 Okay, we are back live inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm here with my co-host Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. This is the end of our time here at EMC World 2012. Dave has been a long run. We've had massive sets of interviews. Amazing week. Mark and I were just talking on Skype. Over 120 guests this week on theCUBE. Combination of a shock and awe here at EMC World and also our trip to go out remote back to San Francisco to capture the H-PACE conference, which was a seminal moment around that industry, first-ever conference. We've had great guests. We've had Pat Gelsinger on here, the CFO of EMC, President of the Division of Consulting Services, Howard Elias, Jeremy Burton, interviewed Joe Tucci. We've interviewed the next CEO of EMC. Presumably, right? If it's true, it's going to come from internally. And I thought, well, let's see, we talked to Pat and he referenced Joe's statement that he's staying on. And Pat said the Beatles are staying together longer. So that was sort of his angle on that. You asked Dave Goulden, what about the GE of technology? Could you be that? And he gave an answer. I asked Howard, what's his dream job? And he said, making customers happy. So I just love the interaction. These guys are very candid. But you know what? There's no arrogance. And I'd say, like I've said earlier today, I think EMC has probably the strongest management team in technology right now. From a pure skill set, experience, execution capabilities, and overall integrity. And if you look at them, any one of those guys, Gelsinger, Elias, Goulden, all could be CEOs in any company. Maybe you've seen CEO of HB or any company that needs help. Those guys are amazing. So EMC's lucky and they got over on the VMware side, you've got Paul Moritz. So I think there's going to be some shakeup going on with VMware, with Moritz getting more deeper. He loves the code, if you've been watching Moritz's signals, he doesn't like the limelight. I mean, I guess he's the CEO technically, but you know, you talk to anyone within VMware, Dave, he's been moving more and more into the, and getting into the technical weeds, because he loves it. And so I think, I'd be curious to see maybe a change there. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, there's some whispers going around about that, but you know, no real concrete information yet. But here's my take on this whole event. EMC continues to out-execute the competition. I mean, that's the bottom line. And they put forth a vision. Howard Elias said it, you guys, the customers tell them, you say what you're going to do and then you do it and you don't over commit, you get it done. And that's what this company's all about. We, you know, they think about VMware. I mean, in a way, you know, when EMC bought VMware, they really weren't sure what to do with it. You know, they were trying to integrate it. It was the Diane Greene tension. And they always seemed to somehow figure it out. I mean, there haven't been like a long list of damaging failures for EMC. I mean, you know, Invista was one product that didn't fly. Okay, and everybody points to that, but it's so irrelevant. I think Goulden really was a really good interview. I'll tell you why. One, we never had him on theCUBE before. Two, we get a chance to meet a guy who's a meat and potatoes manager, managing obviously a really big company in EMC. And he talks about, you know, the three-legged stool for EMC, market share, investment and operating leverage. And you can see that the discipline within EMC is pretty strong. And to your point about not making a lot of colossal mistakes is they don't really put themselves in a position because by balancing those three dimensions of operating philosophy, there's an inherent balance of risk management in there. So no matter what they do, they just can't really hurt themselves as long as they stay disciplined. And he said, the risk is not to invest much to increase the overall market share or operating leverage, but you're stealing from Peter to get the pulse of that. Balance, he mentioned was critical. Also, the other observation from Goulden that I thought was really incredible today was his mention, Dave, of the M&A numbers. We looked at the, he ran the math and said he went back and looked at all his acquisitions. They all were not a lot of revenue. So they weren't buying revenue and those were investments and their entire philosophy was to integrate those investments into their organization for one of those three things. Investment, obviously market share, leadership and leverage. So I mean, and that last point is, so I, it was very intriguing and he has a really great command of EMC's numbers and the internal workings. The one point I would make is that, you know, the VMware acquisition, while it may not be throwing off the preponderance of revenue for EMC of the $20 plus billion that EMC does, the leverage that they get out of VMware is just absolutely phenomenal. And I said it with Chad, when VMware really dealt with that whole storage API problem, the industry has exploded and EMC has been the biggest beneficiary of that because they've done a great job integrating and you know, you're seeing NetApp hit, hit a little speed bump. You know, you got HP going through some issues right now or you know, bogged down with that autonomy acquisition and you know, you saw Dell, Dell had a tough quarter today. You know, IBM continues to do well and it's storage business but it's storage business needs to reinvent itself. So yet now here's EMC and everybody's saying, oh, their products are outdated. They're, you know, they're popping on all cylinders. And then now what do they do? They, you've heard, you know, VNX kick and butt. You know, Symmetrics had a little tough quarter, last quarter, but you know, I have no doubt they'll be coming back strong. I think you're right. They're executing the competition. Then they bring in data domain. They bring in Isilon and those things are throwing off, these are companies that did 1.4 billion in free cash flow last quarter. They have free cash flow machine. Their market cap's over 50 billion. They're growing very rapidly. They're growing faster than the marketplace with what everybody criticizes as an outdated portfolio. Well, guess what? The portfolio's not outdated anymore. And everybody says, well, that's because they bought companies. Well, that's what big companies with cash do. They identify gaps in their portfolio. They fill them, they manage them. You know, Pat said, name a company who's better at doing acquisitions than we are. And I put them right up there with IBM and Oracle. Dave, I got to say, EMC is so well positioned. Watching them transform from an IT only company now to IT plus business solutions and having those conversations. And we heard from Tom Roloff, another president of their division, talk about some of the vertical focused executions with their customers. They have two separate organizations now, territory, geography on IT, but also vertically business line managers force. And they're talking to customers and their mid-language is changing. So that, to me, is where EMC is right now. Moving too quickly, they're moving towards a very credible player in the consultant services business where those conversations are not about speeds and feeds, top of rack, tech, jargon. It's about business conversations. And we brought this up at SAP Sapphire. That's those conversations that are in the C level suite. I need to increase the top line revenue. I want to maintain good operating budget. I don't want to be 70%. I want to take my data warehousing and do it for a third of the price and have more functionality. I mean, there's not a lot to criticize. We heard from some of the users that they're, they didn't like the gooey in certain products and they wished their management systems were integrated better, their infrastructure management. We saw them address some of that today. I think, John, the one challenge that I would point to, Rich Napolitano on yesterday asked him about this. He said, I want to talk about it. That's internal plumbing. We asked Brian Gallagher about it today. He really didn't give the, my opinion was the strong answer about their organization. EMC's organization of essentially high-end, mid-range, and kind of everything else, if you will. I mean, backup is pretty clear, data protection. But even that's somewhat muddled because you got products and data protection, then you got other things that aren't in that group that are data protection related. I think in the next couple of years, John, that EMC is going to have to sort out its organization. I think there's going to be some real challenges it has. And right now it's not problematic for them, but I think increasingly as they start, you know, cross-sharing. Well, Kooledin gave the political answer. Okay, when I asked about the G, it was a loaded question. The loaded question was, where will he take that? Because, you know, and he really gave a really professional answer. Yeah, essentially, let's not get into the tactics of all the corporate governance kind of conversation when the reality it's about the customer. Okay, cool, but throughout scaling the organization has to be discussed. And that is interesting will be a pretext of how they organize. I did really think, I mean, organization is not a trivial issue. I think in companies that organize incorrectly, you know, it's been shown historically in the industry I've had troubles. And I'm not saying EMC's organized incorrectly. I'm not saying it's what they're doing is a mistake. But when you look at Flash and how Flash is permeating the entire portfolio, EMC essentially has Flash everywhere. They got a Flash business unit. They got Flash in the high-end division. They got Flash in the mid-range division. It's everywhere. Let's talk about what we learned this week. So I want to share with you, Dave, what I thought was reading the tea leaves here that might not have been discussed. Well, certainly I have not discussed in the blogs for anyone else because they weren't on the ground for three days. Like, we were. But I want to try to connect the dots from things that are outside that aren't that obvious. First thing is that EMC obviously is more relevant, I just mentioned that. But you saw a lot of acquisitions happening. True Ventures just sold one of their portfolios. You saw the deal with Puppet. And what's interesting is that since EMC bought Pivotal Labs, since Green Plum really kind of pivoted from going after Teradata to being much more of an open, cooler, relevant company with their big data strategy, and Icelon picking up a bigger piece of the load there on the positioning, you saw the company change. They're getting cooler and more relevant. But what's happening, Dave, is that people are realizing that EMC is a gateway for sales. And what EMC is, is a very strong company when it comes to go-to-market. They have an army of consultants, army of sales force. They have a core competency in servicing customers. And we heard from Goulden, their M&A strategies to take companies in that don't have a lot of revenue and make them successful faster using the assets of EMC. I see that happening on the startup community with startups, Puppet, the acquisitions. And I see more business deals coming down. So I will see EMC doing a lot more business partnerships in the ecosystem. So that's something that I'm connecting the dots on. And the other one is that EMC has the leadership and recognizes that they're willing to go into new markets like Hadoop and play in this new data. And I learned from Pat Gelsinger that he sees Red Hat model not working. I thought that was a very interesting observation from Pat Gelsinger, that he said, quote, the Red Hat for Hadoop is not a workable model. So a couple of comments there, John. So first of all, I think EMC has taken a page out of VMware. I mean, VMware is all about, we've heard it for years, that every dollar spent on a VMware license translates into some multiple of ecosystem dollars. It was 15 and it went up to 17. I think somebody said it's up to 19 now. And I think EMC's realizing the leverage that they get, that their big channel play is all around gaining leverage and increasing its breadth and distribution. And second point there is there's a vacuum in terms of partnerships. IBM's vertically integrated with services, HP, Dell, there aren't a lot of alternatives for the partners whereby they're not going to be competing with a large services organization. EMC is a very partner friendly organization right now. It just so happens that EMC's at that right size, they're still growing fast enough because they've done a good job of putting in growth engines. They don't have to go big on services. I would predict after they get over the $100 billion valuation mark and their revenue starts approaching $50 billion, that's when they're maybe going to have to look to get deeper into services. That's what happened with HP. That's what happened with IBM. But right now EMC doesn't have to worry about that. They can grow in that amazing trajectory. Great product portfolio, great work in the ecosystem. I love their M&A strategy. I want to see more from the startups next year. When we come back to the EMC world next year, what I want to talk about and analyze is how well did they extend the business conversation in the marketplace from a solution standpoint? How well did their products get more integrated and deliver more value? And third Dave, I want to hear more about more actual startups, acquisitions, investments, and so on. Yeah, and I'm watching a couple things there, John, for Next Jimmies. You know, they talked a lot about business transformation and that's all about big data. That was a lot of marketing. Most organizations really don't have a handle on what their big data strategy is. I want to see how much EMC can affect that. And the second is this whole converged infrastructure play. EMC and VC, Cisco they put down there, the Gauntlet in 2009, others responded. You saw NetApp with FlexPod doing very well. IBM made three years later its big move into integrated systems. I'm really interested to see how that plays out. And I think EMC's got a good lead there. VC has a good lead. So that's a big, big engine of growth. I think you're going to see them continue to invest in that. And I think it's going to pay off in a big way. Well Dave, this was year three. We kicked the cube off with Mark Risen-Hobbkins and Michael Sean Wright, me and you at EMC World 2009, right? Nine? Nine, 10. 10, 2010, damn. And we're in Boston and that was fun. That was an amazing kickoff. Chowder. We did it, the Chowder post. We had some legal seafood. We had a lot of, it's great, exciting. But what really happened was that started a journey for us. Now, this is our third EMC World, all started here. It's been great, Mark Risen-Hobbkins, now Keyin. We have a full team, Alex Wilcox, and we got another team in San Francisco just kicking it off yesterday. Stu Miniman did a great job. David Floyer, Jeff Kelly, props to them. Chris and Nicole back at the ranch, Art Lindsey dealing with the videos. Hi, everybody. We have David Floyer, Kit. But we want to thank EMC for supporting us over the years, SAP for us over the years, and thanks to all of our spotlight sponsors over the past years, we've really endorsing the format of independent media coverage with the independent analysis. We want to share knowledge, and we're transparent about that. And we want to let the social media sphere take it from there. David's been great. And I want to say thanks for watching everyone and looking forward to EMC World 2013. Bye for now. Okay.