 Welcome back to EMC World, this is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced instructor suite from those, it's our prime time segment. At the middle of the day we take a break and cover what's going on in the news. I'm John Furrier, my co-host here. Dave Vellante at wikibon.org and this is siliconangle.com. Go there for the reference point for tech innovation. Go to wikibon.org for free research. Dave, what's your take on the big data news here at EMC World? What's your take? Well John, so there's a real tie in between the whole software defined piece and the big data we heard Paul Moritz today laying down the sort of pivotal initiative, the vision to really become the V platform for big fast data applications. So EMC's communicating that to its customers. I think a lot of people in this core community are like, that's interesting, very visionary. I think it's hard for some people to get their hands around but I think it's also very clear that EMC intends to put its stake in the ground. John, we've talked about will there be a red hat of a juke? EMC doesn't want somebody else to run away with that. And obviously big data is a theme in storage. So two things I'm noticing out on the Jo Chiquino was one, security and big data. So obviously they're going to bring analytics and big data to the security paradigm. A lot of news lately about two factor authentication, Twitter being hacked, a lot of hacking going on. So that's a big issue. And the other thing is that we heard from John Rose, the CTO at EMC is that's decoupling and making things highly cohesive and abstracting away the complexity. This is the words of operating system. This is a platform. EMC is building a platform. And that platform is storage and you're going to have a scale out fabric that's going to be storing stuff and hopefully perpetuity. But that's clearly where EMC's going, Dave. They are going open. They're saying we are the new multi-vendor which is open and choice. And that's really the kind of the key thing. Other than that, I think this show is just right on message. Operating system, big data, cloud, mobile, social. Well, let me make a comment about that. So I tell you right now, Joe Tocchi many times talked about open. He said, you're probably sick of me here. Sick of me saying this, but we're open. We're going to give you a choice. And he did say once or twice, there will be no lock-in. Now I'll make an observation. To make money in this business, there's got to be some type of quote unquote lock-in. There's got to be stickiness. And I think EMC's has that. It has that in spades today with its controller-based architectures. And I think software-defined storage and Viper has a degree of lock-in. I think S3, Amazon's web services, has a ton of lock-in. IBM obviously has its lock-in. It's the degree of choice, I think, that EMC's trying to differentiate amongst the competition. Okay, we got Winston here. Edmonds are corresponding out in the field here. Studio B, our check-ins. What are you seeing here? Well, you know, I had a chance to speak with Bill Smarzo about what he does. And, you know, he says that he has the best job in tech. And I tend to believe him. He gets to spend time and what he called going with the journey of helping customers explore how and when to roll out a big data plan. So it was really fascinating, the way he kind of discovers the needs and the insights that can be extrapolated. Well, you're new to the Cube team, so I'll just share with you that Bill Smarzo's the dean of Big Data. He coined that a couple of years ago. He is so enthusiastic, but he's passionate about solving business problems. And he told me on the Cube when we did a check-in here, he said, hey, I'm excited to talk about move from speeds and feeds to solving business problems with business leaders, not about the technology. So, we have a check-in with Bill Smarzo. Take a look at this clip right now and on SiliconANGLE, we'll be right back. But watch this clip and check-in with Bill Smarzo. Here with Bill Smarzo, Studio B wanted to ask a few questions. Walk us through a day in the life of Bill Smarzo. What is it like for you to do your job? So, I like to tell people I have the best job at EMC, which I get to spend all of my time talking to customers, right, working with them and figuring out where and how to start their big data journey. So, my average day is if I'm not actually traveling someplace in exotic locations like Des Moines, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska and Chicago and places like that. So, if I'm not actually traveling and working with customers, I'm actually on the phone many times actually reviewing stuff, reviewing processes, trying to help them figure out where are the right business cases to go after. I like you called it a journey, a big data journey and you've talked about looking for business-led, business opportunity-led IT deployments. Tell us a little bit more about that. So, the challenge that we've seen for the last, I would say the last 18 months is that for a lot of organizations, big data has been nothing but technology. It's almost been a science experiment. And what's happened over the last four or five months is the business has gotten clued on to the fact I have this wealth of data, both structured and unstructured formats. I have the ability to ingest this data in real time and I have some massive analytic capabilities available. I can start teasing insights out of that data. Insights about my customers, my products, my operations that really can help me drive better decisions and even create all new monetization opportunities. What has been some of the aha moments that your customers have when they finally grasp that and really look forward to the journey themselves? So, I think the area that surprises them most is that they're very heavily focused on trying to figure out how do I optimize my existing business processes, which by the way is a great place to start for a lot of organizations. But the aha comes when they start mining all that insights that come out of that process and realizing, oh my gosh, I have all these great insights that I can monetize in new ways through new products, new services, new user experiences, even packaging insights and selling to others. So, that aha moment comes sort of after they started doing this optimization process and realizing that the byproduct is all this insight that's really valued by other parties. How can you kind of try to fast forward to that point? How can you, as you're educating people and businesses, how can you get them to really get to that moment sooner than they are in some cases? Well, it takes a corporate mindset on their part that really is about joining together and driving collaboration between the business side and the IT side. The groups that I've seen successful are the ones that bring both parties to bear. And then we run a series of envisioning exercises with them to help sort of to imagine and rumble what's possible. Because they haven't really thought through, you know, I have all this unstructured data, consumer comments and notes from call centers and email dialogues. And in those unstructured data sources, there are invaluable nuggets that can help them learn more about their customers' interests, passions, affiliations and associations that can impact the way they interact with customers. So the way that we do it is we can really drive collaboration between the business and IT. It's to run these envisioning exercises to really help people to sort of to envision the realm of what's possible. Are there any unique kind of case studies or just big ideas around these business opportunities that where it makes sense for big data that you maybe hasn't been implemented but has just been a really big idea in that realm? Well, I would say we're seeing case studies kind of popping up in two different areas. Number one, companies that are dealing with consumers. So retailers, banks, telco companies, they're the ones who can get a lot of value out of their subscriber and customer behavioral analytics. Understanding what kind of things their customers do, what kind of products take a light, how do they behave in certain situations? So that's a huge wealth of information, not only from a customer engagement perspective, but also from a developing and marketing products perspective. On the B2B side, the business to business side, we're seeing a lot of interest in predictive maintenance. So doing a project with an organization they have wind turbines across the great state of Iowa and they're trying to figure out how do I optimize performance of those turbines and how do I do better predictive analytics? So again, business to business organizations are trying to figure out I have all this censored telemetry data, how do I mine that to really help improve my maintenance predictability and drive better performance of all my operations? Fantastic. Mr. Schmarzo, thanks for stopping by at B2B. Yeah, thanks, thanks guys. Okay, we're back here inside theCUBE. You saw Bill Schmarzo talking about big data. Dave, obviously we've got Pat Gelsinger coming up next on theCUBE, so stay with us here in this prime time. Obviously the news all over the web is about EMC world. In fact, we just got some exclusive footage or post from a response from NetApp, Dave, on their response to EMC. That was interesting. We're going to post that on Silicon Angle. Always good to get the competitive response and quite frankly, we love the point counterpoint on theCUBE and I'm interested to see how that responds well with NetApps saying, what's your take on NetApps response? Well, so Brendan Howe made a statement, basically saying, hey, EMC, welcome to the party. That, you know, ONTAP, you know, there's a capability within ONTAP that is essentially software defined storage. Now, it's a little bit fuzzy. I don't think NetApp packaged it nearly as crisply as EMC has and made a big splash about it, but I will say this about NetApp. I mean, NetApp, you see, go to the airports, you see the ONTAP number one operating system and it is. I mean, that's the greatest strength of NetApp is the waffle architecture and its ability to have sort of a single architecture, single operating system that can do many things for many people. Having said that, that's one of the biggest challenges that NetApp has is how do you make that scale? And so, you know, clustered ONTAP is the answer to that. So I think NetApps always had a set of rich data services, but they still are largely embedded with the controller and I think that's the difference between traditional storage, whether it's EMC, IBM, HP, Etachi, et cetera, and this notion, John, of software-defined storage where you're separating the function from the back-end storage. I think NetApp actually has an opportunity that more people don't see and my take on NetApp is that I think that they always survive transformations and markets and they've done that, this classic Silicon Valley trait and I think what's interesting about that NetApp is their OpenStack presence was very interesting to me, Dave. I think that as we talk about operating systems, the ONTAP and NetApp elements could fit well into this build-your-own, make it part of an ingredient element of an operating system. I don't want to say they're a feature of the operating system but in a way, they are a feature of the operating system. They have that opportunity. So if they play their cards right by integrating in and automating and having that automating capability, if they can get that done, you're going to see this element multi-vendor. So NetApp's not going to be bounced out of accounts. I think they might actually grow with EMC. Well, let me break it down. So first of all, NetApp is the largest independent storage provider left with the obvious exception of EMC but I don't even consider EMC a storage company anymore. I mean, it's so diverse. So NetApp is sort of sitting on this island and it's got a big install base and it obviously popularized filers. Now what happened, John, was essentially they sold a lot of them and when you sell a lot of these NAS boxes, they're hard to manage. So NetApp is trying to bet the company on something called clustered ONTAP. Trying to make scale out clustering work and have been working at it for probably, you know, fast five, six, seven years. So they, as I say, are betting the company on this. It is the key for their survival in my estimation. I've talked to a number of people, David Floyer, you know, guys like Roger Cox over at Gartner. You know, they think it's the real deal but NetApp's obviously got to execute on it. Well, we got Pat Gelsinger coming on, David. That's going to be very interesting to see, Pat. We got to gear up and get our mental energy ready because last time we went the distance and we ran out of questions. So hopefully we'll be in a good mood. Yeah, that has happened. He's like the only guy, John, I've ever seen you run out of questions on. It was all after about 55 minutes, but... He caught me on a bad day, not today though. I got a fricking binder full of notes. Pat Gelsinger, we're going to exhaust his brain. We're going to extract all the signal out of Pat Gelsinger today. Winston, let's get Kato to Winston, our new correspondent out of Dallas, also anchor as well, you'll see him throughout the mix now as part of SiliconANGLE Studio B. Winston, you also are going to be doing this check-in program. We're going to start checking in with folks and we already got some folks we're going to check in. Later today, just drive by the Cube, friends of ours and explain what check-ins are. Well, you know, there's a social element to these conferences and we don't have time to have everyone on the show so I want to get out and really just kind of get into the middle and get into the weeds of what's happening here. What are people seeing? What are they experiencing? What are they feeling? Because, you know, you can quote your scripted lines, but when we show up and we just have a chat with you, I think it's a little more real and we'll get some genuine responses. You know, that's exactly it. The check-in really is a social element. You know, Foursquare, Pioneer, the check-in, you know, you check into a place, become the mayor of a place, Facebook has check-ins, everyone's got check-ins. But the idea of a check-in, Dave, is to check in with people because, you know, we want to know what's going on. We asked Jonathan Rose, how's your new job? We're checking in. We care about what's going on with the individuals. And that's what it's all about. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We'll be right back with our next guest, Pat Gelsinger. We'll see how long Pat can hang with us. We'll try to get as much time as we can. If you have any questions, go to at Furrier, at DeValante. We'll try to get Pat Gelsinger those pointed questions, but we'll be right back with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, CUBE alum and good friend of ours. We'll be right back with Pat Gelsinger.