 We're here with our good friend Pat Gelsinger, who is president and COO of EMC. Pat, welcome back. Hey, always a pleasure to be in theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. I think last time we were in theCUBE, like David Scott, we just talk and talk. I think it was like 60 minutes is a record, I think, for you. At EMC World. At EMC World, you were just on. It was a great conversation. My first question is, you're walking the hallways, you're super sessions. What's your observation of this year? Obviously massive crowd from last year. What's your take of VMworld this year? Well, I think at the highest level, I mean, this has become the IT show. Right, what show in the industry is more cross-vendor, right, more transformational? I mean, this is the place. If you're an IT guy, even if you're not a virtualization admin or something where you say, I got to be in my name, this is the place to be. And right, the crowd is that way, the industry representation here. And boy, just as EMC and our tight relationship with VMWare. I mean, it's just proud to be part of the show. Hallways are packed, it's like a sea of people. Getting through is challenging. Any observations that surprised you in the show? Anything that popped out of the woodwork that, from a product, trends, technology? Well, you know, obviously, I mean, some of the things that we've been working on closely are exciting to us, you know, like. Not a surprise though. Yeah, those to me are great. You know, like the whole V-Fabric data director, right, area is one that I'm very excited about. Right, I think Steve's keynote this morning really starting to pull together the client offering. Right, in a meaningful way. Right, you know, we've talked about it for a while and now the pieces are really starting to fit together with delivering the applications, the client flexibility. And I think now, right, many of the things around integration of the infrastructure into the virtualized environment. We've been talking about it delivering incremental releases, but now they're really starting to be just very elegant. Right, you know, clean, smooth, integrated. The APIs are there, the, you know, array support behind it, the converged infrastructure. All those pieces are starting to be, you know, really quite complete. Last year we talked about with you on theCUBE in Moscone in San Francisco. It's kind of like an operating system, you know. But Paul laid out, you know. You worked at Intel, he worked at Microsoft, modern era. So it's making some big progress. End user, they call it the end user, that means it was like end user versus, you know, desktop versusization. Where's the, what's coming this year? What's going to happen after this year? What's your vision of next year? Well, I think there really is a defined, you know, we think about VMware, the virtualization layer as the new data center operating system. Right, as Paul showed in the slide, it's tipping over. Right now is the assumed layer of the infrastructure. And now IT is transforming, right? Everybody is viewing it as that layer of infrastructure. It really has become the defining element of the next generation IT center for the future. And to me, that changes everything. It changes what the admins do. It changes how the industry builds their infrastructure. It changes how people run their application environments as well as the next generation application environments. And it really is, you know, we've tipped over now. Is there any areas that you're looking at from an R&D and M&A standpoint to fill in some of the, or fill in some of the white spaces and or add to the momentum? Well, like. I know you can't talk about it, but I mean like areas. I can't tell you everything. What are you talking about, man? So, but you know, obviously we see that there's a lot of work yet to do in the management and security stacks, right? Those are areas that we really do see that we have to automate. We have to really build on things like the vShield architecture in very substantive ways. We also see that the whole data layer, right, is a big layer, right? We're just getting started with virtualizing databases, the mission critical applications, a lot of work to do in that space. And you know, those are some of the key ones that are getting a lot of my attention, getting a lot of Paul's attention currently. Well, the vSphere announcement earlier this summer, right, was next step in that vision, you know, I guess VMware doesn't use it anymore, but the whole software mainframe, you know what we're talking about, right? That's right. You know, guys like me. We're all over 40, so we can use that word. We can use that term, but that's a grand vision and actually it's a good one. So, but I wanted to talk about, you mentioned integration. And you guys have put a lot of effort in integration. I mean, you've made it a priority. As VMware does a much, much better job over the last two years getting out the APIs, particularly around storage and backup. Does that, you know, people talk about storage becoming invisible. Does that limit differentiation from a competitive standpoint? And how do you deal with that? Well, I sort of view it as, you know, I spent my first 30 years of my career, right? Being invisible behind the windows and the Microsoft operating systems. And Intel happened to make a pretty good business out of innovating underneath those APIs and those, you know, those driver interfaces, et cetera. And I see our job very similarly, right, for it and things like VAI or tremendous demonstrations thereof, right? You know, you could say, hey, you know, it's just virtual storage, right? It's just SRM, you know, what's going on? You know, they're doing all the HA and DR, right? The fact of the matter is a lot of that is just better done in the storage infrastructure. So what do we do? Right, we find ways to enable it, right? We have APIs to do it and then we innovate behind those APIs and the race is on, right? And we're finding ways to be better integrated, right? We're finding ways to embrace flash, we're finding ways right to do, right? You know, long distance of emotion, we're finding ways to, you know, get storage transparency and virtualization in those environments. You know, it has opened up a new plateau for innovation. And yes, if in fact we would stand still, we would just disappear behind the virtualization layer, but we're far from that. So that Intel inside metaphor, when you think about, you know, the big data and we had, you know, a number of guests on yesterday talking about the storage as the big problem with big data, but of course it's all commodity devices. Can you take that kind of mindset into the storage world and start solving those problems and make money? I mean, you made the Green Plum acquisition, you're trying a lot of different things there, doing some stuff with MapR. What do you see as the opportunity there and is it big enough to warrant a lot of attention? Oh yeah, we certainly think so. And you know, if we think about it at the highest level, right, you know, compute is now really pretty simple in a VM environment, right? And I'm not trying to trivialize what Intel is doing and what the compute guys are doing, but you know, hey, it's pretty easy to, you know, V-motion around, you know, a few gigabytes of VMs. And you know, with that, we really see that, okay, it really can be moved around, but the storage infrastructure is getting bigger and heavier, right, and that sedimentation of these enormous storage environments is just becoming overwhelming. So today in my keynote, we show this ability to move the VM into the storage fabric, and that's powerful because now we're moving compute, which is fairly easy to move around and moving it into the storage array for the first time. And that just changes the game entirely. And we think those types of innovations, both take the storage environment and say, oh, yes, they're storage, but they can do all these other things as well. They can do Hadoop natively. They can do analytics natively. All those things that are storage-centric with these big, heavy, multi-pedabyte data environments all of a sudden become enabled with virtualization. And that really is a game changer for Mark. We heard, when we were at SAP Sapphire this year, their theme was mobility. And one of the key points in Steve's keynote was mobility and security. You, we quoted you earlier on theCUBE by saying, security's a do-over. So mobility is not surprising because it has phones and smartphones. Where are we in the mobility and then obviously security? Just give us an update on where you think we are in those two areas. Well, I think we've still got a long way to go, right? And in that sense, you know, data mobility is still a very challenging, right? Problem and distance is very expensive, right? Latency is very expensive. So a long way to go, right? We're doing things like, you know, V-Plex and our data mobility products there working closely with, you know, the riverbeds, the silver peaks, right? It's all in the industry, but this is still a big problem, right? Data mobility is, you know, one of the key challenges of cloud, hybrid cloud environments, et cetera. And, you know, frankly, you know, good problems are good. Is it a do-over? Is data mobility a do-over? No, I don't think it's a do-over. It's get started. There's nothing a do-over, right? Well, I mean, the architectures, you know, we hear from some of the open source guys, like saying that we distributed the nodes out, storage nodes out differently. So there's some new ways of thinking about storage architecture. So I'm wondering what your opinion is on that. Yeah, and I think that really sort of emphasizes the point I was making, right? These storage environments are getting so big, so heavy, so large, you can't move them around. So you're either going to find intelligent ways to make them transparent, cash them over distance, or simply, you can't move them, right? You know, you can't back up, right? A 10 or 15 petabyte environment, right? You know, it will take you weeks, right? Just to back it up once. And by the time it's backed up, you start to roll over again. Back it up again. Right, you know, so, right, you know, these types of things demand new technologies, right? And that's just for us a great opportunity to invest, to innovate, to come up with new technologies. And when we solve those problems, we really have changed the nature of the data center architecture. Because now, an IT guy doesn't look at his data centers, he looks at his data center, right? As a collection of those operating transparently, active, active, over distance, plus the services that he's getting from his third party cloud providers as well. That's just an extension of his data center. You know, Pat, I've been watching EMC for a long time and I've always been impressed with the company's ability to transform. I mean, it's becoming, you know, small, in a small way, legendary. But you're a leader, everybody wants a piece of your butt, right? And so, what's the future of the sand? I mean, EMC used to have a big box, the sand was supposed to equalize that, well then now you become the poster child for sand. Now everybody wants to, you know, change the sand. What's the future of the sand and how are you evolving? Well, you know, with things like iSCSI and NAS and now FCOE, right, everybody's declared the death of the sand, right? It's just dead, right? It doesn't exist anymore. And guess what? Still running the pretty good business, baby, right? And right, what we found is, is that, right, customers, it works, it's mature, right? You know, we've gone to eight gigabit, we're going to 16 gigabit, right? You know, it's just a very, very mature and stable environment. The growth rates on NAS and iSCSI, right, are clearly faster, right? FCOE promises to take off in the future. But, you know, frankly, it hasn't changed nearly as fast as people would expect it would. Now, going forward, we've just said, hey, we're going to play them all, right? We're going to play, right, you know, and all of our products, right, will support all network topologies, both file and block over time. And that's simply our strategy going forward. We're going to, you know, take our business and deliver, right, the best-of-class VMAX and value proposition of the Symmetrax product line. We're going to deliver it over file and block, right, over FCOE, right, over native FC, right, or iSCSI as well. We're going to take our value propositions to whatever network topologies people build and no longer review ourselves only as the sand players in the industry. I want to just ask some, just go back and talk about some of the questions we talked about in theCUBE in the past, about culture. You're, in fact, one of my fondest memories of theCUBE was your first interview. You said you smoke an Intel bomb before you go to bed. And that was, you know, about the culture of Intel. And you're now at EMC for some time now. How has the culture changed from that time to your first CUBE to now? Obviously, massive change. You've guys done some great M&A at R&D, completely different company. What's the Pat Gelsinger image of EMC now? Well, as I like to joke, EMC is adapting to Pat and Pat is adapting to EMC, right? And we're really finding a happy medium in it. But we've clearly said, you know, we're going to have technological leadership in every category, right? We're going to have the best and brightest in every category that we're participating in. You know, we're also going to have an environment that is aggressive like the Intel environment, but we're not going to lose some of the qualities like the customer service, right? You know, this maniacal focus on making sure the customer is satisfied, some of those hallmarks of EMC. We're really trying to bring the two together. You know, as one example, right of that, you know, our West Coast acquisitions make them work in the EMC family. When I took the job, I had one staff member in the West Coast. Today, half of my staff is on the West Coast, right? We really are bringing them. You now have a venture fund. EMC is doing investments. You have a venture fund, right? You know, which, you know, is a really, you know, an acceleration and continuation of what we've done. But we said, hey, we have to be, you know, the valley is the place where it's happening, right? We have to have a presence in the startup community in the valley and, you know, really know what's going on and participate more aggressively. Do you get reports from the field and how close are you to the trenches? Because you've got to put your ear to the ground. Because a lot of the signals from these startups, because they're going to potentially maybe be a competitor of EMC or an acquisition target. You've got to get that data. Do you, are you close to that? You get reports from your folks and say, hey, these are the hot startups to watch. Oh yeah. And in fact, we're invested in many of them. Right? How many investments have you made? Can you talk about it? Or we don't talk about that publicly. But, you know, we're very active doing minority investments in these companies. More than one. Less than 10. More than 10. Okay. We're actively invested with these companies. Right? Flash is hot. It's important to us. Right? We're invested in those companies. Right? Some of the other flash D-dub network and VMware centric storage companies. We're invested in some of those companies. You know, we're actively participating either from a potential partnership. You know, maybe it's a downstream acquisition or at a minimum being closer to the heartbeat of the industry. Yeah. That brings up my next question. The competitive advantage. Obviously you have strategy. What's the competitive fire at EMC and you? What's your approach? How do you compete? What's your personal strategy in competing? Well, you know, what we do is, you know, have the same sort of paranoia that Intel became famous for. Right? You know, understand benchmark data. Right? You know, show me the benchmarks. Right? And how do we compare? Right? Versus it predict where the competition is going to be. Right? And how does our roadmap compare to where we think we're going to be? Then measure ourself of what we said we thought they were going to do against what they really did. Right? And my competitive analysis team that we've beefed up and brought in some key players from the industry who said, never let us be surprised. Right? You know, your job is to take a optimistic or a conservative view depending on your perspective of what's happening in the industry and constantly be driving that into our product teams such that we are never in a situation, right? Where they're getting a head up on us that we didn't expect. Yeah. And you're seeing examples of marketplace of companies part of the old school like HP struggling. They're number one in PCs and they're jettisoned in the PC division. So, I mean, is that just a lost focus? Is that just more of a business decision? It's your view on HP. Can you share or are you going to share your opinion on HP's PC troubles or their decision to get out of that? Well, having been very close to the PC business over time, right? You know, it's in a 30 year business cycle. Right? I think in that regard, right? HP has a very fabulous position in that space, right? But the client business is changing, right? And they have to, just like anybody else, move quickly to be in the front of that next wave of technology. For us, right, storage is interesting. It's a great place to be. But we better live in virtual storage. We better be a leader in converged infrastructure. We better be the thought leader in next generation application environments. We better build in a time to build architecture and big data. You build on your base, right? That's your strategy. And if you are not, right, the technology industry is ruthless and relentless, right? If you are not in front of those major waves of technological innovation, right? You will become, you know, one of the driftwood on the shores of the industry. Well, I wonder if we could stay on that for a second in the context of, you mentioned Flash earlier, when EMC announced originally the Flash with the stack drives, I actually wrote a piece saying EMC lands a haymaker. And they said, wow, this is going to change a lot of things. And I feel like project lightning was a little bit of a catch up. Yeah. Is that fair? It's fair. Okay. There's no reason that Fusion IO should have been in the marketplace in front of us and we're catching up. Yeah, okay. So talk about beefing up the competitive analysis team. No surprises. Were you surprised that Flash evolved much, much faster than you perhaps thought? You know, we took a very array-centric view, right? And we are unquestionably the leader in applying Flash in the array, right? Our market share is about two X, our overall storage share in terms of delivering Flash in the array. We're great, right? What we didn't do was say, our business isn't about Flash in the array, right? Our business is about storage, no matter where it might appear, right? In the network or in the customer solution. And that's what we didn't get in front of. And, you know, with project lightning, right? We're underway to catch up to the value proposition they have today. But we're also out to create a different value proposition for Flash in the future, right? With multi-server, right? Support with array affinity, things that we think will give us a very differentiated position in the industries. So expanding the scope of that discussion a little bit. I mean, for 15, 20 years, we've seen function migrate from the host to the array. And now we're seeing it migrate back. Can EMC as a company who actually facilitated a lot of that migration, you know, can it participate and make that an opportunity? How do you do that? Well, like anything, right, you know, it's about being in the front edge of innovation, right? And creating customer value differentiation. So in this case, you know, we think we're barely the first round of Flash on the server, right? You know, we got a long way to go here. The OS's don't take advantage of it. The applications are infant, right? You know, virtualization doesn't do a good job with it, yet there's a lot of work to be done in that regard. And we see this idea of server side coordination with the storage arrays is a very powerful one. And one that we are going to deliver to the marketplace beginning this year that will give a sustained differentiation and move Flash on the server from niche to mainstream. And if we do that, you know, we'll be just fine in this category. We're here inside the queue at Pat Gelsing. You're always insightful. Pat, you're a great guest. We loved having you. I know you're super busy. And we love chatting with you. I mean, we'd go another 30 minutes if we want to. Like always, this is a great place to be. I have a lot of fun here with you guys. And you know, you know, next time we'll mix it up on the next subject. I'm looking forward to it. I like how you can take, I like how you can take on subjects and not be afraid to talk about it. And you're smart, I'm not to say. So thank you very much for your support and keep coming. We watch your open door anytime. Hey, thank you very much. And you know, like always, you know, for the other people that you're going to have on the show here, you know, we respect our competition and we're just out to do a little bit better for our customers. And you know, what a fabulous place to be here at VMworld. Thank you very much. Pat Gelsinger, fierce competitor, great culture at EMC. He's got a little Intel, he's got a little customer focus. And he's candid. We're going to catch up in the areas that we're going to dominate and he's going to invest in that. So thanks for Pat for having having your time coming on theCUBE. Thank you.