 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back live here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're live at the Sands and it is now my pleasure for the first time today to say, my partner Stu Menon, Stu, how you been? Awesome John, great to be talking on theCUBE with you and our great guest. It's been too long, that's for sure. Good to see you again. We're joined by Manavir Das, who is the Senior Vice President and GM of Unstructured Data at Dell EMC. Manavir, thanks for being with us, we appreciate it. It's my pleasure to be here. Let's talk about your world. This exponential growth, this unpredictable growth, all this unstructured data, and now it's worth something, right? Yes, it is. So people are turning out to realize what an asset, what a resource should be called. In fact, it's funny you say asset because the whole theme and tagline for my team is data capital, because I think people are coming to realize that just like you have capital assets in your factories and your people, data is part of the capital of a company now, right? And you really need to turn it into something. So I think it's an exciting time, you know? For my team, we basically work on file and object storage. Isilon has been a market leader for some time. We have an object storage product called ECS and we are the market leader and we have been for some time. But it's a very interesting time because data is growing so greatly now that the leader today can be a nobody five years from now, right? So what I tell my team every day is how are we going to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted so that we can still be the leader five years from now when that exponential growth has continued, right? And so that's what we do every day. We think about what are the ways that on behalf of the customer, the world of unstructured storage is being disrupted and how are we going to be there on the other side with the customer? Yeah, I'm wondering if you could bring us inside the customers because we've been talking about unstructured data I don't know, at least five years. Yeah. You know, data, data everywhere, but how is it changing customers' lives? How is it changing their businesses? Yeah. What's the update from the customer viewpoint on unstructured data? So we have an interesting perspective because our business really grew up working with specific verticals like media and entertainment, life sciences, automotive and we see that there. For example, in the automotive industry, we have a lot of customers who are doing ADACs and so they're basically driving vehicles around capturing videos of a child running across the street of a bicycle on the road and they're bringing all that data back to our storage system so that they can train their software that runs on the car so that when the situation happens in real life the software does the right thing, right? In media and entertainment now with 4K streaming and more and more digitized movies, how do you produce these movies, right? How does Pixar and everybody produce these movies? In life sciences, it's all about genomics. It started in the research domain with genomics and now it's going into hospitals where people want to use genomics to make real-time decisions about what to do for their patients and these are all ways in which these existing industries are really using unstructured data now as their life plan to change their business so it's an interesting change, really. You mentioned, you said, you know, five years from now, we want to make sure that we're the disruptor. Yes. I read a number and I might not get a, by five years out, all data or unstructured data would be 93% of all data. Yes, yes. I mean, so that kind of growth, I mean, when you see that. Yes. Mushroom occurring. Yes. Is that, is that put a little bit of field? Is that put the challenge? It's a great opportunity, right? It's a great opportunity and it's an opportunity, not just for us at Dell EMC, right? It's an opportunity for everybody, the public cloud vendors, startups and our only interest is, let's take the customer to the right place and if we can participate in that in some way, I believe that opportunity is so big that we will be happy with whatever share of it we have as long as the customer gets what they need and I think every customer is going to have some mix of on-premises storage, appliances, software defined storage, storage in the public cloud, right? It'll all sort of come together and I think we have a role to play, right? And if I may, there's really four things we see about how the data is changing, say from now to five years from now, right? The first thing is flash, right? Flash is no longer just for high-end storage. Flash is everywhere in storage. The second thing is the public cloud, right? More and more data going into the public cloud. The third thing is analytics. What is, who is going to pay to store all of this data unless they can actually put it to use, right? And so how do you provide the analytics? And then the fourth thing is archiving because the truth of the matter is when you expand your data at that scale, most of the data is not useful at any point in time. It may be useful tomorrow, but it's not useful for today. So how do you use technologies like object storage to really economically store the bulk of the data, right? So these are the four trends we see. Flash, the public cloud, analytics, and the advent of object, and everything we're doing at Dell EMC with unstructured storage is to embrace these four trends so that we can come out the other side with the customer on these. There was one thing that caught my ear during the keynote this morning. Many things that were stood out, but one of them, I could have sworn Michael said something about Icelon with Google Cloud. And I'm Googling, I'm looking around. Obviously object storage, I think very much in the public cloud, seeing growth elsewhere, but maybe explain what that is and what's going on. This is a new thing we've done with Google. So this is our Icelon file storage is now available for customers of Google in the Google Cloud, right? So for years, our customers have used Icelon on premise because it's really the only solution in the market where you can get a very large file system that performs well, right? You don't have this technology in the public cloud today. And we have all these customers who run their workloads on-prem using Icelon, right? And they're looking to use the compute in the public cloud, but if they don't have Icelon there, they would have to rewrite their application. So we worked out a model with Google where we host our Icelon gear, our physical Icelon clusters in the same place where Google has their cloud and their compute. So now a customer can run their application on the compute VMs of Google Cloud, but they have some millisecond access to an Icelon cluster that is dedicated to them that is right there. So in this way, they can take the journey to the public cloud, but not have to change their application because they still use Icelon, right? So this is the model we came up with. We've just launched it. So that's what Michael was referring to. We're very excited about it, right? I think it's really an opportunity for the customer to embrace the cloud. And the thing I'm trying to tell every customer that we have because we've been on-premises for a long time is, look, I believe in the public cloud. I actually worked on building one of those at Microsoft years ago. And all we want is, we want to help the customers get to the public cloud by giving them the same technology there that they've had on-premise, right? And so I think everybody wins. Yeah, that's exciting. Thank you so much for going through that. Your team is up there in Seattle, so much going on. Are there big customers in beta on this? Is this available now? Give some of this speech. You know, in the cloud terminology, people usually start with what they call a tech preview or an early adopter program. So that's where we're at right now. We have the first customer already running operational on it, and they will be talking about it in some of our breakout sessions as well. So we are in the early adopter program right now, so anybody who's interested can join the early adopter program. It's fully operational, but we're sort of controlling how many customers adopt it first, and then we expand from there. Let's look at the risk side of this with all that data. It's a treasure trove in some respects to a company, but it's also a very alluring target, right? So from a security standpoint, how, what kind of emphasis are you shifting toward that, knowing that you have that much more waterfront to cover? I think it is the key issue really, and so that's why even John in this move to the public cloud that we just talked about, we have not done this as some kind of multi-tenant, shared kind of environment. This is, every customer has a dedicated environment, their Isilon is in a cage. Everybody can't get into that cage and all the security protocols are in place, right? So that's a very important aspect of this. And then whether it's in the cloud or on premise, we're constantly raising the bar on the security protections. How does the data flow internally between the servers in the cluster? Everything's encrypted, authenticated, protected. So I think that is really the key issue going forward. Well, I know it's a challenge, but as you said, it's also an opportunity. Yes. So good luck meeting the challenge. Thank you. Five years from now, we're still talking about you. You'll leave that chart. Hey, how do you like the music, by the way? It's great. It's a little loud. It's a little loud. Thanks for being with us. You're welcome, my pleasure. We'll continue from a floor that's starting to get a little more energy to it. Here, live at the Sands, we are at Dell Technologies World 2018.