 We're back. Dave Vellante here at Wikibon.org. I'm here with Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. Welcome to the Cube, Mark. Hello. Sorry to be interrupting Ronnie over the back. Yeah, we're interrupting Ronnie. He's talking about waking up every day and going, Woo! I wonder what the woo thing was. I caught the end of it. He's done woo a few times in his life, you know, playing with guys like Jerry Reiss. Let's see if we can have a woo moment. Let's have a woo moment. Right. So, well, this announcement is pretty woo. What do you think? This Satachi announcement? What's your take on it? Actually, I don't know what everyone else has been saying, but my main thing, the main thing that really interests me about this is how they've done the announcement and what this represents for Hitachi. So, I'm not really going to talk about the product. Product's lovely, product's wonderful, lots of great features, but we all know there are elements there that it's kind of a leapfrog in the market. You know, someone else will come out with something bigger, faster, cheaper, eventually. What I think is significant about this, and you tell me too, because you've been around the market a long time, many, many people think that Hitachi has great equipment, great technology, and yet it remains a leader in the market, but not the leader in the market. And I think it's always played this safe, conservative game. And I'm sure people who are listening to us saw some of today's events, drums, things falling over, smoke, and you, once you can make fun of them, it also, and I'll give a more serious aspect to this in just a second, it also signals the fact that they're serious, that they want to play. And to me, it's the marketing element of this that's huge. Just a quick example for me of something. Yeah, please. I was talking to a journalist last week, you know, the way the process goes, we all hear about things. I mean, Hitachi didn't used to tell us anything before it actually happened. And they go, oh, yeah, we're sorry, we forgot to tell you. Read the press release. Big announcements. Yes, exactly. Whereas here, they've done all the work you should do behind the scenes. I was talking to a journalist about this last week preparing their article. And they were saying, you know, I don't like 3D scaling. That's wonderful for Hitachi, because they were talking about it. Now, whether things like that catch on, whether I heard the phrase today, a storage computer, you know, which reminded me of VMware, you know, and the software mainframe, that sort of thing, whether those things catch on or not, it makes them part of the conversation. And I don't know why, but over the years, certainly while I've been following them, Hitachi has almost seemed to be happy to sit behind the curtain and let everyone else fight it out. And if they're going to make, as you know, Hitachi has been doing very well recently, but if they're going to make the moves in the market, then I'm sure they want to grow their business, they've got to grow their base. And you're only going to grow your base by becoming part of the conversation. That's a dangerous combination, you know, great product, you know, if they can combine that with great marketing, and maybe a few more feet in the street, would you expect that they would continue to gain share and maybe could they become a leader or the leader? Absolutely. I mean, again, the this market, the longer you look at it and the longer the terms that you look over, the more it changes. You think it doesn't change, you know, it's like looking at kids, you know, when you see your own kids every day, they don't change. And when you see someone else's kids every six months or six years, why haven't they grown? And that's exactly what could happen here. But they weren't going to do that without an attempt to get a message, get some marketing, get out there and, but you know, rattle the trees a bit. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You see as we all do this industry consolidation, it's probably not likely that Hitachi is going to get taken out anytime soon. Right. But you know, you know, I'm talking about a lot of these startups, you saw it with data domain, we just saw three par, you know, they're going to be, you even hear it with big companies like, like that even EMC, right? Cisco is going to buy EMC. Hitachi is that that one constant, but they've changed a lot over the years, haven't they? So now were you in Japan? I was, yes. Tell us about that trip, because a big cultural aspect of the announcement today. So what was that like? I would say it's fair to say that the Japanese end of the company is where the conservatism comes from. There's a very and that's also why the products tend to be very good. And you know, the Japanese don't tend to rush things out that don't work. And so you see that methodical approach. It's also why if you look at the what Hitachi has done for years, there is a new big announcement. It's pretty regular every five years, roughly speaking. They're not rushing things out 18 months down track, changing everything. They're happy to let one product live its life. So there's a consistency, a methodological method. What's the word I'm looking for? Methodological? That's the one. Definitely. That's lots of You're the brain is supposed to roll off the tongue. Anyway, there's a very clear, careful cadence to what they do. But I'm glad to see for, you know, for our Western palates, I'm glad to see something with a bit more verb come out today makes a real encouraging change. So let's talk a little bit about the industry. You're an industry watcher. What's what's hot these days that you follow? Storage is hot. Storage is sexy. It's storage. I saw that. So I'm very clear what I say. Yeah, totally. Are we ready for the dance? Well, actually, storage is sexy. And the reason it's sexy is because it's high on everyone's list. And therefore, you know, defining sexy as important and of one of interest, because I'm English, we don't do sex. But so you hear all the terms, I'm going to come to that I think are really important because it's all the stuff about virtualization and cloud and so on and so forth and scale out. Yes, that's all very interesting. It's all very important. It's how we do things. But I think there are two things out there that are really significant. One is a general point and one is the technology. The general point is economics. You cannot have a discussion about storage these days without economics and economic value, both from a cost perspective, and from a value perspective, both of those have to come into equations these days. And I just think that's because for decades, we concentrated in storage in it on getting the job done effectively. That didn't necessarily mean efficiently. And I think there's a subtle distinction between those two words effectively mean getting the job done well efficiently adds getting the job done well using the you know, as few resources as you possibly can. So that's one side of the equation. The other technology that's just huge in my view is solid state. I don't mean solid state disk. I mean solid state is a much bigger array of technologies. And it's been for all of us who watch it I actually sold solid state back in the 80s, believe it or not. This is with SDK. Yeah, yeah, right big giant mainframe size boxes that plugged into a mainframe about a megabyte and about a zillion dollars. Great. But it was the same principle then very expensive, very good if you had the right data sets it worked. But the challenge and linking to today that the challenge has been and I think, you know, why SSD is being on the cusp and us Chatterati have all been talking about it for a year or two. It hasn't done that hockey stick yet. It's still seem to be yeah, it's really good at doing certain things. But it's really quite expensive and it's hard to use and it's that hard to use thing that lots of vendors Hitachi included with what they're talking about today are beginning to address by make it something that you don't need to worry about that's part of an automated tiering process. And that leads back to the other thing about the economics that I was talking about and you're seeing it permeate everywhere right not just plugged into the disk drive what you're seeing like Fusion IO doing PCI E and popularizing that and people picking up on that. And do you think that's an either or it's a both? Oh gosh, no, it's a both. And I think the one of things that depresses me as you see people talk about solid state as if it's one thing. Solid state is that's why I was careful not say SSD. Solid state is an array of things. Now, at the end of the day, it's really just expanding all the way down from memory and mainframe memory and sorry, down from the main memory shouldn't say mainframe shows my age, doesn't it? It's okay. Down through the servers. Yeah, a lot of mainframeers in the cube. I'm one myself into the storage itself. And as you say, it comes out whether it's in the server, whether it's as an appliance, whether it is as an SSD. What's intriguing to me is people talk about it all as if it's one thing. And yet they're quite happy to have a hierarchy of other storage. And then what sort of SSD are you going to get? Well, no, it's going to be a whole range. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about Oracle. You're a real sort of new, new kid in the block, right with a new face. I mean, they've been around forever. But you guys have written an ESG about Oracle and the impact that they might have in the business. Are they insane? Brilliant? Both? What's your take on that? Clearly, insanely brilliant would be the answer. Haven't been around the press before. Brilliantly insane. No, I think the question that many people are asking when they bought some, which of course bought storage tech and full disclosure, I used to work for storage tech for many years. So I'm kind of a bit biased when it comes to take. Oracle is selling tech. Wow, who'd a thunk? You know, that really is. I don't need to talk about consolidation. I can't think of a really good analogy for that. But anyway, I think the question when Oracle bought Sun was, you know, were they buying it for software? Were they buying it for hardware? Were they buying it for both? I was actually at Oracle World last week. I think they're serious. They want to be a systems player and you can't be a systems player without hardware. Were you at VMworld as well? Yeah, so different five. No, I wasn't. I was at AMC. Well, they get so confused these days. Oh, yeah, there you go. So we were there. A little different, a lot different vibe from Oracle, open world. I mean, VMworld, I said, was like wood stock and everybody was happy, a lot of love, very open. Oracle was, you know, very close, dominating sort of world revolves around Oracle. You know, here's our box, put it in. Two different philosophies, right? I mean, and of course, now you're seeing EMC go one direction with the open ecosystem Hitachi seems very open, you know, play with everybody in Oracle. Close, dominating. What's your take? Is it kind of Oracle and IBM, you know, going after that vertically integrated stack and everybody else has to compete with the sort of open systems approach or how do you see that shaking out? This is an odd thing to mention first, but something just in terms of the vibe of places. It was interesting. Jack, when he was doing his, you know, he was on here, wasn't he? Red T-shirt? Who to thank? I go to Oracle, there's all my ex-son storage tech colleagues with ties on. Of course, right. I mean, so Oracle, if it wants to be anything, yeah, it probably wants to be IBM. I mean, I don't know. I mean, that's the, that's probably the target that they have. What was the question again? Because I totally forgot. We're just rapping about Oracle, you know, and the open versus closed sort of philosophy and, and, you know, where Hitachi fits in and all that. It's going to be interesting with Oracle because clearly they would like to be closed, but they're going to talk open. And I think many organizations are like that, but they managed to say both things at the same time. We were saying it should be called the Oracle closed world. Yeah, though, and again, another comparison, was that unfair? Well, I put it, it's hard to get out of there, well, because it's so big when you're there. I'd never been before. I mean, the damn thing. It's huge. You're in the bubble. It was impressive. No doubt Oracle or whatever. Yeah, exactly. But here's the thing that's interesting. And I heard a couple of instances that I actually liked. It is hard as a, even though we're in the business, it's hard. Let's say you were just a regular person walking down. You never heard of Oracle. You walk down the street there and it says, you know, five of the top five banks use Oracle and 89 of the top 90, whatever. Yeah, everybody uses Oracle. But it's impressive. It was very impressive. It was nice to hear some of that said in here today. Because again, coming back to that sort of almost corporate shyness that I think Hitachi has represented. They might not realize it because they all work for Hitachi. But those of us who watch the business, they've always been the quieter player. And to hear them, Jack was up saying, you know, and whatever it was, you know, 80% of the Fortune 500 using Hitachi, that sort of thing. That's good to hear. That's the sort of thing that users actually want to know. That's an interesting observation you're making because it used to be really hard for Hitachi to get its customers to stand up on a stage in an announcement like this and tell them we saw Lloyd's banking group up there today talking about how they're, you know, deploying the technology. I think it's because they've used it. It worked as promised and they're happy. You know, I mean, that's a good sign. And so I'm definitely seeing a change in terms of Hitachi and the loyalty and it's around that virtualization platform. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. So ESG did a study in August and it was published and it was one of the pieces of the study was VMware penetration, storage penetration in VMware and EMC came out as the far and away the leader, which doesn't surprise me, right? There was a US based study. I have to clarify that North America and statistically valid. You guys do I think a really good job there. So EMC came out number one in VMware virtualization. Hitachi, on the other hand, is all about storage virtualization, which really isn't EMC's game, right? So is Hitachi sort of the leader in storage virtualization? Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, it's really hard to tell and I'm not trying to duck your question. We had IDC on, they didn't know either. And they should know. They count all this stuff, right? That's their jobs. No, but I think I don't know what they said, but I think the interesting thing and the real way you have to look at it, I'm going to give you a sliding answer and then a real answer. The sliding answer is who knows? And how do you really count that if you're IDC or whoever does the number? He has a licenses, is it revenue? Is it terabytes? But also is it exactly? Is it terabytes? Wow, he's noisy. It's okay. These mics are amazing. So is it the, is it the number of terabytes you're managing? Is it the value that produces for certain companies? Is it the number of sites? Is it the size of sites? Everyone will always find some way they can be the best, you know, biggest, fastest, tallest or whatever in this business. The glib but important thing and, you know, obviously a lot of users are watching this, more than just vendors, hopefully, is to look at what you're actually trying to do. I hate to be really, really twee, but what are you trying to achieve? Which set of applications looks to be best to suit that and what architecture infrastructure you're going to run those on? It's as simple as that. Excellent. Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG, great advice for users. Mark, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you, David. Appreciate your insights.