. I'm working on some different things that have never been done before. And where he said the focus is happening is analytics 3.0, where you converge both your traditional and your future and bring it into one platform. And what we're doing with EMC, which is really incredible, is if you think about how long that used to take to do, you'd have to talk to a storage guy, a server guy, a software guy. You might have to talk to an SI. And I know you guys had Steve Jones from CAP here before. We're all partnering together to go, hey, how about we just give you the car and you can go drive where you need to go? All right, so Aiden, I mean, what it seems to be the platform, you talk about the lake that we can pour all stuff in. You know, how do you manage that and make sure your light doesn't become toxic? Yeah, so when we actually look at it, the fact that, as I mentioned before, we've lined up a number of technologies, that's great, but all you've done is lined up a number of technologies. That's not actually a living, breathing data lake and it's the interconnected tissue that we're building as software, which is going to allow us to actually do that. And that sort of management of access and control to data applications and technology, with a module that we call the Data Governor, that's absolutely crucial. That's what all the clients are crying out for and that's a large part of the secret source for the Federation of Business Data Lake that we're putting together. Scott, wondering if, give us a little insight as to your impressions of this week, activities you're working on, what was it valuable for you to come here to EMC World? Well, we just finished our user conference last week so I feel like we're on a world tour road show. I hear you, EMC was a great sponsor. For us, what's really been impressive is how many joint customers are trying to see can we bring our technologies together and easier. I think yesterday with our teams here, almost everybody around the Federation of Business Data Lake was saying, how can I help use this with my SaaS footprint? So the good news is I think people are really going, this is important to us. We know we have to be agile and quick in the way that we're going to get software and technology delivered. And then for us, I think with the advancements what EMC is doing with Hadoop, with some of the new technologies that they've announced, what you're going to see with the investment we've done with EMC is making it super easy for a customer to go. I'm going to get me some of that and I'm going to really start rocking and rolling on solving the world's problems a lot better, faster, quicker than I've ever done this before. All right, Aiden, you want to comment on any of that? Yeah, I mean, we're working on some stuff which will be really huge, which we're looking to announce over the next couple of months. But the partnership, what I think it brings to customers is going to make it easy to procure, easy to support. And so watch this space, but we're very excited about what's coming. Scott, I'm curious, how do you measure the success of what you're doing? You've got a big, easy system and a lot of partners. How many customers do you have jointly with EMC or kind of the volume of deals that you do? Well, I think it's a couple of things. I think the biggest success is when you see your customer stand up on stage and go, because of this platform we invested in, we were able to change someone's lives, grow our business in a way we've never done before, save costs. And for us, what I think will be monumental is there's a lot of hype and disruption going on in the market and sometimes people get more traditional technology companies and go, oh, and that going to be relevant. And I think what we're able to do is take the best of what's going on in those markets and take the leverage and reach that we have with the customer install bases that we both share together and really drive innovation in ways that they've never thought possible before. I think in general, the way we're looking at the market today, and I think that's the reason why Scott and I see things in exactly the same way is that it's all about making the pie bigger. It's not about who slices bigger at the minute and the ecosystems that we're developing with SaaS and the other guys is, it's all about how do we work together to make this pie bigger. Yeah, Scott, you said your user conference was just recently. I'm curious, when you say the conversations going on here, what the customers are discussing there and what was happening at your conference, are we hearing some of the similar things? What themes can you both pull together? What's really interesting is there's been this classic divide between business and IT. We call it marriage counseling. You get both in the room and they are talking to each other, but they actually don't know what each other's saying. And what I think for the first time, it's been really interesting because EMC has been huge in the IT shops of most organizations throughout the world and SaaS has been more on the business side. And for the first time, what we're starting to see is a real sense of urgency and need from both those two sides to talk. And I think with what we're doing with the ecosystem partners like Cloudera and Hortonworks and Capcheminis and others, are really making that conversation a lot easier. And I think to the point that Aiden mentioned, you're going to see in the next couple of months really some spectacular things for them to be a lot more happier about. All right, so Scott, I know you've got a busy schedule, so we'll have to leave it there. Aiden, also thanks for joining us again. We'll be back, lots more coverage from EMC Roll 2015. This is theCUBE. You're watching on SiliconANGLE TV.