 I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and John, we're here with a good friend, Doc Dorico, who is a technologist at EMC, known Doc for a long time. He's been on the Cube a number of times, and we've actually, you frequent Sapphire, at least a couple of the latest years, but so welcome. It's been about five years now, thank you. I appreciate that. You know, I enjoy coming to both the US show as well as the European show. I haven't made it over to Asia. I've not done the European show. How does it compare? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. They've got a very diverse audience in Europe as well, and you know, while you could say there are a lot of similarities as they go through the technology industry, they have entirely different infrastructure needs, so it's really good for us to get exposed. So, you know, it's interesting. We've been, last couple of years we've been talking, you know, sort of marketing always leads the actual implementations. We've been talking about cloud and big data, and even in memory for quite some time, you're starting to see, certainly cloud and analytics slash big data become real, but what are you seeing? What's sort of evolved and changed in the last couple of years? Yeah, you know, cloud is definitely becoming real, and more and more customers, Dave, are putting things out into the cloud either as a platform where they're running, starting to build up applications in the cloud, or they're using cloud services, you know, Salesforce.com was unheard of a couple of years ago. Now it's hard to find a customer that isn't using them for CRM or a company that isn't using them for CRM in some shape or form. So, you know, as this all starts to come together, what's starting to become more important is that people have to mine not only what's in their data center, but they have to go out to these other sources for information and pull it all together into one place that's aggregated. Yeah, so we touched upon this last year. I've asked a number of guests from EMC about the comet that was made earlier by Jim Hangeman-Schnabe this morning. He said, imagine a world where all data is in memory, and imagine you don't need a traditional disk-based database. Yes, he did. And I said, okay, he's taking a little tiny slap at a Oracle, which is fine. But then I'm saying, I'm going to have some folks on EMC later. I really want to ask them about that. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, and I particularly loved his comment also where he said, you know, the people who continue to believe in disk have to realize that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's a good humorous moment. But, you know, he's talking about, you know, memory technologies that are shrinking to the point where, you know, in 40 years, you'll be able to get memory technologies that can sustain, you know, the size of the Internet today. You know, I'm not sure that's literally true. But it is kind of mind-boggling. It is kind of mind-boggling. You'll see that. But he's talking, you know, 40 years out. And, you know, I mean, of course, you have to imagine that as information has accelerated over the last decade, it'll continue to accelerate. So 40 years from now, you're going to see much larger amounts of information that have to be mined. And, frankly, you know, as we look at disk technology today, disk technology continues to evolve as well. You know, the EMC products are getting more and more based on silicon-based technologies, not just, you know, spinning rust, right? I mean, there's a lot of new technologies coming out. So those will continue to evolve. But I think, you know, the important aspect is that there is, you know, faster and faster technology. And the software to manage that information is really important. And the other piece that I think, you know, I actually heard someone say on one of the earlier CUBE episodes, they were talking about the evolution of servers and saying that it's not really the evolution of CPU and memory that's important. It's the I.O. that goes with that to be able to process that information. And, you know, that's where we see the importance. And we still think we have a long way to go with relevance. And, you know, with all the respect to this morning, I think it was a great message and a great vision for the future. But, you know, we have to think about the next three to five years, not the next 40. Because I've been talking to some customers here, I'll see SAP customers. And, you know, the hallway conversations are along the lines of I have EMC, I have SAP, this is a classic legacy as people call it in the industry. But in reality, you guys aren't legacy vendor, you're making huge investments to purchase the company, Stream.io. So but the conversation always goes back down to Flash, right? So Flash is obviously disruptive enabler around speed and I.O. you mentioned. So this architectural kind of configurations emerging David Floyd, Wikibon, many of them coming, the cutting edge ones, but customers are starting to play with sand configurations in front of EMC. You see Fusion I.O. next to the processor. I need my EMC, but I need to have better caching, but the caches can't fill the data in memory. So in memory is kind of this elusive term, right? But yet it powers cloud and mobile, right? So what's your take on that around these proof of concepts and or these architectural configurations that are emerging? Yeah, I think you've hit it on the head, John. I think, you know, look at what we're doing with our VF cash technology, right? We're not just taking Fusion I.O. cards, we're not just taking Stream I.O. boxes and sticking them in front of storage, we're actually taking the VF cash technology and integrating it with the storage back in. So when you put something out there, it actually ties into the storage back end. So you've got the persistence in a shareable environment. You can replicate it, you can clone it, you can do all the things that you do with the storage infrastructure. And then flash technology is evolving as well. There's the traditional flash today. We use a single level cell type technology. There's multi-layer cells like in your cell phone, which are much cheaper, but they're not as resilient. And there are next generation technologies that are coming out in the next three to five years as well. You know, that, you know, phase change memory that'll change literally the state of the electrons, right? So that you can store things and access them faster. But the important thing is it's got to be integrated in a way that you can manipulate it and control it from a sexual point so that it can be managed and seamlessly part of your overall environment. Yeah, and it's interesting too, another observation is it's just more some color from my perspective, knowing EMC and having you on the cube and other EMC exactly like Pat Gelsinger and others. SAP and EMC have the same vision. I mean, I'm very impressed with EMC's comprehensive vision. Obviously, they're an application company. They have a more swath of range of customer base than the EMC relative to what they offer. But it's a lot of cloud meets big data. So EMC is cloud meets big data, which is, you know, clever slogan, very relevant to what you guys are doing right now. But SAP doesn't even actually use the word big data much. But everything that they talk about is big data. It's cloud meets big data. So, you know, you hear their investment areas, mobile, cloud, that's essentially in memory, cloud and mobile. So that is a big data company. Yeah, so you guys align well with that. So how do you talk to customers and what are you hearing from your customer base around the big data configurations? I just mentioned stands in front of this. But in particular, can you give us a use case like which Nabe offered us? Yeah, he said put up put HANA in front of a data warehouse is risk free. Is there a use case for EMC that's that simple to understand relative to flash and these IO memory? Yeah, put me on the spot with a with a simple use case. But you know, that I think the EMC world big data means a lot more than than just the simple cases that you that you talked about. You know, the big data can be unstructured data to some, it can be structured data to others, it can be an aggregate of all of that. So I think, you know, the use case for for us is how do we take all of this information, bring it all together for regardless of how many different sources, regardless of how many different types, how do you bring it together and how do you mine it, mine it for value that can be presented to your business. So where are we going with it? You know, clearly, you know, we see the value of being able to take different disparate data data types, bring it together and then perform analytics on top of it, regardless of where it lives as well, which is which is critical to our infrastructure. So, Doc, my last question is, you know, for the you know, well for the last 15, 20 years, we've seen function move out of the server, you know, up to the array and you're starting to see function move back. The storage hierarchy is sort of elongating toward the other side of the channel. You mentioned connections into the storage array and that's, you know, clearly your area of expertise. What about the other direction? What are your thoughts there? Obviously, you've made, you know, an acquisition. My guess is it's not your last. But talk about, you know, what the strategy is to take advantage of that. You're not a server company, even though you own VMware. That's kind of a, not kind of, it is a server play. Is that the strategy to get closer to the channel and and close it to the Intel processor and and and talk about your strategy to manage that entire hierarchy? Yeah, you know, I think it's, it's an all of the above. So it's, you know, that an answer E, right? All of the above. You know, we really, you really have to look at, there are many, many situations where we're going to have to take some of the processing capabilities and move it down to the data, because you don't want to move all of that data every time you need to process it. But you also have to take some of the data that's going to be used a lot and move it up to the server. So there's, it's that integration and the play of the two parts as they come together. So, you know, I guess, you know, in the interest of time, I'll just say, stay tuned. We'll be watching you get your best people working on this. All right, Dr. Rico, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. Always a pleasure to see you. Always fun. Thanks for watching everybody. We got a big day, big afternoon, John. We got a great guest coming on. So keep it right here and we'll be right back after this word from our friends and sponsors.