 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE at Big Data NYC 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Juan Disco, with support from EMC, Mark Logic and TerraData, with hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Welcome back to Big Data NYC, we're in the Big Apple. My good friend and the friend of theCUBE, Rich Napolitano was here, Rich, it's great to see you. Yeah, good morning. So, first of all, congratulations on just the phenomenal career at EMC. You've recently left the company after, I mean, it was a lot of years there and some great work and I'm sure you got the scars too. You went out and really did some just unbelievable work in the field with the products, particularly, I personally watch what you did with VNX. I mean, you took that thing and you and your team. I mean, obviously you got a lot of great people. And a lot of people called for the death of that. And you really just created amazing platforms and congratulations on all that and how do you feel? No, no, it's great, it was a great experience. EMC is certainly the best company I've ever worked for that I didn't run personally, so there's no question. I mean, Joe Tucci, great leader. I've been very fortunate to have some great mentors in the industry over 30 years and Tucci's the top of the list. He's done a remarkable job in that company, the senior staff, David, Pat, Paul Moritz, my team, my peers, a great company, great culture. Fundamentally, you understand two things. It's all about the customer and it's all about the product. And if you get those two things right, you're doing pretty well. So great experience and some sadness because I love a lot of people, but you know that's my background. I've done a lot of startups and it's time for me to go back into that world. So that's where we're gonna go. You gotta look for the next big thing. The next big thing. I don't know how much you can say about this, but there's a lot of people trying to break EMC up and take VM, but it seems to me that EMC always did a great job of leveraging VMware and driving value for customers. I mean, what can you say about that? Do you have any initial thoughts on that? Yeah, it's hard to really comment. Obviously, a lot of inside baseball and I will say just this, right? Never underestimate Joe Tucci. Just never underestimate him. He sees the industry unlike very few people in the world. And so the opportunity in the marketplace is we transition into this new world with the assets that EMC has to offer a tremendous value proposition in the marketplace. EMC is very well positioned whether it be with Pivotal, VMware, the existing storage business, the security businesses, there's huge value in bringing these together to solve the most complicated problems in the marketplace. And I'm totally confident in that team to really figure it out and continue to grow and develop in the marketplace, especially as we transition into this new era. Yeah, Tucci, unique animal in this business. I mean, really came out of the sales. I know he had a technical background kind of. It was like a program like everybody was back in the day. And then when he came from Wang, there was a lot of skepticism. He's following Mike Rutgers, right? He did some amazing things through the dot-com boom. And Tucci's just taking it to new levels. I mean, I would say the greatest CEO EMC ever had and the CEO of the decade. I mean, it's hard to argue. It's hard to argue. I mean, Joe is certainly unique, but he develops and engenders tremendous camaraderie in the team. I stayed at EMC as long as I did because of Joe. Yeah, so were it. So a lot of us are really wired that way. And it's a great culture and it'll continue on. It's a very solid base to continue to build from. But from my perspective, startups are for me, and it's back into that world. So let's get it to him. It's cool to see you down here at Duke World. I think this is, is this your first time at this show? Yes, my first time at Duke World. Yes, it is. What are your impressions? I'm usually excited. I came here to really understand. I've been, you know, the last six months or so just stepping back and thinking, reading a lot, research papers, the economist talking to 25 or more startups, venture firms, private equity, to really step back and think about what's happening. And I got a lot of validation just walking on the floor and talking to people. I've been talking to potential customers of future technologies, et cetera, either here and my last six months. And there's tremendous validation about something very, very important and profound, which is the new applications in this next platform era. And we're all kind of familiar with platform one, platform two kind of jargon. And as we move forward, I see this transformation really being driven by two fundamental changes, the change of nature of applications, they're scaling out, and the change of the nature of kind of this new data repositories. And those two things are gonna represent, you know, tremendous opportunities in the future. So the validation here was you look at this community that's so passionate about Hadoop and the various abstractions on top of that. And what's happening there in terms of the potential for solving much more complex problems with these new technologies is a major transition point for the marketplace and an opportunity to build some great companies. So, and I'm sure in your observations and your reading and talking to people, you've seen how complicated this is for customers. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of just the things that you've observed? Because you come from a world where essentially you're trying to take complexity out of the situation, put it into a box, let people spend money to save time because they don't have that time. And this world needs that kind of help. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think, you know, I've been talking to a lot of people I know in the industry and some of my mentors over the years, et cetera. And we're in a unique moment because if you think about the four fundamental building blocks of IT is applications, compute, network and storage. We've had a certain architecture associated with that. In platform one, it was very monolithic. They were tightly coupled and companies of that era like Digital where I started my career, they built everything and they sold it to you directly and it was all monolithic. In the era that we're living in now, we kind of went into a best of breed kind of model where the applications became independent from the compute, compute became independent from the network and network became independent from the storage and we've lived in these horizontals and there was a lot of system integration that occurred to create a value proposition for the customer. And now we're facing a time where all of those swim lanes between these architectural building blocks are now blurring. So what is compute? What is the application? What is the network? What is the application? What is storage? What is compute? All of these boundaries between these fundamental building blocks are all shifting around. And it's kind of fascinating, right? Because if you think about a storage subsystem, a lot of the resiliency things now are shifting up into the application. That's very interesting. If you look at NYSERA, NYSERA would say they are a network. So all of these architectural boundaries are shifting around. And so that represents, and so why is that? Because when you look at the use cases of big data applications or mobile or social media, et cetera, if you look at how these applications have been written, this horizontal scaling that's been validated here at the show, why is that? Because what people I think have realized is that the agility associated with these new architectures allows them to deploy much more rapidly, much more cost effectively, enable geographic distribution, enable scaling, enable easy scaling, allow you to more programmatically control your infrastructure based on policy and other things. It's a very rich time in the industry. And so the system companies, like an EMC, to get back to your original point, have that skill set of being able to assemble these things into a solution orientation, which is why fundamentally I think EMC and a lot of these other system companies at the time have a big value proposition to the future. Even though those boundaries are shifting, the people that understand had to make these very complicated systems consumable to the masses. That's a big value proposition, whether 25, 30 years ago or five years from now. So historically infrastructure has to be resilient. It's got all kinds of function in it, particularly related around recovery. And if I infer your comments, a lot of that's going into the application or into some software layer above the infrastructure. So how are the requirements in your view of infrastructure changing and what are going to be some of the critical success factors for winning in infrastructure? Sure, I mean this is a great question. And this is the essence of what I've been studying. I started thinking about things like converged infrastructure several years ago when I was working at EMC because I wanted to understand the implications of these technology transitions on my business. Obviously I ran about a third of the storage business. And so understanding these trends was very important for us to continue to grow VNX and other parts of the business, which as all publicly disclosed are doing quite well. But so what are the requirements in the future? The requirements are coming from these applications. So the real answer to all of these questions, I believe in the future of the infrastructure, actually come from the applications. And so their requirements on scale is fundamental, right? You look at the difference between the rapidity of growth of you name the application, even video games have this property, you know, more and more subscribers. When a bank puts up a service, they can't predict how many people are actually going to use that service. So they need tremendous agility. If you look at things like Hadoop, the nature of Hadoop is that you're sharding out your processing across all of these processor complex. Well that fundamentally changes the nature of the communication in the data center from North-South. I compute on this vertically scaled infrastructure and I give you the answer to your client to I am sharding out these requests across all these processor complexes and my traffic suddenly explodes East-West by orders and orders of magnitude, shifts from North-South to East-West by orders and orders of magnitude. If you look at these applications, suddenly network congestion is a big deal because I have all these different flavors of traffic running over the same kind of network and the network hasn't changed in 20 years. So does it really meet the requirements of the future? How do you scale these applications? If you get, you know, thousands of users to sign up for them, how do you scale them easily? How do you deploy more readily in your infrastructure when you have data centers spoon all over the place? There is not anybody that doesn't want to talk about cloud or how do I geographically distribute my data across geographic areas? So how do we make the experience of deployment geographic distribution? You know, one of the interesting things I learned more about here is this notion of the enterprise data hub and, you know, so imagine if you have this centralized repository where many different kinds of applications are manipulating these data sets and your applications are, you know, composite applications from other applications, but you need to share this resource. Well, the moment you share it, you also have security concerns, right? The moment that you share it, if you have your data depository here in Manhattan, you may want to share it within a data center, right? But you also may want to have DR, say across the river New Jersey or in Brooklyn or in Queens. And so, you know, you want to have agility in terms of your physical location. You might want to have some of it, you know, in-house, you know, internal cloud or external cloud. So how do you build these notions into these modern architectures that were kind of bolt-ons to the existing platform architectures? So, wow, I mean, a lot of things that you've sort of triggered in my brain, mobile really is pushing, is forcing that network to get flatter, but networks aren't flat today. They're really hierarchical and rigid. And then that concept that you laid forth about these swim lanes, I'm envisioning data actually being one of those horizontal transports that people can take advantage of. So people don't want to necessarily muck around with the infrastructure like they used to, right? They want that to be sort of a converged or consolidated, simple. Give me an infrastructure as a service. I don't have to worry about all that complexity. And then let me put some leverage around data and then build applications on top of that. That share that data, which is a new business model. It's critical. You mentioned, yeah, the ability to share data, and we talked about this earlier, is the value of your data goes up as you reuse it. And using it throughout multiple applications, different uses and being able to rapidly spin up new applications when you've got a new idea, new hypothesis. And then to me, one of the really big challenges here is actually that being able to rapidly do that in a way that's easy for the user to get these insights. Correct, I totally agree. When you look at the traditional, so we all grew up, I'm older than most guys, but I grew up in the mini computer era. I did work on some mainframes when I was in college. But the vertically scaled notion that we've been living in in terms of this first very monolithic and then kind of best of breed architectures and client server era, we're really vertically scaled. And so, again, the indications for where I think the future lies in infrastructure is not actually in the infrastructure, it's actually in the application. So why are people writing, especially in this metropolitan area, I spent a lot of time with people that I've known, so I grew up here a long time ago, spending time with people that I've known, everybody's really writing their applications to be horizontally scaled. And so, why is that? It's for all the same reasons we just talked about. It's the agility associated with deployments, the ease of use, it's the modularity, it's the ability to partition the dataset to isolate these things. So how do you build an agile infrastructure to enable these applications in the new era? Which is frankly my focus now. So what does the infrastructure need to look like to enable these requirements to these applications? So what's leading these days? I mean, there's always been an age old discussion, John Furrier and I have it all the time. Is it, what's the gate? Is it the application slowing the infrastructure down? Is the infrastructure slowing the application down? Where are we at today? I see this is what I love about this. In reality, I've been doing the same thing for over 30 years. So when I wake up in the morning, before I look in the mirror, I think of myself as an operating system software guy. Because I started my current deck over 30 years ago in New Hampshire, in Nashville, New Hampshire, in the VMS operating system group. And so these are systems to get to the point, right? These are complicated systems. And there are hardware and software components. There are applications. There are your physical, virtual operating systems. And it's really at the end of the day a system. So the trick is to really understand the system. And then if you approach this from the top down, because I see a lot of companies approach this from the bottom up. Not to pick it on any industry, but how many more flash startups do we need? I know a lot about flash. I probably saw more flash than anybody you know. So, and I know more about how flash fails than probably anybody you know. And we got really good at making sure we protected people from it. But that's such a bottom up orientation. That's not how you're gonna solve these problems. These are system level problems. So once you understand the applications, then you can understand then what the essence of the infrastructure. How do you shape the infrastructure for the future to meet the requirements of these new age applications? Yeah, I want to go down attention with you and just get your opinion because I tend to agree with you. I mean, I can see, I mean, flash, I'm very excited about flash, of course. I mean, how can you not be excited about flash if somebody's followed the storage industry for a long time. But you can see that getting not that interesting down the road. And you know, David Scott said this to me. He said, you know what? I don't see the flash guys, all these startups are getting escape velocity. The way that the virtualization guys were able to because we got lucky, he said, about three par. He said, we just happened to raise a ton of dough before the market crashed. He was well positioned for that. And obviously, you know, he's sharp guys and they did a good job, but you remember how much they struggled before they got bought out by HP. And so, and he's saying, he thinks the flash guys are not going to be able to get there. He used that term escape velocity because EMC's got a solution, HP's got a solution, Oracle's going to have it there. What do you think about that? I think it's actually a good thing. You know, there's a lot of research on this. And you need, especially in a period of this, you need, I think, excess investment. You need excess investment. We don't fund government research and things like we used to. So it's got to come from industry somehow. And so, excess investment actually ensures success because anyone's success is so compelling that, and how did he get there, right? It's a, someone's got to come and say, you know, and how did he get there, right? It's a somewhat, not just a probability game, but you need to have excess investment in an area to be sure you've covered all the cases so you can really discover what you need to discover. So it's really, you know, leveraging venture. And at the end of the day, there'll be a few successes and that's what you need to really kind of get us to the next level. Yeah, okay. So some excess investment is actually a good thing. And that's good. You could argue, is it too much? I don't know. So some excess investment is a healthy and good thing. Let it shake out and if a couple guys emerge as leaders, great, then we'll take us to the next step. The beauty of the American economy. And the Silicon Valley economy. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit. I mean, it's a vortex that you can't compete with, but we're here in New York and New York's got some good VC juice going. We live in Boston and you know, they've always had, it's very strong, obviously, you know, bio and pharma, but the tech business there, in your old neck of the woods up in New Hampshire, there's some things coming back. What's your take on the whole VC world and talking to a lot of folks? Yeah, I mean, the good news is that we're not capital constrained, right? Yeah. So, you know, what I look for are, you know, are there customers and are there engineers? Because it comes back to the two things we talked about earlier, which is, you know, there's truth in two places, right? In a company, in a technology company, in front of the customer and in the engineering lab. But that's where there's truth. Everything else is some of the form of information. And so, you know, if you have great engineers and we have tremendous system-oriented engineers in the East Coast, just tremendous, you know, you look at that DNA pool, it's a very, very rich DNA pool. The challenge has been actually, the East Coast guys tend to sell out. Right. That's the challenge. And so they sell out to West Coast companies and because there's a bigger go-to-market, whatever. But that's the pattern over the years. So the talents here, for my Sundays, when I analyzed the market in the US, when I ran USLs for Sun back in the heyday when we were growing, 70% of the revenue is east of the Mississippi. So why shouldn't you be able to build great companies in the East Coast? You should. Well, that's why I'm so excited that you actually popped out at EMC and are doing, you know, looking around for your next big thing. But EMC sucked up a lot of talent. You know, a lot of that's talent. That's true. But there's a lot more. There's a lot more. I mean, you know, you look at the telco, you look at the old operating system groups, you look at the software companies that are there. There are companies that are moving from the West Coast to the East Coast now. Well, because it's too expensive to get talent. Google, Amazon, Rumor Hazard Arista is going to move to the East Coast. So, you know, we see this migration because there's talent here. We have tremendous universities in the East Coast and we have a lot of customers. So those are the two fundamental ingredients. So in thinking about your next big thing, what are the sort of characteristics of that next big thing that you're after? Maybe you could describe that. Yeah, so I think, you know, what I'm thinking about is, you know, you look at how people want to use IT in the future. And I'm kind of in these three loose buckets. I think about cloud and distributed data centers. It's just being how people will think about infrastructure, whether it's on-prem or off-prem. So kind of cloud and distributed data centers is just one vector of the future, you know, platform three orientation. The next is this idea that, again, I came here to try to validate and I think we have validated is, you know, the horizontal scaling of these applications, whether it be big data apps like Adoop or just, you know, multi-tenant applications where you have a lot of applications or virtualized environments where you have a lot of VMs, they really all have the same property, which is they're scaling horizontally and they're sharing common resources. So you have cloud distributed data center, horizontally scaled applications, big data, and then you have just these requirements to build an infrastructure that's just more agile. You know, I think about these kind of vertically scaled infrastructures and I think often I'll look outside, see these things I have time to ponder now, right? And so I spent 30 years in New Hampshire and so I've seen a lot of trees in forest and I think, you know, if you look at a tree, it's very interesting, right? Tree has all these leaves and branches and you have these leaves and it has this trunk. And the beautiful thing about a tree is that, you know, every year it grows a new ring. And why is that? Because every year it has more branches and leaves and it's totally in proportion. And when you're growing at the rate of a tree, you can have a vertically scaled architecture. But in this new world, you just can't have that architecture. It's too rigid. If I'm growing one ring a year, that's fine. But if I'm doubling my number of customers on mobile, on big data, et cetera, I need a different architecture and that's what I'm thinking about. Well, you're a world-class executive and see the forest through the trees. I'm really excited to watch the next phase of your career. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's really a pleasure having you. All right, good to see you. Take care. All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Big Data NYC. This is theCUBE. Right back. Thanks a lot. That was.