 and from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to EMC World 2016 everybody. This is theCUBE, this is our seventh year at EMC World. theCUBE goes out to the events, extracts the signal from the noise. It's our pleasure to have Nina Hargis there, the new CMO of EMC, long time marketing exec, at EMC, VC, Nina, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much, great to see you. So I'm here, of course, with Brian Graceley, my co-host. So first of all, Nina, congratulations on the new role, huge role. Following some, filling some big footsteps, you guys have not missed a beat. EMC World's as big as ever. How do you feel? It feels great to me. I know I'm inside it, so maybe that's the way I should feel, but the bottom line is, I think we want each year, for EMC World, not just to be a place where people come and hear about the products they're using every day, which is really important, but they also get ideas for the future and they learn from other customers on how far they can push the envelope and they get inspired to take it to new levels. We really try to focus there. So big numbers, I mean, 10,000 plus. Absolutely. Just the stage is another record stage. A lot of products, which is typical of EMC, and the theme this year is modernized. Talk about that a little bit. Why that theme, why now? So I think maybe two things. I'll take it in two steps. One, I was kind of laughing to myself during part of this year because there was press around would EMC continue to innovate? And we've been working on the products. We had so many product announcements, big product announcements, big solutions announcements here at the show, and we knew that was coming, so we were just dying to get out here and get this innovation, you know, just get this innovation launched. We had made big announcements in January and February with VMAX All Flash, kind of following the extreme IO, big, powerful flash market positioning, and we wanted to get Unity out there so we would have All Flash across primary storage. So getting this out now at the show was really important to us, but all the other innovation, you know, we're an innovation engine, you know, one of the words I used, and literally the product line has been refreshed this year since last year's EMC World. So there's something for everyone, you know, and I think it's really important. I mean, that's just who EMC is, you know, we're an innovation engine. Chris Radcliffe called it yesterday in the queue with an embarrassment of riches. Embarrassment of riches. But that's a challenge for you from a marketing standpoint. You have so many people I'm sure knocking at your door, hey, Dean, I want to make this product announcement or that product that I only need some air cover. How do you adjudicate? How do you deal with all that sort of demand? You know, it's really funny because when you're doing engineering planning, which is part of my history, you always hope that you have things that have come out in a rational fashion, not everything sort of comes together at once, but in the real world of engineering, sometimes things come together at once. And some of these products that we've been wanting to bring to market, but we want to make sure we brought them out when they were absolutely rock solid, sort of came together at the same time. Our customers were using them. We had them out in really powerful betas. Holding them back made no sense. So, you know, we kind of pulled it all together and we got them out here at EMC World. It's funny, but there are a number of other products we have held back, and you'll see those coming out in the next couple of quarters. Yeah, I did. The first show I attended back in Boston, I think it was 2010, very storage-centric, very, you know, storage-admin-centric. Since then, you know, virtualization's a big part of the show every year. Automation, cloud computing this year. So, a different audience mix. Give us some examples of how you're having to spread out the story and some of the things to, you know, sort of really talk to those different buyers. Yeah, well, I think Joe started talking about the early days of the first Wizards conference. That was really a storage practitioner's show, right? You know, if you're working in the storage arena, this helps you better understand how to use the products, talk to the engineers. We've never wanted to lose that. We've never wanted to lose that and we spend so much time on the technical sessions to make sure that's the case. But some number of years back, we decided that we didn't want people to just come to EMC World to learn more about how to use the storage they were already buying. We wanted this to be the kind of industry event where people come and they learn about the possibilities, not just in storage, but that are transforming IT, that can transform business. And through the Federation, we really do have those technologies that can impact the business in a whole different way. And we've been working pretty hard on these Federation solutions with our Federation family. I think when we bring those forward, even someone who has been focused on storage in the past is very interested in seeing, you know, how does this fit into the bigger world and how do I push the envelope? And, you know, at this point, it's all about faster, more modern IT to speed the business. Yeah, so inspire them, let them go back home and go, hey, did you see that, what that company did? Can we do the same thing? Think a little bit differently. We're doing a lot of peer-to-peer work here where industries are coming together, where peers are willing to share what they're seeing. And healthcare is a great one because there's a lot of sharing in healthcare. And a couple of customers I was talking to last night, said, well, you know, I'm going to go home and think about this differently. I mean, just little things like that, if you can get something like that from an event like this, and so let me go back and explore it, you know, we feel good about that. That's great. You know, you've had sort of three quite distinct roles at EMC, you know, in the services, you know, as an executive in the services, you know, division, marketing, you guys are, EMC is a product company. You know, it's made that clear. Sure. And so you kind of, marketing was kind of, you had to walk a fine line there, right? And then VCE, you had many masters to serve, right? Do you feel like the gloves are off now, at least for a period of time until the merger takes place? The merger takes place. Actually, it was three really different experiences, right? You know, a lot of, you know, a lot of putting technologies together in stacks, traditionally was done through services. And there are lots of companies that still do it, the good old fashioned way, they send in lots of services, people who glue it all together and hopefully get it working for you, but now you have a custom solution. A custom solution makes you less nimble. There's a lot of things about it that, you know, aren't goodness. But you know, services is sort of the start of all that. And there's still plenty of places where you need services to intervene and customize workflows, et cetera, for your company. But VCE was a place where we took a different approach. You know, can we bring together these powerful technologies in a stack so that IT people can spend their time not doing what you used to call undifferentiated heavy lifting and focus more on- Still call it that. Still call it that, still that, by the way. And focus on getting more applications out, getting more sensitive to how the business needs to innovate. And VCE was an amazing experience. So there were many masters, but the concept was really simple and customers gravitated toward it. At the beginning, I think the reputation of our brand parents, EMC, Cisco and VMware, maybe got us in the door, but that's not what kept us in the door. And these platforms, you know, this works. These platforms worked and now we're seeing the whole converged infrastructure portfolio. So I think EMC has taken a fundamentally different approach to speeding up and enabling IT, which isn't we'll send you lots of people to glue it together. It's can we sell you bigger building blocks so that you start ahead, you get there faster, you can focus differently. Well, it's interesting because if you think about the early days of converged infrastructure, it was sort of a heavy lift. And now with the digital transformation, customers like, yeah, I don't want to spend time on that IT labor. I want to transform my business for the digital world. And that's really what the modernization theme is all about. It is. I mean, in all honesty, maybe there's no reason to do it the old fashioned way, but there probably aren't many businesses that want to tolerate the time and risk of doing it the old fashioned way. Everything has gotten faster. The expectations of business have gotten faster. So how does IT get faster, right? Whether you're clearly cloud computing has taken off for those companies that are looking at going to the cloud. It's not just the economics of cloud, which often actually aren't a whole lot better at scale, but it's speed. So for IT to be effective, they need to operate at a whole different speed. And this converged infrastructure and solutions that we're building give them again these bigger building blocks so that in fact they get faster, they get sure and they do get new services, new capabilities out for the business a lot faster. You had a little sizzle reel this morning in your keynote and you talked about learning, collaboration and fun. Talk about some of the fun stuff that's going on here. EMC world, okay, one of the things I love about EMC world is we try to convey a lot of deep information. We really do. I mean, some of the sessions are pretty deep. Even on the floor, once you start digging into products. But we try to do it in a way where it's fun, it's entertaining and maybe it becomes more memorable because you see it in a way that sort of sticks. This year at EMC world, we have all kinds of things going on. So we've been talking about sort of the power and the speed of some of the new technologies that allow our customers and partners to do things they had never done before. So if you really look at the world of big data comes to sailing, right? Or big data comes to cycling. These are things that, you know, they step, right? And the demos that you're seeing and the Q-Solutions Expo. Internet of data. Exactly, you know. It's a fun way to present these ideas. We're looking at the avatar display where people were becoming avatars. And the truth is the power of technology behind that that makes it possible. But even when we were talking about healthcare and Michael was talking about how long does it take to map the genome or your personal DNA mapping? These are truly transformative and they're making a difference in people's lives. And I think everyone at EMC wants to believe that what we're working on can change the world. The only way it changes the world is it becomes part of a bigger solution that really does change the world. So even for EMCers who are working on deep technologies, seeing it come to life this way, and we're trying to showcase it more as part of industry solutions or fun solutions like sailing, telemetrics, it really changes it up. But I think it gives us a sense of more purpose, right? What we do matters. You know, Hargis, doing your part to change the world. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. We're going to look for you. Obviously, VMworld Big Show for EMC always has been. I'll give you the last word, you know. We're excited about the merger with Dell. I think we're eking out little bits of the vision of what we're going to become with Dell, but there's a lot of symmetry there and what we can bring to market. So you're going to be seeing some big things as that merger gets closer. Awesome, well thanks again for coming to theCUBE. Thanks for having us here. This great set and the wonderful guests we have at EMC World and we love the collaboration over the last seven years. Love having you here. I think we go back a long way. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from the Sands Convention Center in Vegas. Right back. Looking back at the history of Dell, personal.