 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. We are live in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, with my co-host, Paul Gillan. We're joined by Suresh Satya Murki. He is the Vice President, Marketing Storage Data Protection here at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Suresh. Thank you for having me. So I want to start out by talking about, Dell EMC has one of the broadest portfolio offerings on the market, the broadest. How do you, that's an opportunity and a challenge to communicate that to customers. How do you communicate that to customers without talking over their heads if they're not quite there yet or meeting them where they are? Yeah, so if you take a typical customer, let's take an outside in view, not approach it from the perspective of what marketing wants to tell its customers. You have enterprises typically between three and 5,000 applications, right? And none of the applications behave the same way. Some are performance centric, some are capacity centric, some need a balance of performance and capacity. Some customers want different price points to buy those. And we, as EMC, have taken the approach to make sure that we have a portfolio that helps the different customers with the different workloads and use cases that they need. So our go-to market has been to have a category of products under high-end arrays that meets the needs of mission-critical applications and block storage. Mid-range and unified storage products that helps with file and block and mid-range use cases and unstructured data, which is file and object and scale-out architectures that help with those. We think that classification will more clearly communicate with those customers that, hey, for block-oriented performance workloads, you go here, for unified needs, you go here, and for unstructured data, you go into the other pool of file and object. So that classification kind of helps structure this in the minds of our customers, and that's the approach we're taking. Now, I, as customers, are adopting big data and are increasingly looking at data in terms of tiers, particularly with the data lake concept. Are you having to educate them on how they really have to restructure the way they look at how they store data? Yeah, so big data is increasingly more unstructured data. It's the tweets, it's the weather patterns, it's all of the different things that come together. It's not sitting within your database inside queries and tables, right? So for analyzing big data, the most important thing that you need is a multi-protocol storage system because your data is going to come from multiple sources and you have to be able to ingest the data into the storage system. We have taken the approach of in-place analytics where we don't want the customer to move the data from a primary storage into a separate environment to do the analytics and they're able to do it within infrastructures like Icelon and Elastic Cloud Storage and we support it with the native protocols like HDFS. So analytics and services can be built on top of it to be able to analyze it as well. And we think that's the approach to analytics going forward because the volume of unstructured data is doubling every two years and you have to be able to do in-place analytics. And here's another advantage of in-place analytics. You want to be able to cross-correlate data from multiple sources for it to make sense. So a multi-protocol storage system is the most effective data lake for you to go with. I'm sorry, Rebecca, but explain multi-protocol storage. What's an example of that? So let's take an example for multi-protocol storage. Let's assume that you have file-based workloads. They typically use SMB protocol or CIFS and you want that to be supported. At the same time, you may have applications that are more modern applications that use object storage and REST APIs. The same storage system should be able to support that one as well. And at the same time, you want to analyze the data in there and the analytics and services tools that are out there use HDFS. You want the system to support HDFS as well. So being able to do all of those within one system and not having a single protocol supported system is a key to big data and data lake in the future. Give me a big picture of where we are and where companies are with data and analytics. You were just talking about the explosion of data and how we, companies now need to correlate multiple sources of data to make sense of it. Where are we on the path of this? And does it worry you that we're not further ahead? Yeah, I do think we are still scratching the surface and most companies are still in its infancy in the adoption of analytics in general. But I do think the opportunity is just about to come and I think companies have already begun to see data as an asset. They no longer see data as something they need to manage and keep for records or for regulations. They see data as, hey, in the future, there is going to be a goldmine of information that I'm going to get from this data that I can actually use to make sense. We in marketing use data based on customer behavior and buying patterns to define our campaigns today inside EMC and Dell EMC. We have our own data lake to go do that as well. And we are seeing more and more companies that look at the other companies defining new business models and going towards digital transformation and they're looking at these companies and saying, oh my gosh, I don't want to be left behind and investing in the analytics as well. But that said, it is happening in what I would call a step function. Slow but steady adoption, not stretching too far, not putting all the data in one system to be able to analyze. I think it will happen more rapidly going forward. And I think when it really catches steam, is when they realize that the competitors within the same industry are doing it and they're using that to make better business decisions and helping their bottom lines. That results in revenue is going to drive the behavior of catching up faster. And I think this is the year that's going to happen. The streaming data is the fastest growing part of the data universe right now. What is your position in streaming data? What's your product and then how are you managing to keep up with the demand for capacity and speed? So I don't want to steal the thunder of an announcement that is going to happen tomorrow. So we will have a project that we are going to share tomorrow that talks about how we are going to handle batch and streaming data with resilient storage systems underneath it. In one device? Yes, it is. Cool. Tell us more. Yeah, well I'll have to wait for that for tomorrow. Okay, that's a state secret. That's a state secret. We'll keep that for the preview tomorrow. I'm curious, we've heard so much about changing the way employees get work done and how the innovations that are taking place at a company like Dell EMC are changing the way the way we do our jobs. Have you seen that happening just in your unit within Dell EMC and how it's changing the workload? Absolutely, absolutely. So I do do these meetings like these. We no longer carry big laptops. We carry tablets with us going forward. I don't have a bag or a backpack and you would say five years back when you go into a conference you would be carrying a backpack because you don't need to. You have everything that you need on your phone and your tablet. You have all the applications that you need to access all your work environments. I can approve all my expense reports for my employees while I'm on the move. I get all the alerts through my applications and the entire conference is run out of an app that reminds me when it's time for lunch and breakfast. I think there is a significant change that has happened in how people work over the last five years, primarily because of the mobility enhancements and that is also a function of what is causing big data. The problem we started talking about, right? It is just the proliferation of applications, the proliferation of devices and all the data being generated is being stored and there is value in that data and we are going to find ways to mine those in the future. At this point the intent is more to store those, not to mine those, but at some point people are going to realize, hey, there is value in this. There is value in knowing where Suresh as an individual was at EMC conference. So we know where we can market to him, right? And I think that will happen in the future as well. And that's the way to extract value. Yes. Suresh, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for my co-host Paul Gillan. We will have more from Dell EMC World after this.