 brought from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to EMC World Day 2, everybody. This is theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Good friend Guy Churchwood is here, he's the president of EMC's core technology division, the bread and butter of EMC Guy. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Coming off of the keynote, I loved what you guys did up there. It's like you said, you get this, usually you get this tsunami of power points and teleproms, and it's like, okay, that's nice. You guys mixed it up, had a little fun, did some good videos, some great demos, so you put a lot of work into that, it showed. There is, I mean, obviously what this year it's been, I've described it as an embarrassment of riches again, because if you think about it last year, we actually delivered well on EMC World from the core technologies. And I did do this private handshake with CJ, and I'm not sure if you've seen him yet, but you want to ask him. No, yeah, yeah. And I did literally say to him that this year's your year. You know, as in 16, it's going to be his. And I went back to the team and I said, look, 17's going to be great for us, but we need 16 to be great. Like, make some magic happen. And every team basically rallied around and just drove like crazy. And now you have just a fantastic release schedule. And it's so good, if you think about it, in February we announced all flash. You know, you then go into March and we actually announced the DDVE, the Virtual Edition of Data Main. So we didn't need to announce those at EMC World because we had so much that we were announcing. And we actually have a bunch more stuff that we can be announcing after EMC World. So we just had this beautiful execution. And so, yeah, it was really good. And I think part of the keynote, you can stand up there and do the presentations. You know, we mixed it up quite a bit. Obviously we had the cafe or the coffee bar, the barista, and we were visited by, you know, Joe and Michael, which was unexpected. And that was fun, you know. But it enabled us, and the core behind it was, it's not just technology, right? It's actually the people behind it. And one of the things that when we've gone through this merger, as we're through right now with Dell, lots of organizations have been saying, well, they'll slow down, they won't be innovating, they'll be confused about what's happening, people worry or spin inside, they'll be confusion. And, you know, part of this is to really say, no, it's not going to happen. We're done and we're executing. And everything that we showed is going to be shippable or is shippable this quarter. So it sounds like a little healthy internal competition with you and CJ, right? That's a good thing. Yeah, and he literally is my sort of partner in crime, right? So we work exceptionally well together and he's delivering like crazy as well. So it was yesterday, we were both together and we were doing a presentation. And if you look at the execution against it, even Michael, sorry, David's presentation yesterday, he just went through the whole stack. It's across the board. And so it's been fantastic to see both organizations rallying around and just, you know, driving like crazy. I mean, that's always been sort of the heritage of EMC, is getting products from R&D into the pipeline, out into the market, go to market with those. I mean, that pace hasn't slowed down at all. I remember mega launch in the earlys, probably before you were here, but you remember mega launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like a truck probably. But that pace has continued and that's sort of fundamental to EMC's culture. And it's speeding up, right? So part of it is people describe DevOps, you know, and I look at things like agile development, I do believe that the days of working on something for three years and then having the big reveal are kind of drawing to a close and you really want to make sure that you've got incremental benefits. And I'm a big believer that how you interact personally at home, you know, away from work with technology, greatly impacts the way in which you think in business. And if you kind of think about it, when I'm sitting opposite a CIO, I took a different track to he or she, but they're also of that same genre and they're looking at technology as it's grown up. So for instance, the Apple, you know, and you look at something like an iPad or an iPhone and you have the app store, I look at that every morning to see what applications are updating because I do want to see that iterative change. And if you look at things like Tesla, you know, how they can do a software update and increase the performance of your car, you do start to think to yourself, we want to do that, right? You know, from a business perspective, let's make sure that we can separate hardware from software and we can actually give iterative changes. So for Dunwall was talking about VMAX 3, talking about the all flash array and saying from a software perspective, we're actually ready for inline compression, but we have to make sure that by the time we deliver it at the end of the year, it actually just slots in and up and running. It's interesting you bring up Tesla because, you know, this story was floating around on the internet recently about somebody, I think wrote a blog on it, my Tesla updated like that, my wife's, I won't say the name of that car company, just to be kind, they had to bring it in to get the software update. So you feel like you're Tesla or that other guy or somewhere in between. You know, look, I want to turn around to you and say, we're absolutely Tesla, we're out there and it's absolutely fantastic, it's all great. Now as you know that, I have that level of candor and going, no, we're not there yet. It's definitely a spy to go there, but for instance, Beth Failing was talking about ECDM, the Copy Data Management, and she snuck in at the end of the presentation, a thing called Skyline Analytics, which is a program that we're working on, a project, and that's a crowdsourced heuristics AI. Now, if you go back two or three years ago where Stephen Manley and I were on the stage, we actually presented a thing called Prometheus and it was a demo of the next generation of UI which learns from your environment, crowdsources, figures out what everybody else does and says, you know, I know you've optimized it that way, but we've checked another 15,000 data domains and they do it a different way. And so you could change it. So if you want to hit autopilot, we'll reconfigure yours for that. And so it's a modernized UI. That's actually this Skyline Analytics. We're very, very close now to having that in production and it'll enable somebody to have this beautiful view across their protected index, their systems, their copies, their primary, their backup. And so I think we're nearly there. You know, we're not there, it's not perfect, but I think it's that continued journey. You just need to make sure that we've got people on that track. So the theme all week has been the year of Flash. Obviously, Flash has been around for a long time, but we're reaching that point where you don't have to think about tiering things. You don't have to think about where it goes. What happens when the media becomes essentially a commodity and for customers, like what's really going to change for them now? When you don't think about IO, it's just there. You don't think about that planning, it's just there. So I'm going to be a tiny bit contrarian, right? And I'm not sure if I'm going to be correct on this, but you know, right now we talk about hybrid arrays and we talk about all Flash. You know, we've got the year of all Flash. We've got that because we believe that this is the tipping point. This is a rotational year to actually drive towards it. And I actually do believe that from a primary storage perspective in the data center, there's no reason why you shouldn't be putting an all Flash. However, if you think about hybrid, people basically have two things they drive towards. One is dollop-a-iop and one of them's dollop-a-gig. So in other words, densification and very, very high performance. You can assert that even if we get to Flash, there'll be tiers of Flash because I don't believe there will be a Flash unit, a thing that delivers high performance and also high capacity. And so you'll end up with a tiered AFA approach. You know, so I think that that's what you're going to see moving forward. So I think that the intelligence is to make sure that we can actually produce device or drive agnostic systems that are both scale out, scale up, highly resilient, and have that high performance. But definitely, you know, this is for sure the year of all Flash. We're delivering it across all of our platforms and we do want this to be a pivotal, you know, rotational year on the back of it. Yeah. Talk a little bit, you know, talked about, you know, copy data management. We saw the stuff that was announced yesterday with Rodney Rogers and Berchastream. Where do you guys think about cloud? Is it a tier? How do you talk to cloud about customers about, you know, security around cloud? Yeah, there's a couple of things. I mean, one is you can see cloud as a tier of storage. And so we've got things like the TwinStrada and you'll do, you know, cloud array or cloud boost or cloud pools from Icelon where you're basically saying, I can actually use it as a tier of storage and it's kind of like a dumb static thing that you can bring back and use it as an archive. We've just announced that Data Domain actually has then tearing off the back of it so you can do long-term retention with Data Domain and then push to VirtuStream and that uses the ECS technology behind. So that's where CDNI are locked really tight into that. I look at VirtuStream in the same way as I look at converged infrastructure and again, weird way to look at it. But if you think, I produce components and then we sell them and people buy components and they like that and they put their data sensors together. Increasingly, customers want to buy an outcome and an outcome has two flavors and it's kind of like, if I'm a factory, this should be a form builder. If somebody puts things together, it works better together and then deliver it and there's two forms, cloud and converged. And so on the cloud, I see VirtuStream and or public if they want to go into that route and then on the other side, which is converged infrastructure and that's where VC and that market moves to. So I think that the way you kind of have to look at it is you can use cloud as a tier of storage but that's sort of table stakes and a bit boring because the reality is you've got to say, what does that do for you? If you move to then the idea of a modernized data center to a metadata center and you can separate metadata from where the storage resides, now you can do kind of interesting things. So you can do analytics. You can actually get to a fact that you've got a fabric then of storage. And I think where organizations want to get to is seamless data migration between multiple clouds and on premise to the extent that they can tier and retire based on the application lifecycle. And that's how we're going to start kind of adopting cloud and driving. So putting intelligence into it. So in your keynote, you talked about this notion of technical debt and then you sort of put forth this verbal framework of how people should think about where they should deploy based on, it was basically a time, days parameters. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, and then it really is, is Dave, I mean, I'm not smart but I'm quick at picking up what other people say smart. And so it was so funny. We have that in common, but I think you are smart. I met a customer for lunch and what I said is I said, okay, you got technical debt and everybody has this, every customer has. I've got this thing inherently. I know it's not going to be agile enough for me to go where I need to go to. So therefore I've got to save money there, run it more efficiently. I'm always going to have it. You want it as small as possible and then I want to throw money out somewhere else. And so I had that and I said to him, so how do you do it? And he goes, it's about finance and it's about the application. So I go to the app development team and the app development team convinces me how long the apps can be around. Less than three years goes to the cloud, right? Three to seven years agile infrastructure, SDDC, blocks, racks, rails, bricks, doesn't matter. Something that's easily redeployable. Seven plus years, that's two hardware cycles, deploy on my premise, on my stuff. Now I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's a great construct. And then if you look at it and you say to yourself, no company has all of their applications in the same curve because they fireflies. You've got small, fast applications. You've got long-term ones like an Oracle or an SAP HANA. It'll be a long-term. And then you say, so if I've got that and I've got apps everywhere and I've got parts of cloud and parts in and parts hybrid and parts, that's the world we're going to live in, that dysfunctional world. And therefore you need a meta layer that allows you to say, is what I thought happening happening? That's one that's important. And the other one is you need that mobility, right? So you need a vision and a visibility into it. And that's why each of the products that we have on primary, I want to extend it. They're all about simplification. They're all about integration. They're all about extensions to the cloud. And then you need that viewpoint on the top end. Well, it's a simple framework and one that you can actually, you could overlay a value construct on top of it if you so choose and dig into your cost. And you said something that caught my ear. Your role as R&D folks is to compress, help customers compress that technical debt. You're basically putting that into your product. Yeah, and so if you look at something like VMAX VMAX 3 with the All Flash Edition, and this is, you know, back to that year of All Flash, when you have a bank who turns around and they say, hey, look, I had a standard hybrid array and I went to an All Flash array with Xtreme IO and I got 10 times the capacity per floor tile, then they know that it's going to be cheaper to run that data center and it's easier to administer. And therefore they can throw that money out and then start spending that on a cloud foundry or whatever application. But if they don't do that, they've still got the debt there. So their whole job is to say, I need to get my arms around the technical debt and I need to shrink it down as possible. They need a company to rely on with that and then wherever they throw the money out to, they actually want to follow that through. And that's so my job from core technologies is to help customers harness that, shrink that down and then start doing the transitions because I've got a client base to move. You know, that's the core technologies. And if you think of CJ, so a lot of what CJ does is the blue sky stuff. And so his idea, his thing is really come up with that creativity at that far end as well. So little known fact, probably 70% of my resources are actually working on products that you can't even buy today. So that's why I'm still emerging. But the reality is us taking the clients that we think about today and pushing them through this journey at their pace. Yeah, the big part of compressing that technical debt is automation, attacking that IT labor problem, which there's a lot of IT labor focused on your core portfolio managing that today. And you're directly attacking that with R&D. And last year, you poked us a little bit on hardware company versus software company and what are we and how do we move forward. And I think that you'll see this year if you look at like unity, one of the great things about unity is we actually deliver it on day one. So shippable, a hybrid version and all flash version, a software version and a conversion version. So I want to get rid of the idea of religion. And it's the same with data domain. You have a virtual edition of it. I don't care whether customers want it on their hardware or hard hardware. I just want to make sure that they've got a choice and they've got a direction and we can take them off their island and move them through at their pace based on the application's life cycle. It's not a company thing. Well, it's important because a couple years ago you guys put out forth that vision that exactly what you just said, we're going to be transparent to the customer, however they want to deploy it and you're fulfilling that. So congratulations. Really, you're putting your fingerprint on the core technology division and you're a great leader and really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and all your time. So really appreciate it. All right, keep right there, everybody. This is theCUBE. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live from EMC World 2016. Right back. Looking back at the history of Dell.