 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Okay, welcome back everyone. Here live in Las Vegas for EMC World 2014. This is The Cube, this is our flagship program. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. Our next guest is Cube alumni president of EMC's mid-range and enterprise systems. Brian Gallagher, welcome back to The Cube. Great to see you. Thanks for having me back, I appreciate it. Yeah, you've been very actively socially on Twitter. You follow our accounts going up. You're still not an authorized account. We got to go talk to Twitter about that. You had the keynote. But now you now have taken on more under your wing at EMC. So first, let's get that out of the way and explain to the folks kind of what the new organization looks like, what you have taken on, and your charter. Yeah, great question. So when we look at the two products, VMAX and VNX, clearly number one in their market, in the respective markets that they serve. And by a wide margin in the high end, VMAX has been the leader for years and years and years and VNX has been the undisputed leader in the mid-tier market as well. Both of these systems have been built and purpose built for the market that they serve. VMAX and Mission Crit data center for years and VNX, the design center, has always been about price performance, best price performance in the market. And when we put these two divisions together, my strategy and our strategy around that is what I call best of breed, better together. And when we look at the best of breed, we want to preserve the brands in the market. They're very two strong brands, purpose built for the markets that they serve. And we want to maintain that differentiation in the market and we'll continue to invest in that differentiation. When we look at better together, this has been a request from customers around, hey, they are best of breed, but they look like two different products. What are you guys doing to make them work better together in my data center? And we have a ton of overlap in customers. If you look at VMAX customers and VNX customers, VNX has actually got an order of magnitude higher install base than VMAX. But VMAX, if we go into the VMAX accounts, there's, predominantly, there's a lot of VNX as well. So in the areas of better together, what we're driving is a common user experience. What our customers see today is Unisphere, but there's two different versions of Unisphere. You'll start to see those lines blur over time. We're moving to what we call common service level objective management policy. We're working with the Viper team, also on that and getting broad based acceptance at EMC and also outside of EMC on that strategy, where we want to manage application by service level objective with policy-based automation. We're also driving common block and file replication technology and strategies around that. Common cloud integration strategies that you'll see come out from the division. You'll see much more commonality across the board in terms of what we offer to market. Because in the past, what we'd do is we'd innovate. We'd innovate separately and a lot of our customers would say, hey, that's great. But I also have the other product in my data center. What are you doing about that? So it's a combination of things you're doing within your division and things that are Viper related. Is that right? Okay, and so talk a little bit more about Viper. I've asked the question a number of times this week. It's various EMC execs. Is Viper a way to sort of simplify and consolidate the stove pipes? Is it a future of storage or is it both? And many people have said both. What's your take on that? Yeah, so there's two components of Viper, the Viper data services and Viper controller. When we look at Viper data services, there's the access data services around block, file, HDFS and object. And then there's advanced data services around data protection and availability. And our strategy is to provide data services, so VMAX, HDFS, we can run Viper HDFS on VMAX or VNX object services. What you'll see is more tight integration of those data services with the platforms. And then for advanced data services like data protection and availability, you already see that with like RecoverPoint. RecoverPoint has been virtualized, Vplex has been virtualized. We're consuming RecoverPoint in the core storage platforms. And you'll also see those services being deployed across other EMC products or non-EMC products or commodity hardware. So at the data layer, it builds out the capability so that we can serve our second platform customers with existing applications around SAP and Oracle, DB2 and SQL and all the applications that we've served for years. And then new applications around object and HDFS that are more emerging in this third platform. Then we look at the Viper controller and when our strategy there is to provide self-service provisioning, reporting and automation and to simplify that for EMC products and to expose the maximum value, we're driving our strategy around lines of service, class of service, getting broad base acceptance of that so that we can provision an outcome of an application, not provision the hardware of an application. So I want gold, I want silver, I want bronze. Fidel Maruzzo talked about that on Monday in her section of our session. And it's to really simplify the practice around data storage and data storage management. So you've been at EMC a long time. The industry has been licking its chops to get into your install base. I think you go back to Mercer Road even. Don't you? Maybe. Okay. So you remember that. I do remember that. And I've been around a long time. So the industry has been licking its chops to get into your install base for a long, long time and many, many attempts have failed. Now you see all these disruptions. You see all this, all flash array stuff coming out, competitors and internal. So talk about what gives you confidence that you can, or what's the strategy? Is it to keep putting those data services out to the marketplace faster and more robust services than anybody else can do? Including maybe even the internal stacks. Talk about that a little bit. So great, great question. For years, for decades, EMC sat a big target on our back. And that target hasn't left. The target's only gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. And you look at a lot of the new entrants into the market, they're all after EMC. And to answer the question simply, there's really two components of it. There's technology and then there's services. And let me talk to the services piece first because we always talk about technology. EMC has by far the best global services capability in the market bar none. And we hear that over and over and over and it took us years to develop best in class, professional services, delivery services, implementation, migration services, and support services. And we have a surround capability that is unparalleled in the industry. And that is a differentiator in our market today. Many times we talk to our large customers, they're like, I really like this startup, EMC. And it's like, okay, but why aren't you buying that? It'd be better if you guys acquired them and you could service them. And so that's a huge differentiator. On the technology side, what we see is that, especially if you listen to a lot of what David Golden talked about on Monday, that we're solving the entire problem. The competition may be solving a facet of that. We're solving the multifaceted problem. And when we look at some of the new emergent players in Flash, we purpose-build our products. Some of our competitors are saying, hey, this move data to compute, don't worry about that because of network latency. Network latencies are so short. The access latency of Flash is longer compared to that. That's not true whatsoever. We've done a lot of work in this space. We know that moving the computational capability of applications, whether they're existing enterprise applications or big data applications, taking out every aspect of latency in certain environments is absolutely critical. So you saw that with DSSD. We've had this comprehensive Flash strategy since we entered and drove the market in 2008. We've continued to build out that Flash strategy. You'll also see moving compute closer to data for even larger amounts of data sets. And we're solving both sides of that equation. So it's a very interesting time in the IT market from a model perspective. And it's also very interesting in terms of a technology perspective as we look at the disruption around Flash, virtualization and leveraging multi-core technology. We had David Goulden on yesterday, Brian, and he was saying that he pays very close attention to your install base metrics. And he said the install base is not declining. Now despite the fact that you might put in a new VMAX and replace two or three SIMs, older DMXs even, but the install base is not declining. If you look at that install base, there's obviously some portion that really doesn't need the full stack. Maybe just needs low latency, we're in all Flash array like Extreme IO or maybe even a competitive product would fit. What percent of your base do you think needs that robust sort of set of services? Is it the vast majority? Is it a huge portion? I wonder if you could help clarify that at all. So let me separate it in the high end and the mid tier. In the high end, most of the market needs the advanced data services not all of them, but a high percentage of the market. And we found that with our 10K product line, right? So when we introduced the 10K, the initial reaction was that's too expensive to be in that segment of the market. That was designed purpose built for reaching a broader audience around the globe and in different vertical segments. And when we deployed that, we saw a high percentage of the 10K customers that went out actually with RecoverPoint. The replication technology that allowed us to replicate whether it was Vmax to Vmax, Vmax to VNX, Vmax to Vplex that virtualized either EMC or non EMC equipment. So we saw the demand was really about getting that level of protection, that level of safety in that segment of the market at a lower price. So that was critical. On the mid tier side, we've seen that the replication requirements are less, but with the VNX E, we saw a surprisingly amount of customers that were requesting advanced data services in the lowest segment of the VNX market. So we do see that when people start to consolidate, they get the benefit, they get the TCO advantage. They're saying, hey, you know what? I got to worry about business continuity. I've got to worry about compliance. You know, I need that capability. So advanced data services. So we have some questions from the crowd chat here. Tim asks, is storage challenge about feature function or price point value? And then he goes on to ask, is flash the answer to everything? Not as apoc, as apoc protectors change. How do you answer the first question, which is the feature function versus price point value? Is it mutually exclusive and integrated? Yeah, you see, I'd say it's a Venn diagram. You see in the center, you know, which would be the predominance of the market. People want features and price, right? Other, you know, at the outside, we do see people that are, you know, predominantly driven by the use case and other people that are buying predominantly on price. The bulk of the market is in the intersection of those two. And it's much like buying a car. You want the best value for the dollar and that value comes in the future. So the crowd father says, this is the crowd father anonymous handle on there, says competition is moving on Brian Gallagher's turf with VMAX and some cases flash. I want us to read the next section. Swim with the fishes if competition takes EMC head on. So that's traditionally been game on. So how are you going to address pure and in particular some going after the install base? I mean, you got, I mean, what's your strategy? How do you answer that? Are you going to carpet bomb, ignore them? At what point do they start stealing your bread at breakfast and it becomes your lunch and then possibly dinner? Yeah, so great question. So again, I think pure is dealing with one facet of the overall component. We've been in the business, you know, for a long time. We understand the requirements of our customers. The need for speed is there. The need for, you know, sleep is also there, right? So people can sleep when they put their applications on VMAX, we've proven that day in and day out and with any technology, there are bumps in the night. You know, if pure can say they don't have any bumps in the night, then bring it on. And what I started off earlier saying, you know, global services at EMC competitive differentiator, we'll put our guys against their guys any day of the week. You know, both from a technology perspective and a service capability. So bringing it on for the competition. Ryan, it's always great to have you on theCUBE. Fine, I'll give you the final word. Explain to the folks out there in your own words, obviously this migration to the third platform or modern era, as we say, you guys say third platform. It's got some serious buzz, there's tectonic shifts. There's a lot happening. Why this year, more than ever, this EMC world is the buzz and excitement and opportunity so on everyone's mind, which in your own words, explain to them what it's all about. Yeah, I think it's really time to value. When you look at what our customers are looking for, they drove cost out of the data center. That was critical to ride through the great recession. Those that were very maniacal on that were able to survive. And what customers are looking for now is how do I derive value? How do I differentiate in my market? And really that's about IT applications, how they can develop new capabilities, new technologies. So the third platform is emerging to solve that problem where I can get to new applications in a much, much shorter period of time. And obviously EMC is driving a lot of that and not just the core component of EMC, but with VMware and Pivotal, providing a more comprehensive solution than just where information lives. It's about virtualizing that, applying agility, flexibility, speed, and simplified application development environments that allow customers to mine the value out of their IT. Brian Gallagher here inside theCUBE. Great to see you, CUBE alumni, now in charge of the big portfolio, a big part of EMC's business with their customers. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight and vision and your affinity towards the competition. Bring it on, love it. This is EMC World. Love watching the transformation. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break live in Las Vegas at theCUBE. We'll be right back.