 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World for SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of EMC World. Three days of nonstop interviews, day two's in the books, 45 interviews, 19 more today. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the sealant from the noise and bring the data to you and share that signal with you. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante. We have Jeremy Burton, the executive vice president of product, operations, and marketing. You were the CMO, now you're running product operations. You're running the whole show here at EMC World. We interviewed you on theCUBE when we was born in 2010, when you just started EMC, what a journey in transformation. Congratulations. It seems like a long time ago, say only three years. So the show gets bigger and bigger, has the Jeremy Burton fingerprints all over it. You and your team have done an exceptional job. The feedback here has been great. Very clear messaging. You've always said, hey, I'm out the messaging, making it very clear, big fonts this year. Bigger impact. Really big fonts. Big fonts on the screens. But people are happy, they're really good with the story, is working, and the feedback has been phenomenal. So give us the update on the show, just some stats and just some things that are happening that are notable. Yeah, well with the show, what we've tried to do over the last few years is, we would always hold a lot of ancillary events and we've tried to roll those all into EMC World. So this year, we've probably got between nine and 10,000 customers and partners here. This is people who actually pay money to attend, so like you guys. But then it's a technical show, right? And so we use the fact that we've got our best technologist here to do our TC conference, that Chad obviously is our leader of the TC's. So there's about 2,500 people here from the TC community and then obviously there's a lot of guys out of R&D and EMC employees who help put on the show. So it all adds up to about, you know, 14 to 15,000. Well, Tucci was talking about on stage how proud he was from how the show evolved from originally a technology show to, now obviously transformative show now. So obviously the tech is important and the messaging's there, so people look at the message saying, great, how do you bridge those two together? Obviously you have to balance that and try to get a clean alignment of EMC, which is now a new transformed company. Going back to 2010, we've seen the transformation as a company, software defined data center, that aligns beautifully with what VMware's doing and where the market's going on software defined storage, all these things and with internet of things that ties in the pivotal acquisition. So, you know, you've got four companies now, Joe Tucci's proud. Now, the messaging, how are you going to get your arms around that? So, I mean, a couple of things in the show, I mean, it still is a technology show and most the attendees here are technical. We do get a lot of IT management types, get that out of the way, throw it out there. We get a lot of IT management types, but by and large it's a technical show and so you've got to keep that car, like 500 technical sessions. I was just upstairs with the EMC proven professional. There's already 1500 people been through certification at the show and there's only a 50% pass rate, which, you know, means that there's 3000 people already taking an exam and, you know, we've got to keep that, right? I think people are justified coming to a show like this for education. It's going to make them more knowledgeable, more valuable to their organization and that really is the justification for coming. At the same time, and I think probably now more than ever, it's more important than ever before that people understand what we're doing, right? We're big, we've got the VMware thing going on. As you said, the pivotal thing going on. We've got, you know, security with RSA and then EMC and I think if folks don't walk away with an understanding of who EMC is and why this makes sense together, then things get really difficult really quickly and by the way, it's not just our customers and our partners, it's our employees as well. I mean, if we can't explain to the company what it is we're doing, and this actually is the best forum for doing it. So all the guys back at work, I mean, we webcast this thing to all the guys back at the office. So it's a forum I actually think to get our employees on the same page and our customers and our partners. So you've got to dumb it down. You've got to keep it simple. You've got to talk, you know, big elephant pictures. It's easy to get stripped up. There's so much to talk about. You could get, you could go into the weeds pretty quickly with all that, all those different elements going on with software and all the different brands and companies, there's a lot of nuances there. So you're up leveling it. And you've done that successfully with cloud means big data was your first, I think big move from what we saw was, okay, let's simplify cloud means big data. How have you expanded that? Because then you're adding more onto it. What did you put on top of that? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that is generating just a tremendous amount of interest is security and in particular, not just security, but the whole area of IT trust. I think most organizations feel like that's one of the biggest impediments to the success of cloud or big data. The security world is, I think, undergoing massive change. And if you want a topic to get access to an executive suite or a boardroom, just go talk about security. And we didn't feel like that element was strong enough in the story. We've got a great asset with RSA. We've been working on a product refresh around the security analytics tools and really building those underlying big data technologies in. And we felt it was the right time to really elevate that component of the story. So Jeremy, a lot of people obviously think of you as the marketing guy. You even sort of in a self-deprecating way on the stage the other day, positioning yourself as the marketing guy. But you're actually very much involved in the product side. I remember my first exposure to that was last November when you presented what was then called Project Born. I think I told you my jaw dropped. Not only because it was you presenting it, but the level of depth and the boldness of the vision. But so I like to start with a why. Why are you doing Viper? Why are you going to the software define? What's the heart of that? Yeah, I mean suddenly the research that we've done suggests that, look over the next four or five years, you're going to get growth in existing or traditional applications. We think they're going to grow maybe 70% over the next, in total over the next four years. But we also see the emergence of a bunch of applications that are architected differently. And we see hyper growth in those applications. So you've got a couple of things going on. There's an existing architecture for the traditional apps and there's new architectures emerging for a lot of these next-gen apps. And we don't believe these next-gen apps are way more kind of attuned to being deployed in a public cloud architected system. Now again, our research that we've done suggests that a large portion of those apps are going to be deployed in private cloud environments but using a different architecture. I'll put another way. I think a lot of companies would love to walk up to Google and say, hey, if I gave you a million bucks, can I buy all of that software that you've written and apply it to my data center so I can run my data center like yours? Why? Because they've got workloads that they just can't go and put out in the public cloud. And nobody's done that to date. And so obviously Amitabh with his background and experience, he's built one of these things. And so I think Viper is the first commercially available software package that is going to allow data centers to adopt this web scale model of data center operations but in their own data center environment. And the nice thing about it, it's going to be the newly architected apps and the existing apps that'll help them manage. That's the nice thing and the hard thing about it is you're going to include all the existing stuff. I think about Oracle Fusion apps and I go, oh my God, the integration there. So a lot of work going on there. Yeah, it's a big project. I mean, Amitabh, but he's used to large scale development. He ran a little thing called Windows, right? And so it is a large project and it's a bold vision but I think we've got the team to pull it off. And I think a lot of the stuff we build ends up kind of leaking out and people see it coming. I think Viper's one of those things that maybe snuck up on one or two of our competitive friends. Well, that's going to change the whole competitive landscape. We can talk about that John, but I know you want to jump in here. Well, I got to ask, because you're the king of messaging because you have a good vision on the marketing side, you understand the products, you got the story right. We have been reported that early. The story's absolutely right on the money and you've introduced some things late in the game, messaging and it's a good flagship for the employees in the marketplace. Earlier yesterday we kind of were riffing on this idea of back in the 80s and 90s when the land era, as Joe Tucci puts it, phase two or whatever, era two, the lower end of the OSI stack was standardized. OSI, I haven't heard that word in a while. And you remember the seven layer model, right? So remember in an early neighbor above TCPIP, it was just kind of a flux. But underneath that was all standardized and that exploded massive wealth around internet working and three comps. They're all born, right? So a lot of wealth was created and great things. So but back then in the vendor community, it was multi-vendor was the messaging. If you're multi-vendor, you work together and that spawned great vendor Olympics, as Dave always says. But now in today's market, it's open in choice and it's kind of fuzzy. How do you put your hands around open in choice? So the question is, how do you get your arms around what is today's version of multi-vendor? Open stack seems to be very interesting out there. It's open source community. So I'm talking about where we're talking yesterday is that open source seems to be now the multi-vendor message. If you're playing in open source and can be open, but not open source, that's the balance. So how do you look at that? Because that's a complex topic. What is open in choice mean? Yeah, I think to me some of this speaks to architecture. I mean, at a very high level, there are some natural seams in the infrastructure. I mean, I think the virtual layer for me is it's a natural seam. It abstracts the hardware and it allows you to run any application on top. And we've really organized the company around these natural seams. You've got EMC information infrastructures as Joe's now kind of ordained it. That's kind of below the virtual layer. And we want to be able to have folks manage storage arrays in a very, very consistent way and by being very public about the interfaces that we use, right? That's number one. Number two then, obviously you've got VMware focused on this virtual layer and then you've got Pivotal, again, there's a natural abstraction for the applications. And so we feel like, okay, it's not like ultimate choice at every level, but if you want to use a different virtual layer or if you want to use different infrastructure, the architecture that we're proposing allows you to do that. I mean, obviously we'd love everyone to buy EMC storage. We're not advocating, go get a healthy blend of third party storage and get on with it. But if you're thinking about your data center and architecture, think of the virtual layer as an abstraction from the infrastructure and think of the applications as an abstraction from the virtual layer. So the multi-vendor was box specific in that era. In the modern era we're in now with software, it's how do you play multi-vendor? I mean, how does that, it's software. The open source, is it? Well, I think you're kind of religious about supportable interfaces, right? I mean, if you want to make those interfaces public, if you want to make them open source, I mean, that's another step as well. I think the difficult thing with open source is knowing exactly where to draw the line because the way the license is written at times, once you hook a little bit in, you kind of fall in. Lock in? Well, yeah. Well, but I mean, we can't have, if every piece of IP that EMC builds falls into open source then we don't have a sustainable business, right? We can't pay engineers then. If everything was free, we can't pay engineers to go solve the next customer problem, right? So there's some intellectual property that we feel is proprietary to us that we want to charge money for, but interfaces should be open. I think TCP, IP, lots of implement, various different implementations, but very common interface to what is above. I think we've got to take that mantra, the interfaces that VMware surfaces, the interfaces that are storage arrays surface that they've got to be standard, they've got to be consistent. And there are models where you can do 100% open source and make money, be a 100% service company, but that's slitting your throat, which makes no sense. But so Amazon has turned the data center, this complexity into an API. You guys are doing the same thing now with your storage vision. Yeah, back to what John was saying actually. So Viper will support the Amazon APIs. Right, right. So, and also, look, we think HTFS is probably going to emerge as the de facto access method. We'll support that. That's not an EMC API, that's an industry one that we will talk so that it keeps the customers option open. But you're basically putting forth the vision where you're saying, okay, we've got all these controllers that you need to buy to, here's an open interface through an API. So that, you're creating a platform and changing the definition of what storage is. Yeah, Viper's definitely a platform plate. It's an architecture and a platform that we think is extensible. Because there will be new storage arrays come along, make no mistake. There are many startups out there. And I think Andy Brown put it really eloquently with, from UBS, they track 132 different storage vendors. He's going to bring new storage vendors into their architecture. And he wants to be able to provision them and manage them in a very consistent way. Yeah, so that notion of platform, as I say, I think changes the way people consume and program to storage. And there are a lot of companies that could create either a de facto or some other standard. I mean, you've got EMC, IBM, HP going to OpenStack, and you've got NetApp, who's in the mix, and do they have the juice to actually create a platform? EMC clearly does, but you've got a tremendous amount of work to change between now and sort of getting there. It's easy, but it's done. We did the announcement. We got to deliver the product. You did a good job at that. That's not so easy all the time. It's maybe easy for you, but nonetheless, David Goulden says, well, we've got 70% of the market to get to. Is this how you plan on getting to the other 70% or 30%? Yeah, it certainly, I mean, again, our size 20 billion were certainly not as big as the IBMs and HPs of this world, but we've got to open up new doors and new avenues to revenue. And I think embracing third-party storage, commodity storage, it might not have the same margin structure as our current business, but it's growth. And I think if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it, and we're going to be playing defense instead of playing offense. Again, the thing I like about EMC right now is, I mean, Viper is a very offensive move. Yeah, there's some risk, because I think some of our existing business, you know, it'll be a counterpoint too. But again, if we don't do it, somebody else will. And so I'd much rather be driving that train than following it. Well, and you say your margin's starting, but the gross margins will be substantially higher, but you obviously have volume to make that from. I mean, margins are very interesting, right? Because there's kind of margin percentage, and then there's margin dollars, right? And if you don't have any margin dollars, the percentages are relevant, right? So I mean, we care about margin dollars badly. Hey, if the percentage is a bit less, then it will accept it if we can capture the opportunity. It's a mathematical calculation that comes out of the business model. So Jeremy, obviously, we always use the phrase on the cube, the sizzle and the steak, the barbecue, you guys have all the sizzle, got the messaging right, the stories, home run. Steak is the products and the operations that you're running. So talk about what you're seeing there, because we had another theme that's come up early in the first two days is the whole solutions market. I mean, we've had Tom Roloff and his team on and amongst others, channel partners. There's a huge amount of trust on the deployment side as people start deploying hybrid clouds. So I want you to comment on how you're aligning out that group, but also on the product side, there's new use cases. So we had Brian Gallagher on Rich Napolitano. What they're seeing is they've got growth in their business. So much for that downward spiral that's happening. So there's new use cases emerging. What are you eyeing right now in the marketplace? Because you are watching the store, you're watching the trend lines. New use cases are obviously coming on board. Which ones are you seeing as a slipstream that you're going to ride heavily? Yeah, I mean, and this is not the first time that it's probably been mentioned, but certainly, I mean, a lot of interest around VDI. I mean, I think that wave has been promising for quite some time and it's never kind of hit the beach. But there are certainly signs that that is building. Obviously, you've got very different performance profile and requirements for the VDI use case. And we're also seeing in like test and dev environments, massive database consolidation. Then you've got very random kind of IO and workload patterns and that presents a very different challenge for traditional storage arrays. I mean, we see kind of new use cases almost heading towards high performance computing. I mean, the thirst for IOPS and bandwidth. And I think this is where some of the server flash technologies start to play. I'm pretty fortunate that I've got a guy in my team, John Rose. I think you guys have spoken to him. John's been great. He's come in. He's not a storage guy. He's not, he's a systems guy, right? He's very broad. And when you've got a guy like Pat Gelsinger who is a technological brain the size of a planet, when he goes off to VMware, that leaves a gap. And I think someone like John, what we've tried to do with John in the CTO office is pull it much more central to product strategy. Have him understand the use cases. Have a forum with the various different engineering teams so that we can vet out what our strategy is going to be and then lock and load on what the way forward is. And that helps in the go to market later. On organic and M&A both? Yeah, in both. In both. And I think one of the healthiest thing about EMC is the attitude towards M&A. You know, we almost look at organic and inorganic development through the same lens. It's another way of achieving the same goal. You know, I mean Viper, very, I mean, organic development. Say, you know, EMC is a big company. Do we innovate Viper, you know, all organic? But then, look, we're acutely aware there's going to be people outside the company that are going to do a better job in certain areas. And we've got to use our balance sheet to get access. But John's played a good role because, you know, we've got a broad portfolio. Not all of that portfolio is relevant to every solution. Not all of it is relevant to VDI. Not all of it is relevant to database consolidation. And so my job for probably the next, you know, 18 to 24 months is try and get a lot of focus around SAP solutions, Microsoft solutions, VMware solutions, Oracle solutions, solutions that we're going to go sell to service providers. And can we pull a thread across the company and have all of our different teams? Tom Roloff's services organization, the marketing organization, the sales organization, to really get after those solution areas. The foundation of EMC seems to be settling in. You start to look at that. And, you know, Dave and I always speculate on theCUBE every year about, you know, the future of EMC, who's going to take over, Tucci, who's going to do this, but one of the comments we've always talked about was, even going back the past two years is, look at the bench of talent that EMC has. At the time, you yourself, Gelsinger, Moritz, Tucci, Goulden, it's like, wow, we got all those guys in one group. That's, you got heavy hitters all there. Now it's settling in nicely. You got Moritz with Pivotal, Gelsinger is at VMware, you and Goulden, the team, John, and, you know, the Microsoft guys, I'm a lot of them. I don't think Bill Scanlon running sales is one of the best guys I've ever seen. So take us through that transformation within EMC, just over the past 12 months with Pat going to VMware, with Paul, got a clean canvas to paint the future of the data management in Pivotal. How's that all shaking out? I mean, it's settling in, so we kind of know what it is. But how do you see it evolving from a product, from an EMC out perspective? Yeah, I think this is where, you know, Joe does, it works his magic, right? I mean, he, you know, he's, he can bring the right personalities in, he can blend those personalities into a team and figure out, you know, who the best person is for the particular job at a point in time. And I have to say, I think, although there's been a lot of change internally, we've not missed a beat and it's different. But, you know, I think different is good. And I think when things are different, it, you know, I think personally for myself, I mean, I always do my best work when I'm outside my comfort zone doing something different. And I think, you know, Pop Palmer, it's probably the same way, right? Fresh challenge, small company, hey, take it from where it is today and be the next VMware. You know, Pat, going into his first CEO role, I mean, he's going to be invigorated. So the change has been a positive. And then we brought in new folks like John Rose from the outside to help really be the guiding light on the product strategy side of things. And look, I picked up a bit more responsibility along the way. So, and what we're trying to do and- You're scaling the team. Yeah, we're scaling the team. And also, as a big company, you know, a lot of big companies, they make the mistake of trying to be small. Like, oh, we're too big and we've got to break the company up. And I feel like the success for a big company is proportional to how many of the pieces you can align. So if we've got a handful of solution areas and we can align the entire company, sales services, marketing and R&D behind that, then we can beat most people. Because a lot of big companies, and I think there's some pretty good examples out there, they've not been able to get out of the way themselves to capitalize on the opportunity. And I don't see that, you know, within EMC. Dave and I always talk about, you know, how companies grow, you ratchet up one group or this group where you clean this room then you move to the next room. So, so obviously you guys have done a good job of VM where it's settling in, Pivotal's clear, clear mandates, EMC's got this. What within EMC do you see that's going to be the next kind of ratchet area that you want to ratchet up? Is it the services and the solution side? Obviously, you know, here on Stahl Base is huge. You're all buying more and more drives. And so now IBM is a real big services business. You guys are expanding that area. You got R&D. What's next? Products, I mean 2014 is a big product. It is. And look, I think what's very clear about this is we're only in the services business because a lot of our customers expect us to, you know, install and advise them on our products. When we also partner with a lot of the big six, our intent is not to be a big SI. So you're going to see the primary focus be on the product side of things. I mean, look, I think all flash arrays are going to be big. We've got Extreme I.O. coming later this year. The early reaction from the customer base has been fantastic. That's a big deal. I loved Rich Napolitano's pitch earlier today. The fact that he dragged a bunch of guys out of his labs. There's some amazing stuff coming in in VNX. Guy Churchwood, another fellow Brit. He's a funny guy and he's doing some pretty amazing things in the world of backup. So that's exciting. On the go-to-market side though, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. We've got to go from selling product to selling more of a solution. And by the way, our channel partners want that as well. And so one of the big transformation areas on the go-to-market is to be more solutions-led versus product-led. And Tucci, Ozzie wants that technology. So you're clear. Channels there, no channel conflict, have that solid and lead with the products. Yeah, I mean, from where we invest and what do we think first about, it's we've got to have new technology to solve the new customer problems that we're seeing in their environments. We have a few short minutes. I just want to kind of, while you're in the cube here, just kind of riff and we always try to get the magic going here. But, you know, you've been impressive. You like to try new things. You've been a great friend of the cube. I want to give you a shout out while we're here. But also you're pushing the envelope in marketing, right? So you still have your heart in marketing. Also, you know the product is a new area for you. You're doing well there and got that focus. But the future of marketing, you know, we were talking off camera last night about, you know, the publications and the broadcast, there's all the changes going on. You guys have EMC, TV and force. It looks like CNN, obviously we're envious with terms of the production values. And your budget's a little bit bigger than ours. But, you know, what do you see as a future of our, you've always had a great vision of like ours, like go direct to the control, the narrative. You've always said that. What's next? How do you see, what's around the corner for new things that you see enabling EMC? Yeah, I mean there's some things that are going to be very much the same, but there's some things that are just going to be very, very different. I mean, I've got a great guy in my team, Todd Fawcett, that I've worked with for many years. Works on Jonathan Martin's corporate marketing team. And we want the marketing team to be more data driven. And as marketers, that is a very tough pill to swallow because you got a lot of type A's, people like to be busy, we do stuff because we feel like it's the right thing to do and we like to be busy, but letting the data drive the activity, that's what it's all about. And so really, we've got a data science team within marketing. We have about 150 terabytes of data that we analyze. We're trying to build propensity models to better target our marketing campaigns. And marketing, if you go back 10 years, it was much more of an art than a science. I think today, if you're not into the science of marketing, you're going to end up out of a job. Because at the end of the day, marketers are spending somewhere between two and 10% of revenue. And the CFO's got to ask the question, hey, if we spent nothing and I took that, the bottom line, would that have a greater impact on the stock price? So that to me is one big thing that is, and I can see it changing kind of before my eyes. Obviously, social and the video and people's attention, people have got the attention span of goldfishes today, right? And if you're not delivering content in a fresh new way, I mean, part of the kind of infographic feel of the keynotes is people are attuned to consuming information in a different way. And actually, I want to change it all again next year as well. The big screen's great, but I feel like it's at its day. Because the way people consume information, I think is changing and we've got to stay current. But the one thing that I would say is going to be consistent and the same is the message. And I see it time and time again, when companies get that wrong, it's a kiss of death. The message. Yeah. The message, so the clarity of message and what the message is and how it's differentiated. That art and that skill is still going to be precious. And the entertainment side of it, some feedback from I've been seeing on Twitter here is that EMC used to be kind of arrogant, kind of being polite there. But here it's not. They're confident and open and there's a lot of entertaining things here. And some shows, I mean, people want to be entertained. Talk about your vision there because you have some nice stuff here around making it a good experience. Yeah, I think folks coming to the show, yeah, they want to be educated but they want to have a good time. And I think the nice thing about the EMC team in general, I mean, if you can go into the bar, you know, late at night and you can hang with Joe when he said that he wants to shake everybody's hands and it'll take 20 seconds. I think on the casino floor last night he spent most of his time shaking hands. He's waking. But so I think making executives approachable, I mean, that's part of who we are and I think that sets a tone for the show. And then if you go into the exhibit hall there, we've got a lot of different divisions. We don't tell them what to do. We say, look guys, we've got the superhero theme. Be creative within that envelope and do something fun and different. And what I've seen, if you can set the right environment for people and say, look, it's okay to take risks. Creativity is okay. Everybody's got it within them. They just don't often think they can take the risk or they can be creative or they've got to have some brand cop approve something. We don't have any brand cops or people walking around stopping folks being creative. It's encouraged and applauded. Mark Zuckerberg always says break stuff and that how things get done. It's the same philosophy here for you. Jeremy Burden, final word I'll let you get and then we'll break here as we're pushed on time. Just give a quick sound bite on the show, the vibe, the success, the positioning. Yeah, we came here to do one thing really, which is to lay down a foundation around software defined storage. We had a great new product offering to do it. I was very concerned going in because it was so new, people wouldn't understand it. I think people do understand it. It's been the biggest EMC world ever. We've got more of the bloggers and the press and the analysts here than we've ever had. And the asset test is, are people having a good time? And we've still got Bruno Mars to come later. So the big act, I guess, is still to come, but people are having a good time. I'm sure you got a good deal. You always picked the winners first on that deal. That was popular price would have went up had you gotten them a little bit later in the game, right? Jeremy Burton, Executive Vice President of Product Operations and also the CMO, the man behind the re-energized brand, his team doing a great job. This is theCUBE. We are exclusively covering EMC world three days. We're day three. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break.