 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE, it's looking at Engels flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is CJ Desai, who's the president of EMC E-T-D Emerging Technologies Division, one of the main pillars of the future of EMC. Now Dell Technologies, I can all come in together. CJ, great to have you back again this year. Great chat last year and before, thanks for coming on. Of course, happy to be here, it was great. So last year, we had an interview, we really kind of nailed it last year. I mean, basically you're just executing this year. Last year, we talked about the emergence. We didn't really talk cloud-native, but you had the playground to essentially invent the future for EMC. And it was not just like this fantasy land, it was actually stuff you had to get done really fast. And you executed. So a lot of announcements, certainly so much product discussions, deep dives, great stuff. Give us the update. What are the exciting highlights this year you announced this morning on Keynote that you want to highlight to the folks? So John, one thing we said today in last 100 days, we refreshed all of our product lines to a major version. So just to give you a quick synopsis of that is we launched Scale.io 2.0, right? This is our software-defined block storage. We also finally made DSST available because when we bought the company, it was in a pre-alpha stage. Amazing technology, I talked about it last year, that here is what's coming soon and we finally shipped the product. So we are pretty pleased about it. Isilon 8.0 from Edge to Core to Cloud. Again, major release. Isilon added 1,500 customers in 2015. It is on an amazing growth trajectory. And last but not the least, ECS, Elastic Cloud Storage, is that object storage is doing very well and we shipped 2.x origin of ECS as well. And then the last thing which Chad announced, which was Neutrino, this is a cloud-native platform that allows you to run multi-services that is VMware, Photon, OpenStack, and few others. So, very busy times. And then of course, Nitro. Nitro is a huge announcement, but we haven't shipped that, it's in work, so. That was a secret project that we heard about. That's a secret project. So I talk about the dynamic because I want to highlight the importance of what that all means, really a great accomplishment we just laid out because when you talk about merging, we thought last year like, okay, we got to invent the future and the theme this year is modernizing. And that really is demand. How do I get started today versus some science project or incubating stuff over here? You guys really got down and dirty and said, okay, let's get some working product out the door. What was the focus? What were the internal conversations this year? How did you get that done and where did you pick your priorities and what order? Yeah, so, great questions, lots of questions. I would say, when we look at these products, so I have Isilon on its eighth revision. So that's great. Data Lakes 1.0 2014, now Data Lakes 2.0, we announced Project Nitro. Isilon is on a great trajectory, scale out NAS, we are capturing market share from you know who and we love it. I mean, we always when it scale out and when it say archive type of workload, EDA, media entertainment, I would say we are the only real game in town. When people try to say, we also do scale out and there's some big complicated stuff that comes with those kind of things, it doesn't work. So, Isilon, just from a priority on your question, we just want to execute on Isilon. It is a great product, we shipped 8.0, we allow it to tier it to cloud from Isilon UI. Awesome, right? So, that's some significant functionality. That takes Isilon into the cloud era to get interconnected there. And then, you know, the things then scale out, architecture is always very hard to do when we have so many nodes and clusters, non-disruptive upgrades, rolling back to the previous version, we did BST 10 upgrade, I mean lots of features and having one FS in edge locations where people can use Isilon on a VM, on a commodity server, it just expands our time significantly. But Isilon, you kind of had two white spaces, I'll call them, one was you had the global namespace inside of a data center, you talked about that today, extending that, which is not trivial. You'd be interested offline to understand how you did that. And then the other, of course, was cloud. But we've seen some slides from David, well, first of all, for years, Joe Tucci's been talking about the waves. And today, or yesterday in the analyst session, David Goulden showed some slides, some S-curves, right? Business school, you jump an S-curve. You're the new S-curve, right? And you've got Isilon, DSSD, Viper, ECS, ScaleIO, and now VXRAC, right? We provide the software for VXRAC. But that's the portfolio, right? Isilon is obviously the crown jewel of that, driving most of the revenue. So we're seeing real time jumping the S-curve to your business. That's sort of how you're organized, right? Yeah, and Dave, you know this well, when EMC acquired Isilon five years ago, it was $200-some-billion business. 2015 was billion and a half. I mean, it's just phenomenal growth, double-digit growth, and we are doing very, very well. So on priority, make sure that we can keep the momentum with Isilon on elastic cloud storage, where you have economics much more favorable to public cloud. So, you know, I talked to yesterday an EDA company. They love ECS. They want to, I don't want to use the wrong term. They want to put all the stuff in that has become cold data in ECS. They're like, we are not going to go to public cloud, too complicated, lots of security concerns, and the industry, they cannot do it as much. So ECS was second, and these are not in order. Scale IO, you know, the product was, originally was 1.0, now we are 2.0. What Scale IO is becoming, I use the financial services example, a large, large global financial services is now running Scale IO in production. And my goal with these products is, get real use cases, define real use cases so customers understand, hey, okay, I got it software defined storage and commodity. What did I do with it? Which specific applications I run on it? Is it resilient? Does it have data services? Does it do non-districtive upgrade? Is it secure? What if a disk fails? Can I call EMC? Whatever. So, making sure that these products have right use cases, are deployed, and have happy customers, and then that it continues to. I'm intrigued by the organizational model, if I may, this sort of S-curve, you've got all the sort of steep growth stuff, and you don't break out the size of your business, I don't believe, you just gave us some metrics, but it's meaningful. Yes, this is not emerging as an emerging division with $10 million in revenue. Right, right, it's billions. And so my question is, as it becomes even, more than just meaningful, it becomes substantial part of the company's revenue, what happens? Do you continue to cultivate that, and maybe you can't say, but do you hand it over to Guy, or? First of all, I don't like handing over anything. Ah, I know, there's a good healthy competition going on there. We asked Jeremy, which keynote he liked better? He said he liked today better. Sorry, Guy. So, you know, I would say, that used to be the original model, now we are very on bimodal IT, or however you're going to look at it, and David had the blue side and the green side, and I'm focused on the green side, so we're not into, hey, when ECS matures, let's throw it with primary storage, it doesn't make any sense, right? Keep driving. So, yeah, I am doing unstructured data storage, so which is ECS and Isilon. I'm doing data analytics, which is Isilon and DSSD, and software defined storage, which is scale IO and ECS. So you have like three, you know, the Venn diagram looks like that, SDS, you have data and analytics with Isilon and DSSD, and then of course software defined storage. And you got the native cloud, which is different than the enterprise hybrid cloud, so essentially you could just say, you get the developers, basically. You have more of the DevOps piece, cloud natives. And we have EMC code, I don't know, David and John, if you have seen, those sessions are going fully subscribed. We didn't think so. So last year we had only one session and it was standing room only. This year we did multiple sessions, and it's still standing room only, because this is, how do I have persistent storage for containers? A lot of people have that question, hey, I'm trying out containers, don't know what that means. Microservices. Yeah, microservices. And tell me, CJ, can scale IO support containers? What if it's ECS? So every single code, which is in part of my team, all those sessions are going fully sold out. We released Viper Controller 3.0. We opened sources last time we talked about. Again, the same thing. Very well attended sessions. The message I'm inferring from this event, particularly as it relates to cloud, modernize your existing apps. We'll help you do that. But for the cloud native stuff, you don't have to go anywhere. We can help you with that as well. Business processes, vendor relationships, ecosystem, we have you covered. Because if you say you're doing it yourself, we have all the parts. You can give you all the parts, go party and we'll help you go through that journey. If you want to say you want to turn key appliance, we can do that too. So what Chad covered, Neutrino, if you have an open stack and you said, I just want to make it simple. I want open stack to go and keep running very, very fast. We'll take care of all the behind the scenes stuff. If you say, no, I want to take open stack with scale IO storage for my unstructured ECS storage. We can do that too. Well EMC is acquiring a new persona in the ecosystem through your group. That's the developers, right? It's a developer cloud environment because it's got the dev, as you mentioned, containers. All this stuff around orchestration, automation. This is huge and it's relevant. That's a great validation on the code side. Congratulations. Really highlights the relevance and validation to your group. And John, you know our history where we came from. So like the Verizon guy said today, he said, EMC has software defined. What does that even mean? Is it real? And they tried it out and they looked at public cloud options. They looked at our products and they're now in production. So this is pretty big deal. It's Verizon. It's not like some company that's small or something, it's Verizon. And the other guy on the stage today, I think it was Siemens gentlemen, IOT. And Jeremy interrupted and said, hey, is this real? And so you're seeing a tailwind with IOT, particularly in object, right? Because in object what you have is so many files and if you try to put it on a file construct or even a block construct or something depending on how you, it's very expensive. So at a web scale when you have, once you go north of 50 petabytes, object is the only answer, right? And that's what we are finding out where ECS is. When customers says we continue to grow four petabytes a month or whatever the terms are for IOT, that's when we find that there's- And you guys have the capacity optimized measure, but also you have tooling on top. Herd search, when you get over that scale, there's a lot of issues that need to be resolved. Metadata search, then of course they want encryption, if it's healthcare and all that. So I got a question, but I know Dave wants to jump in because he can give me a- I just want to clarify something on IOT. Is Isilon have a play there with a data lake or is it really, you're seeing the momentum with ECS? It depends on again the size of the IOT implementation. If you have many, many sensors, see the thing with IOT is if you want globally distributed data centers with a single global namespace, ECS is the answer, right? Because it can scale, it can replicate across the van, because that's what objects do. So you don't get the kind of performance that Isilon will give you, but that's what object is. We had a question from the crowd yesterday. I wanted to bring it up. I stated it for you because I knew it would be great for you. DSSD is the latest flash darling, period. How is it doing? And is right scale flash, rack scale flash, a recognized category at this time? That's a good one. All right, I have a feeling you came up with that question, but that's okay. It is, actually I wrote it down. But it came from somebody else. So first of all, it's a new category and new category always people scratch their head first. What does a rack scale flash means and this and that? I want to answer your question. For high performance databases and analytics, we are absolutely seeing the demand, right? And the question customers ask me is 10 million IOPS, dude, what am I going to do with 10 million IOPS, right? So when you really, really have that workload where your IOPS are critical, when you say that latency matters to me for end of the quarter or fraud detection or genomic sequencing, that I want to be able to publish results, that's where it matters. So that's where we are seeing the momentum. We shipped the product in March, it's May. Of course, we got few orders already and customers have purchased it after POC and we have a lot more coming. So we are seeing it's expanding, but I will say high performance databases, genomic sequencing, fraud analytics, real-time analytics. Well, this brings up the whole STS, or defined storage consumption challenge for you, which is there's now a variety of ways to consume the tech. So talk about that dynamic. How has it impacted the product development? How does it impact your view of as you put the portfolio together? It is a tough one. I would be lying to you if I say, hey, I can do it in my sleep. No, what we find is, first of all, STS or software defined X, we find that that initiative usually comes top down. CIO or head of infrastructure will say, 20% of the infrastructure should be on software defined X, networking, compute, storage, whatever. And we find that when they do that, then we get all this request, hey, do you have hyperconverge? What is your STS story? Do you do blog? Do you do file? Do you do object? We don't, you don't go and tell somebody, here is what STS can do for you. That's a tougher sale. It does happen sometimes, but a lot of times in customer environment, we see it coming from top down. Is that driven by replatforming initiatives or re-architecting? It's like, yeah, we have new generation of application. I'll give you a classic example, MongoDB as a service or this new with microservices. We don't want monolithic application infrastructure. We want to do something new. Why would I buy an expensive hardware product from us or somebody else? I want to go start small and grow big. So that's where software defined comes in. Something like DSST on the other end of the spectrum, very fine-tuned hardware with the software, shared storage and customer says, hey, if I buy this product, I can see my ROI clearly because I'll have real-time, my fraud detection on a credit card fraud used to take four hours, now it takes two minutes. And I'm going to reduce false positives, dramatically, yeah. So that's time STS does not come up because it's a whole different way. Well CJ, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I know you had a great keynote this morning. We watched, it was fantastic, great fun, but also you got the great messaging out. I'll give you the final word for the second. Nitro, we didn't talk about nitro. Yeah, let's talk about nitro. We got one minute left. Yes, Icelon, all flesh, no compromises on one FS data services. It's going to be awesome. Really, and what's the ship date on that? 2017. And what's it mean for customers? Because share the meaning of it. Why is it so important? Performance and capacity. So you get a lot of performance and capacity. And like I talked about media and entertainment, John Landau did a phenomenal job today. Or you look at EDA space or healthcare space. This is something they've been asking us for a long, long time. Icelon was always pigeonholed into, this is an archival scale out here. And we want to take it up a notch. I'll give you the last word. Share it with the folks who are watching who may have missed the keynote, or just want to hear from you. What is the message that you were delivering on stage today? What's the core message that they should walk away with from your keynote and your results and product announcements today? EMC is serious about software and software-defined storage. We are serious about open source, as you have seen with Icelon, SDK, Viper Controller and all of that. And we are extremely serious about next-generation flash. So as you modernize your infrastructure, whether it's Icelon, whether it's DSST with flash, we are there for you. All right, CJ, you're the president of the Emerging Technology Division, doing some great things. Here at EMC World 2016, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the history of Dell, personal computers,