 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon, here with SiliconANGLE TVs live coverage, wall-to-wall from EMC World 2015 in Las Vegas. We've got two sets going, I think we're going to do, I don't know, 65, 70 interviews overall, so wall-to-wall coverage on lots of topics and digging into the big data space. As I mentioned in the earlier interview, the kind of third platform, cloud-native, some of the things here, let's talk about what the applications are sitting on top of the infrastructure. Joining me for this segment are Aiden O'Brien, who's the general manager of the EMC Big Data Strategic Initiative, and Scott Jones, Global VP of Big Data for CapChem and I. Gentlemen. Well, Steve Jones. Steve Jones, I'm sorry about that. Ah, boy. As long as you've got on the brain, we keep having the next interview, Scott. Some too many of these, so. Thank you, Steve. You know, the thing about live TV is we just keep rolling with it. Excellent. So Aiden, welcome back as a Cube along with Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure. Steve, if you would, tell us a little bit about, you know, your organization inside CapChem and I and your role there. So I'm globally responsible for what we do on Big Data. We've got several hundred people spread in multiple countries from Australia, Brazil, India, China and all around Europe and obviously here in North America. And we made a very real sort of strategic decision a few years ago, which was to be positive in how we approach Big Data with our partners. So not just sitting back and sort of getting a bill of materials and then sort of trying to put that together, but how do we work together in a true partnership to bring the business knowledge we've got, the architecture we've got, and then work together with partners to industrialize that, to get clients to value much, much quicker. All right, so Steve, tell us, you know, how you're engaged with the Federation Big Data Lake, you know, how long you've been working with it? Have you guys, you know, have many customers using it yet or? So, I mean, in terms of the Federation, it was actually two years ago at this event that we first between CapChem and I at the time then just with Pivotal on the concept of a business data lake, which we announced at the end of 2013 and then I think at the start of 2014, we sort of started talking with the broader Federation about how do you take that further and industrialize? So we've had customers before the product was a product and then really about how that engineering's been done and the industrialization and removing the amount of work that we have to do that doesn't add end value to the customers. So all of that engineering that, you know, we had to get a skew and a bill of materials and plugs things in and connect them and put the software and worry about CPUs and stuff like that. You know, that's been for us with the Federation Business Data Lake, the huge bonus because we've done the business data lake, we did it on EMC infrastructure, but then really with Aiden and his team turning that into something that's true value, truly about the business value, not about, you know, the flashing lights and the cabling. So Aiden, you know, I think that two years ago was really when the Federation was announced. Last year was when we started talking about the big data solutions and here we are kind of two years in, where are we kind of, I think the old, you know, storming, norming and, you know, storming, forming and norming, I think, is where we go with it, you know, are we at the full 1.0 version of what this is and you know, talk about how the partners have been helping you with the development of the solution. Yeah, shows you lots of different points there. I mean, I think about where we are now today compared to last year even, you know, we were a pipe dream with a sort of a big slug of seed funding from Jeremy and David last year and now, you know, we've released the first version of the product in March, you know, it's in directed availability now. Huge, huge demand for it. I mean, even sort of, you know, this show, you know, sort of, we've had over 75 client meetings just this week talking about it. So the uptake and the interest is really phenomenal, to be honest. I think in terms of the partners, we're very cognizant, I remember sitting down with the execs in the beginning of last year saying, got to recognize that as much as we would love storage technologies and HDFS to be a control point in the big data space, it's not, you know, it's the business outcome which is absolutely crucial and, you know, thankfully, you know, the execs are very switched on and they got that straight away. And so, as a consequence to be able to achieve that business outcome, we know we need to actually sort of partner, not just with SIs, but also with ISVs as well and we'll speak with Scott afterwards about that. But, you know, CAP in particular have been, you know, phenomenal as a partner because we're aligned in terms of how you actually work in this space, how you bring together data, analytics and applications. And not all of the SIs see it that way but the partnership with CAP has been very natural from day one. Steve, if you look at the, from the customer base, is this, you know, kind of certain industries that are leading the way there or is it really something that can be broadly looked at across all industries? Well, I think, Ancelan, in sort of two ways, is from analytics and the impact of analytics, that's every single sector. We were presenting this week on what we've already done using the Federation Business State Lake in automotive, in oil and gas and taking real business value use cases. You know, how do you understand when somebody is liable to look to buy a new car? So I can reduce churn, I can offer them a better service, I can tune the sale much better to them. In oil and gas, how do I optimize the production of a field? So sector-wise it goes across but I think the more important thing is the second point which is from an engineered solution perspective, how is that appropriate? How does that work? And that's something that's about why these companies aren't Google and Facebook. What I mean by that is they don't have a billion service. Their business isn't delivering technology. Their business is being an oil company, being a retailer, being an automotive. So the less time they spend doing a bunch of hardware engineering and a bunch of deciding on the boxes and the wires and installing the software and configuring it, the better. So I actually think the issue is what's the maturity question? Are we still in IT worrying about our box specs and pieces like that or are we turning it and starting to say it's about the business? And we did a survey together with EMC and Capgemini on the fact, and one of the interesting facts around big data is over a third of big data spend is coming from the business. They want the business outcome. So really we see that as the switch is how is the business able to consume this? Yeah, so Aiden, I'm curious if you can comment because we're here at EMC World. There's lots of people figuring out how to get better utilization out of their storage, out of their storage network. You know, when we walk through the show floor, I mean, still a lot of gear here and there's a lot of software here. So I mean, the hardware still matters, the software still matters. I understand the business outcome. So how do you balance that from an EMC standpoint? So it's one of those where if we look at the size of the typical big data deal, the largest part of it is the infrastructure. You know, there's just without question. You know, all the research is there to back that up. It's just a question of, you know, how do you actually achieve that infrastructure sale or that big data sale? I mean, it's exactly the same as, you know, what happened in the past when we moved from physical infrastructure to, you know, virtualized infrastructure, you know, back in, you know, the early 2000s, being able to have a conversation around virtualization allowed us to sell the infrastructure. Being able now to have a conversation about business outcomes and analytics is what's allowing us to actually sort of pull through the storage and infrastructure products, which are absolutely crucial. I think, you know, to build on that, you know, the work that we've done, which is sort of, you know, the challenge with it is that you've actually got to get a mix of a more standardized infrastructure because the problem in the market is that it's taking companies six to nine months to stand up the environment. Yet at the same time, we needed to provide a solution which is pre-integrated but gives flexibility to customers to choose the analytical technologies they actually need. And that's the magic of really what we've done here. So Steve, I want to get your reaction. I talked to some of the pivotal guys and they said, you know, in the old days we used to say, you know, faster, better, cheaper, kind of pick two. Today, if I can give you faster, faster, faster, it takes care of everything. I'm not sure that most customers are ready for that but I'm curious what you're seeing out there. I think it's not so much that customers are ready for it if you consider the customers to be the business. If you consider customers to be IT departments, yeah. I think there's a challenge of how fast we need to start moving. But if you look at this at a fail fast, this ability to say, and I don't know, it's been a customer recently where we had a project that was scheduled to take sort of six weeks. After two weeks, the analytics, the SaaS actually, we were able to prove that that wouldn't deliver the value they wanted. There's nothing more stunning than seeing a business person's face when you tell them we're stopping the project because you won't get the value. That mentality move of how do I get to the value? Why, how do I have a pre-integrated solution? So all we're doing at Camp Gemini is we're doing the business value. What Aiden and these guys are doing, what SaaS are doing, what the pivotal guys are doing is doing the engineering underneath so we can be fast, fast, fast. The cheap piece is related to the value. If your cheap is not about just being cheap, it's about being cost effective for the value you deliver. The more value you deliver, the more analytics you can do, the more infrastructure from an EMC perspective that gets solved. All right, so Steve, want to give you the final word. What's your advice to practitioners out there? How should they be approaching this whole big data solution? Well, clearly, you know, from Federation Business Data Lake, but really actually that is the point, is what are your business outcomes? And don't do a technology proof of concept, is my biggest thing, but concentrate on where are the current questions in your business, the decisions that are made, the way if you can get an insight into that decision, what we call insight at the point of action, concentrate on that part and industrialize the rest of it. So you're all about compressing the time to value. So simplify, rationalize, industrialize the infrastructure and put your investment from a people perspective on delivering the new value. All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there. Aiden and Steve, or shall I call you Moses Jones? Thank you so much for stopping by, but we won't call you Scott. Thank you so much. This is Stu Miniman. We will be back with lots more from EMC World. Stay with tune, watch all the playlist.