 Okay, everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org, and this is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of EMC World. We're live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, where we bring you the smartest people on the planet. We extract knowledge, we cover enterprise IT, cloud, big data, mobile, social, and we're here at EMC World in Las Vegas. We were just listening to Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger, big keynotes this morning. About 13,000 people in the audience. The show grows every year. EMC, as Joe Tucci says, is the smallest of the big and growing quite rapidly, and now becoming a much more strategic component of IT organizations. Used to be EMC, just purely a storage company. We're seeing EMC transform itself. We're here to talk about that. We have Rick Wallsworth, who is the director of product marketing for the IMG Group at EMC. Rick, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, it's good to be back. I appreciate it, yeah. And I'm joined by my colleague, David Floyer, who is the CTO of Wikibon. David. Good afternoon. Thanks for sitting in. And giving my co-host John Furrier a break. So, Rick, transformation, right? I mean, transformation is about cloud, it's about big data, it's about simplicity, making things easier. You guys have some announcements this week. App sync, data bridge, a couple things we're going to talk about. Why don't you give us the high level and we can get into it. And at the end of the day, it's all about creating your IT organization and turning it into a service. And the ability to be able to offer services on the fly around data protection, and that's really where AppSync fits in. The ability to be able to take what are typically very manual processes, and the ability to be able to take those manual processes, now automate them, and create a service architecture that allows you to be able to scale these out on a very simplified fashion. So, if I look at AppSync, AppSync really has kind of three tenets. The first one is simplification. Everything from the installation to the operation is really simplified in such a way that you can deploy these services very, very quickly. The other is self service. So the ability to be able to empower the application owners to be able to take advantage of the fact that now they have the ability to be able to manage their own copies. So if I want to be able to create test and development copies, or copies for my sandbox, I can now do so on the fly, but allow the DVAs to handle their own storage. And then on top of that, the ability to be able to scale it, to be able to go into these environments and scale them out, start very small, but then start to grow these environments very, very nicely. Yeah, so when you talk about those three attributes, simplicity, self service, and scale, I mean, obviously the cloud comes to mind. The Internet giants, I mean, I think the Internet giants have paved the way. They've put a lot of pressure on IT. CEOs and C-level executives go home in the weekends and they maybe hit their Facebook or their Gmail and say, wow, this is so easy. Now, of course it's, you can't just translate that to IT. That's the big challenge because you've got hundreds, maybe thousands of applications. But David, we talk about this all the time. You're seeing sort of a schism between traditional IT and these sort of new Internet giants, the cloud service providers. Can we close that gap? Absolutely, and you can learn from it. There are different challenges and the challenges that IT shops have, you said, is diversity, the number of these applications, and because you've got that diversity, you've got challenges like, how do you maintain application consistency? How do you make the applications allow themselves to be managed? And probably one of the premier environments at the moment is Microsoft because of their investment in VSS and other technologies like that. And so one of the things I'm interested in is from your point of view, you've announced AppSync, which looks really good from a show point of view. But what environments are you covering and what environments are you seeing yourself cover in the future? Yeah, it's a great question. And what we did is we really drew a bullseye around that Microsoft stack. And to be even more specific, Microsoft stacks running in virtual environments. So I take my Exchange server, my SQL environment, I virtualize it. Now I can run that on a virtual environment. And then really at the onset, looking at that mid-range market, so looking at the VNX. So we wanted to be just very, very focused on how do you drive those services out at that portion of the market because that's where we're seeing all the growth. And then as you pointed on also, the ability to take advantage of some of the tools that the application vendors provide and then to integrate with that so that now I can seamlessly create application consistent snapshots and then allow the IT, either IT administrator or the DBA to be able to manage exactly or even the VM work exactly to be able to do that within vCenter now. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in how I access that data on a real-time basis. So we just did a survey on Wikibon of our community members on IT transformation. And we asked them, you know, some of one of those conditioned response was which of the following best describes your attitude toward where you're at with your transformation? Two things stood out. One group, about 30% of the respondents said, it's really around the infrastructure. That's our main focus. The other group said, it's really, we're really driving hard toward service catalogs and IT as a service. My sense is that's what, it's that ladder piece that AppSync is really designed to do. Talk about that a little bit. Exactly, because now what I had the ability to do is now I can define services on a very repeatable basis. I say for my high-end exchange environments, I'm going to create a platinum service tier and that platinum service tier is going to give me synchronous replication and the ability to do recovery on the fly. Now what I can do with that is I can now take that and roll that out on a fairly wide basis. So I have the ability to be able to take those services on a very repeatable basis and offer that to the tier of customers that demand that type of service. But then I may have other customers that say, I have, I don't need that synchronous recovery. I can live with async recovery. So now I can create another service tier to be able to do that as well. So it allows you now to, within that service catalog that you mentioned, to be able to create these services and then roll them out on a very repeatable basis. Yeah, because a lot of services are delivered historically as one size fits all. This is, take data protection, for example. You got daily incremental weekly fold. That's it. Or if you've got a lot of money, you can maybe go out and buy SRDF or something for this. That's the old model. Right, but that is changing. Absolutely changing, absolutely. And so we take advantage of technologies like RecoverPoint that give you the ability to not only have continuous replication, but then also the ability to be able to roll back to any point in time. And then as you mentioned, to integrate with the applications themselves, to create application consistent bookmarks so that as the exchange owner, I know that point in time, my exchange environment is exactly the same price. So I think that's a very powerful vision. So where do you see yourself taking apps thing? Because at the moment, as you said, it's targeted at quite a small area. It deals with SQL, it deals with exchange. That's a good world, but it's not the whole world. Yeah, absolutely. So broadening that out. I mean, where we see this going is around environments such as Oracle, right? Where you have a lot of the same challenges within an Oracle environment, I need to make sure that that database is in a consistent state. So Oracle, SAP, so really now starting to move up the stack into some of the more critical applications and leveraging the same capabilities, but now doing so for the mission critical apps as well. Okay, and so there's a hutch bunch of things you've got out there. So you've got your DPAs, you've got your, what are they called, the replication managers, all the things like that. So what's happening to those? And how does all this fit together? So great question, and one we get all the time, right? Our field, our customer wants to know. They've got those installed at the moment. And they have them installed and they'll continue. I mean, we're going to continue to make investments in those products. But where we see that division is replication manager really serving the kind of high end of the space, SAP, Oracle, Symmetrix, VMAX, whereas AppSync's really more targeted for that mid tier market. The mid tier market, absolutely. Okay, absolutely. So yeah, messages, those products are not going away. All right. Rick, I mentioned, okay, I'm sorry, please. No, no, I was going to change the subject to data bridge. Right. Before you do, before you do, you mentioned recovery point. Can we talk a little bit about the whole pressure on RPO and RTO? Absolutely. It's changing. RPO and RTO is shrinking? Absolutely. Business is demanding tighter RPO, RTO. How does this fit into that trend? Yeah, well, it really takes advantage of it. It takes full advantage of that capability. And the reason for that trend is that the fact that there is much more dependence on the data. I mean, Pat and Joe even talked about it in the keynote today talking about essentially the tolerance for downtime is going down. And so you have an infrastructure now that can take advantage of that. What AppSync does is it taps into that and now allows you to build those natively into the service plan so you can roll these out on a very repeatable basis. Yeah, okay. There's good, it seems to be very good connection with the snapshot technologies of VNX. And that's been one of your weaknesses, hasn't it? Right, it has. Compared with some of your competitors who really focused on that. So you think you've caught up now or you're... Certainly have caught up in terms of the ability to be able to leverage small aperture snapshots, leverage those snapshots in conjunction with technology such as recover points. Exactly, so I mean, if anything, we've leapfrogged, we see from a competitive standpoint, the ability to take advantage of both those snapshots and the ability to be able to leverage those for test dev type environments, but then at the same time use recover point for real-time recovery. So all important is that you can apply differential service to applications specifically and one size doesn't fit. I think we're working with other divisions. We had B.J. Jenkins on here earlier. And he kind of put forth the vision of what I would call the time machine for the enterprise. You know where you're sort of dialing back to whatever point you want based on your RPO requirements. How do you interconnect? What are the entries and the exits between divisions at EMC? Because you got a lot of technology across the portfolio, it's getting bigger and more complex. And each one has its own management product too, right? So the customer's probably pulling you in different ways, in different use cases. And so I think that really kind of heads on to the data bridge discussion and the ability to leverage an architecture such as data bridge to be able to start to now bridge together these different disparate management technologies, but now start to bring it together. And so what data bridge is essentially an environment that allows you to build custom dashboards but make it your data. So I can take, for example, the primary data I'm getting from ProSphere, the backup data I'm getting, B.J. was probably talking about, that I'm getting from DPA, and then mash it up against my own environment, which may be customers and the rate usage. Now I can get full detailed utilization, but it's relative to my data itself. So data bridge really provides the ability to bring these together under one console. And then now as a CIO, I could give you a view of that data that's unique to what you want to see. Can I push on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Mashups haven't got the best track record in the world, have they? And one of the challenges of that mashup process is... Well, why do you say that? I got to interrupt. Like Google mashups, right? Maps and... Yeah, but when you actually look at them in detail, the Google stroke mashups have a very, very clear API and data cleaning. They know that that is a map and they know it's coordinates and they can... There's a lot of certainty. There's a lot of certainty. Whereas when you're looking at the sources of data that you're talking about, there are not consistent definitions. They come from all over the place. They come from different vendors. How do you put a structure around that so that you can get real data out of it as opposed to illusionary data? And that's really one of the benefits of Databridge is it gives you the ability to define what those relationships are. I can take the data sets and now map it into specific tenants, specific users. But then once I have that mashup, I can now create customized dashboards. So the benefit is I now have the ability to be able to define what those rules are that's relative to my business and then build the dashboards and the apps specific to what I need. So from a user standpoint, it gives you really the ultimate of flexibility because I have the ability to do so myself. So we see really Databridge as a first step to be able to do exactly that. And again, going back to what you said earlier around IT as a service, this really now starts to give you a platform in which you can build these dynamic, catalog-based services for cloud-based deployments. Excellent. Now we have a segment coming up next with Jason Buffington, who's with Enterprise Strategy Group. Great segment. And we're going to drill in to this a little bit. Just wrote a white paper on Databridge. So we're going to get his perspective. David, I hope you can stay. Sure. Okay, so first of all, Rick, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. As always. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Stay right there, everybody. We'll be right back after this word.