 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's Cube. Our flagship program, we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and we have a special guest here today, and Jeremy Burton, the executive vice president of products and marketing, CMO. That's right, still. You still got, now, adding more responsibilities on your shoulders. I didn't take anything off me, just gave me more to do. Dave Vellante, my close. Congratulations. Jeremy's been on theCUBE since we started theCUBE, 2010, and been a big supporter of us. We appreciate you've been doing an amazing job with EMC and the branding and messaging. Now you get the products, you had the keynote today. So first of all, we got to know, we got to get you talking about the keynote because Larry took some punches at EMC, and you guys were classy. Joe was classy, he was passionate about this time in history. It's an inflection point. Then you came on and did the tactical display of the demo and took a jab at Oracle, but what should you take on that? I know you're ex-Oracle, so you're not going to take this lying down. Come on. We're generally nice people at EMC. No, I mean, look, I think Oracle's mode of operation and Larry, it's not changed. The one thing about Larry's is very predictable. And so you know that that is always on the cards. At one level, I would say it's a mark of respect. It doesn't call everyone out. We were deemed worthy to be called out, which I think in a backhanded way, there's some level of admiration for what we've achieved. But I think at the show, I firmly believe that the customers, I'm not sure where they want to see a lot of that, they have EMC in their shop, they have Oracle in their shop. And if there's one thing I think EMC's been built on, and I know Joe, this is very near and dear to his heart, he wants to keep the customers happy. That's really what he's all about. And so he's tended over the years, not really to get involved on any level. And I think he saw this morning, he laughed it off, which I think is the right approach. In the tech business, we swing from time to time, but ultimately, I think it's, are we solving the customer problem tends to override? And that's probably where Joe's coming from. But the customers be the judge at the end of the day. Yeah, they ultimately decide and write the checks and keep the lights on for us. And I think what you'd find with Oracle as well in front of the customer, if there's a problem, we actually do work together pretty well. So, but it's always exciting coming down. Hey, I just hope we get invited back next year. And keep on doing those great keynotes, you'll be invited. So we'll also talk about the keynotes. So you did, you did have basically half the keynote, I think maybe more like three quarters of the keynote. Talk about what you talked about rehashing, we'll drill down on it. You showed some demos, you talked about the Project X and other projects. Yeah, Flash is pretty interesting right now. You know, what's clear to everybody is that it's going to become, you know, a disruptive technology in the data center. I mean, I think there's a handful right now. I think Intel multi-core continues to be a disruptor. Virtualization does. And I think Flash is probably the third pillar. You know, we see it playing a role in the storage network. We see it playing a role in the server network. We're pretty excited about Project X as we've called it internally. Still got some work to do to finish it off. Unfortunately, we get held to a different standard than startups do. You know, our customers tend to get upset if we lose data. So if it goes out with an EMC badge on, we always have to, you know, make sure we give it that extra pass. But the technology itself is amazing. And the purity of something that was designed for the new medium is pretty exciting. So you're going to hear a lot more about Xtreme I.O. And then, look, big data continues to be, I think, a big part of EMC's future, you know? Well, you talk about the customers, obviously. EMC, huge customer base. And you don't want to over-drive the market at the wrong time, right? You don't want to bring too much. One of the sound bites you had in your keynote was, a little bit of Flash goes a long way and I couldn't resist the tweet saying, a lot of Flash can go a longer way. But eventually, the startup's now working on Flash. We had one on, yes, they called AeroSpike, working with the Fusion IO guys. So, you can only feed the customers so much, right? I mean, you have a huge presence with the V-Maxes and your install base. What's the timetable? I know you're pedaling as fast as you can on the product side. How do you look at that? Because you can only go as fast as you can execute. Yeah, you always, I think, in tech and we're the masters of believing that everything's going to flip tomorrow. And reality is, a lot of these trends take years. If you look at the typical refresh cycle of a storage array, it's probably a minimum of three years. And so these transitions never happen as quickly as you think, but they do happen. So the best thing we felt we could do right now is take our existing technology and infuse it with Flash and hence the hybrid array. And I think customers, they can get a lot of benefit for not much outlay from a, kind of capital outlay standpoint. But for certain environments and certain workloads, you're going to need fundamentally different technology. And so we want to be working on that stuff as well. And Server Flash with VF Cash and Thunder, which you're going to see in the early part of next year, that's a big part of our future. And I think the all Flash array, I mean, the interesting thing about Server Flash right now, if you need it, you really need it. And you're going to pay 10 bucks a gigabyte for it, right? I mean, you're going to pay a lot of money for it. Because of some value, a bigger value you're getting out of. Well, if you're desperate, I mean, if your Facebook and response time is everything and you want to go stuff at 10,000 servers full of Flash, you're going to buy your DAZ works, right? But realistically, everybody knows that DAZ sucks. I mean, it really does suck. It's always been faster, by the way, even with disk. Dave wrote a post called get your head out of your DAZ. It was, but it does, it sucks, right? And DAZ with disk is not that different to DAZ with Flash. It's fast, right? And it was fast with disk as well. But the thing is, is if the thing blows up, you lose all your data. Now for certain workloads, that fine. Not for all of them. So we think that ultimately these all Flash arrays, because they protect the data as well as serve up the data quickly, we think they're going to have a huge role to play. So Jeremy, you mentioned that things take a long time. I think we'd all agree with that in this business. At the same time, EMC's become much more anticipatory with some of its acquisition strategy, the acquisition of Extreme I.O. Rather than wait five years and pay 2.5 billion, like you did for Data Domain, you really went for it. Thanks for reminding us about it. Yeah well, hey, it's paid off too though. But so it may be taking a little bit more risk, but at the same time, seeing the trends, even though it's going to take a long time. Pat Gelsinger a couple of years ago on theCUBE at EMC World said, you know, look, admittedly, we're behind, but we're going to do some things to catch up. Then you did VF Cash, and then now you've made this big acquisition. From a product portfolio standpoint, are you there yet? Or do you have to do more, say for example, integration with VMware? Take us through where you see that going. Yeah, unfortunately in this business, and it keeps us all gainfully employed, you're never there. So you never have, you never look at the product portfolio and go, I'm done, I can take the week off, you know? Because there's always someone, I think the beauty of the tech industry, there's always someone challenging and someone pushing. We've got more work to do on Flash, clearly. We still, you know, we haven't shipped Thunder. I think the server networked Flash, you know, shared Flash on the server. I think that is going to be a big deal. We've got more work to do there. The integration with VMware is a big deal. I'd like to see us continue to do more in the way of security. You know, VShield is very, very promising. I think it's a great framework for taking security into the virtual world, but there's a lot of work still to do in that area as well. And I mean, I really liked what we did with backup. With VDP, we embedded Avamar right into vSphere. It's the default backup client. I'd love us to see us do more of that kind of stuff in the realm of security, because everybody needs security, and the more you can build into the system, I think the better off everyone's going to be. So before we get off Flash, I wonder if I can, in your keynote, you talked about big data and the transformational effects that it could have. Basically, in the last five, seven years, we've been cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting costs, and the discourses you think are going to change. So it's kind of a semi-prediction that you made. We haven't agreed with it. I wanted to ask you about that in the context of Flash, and its potential impact on bottom line business productivity. What do you see there? And what do you predict in terms of its ability to really drive productivity, revenue, perms and things like that? Yeah, I mean, Flash in and of itself is going to achieve nothing, right? But I think if you can build smart software on top of Flash, that can deliver huge value. So think about, I mean, I talked this morning about a storage array designed for Flash. Let's go a step further. Imagine if you designed a database that just assumed that the IO problem had gone away. Just imagine how much more quickly you could serve up response to queries. And I think that kind of thing is going to have a profound impact on business. When you start to design databases and applications for this new medium, you're going to get response in a fraction of the time, and you should be able to deliver an order of magnitude and more functionality. So I want to also ask you to just changing gears a bit. Oracle's made a lot of noise about cloud, something that you guys have been talking about for quite some time. Do you feel like Oracle's generally maybe Larry, specifically, a little rewriting of cloud history? I don't know whether he's rewriting history. I think he's maybe adopting a bit of history. But look, Oracle's always a factor, right? They're a huge company with a huge install base. We've taken a different approach to them when not in the service provider business. So we've made a conscious decision to say, look, we're going to partner with service providers. We're going to be an arms supplier, if you like. We're going to do everything we can to make our partner service providers successful. And we think that they will run the application workloads of the future. And Oracle's taken a slightly different approach, saying we'll provide the infrastructure and we'll be the service provider. And whether or not people want to come to Oracle directly to be their service provider, or whether they want to go to a third party, remains to be seen. And they say we don't play well with others either, multi-vendor-wise. That's a challenge for them. You mentioned flexibility and you're jab at them a little bit, but it's truth in that. Yeah, and I think if you could do it all yourself, you probably would, right? I mean, I think everybody is in this, like I trust, the person I trust most is me. And so if I can do it all myself, then maybe I'm happy. The question is, is do you have the bandwidth? Do you have the resources? Do you have the expertise to do it all? We've made a conscious decision, like hey, we're not a service provider. We're a technology provider. Oracle, obviously, has got an opinion that they can do it all. So for those who didn't see Jeremy's keynote, you said tongue in cheek, flexibility and choice is not something we've heard a lot about this week, and I tweeted out, yeah, I'll say, ha, you know, blah, blah. My question is, if you were running Oracle, would you do it differently? You know, the thing is you look at Oracle's share price, you look at their valuation, and it's hard to say, it's hard to say it's not working, right? So, you know what? You're only 152 billion dollar market cap right now. 30, what, 40 billion in revenue? Yeah, I mean, I left Oracle 10 years ago, and they were half the size with half the market cap. So, you know, clearly it wasn't me leaving. That is custom, but you know, I think there is room though. I think customers want choice, they want alternatives. You're going to find people who are going to go the Oracle route, they're going to, you know, be okay with the, you know, really, exudate is almost a kickback to the mainframe era, where you've got a proprietary system running a specific application, or AS 400 is probably, you know, maybe even a better analogy. We've got a different strategy, and I think there is probably room for both. I like how it's better, but it's hard to point at Oracle and say it's not working, because... I mean, they're fierce competitors too. They have a lot of things. We give them a lot of props in a lot of areas. We also kind of challenge them, but you know, they're competitive, and they're sales-driven, and they work that. Yeah, and if you're in the same markets as Oracle, you've got to be on your game to compete. Yeah, got it. So, you know, we have a healthy degree of paranoia. At the same time, we've got a lot of mutual customers. So I want to talk about some of the coolness you've been doing in the marketing side, obviously. Now that you're running the products, that was cool. We'd love to talk more about that, but the marketing's been great. You know, we've always been proud to work with EMC and have the chance to watch you come into EMC at the first cube that year, and CloudMeets big data. Now you've got the new campaign, which CloudMeets big data still works. The longevity's still there, so that was a success. Now the face of big data is genius in the sense of you're taking it to the mainstream, where people don't want to go under the hood. Right. So, EMC, the hype translated into value, right? So, take us through the mindset of Jeremy Burton with the face of big data for the folks who haven't been following. The face of big data is EMC's campaign. And in quasi-independent way, not so much EMC sales pitch, really more of a service, public service, to share examples of what's going on in real life that where big data changes the world. So, you can go to the faceofbigdata.emc.com slash... Human faceofbigdata.com or emc.com slash human faceofbigdata. You'll end up in the same place. Human faceofbigdata.com, so take us through the mindset. Okay, obviously there was a New York Times article written, you spent a lot of dough on it, so it's expensive. Centerpiece of your campaign, obviously in the keynote you get some great images and stories, so take us through the mindset of this program. Well, reality is, I think with this kind of a project, I mean, I just had an amazing guy, Rick Smollon, came to me with an amazing idea. And I think in my career, I've had a lot of joy betting on individuals. You know, reports and committee meetings I have a lot less time for, but he's a guy who had an amazing idea, had a bit of a track record for doing something like it before, wanted to go out, send a hundred photographers to 30 countries and capture images of how big data is changing humanity. Thought that was cool. Didn't really know whether he could do it, but thought it was cool. Said, hey, we're going to do a census of the planet. Thought that was cool. Said, we're going to send the book that I create to 10,000s of the world's most important people on the same day. I thought, that's really cool. And then we want to get into schools and we want to help kids understand what data can do for them. And so, you know, this was a half hour conversation at Pete's Coffee that turned into two and a half hours. And so we bet on Rick and Rick's team and he's a journalist. So he's not a tech guy. He's a photographic journalist and he's a storyteller. And I've been blown away. I mean, I really did think that the only folks capable of using big data were up and down Highway 101 because it was so advanced and so cool. But he's uncovered a couple of hundred amazing stories from around the world and they've all got this common theme of the internet of things and collecting and analyzing information and seeing the big picture. And I think that's something that you can apply to most businesses. And it gives us a much more disarming and human way to go broach the conversation with a lot of business people who candidly, we don't speak to that often. Is this going to be a long, longer campaign? Obviously it's a great idea, an amazing idea. It's a human idea. It's a human social web. It's personal, right? So it's about the people. So is it going to be a longer campaign? It's going to be like cloud means maybe going to keep it going for a while or? Yeah, we've got a number of waves coming up. We did Mission Control in New York, London and Singapore took place actually today. We, the census is still running. We've got the iOS app coming out any day now. It was supposed to be an app. We got caught in the iOS 6 jam. But we had about a hundred and, last time I checked, 107,000 downloads on Android. We had about a million questions answered. We're hoping we can double that with iOS. And so you've got a couple of million questions that you can start to understand what's going on on the planet in a relatively short period of time. But this campaign is going to run through next year. I want to take it on the road. I want to invite folks from organizations to hear about the human face of big data, but also hear about the corporate face of big data. And there are a lot of similarities and correlation that can be derived between the two. Well, you guys doing great at EMC TV. The Cube was on a special segment with Richard Schlesinger from 48 Hours in Europe as they did a Cube special. Dave and I did with your team. So great on the marketing side. Yeah, look for that. So what we did was we took the best of the Cube content on big data and weave it in. Created kind of a story around Richard curated the Cube. So they took the best clips that tied into some of your theme. So it was actually, we were kind of one of the tech geek faces of big data. I guess if you look at that way. But look for that on EMC TV. So great stuff on the business side. There's been some news. So today there's some news that EMC has a new CTO reporting into you. The CTO office is now reporting to you and Jeff Nick is moving to work with Maritz. Is it? Right, we get a new mission for Jeff. Pomerance spending his time on big data and this next generation of cloud applications. So a mighty and worthy mission there for Jeff. Is he going to move to the East, stay on the East Coast? We end up being in these weirdo bicoastal situations because we've got half the company East and half the company West. And I'm sure Jeff will end up going back and forth between the two. And then we've got John Rose coming in who joined us from Huawei, which is interesting because he's a company that is doing well that not many people know a lot about, number one. He's a systems guy. Reminds me a bit of Pat Gelsinger a little bit actually. You know, he's a silicon guy and networking servers and all that kind of stuff which I think if you take a view of the future you've got to take much more of a systematic approach and his company was crushing Cisco and Juniper and a lot of big service provider deals. Yeah, I mean, they're competitive and he's got some insight there. Clearly, you know, we're big partners with Cisco and so hopefully the some insight he can maybe lend that as well. So what's he going to do for you guys? So how's this, any changes in the CTO office that's going to report to you? Are you going to be setting the agenda? Are they going to be reporting trends to you? The big picture stuff? He's got a technical background, right? He's a very technical guy. You're going to push him, I bet, into a marketing role as well. Well, so he's first thing, primary directive and big fan of RoboCop years ago, right? The primary directive for John is technical and product strategy. We've got a very diverse portfolio. You know, someone's got to put some method behind the madness, make sure that we're marching in the right directions. We've got a divisional structure at EMC. We've got some amazing guys in the divisions that work as CTOs. John's goal in some respects is to work with those divisional guys and make sure what they're working on hooks up to the overall strategy and make sure that we hammer flat some of the technical issues that break out between the different product groups. So that's job number one. And then there's what I call kind of classic CTO programs. I mean, he's on the hook to really drive an innovation program at the company. You know, our distinguished engineers and our fellow programs. I mean, he's behind all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, first and foremost, technology, product strategy, all of that good stuff. So, Maritz is now in the home court of EMC. I see Pat's over there running VM where we had some good commentary on that. So my comment was, Paul's got the new canvas. At the VM world, we talked about that he's got the blank canvas or a fresh canvas to work off of. You know, you're at EMC. You know, he's VMware's out there, strategic partner at the rest of the industry. You're bringing in a network guy. You scratch your head. You say, hmm, Nassir over at VMware, software-defined data center, EMC, software on top of Flash, hmm, Jeremy. So like, what's Maritz thinking right now? What's the mindset and how you guys, you know, passing the puck back and forth to each other? Yeah, I think right now, and we've not really been that descriptive about Paul and what his role is. What we do know is we've got a number of interesting assets, not just around big data, but I think the applications that you would build on top of a big data platform. Paul clearly has got a great track record. He built a little platform a few years ago called Windows. So he's got a track record of building software development platforms. And that's really what is consuming most of his time right now. I think what you'll see John focus on is much more the infrastructure play. Networking clearly is a part of that, but it's not just networking in and of itself. I think it's networking in relation to servers, in relation to storage, in relation to virtualization, and how does that ecosystem come together? Yeah, the software to find infrastructure is we're calling it. Yeah, what was kind of weird this morning, I felt like after listening to Larry Session on Sunday, you had the software company talking about hardware, and then you were the hardware company talking about software. Yeah, and you had a great demo with the Green Plum Chorus, and of course, Dave pulled up our little, our dashboard of the Twitter Firehose, and it's real time. You said that you have consumed up the Twitter Firehose. Yeah. Six million records. Billion records, that's quite a fee to pay for Twitter for the CPMs, but did you suck it all in? You consumed it into a corpus? Yeah, what did you do with it? What did you, 1000 node? Well, can we get a copy of it? No, we built this 1000 node Hadoop cluster out in the middle of nowhere, and it's actually in conjunction with the Human Face of Big Data Project. We got access to the Twitter Firehose, we dumped it in there, and we've actually been working with a couple of partners, one on the floor here, Tableau. In fact, did you go see the Human Face of Big Data exhibit on the back of our booth? We have a data DJ there who is doing visualizations for the Human Face of Big Data, but a lot of those visualizations are derived from mining that they've done in our big Twitter Hadoop cluster, and it was actually fascinating because most of the work, when you talk about searching for needles in a haystack, that's exactly what it is. We're trying to tease out themes. We know we've got a story in the Human Face of Big Data launch about crime and how Big Data can help prevent crime. And so we then went to Twitter and said, well, what have we got about crime? And then what have we got about murder or guns or drugs or, and so we teased out of the Twitter Firehose interesting sentiment about certain topic areas that were related to the story that we had in the Human Face of Big Data launch. And what shocked me was I thought this would be an active God in a year-long exercise. I mean, it took no time. I mean, it took a few days and we had everything that we needed. So it was absolutely fascinating. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on to the theCUBE and my final question is what's next for next year? We always ask this question and you always have a good answer, so I want to ask it again. What's next for you on your roadmap? Obviously you've got to take this to the next level. You've got it on your plate. You've got a lot on your plate, now product and marketing. What else is kind of fostering in your mind in terms of what you want to do? Yeah, I think next year's a huge year for us. I almost look at this year as much as we've done a lot was probably one of our more bare years from a product perspective. There's some pretty exciting things that we've got lined up. It's clearly going to be a big year for Flash. No surprises there. We might even tell you what Paul Moritz is going to be doing next year. Good. I think that'll be fun. We'll figure it out. He's in Palo Alto. I'm going to drive over there and crash it. Intel multi-car, I said it was one of the most disruptive things in the data center. A lot of people consume the process of power. A lot of people don't rewrite or architect their software to take advantage of multi-car. We've done a lot of that work and some of the numbers that were getting back are mind-blowing. And I also think you're going to see us talk a lot more about the world of security. That, I think, is still low-hanging fruit, top of mind. We've not solved it yet. So that's another area with that. I think you're going to see us raise the profile of in the coming year. Okay, Jeremy Burton, executive vice president, CMO, rising star at EMC, and they kind of goofed you on stage and pulled a picture of Joe Tucci and then Mitt Romney. That's hilarious. Great success at EMC. Continue to do a great job. I would like working with you guys and I'll see you performing with your success. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE. I'm with Dave Vellante. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest. Great.