 From the Santa Clara Convention Center, this is SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive coverage of Hitachi's information form in 2010. Now, Inside the Cube from SiliconANGLE.tv We're back at SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage of Silicon Valley technology and beyond. We're here inside the Cube with Mickey Sandoffy from Hitachi Data Systems, and we're at Ground Zero in Silicon Valley where Hitachi's unleashing new vision, actually extended vision for you guys, new for me to hear and others to hear around the cloud, data at the center of innovation, but also at scale. They have huge customers, huge scale, and new demands that they're addressing. And Mickey is the Chief Strategist Officer for the cloud. And during the keynote, your CEO who was on the Cube earlier talked about the content cloud. But just first, tell us really from a Chief Strategist standpoint what's happening with Hitachi. Just take us through quickly what's changed for folks out there who want to see the new picture of Hitachi right now. Sure. And I think what you heard from Jack is that information really is the foundation for, not just a data center, but for all business moving forward. So it's the data that we're processing, it's what we're actually revenueing. It's the infrastructure now, which is, you know, virtualized server infrastructure. It's just other forms of information. So at the foundation when we talk about cloud, it really is across all of those different areas. How do you build infrastructures that become really foundational in your data center that allow you to leverage virtualization as a way to get to your information, where you need it, when you need it? He talked about content cloud. We talked about a lot of things. We recapped that earlier. But one thing that jumped out of me was a couple things. One was the notion of new demands on the business, future requirements, unstructured data. We talked about applications and how applications need to free up from the data. And he referenced this in what he called the content cloud. So take us through what is the content cloud? What's the definition of the content cloud and what does it apply to? So the content cloud is how do you build a pool of information and leverage that pool of information as your business grows, as your own life grows. He used healthcare and life sciences as a couple of examples there. And part of that is you feed information into this almost black hole today, where it just stores the bits. But that's not good enough. So you talk about power points that you might create, or word documents of this video. Ten years from now, you want to find that information. How do you leverage that and in fact use something or do something with that information in the future? So our vision is let's create an intelligent content core, which does become the cloud. An ability to not only store the information or retrieve the information, but add intelligence on top of it. The ability to find that content, the ability to reuse that content out of the context that it was created, perhaps. So this video stream, for example, ten years from now I might want to take a clip. And who knows what we have in terms of a new high-def broadcast. I could be president of the United States and I could have some dirt on me from when I was down the cube. Absolutely. So we want to be able to find that. We want to be able to take those juicy clips and reuse them. I know that the Governor race in California is using all kinds of clips against that. That's amazing. Carly Farina clips from her sound bites as an HB person. You can see the high-def wasn't around then. No. But content clouds, we resonate with that because we do content business. But what does it mean for application? What does it mean for the market and users? Is it a user application or is it just a whole paradigm? Is it definitely different? It's not a user. It's not a corporation. It's what do you do with information? How do you make it valuable? So for example, information that might be a healthcare record is locked into a healthcare system today. And Jack's point was, hey, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, those records have to persist. Hopefully I'm going to be around in 20 years. I'd like that information that was collected today and a checkup I might have with my doctor become useful to me 20 years from now. How does that work today? I mean, so compare and contrast, you know, old way and this new way. Yeah. So where we are today is that information is very tightly coupled and locked into an application that creates it. And where we're seeing that is just look at something as mundane as word processing. Over the last 20 years, how many different word processors have come and gone? Each of which has its own proprietary format of information. So now if I wanted to get a document that I created 20 years ago with WordPerfect, how do I do that? It's in a format where I have to use that application to get my information back. So the idea of a content cloud is you start to store information in a way that makes it portable outside of that application. So if it's not WordPerfect, it's Microsoft Word or it's something else in the future, I have that information available to me outside of the context of that app. So last week at Oracle Open World there was sort of an interesting discourse going on. Allison stood up and on Sunday night introduced the exologic, you know, cloud in a God box, I call it the God box. And then the next day, Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com said Larry just doesn't get it. Cloud doesn't come in a box. And then on Wednesday, of course, Allison has to have the last word. He says, no, actually, you know, Benioff doesn't get it. What do you think Salesforce.com runs on? It runs on 1,500 Dell servers. Those are boxes, right? So what's your take on that? Is cloud run in a box? Well, I think you're being a little bit too pedantic when you look at that. Of course you have a computing infrastructure that has to run on some computing infrastructure. So the idea is how do you disassociate the information, which is the valuable piece from the hardware and the underpinning software that it runs on. And that's really what we're focused on. How do you free that information so it can actually supersede the infrastructure piece? So I don't care if it's a box in your private data center and you call it a private cloud, or if you have it in a hosting facility somewhere and it's a public cloud or you combine the two together, it's a hybrid cloud. What you're really talking about is the information. How do you have portability of that information? So what we talked about today with VSP is how do you free that information? That's one of the underlying enabling features that you need in order to get you to that vision of a content cloud where it really is information portability. I don't care about the infrastructure anymore. I care about the asset and that asset is my information. You know, that's interesting. John, I mean it's an information management centric vision. I get the sense that the whole oracle box vision is legacy. It's outdated. It's closed. They should have called it closed world. Oracle closed world. Oracle is not open. You guys have an open vision which you talked about but oracle is closed. You have the app as their app. They look at the customers and say, hey, you run oracle. We don't think we dare to rip in my place. They don't really do that. Their customers are solid and they're not going to lose their customers so they don't really care. It's interesting because the folks who are entering the workforce now are people who grew up in the Facebooks and they don't know the legacy of having a piece of machinery on your desk with an application that's tied to that piece of machinery. So I think that nature, that conduct is starting to work its way into the bloated PC chain to your desk. We heard a couple of other presenters in there, Microsoft, for example, talking about information everywhere and we aligned to that. I don't care if it's on your iPhone or on your BlackBerry, on your iPad I don't expect that information to be freely accessible no matter where you are. So that's an exact depiction of outside-of-the-box thinking. It really isn't the box anymore. It's the information, how do you free it and how do you leverage it for better known? He mentioned automation too which we all know, automation and configuration management. Automating those complexes is a real job one. So he talked about tiering. Is tiering something that is automated today? Because you can have kind of cloud and you've got to build boxes and put them in cloud. Old data needs to be recorded over to a different set of disks or lower cost disks. So costs obviously are a big driver in all this. Storage is not going away. It's a tsunami of data coming down the marketplace. Is tiering that answer or is that only one element of it? It's a step on a continuum of steps. So what we have just introduced is the ability to do that in a far more automated way than anybody else offers today with the 3Ds of scaling up out and deep. So the deep part when you talk about cloud is especially important. We're going in a transition right now from terabytes to petabytes that's already happened. We're going from petabytes to exabytes. In the next five years we're going to be talking about the exabyte data center not the petabyte data center. So to manage the cost of that just the mundane things about getting the information there and managing the life cycle of that information you have to have sophisticated automated tools to be an application. It has to be baked into that infrastructure so you can get information mobility so you can lower the cost so you can put the right information at the right place at the right time and that it is fully automated. We talked about acquisitions. Jack didn't want to address it. He did the old CEO thing. We said we may buy if we need it but we don't need it. You're an acquisition right? Were you part of the archivist? Well that's the thing. You guys are a big player. You're a whale in the space on the high end. You're interfacing with huge install based customers. You know that startups would like to get a piece of that action. Are there opportunities for new companies? When I say startups I don't mean like three guys in the garage it could be three guys in the garage but it could be series A, B funded companies Silicon Valley or somewhere else who has a product that needs to pivot and work on things. Is there anything that you see that are white spaces that are opportunities for startups? There are huge opportunities for a number of companies. So whether you're a startup or a big company that's shifting directions, we work with all of those. We tend to look at first what is our vision of where things are going. I think Jack did a very, very good job articulating that. He did. Now of course to line up execution to that vision there are many, many steps that we have to take and many different pieces that we have to put together to realize that vision. And deliver the product. Absolutely. So a lot of those technologies are fundamental to Hitachi. As a company we have a lot of research and development that we do ourselves. But of course we can't solve all the problems ourselves. So that's absolutely where we look at a wide range of partners in the ecosystem that can complement or in some cases become a more permanent part of what we're doing in that strife from here to there. Are there any particular areas you can point to or talk about publicly that you say, hey, Hitachi really would love this area to be developed faster or something in this area. Probably not in this forum but certainly what we're looking at is along that line of how do we get from a data view to an information view. Transforming the data center from the data center to the information center. Because it really is about information. So where our minds are is how do you manage that information? How do you promote that information? How do you repurpose that information? How do you find that information? So it's really taking a centric view around the information and we're building our path to getting to that. Where does classification fit into that whole thing? It's kind of been the holy grail of information management is automating classification at the point of creation. Is that a barrier? Is it going to be an enabler? What's your angle on that? I think this is kind of human nature. So if you looked at the top-down information classification systems, I think a lot in the industry would say it was an abysmal failure and the reason for that is people don't think like computers. If you look at a document, I have no idea how important it's going to be 10 years from now. Only time will tell me how important it was. So that's why I really take this infrastructure up view. We have to provide these tools not just for information that was placed in a very rigid classification system but for any digitally created content, whether it's rich media, whether it's structured media, it doesn't matter infrastructure up. So we're basically building that view of all the enablers, all the virtualization technologies. So I'm not virtualizing a box but I'm virtualizing all of your information assets. And with that, I can start to put more and more intelligence on top of it and I can do things like classification. I can do things like repurposing or reuse of information for different businesses. So infrastructure has been a barrier there and you're trying to remove those barriers. Yeah. So what we would talk about, one of the themes is no silos. And from a Hitachi perspective, we've always built that vision of we have an integrated strategy with no silos. We're one of the few vendors out there and can deliver that today. What we did today with VSP is a next step in executing against that vision. It's again taking the technology that we've really hardened in some of the largest enterprises and adding that additional dimension of scalability to it. Can you talk a little bit about your role as a strategist and within Hitachi which is a different culture than the normal Silicon Valley companies. How your insights flow through to actual product? Sure. So Hitachi data systems has undergone quite a transformation over the last five to seven years. So under the leadership of Jack and folks like Brian and John, we've really taken it from a, okay, we're just going to sell what Hitachi builds mentality, which is what I think our competition would have pegged us as in many cases still do. But we've really taken that to really an innovator in the industry. Taking our own technologies, developing them, you talked about our content platform now. Invested strongly into that that becomes a big piece of what we're doing. Looking at things like our recent acquisition of Parascale, providing another element of how do we move information in and out of that content cloud. And then what we look at is well, how do we leverage some of our core capabilities across many different Hitachi products. So for example, our server platforms. Of course you talk about needing to run this thing on a box. You have to run it on a box. So some of the core technologies that we've developed over many years in Japan, and we're starting to bring those to the global stage. So L-PAR technology that you would have on a mainframe providing very secure computing environments in the open systems world that integrate into that information layer. So my job is really to act as a bridge from what we're doing in the global stage outside of Japan, and really project forward what we need to be investing in across the different products that will converge into that information cloud. So you're a dot connector with a crystal ball. Susair. Virtualization is obviously really hyped up and it's delivering. But there's two camps. There's people who are afraid of virtualization, and ones that are absolutely intoxicated by virtualization. And the guys who are intoxicated by virtualization are the tech geeks. Wow, we could do things completely different. What's your angle on those two camps? Is it real? And how would you say what are those new opportunities that virtualization is enabling? Well, you know, they're really you're right, there are two camps that have and have nots, right? So the ones who have embraced virtualization, whether it be storage, server, networks, or all of the above, have realized a significant advantage in doing that. And it's not just cost reduction, it's also agility to the business. The ones who are kind of afraid to do that, it's okay. You know, this is a continuum. You don't have to jump into the deep end of the pool. So our view is we can provide an infrastructure where you can start as you are today and then kind of walk down that path to a more and more virtualized infrastructure over time as you, your company, and your different, you know, regulatory requirements perhaps allow you to. There is no one right choice. Now we firmly believe that, you know, fully virtualized infrastructure is where you have to get. And in a way, it's kind of a throwback way back to the mainframes, right? The mainframes were fully virtualized. There was no notion of my data is in this piece of storage. It took care of all of that. Everybody trusted mainframes to run their most critical applications and they still do today. What's happening is that technology is permeating everything that we do in computing now. Completely distributed and embedded. That's right. So you guys developing kind of the content mainframe? Is that how we should be thinking about this? So mainframe I don't think has the right connotation to it. You would think of the mainframe as very monolithic, right? Well, you know, Paul Maritz says they're developing the software mainframe. So not meaning a pejorative, but mainframe to me is a very powerful and virtualized. Yes, there are connotations and denotations. The connotations around security and robustness and reliability and scale, those are absolutely the right connotations to have when you use mainframe with what we're doing with information cloud, absolutely. All right, we're here with Mickey Sandorphy live at theCUBE at the Hitachi information explosion here. It's been an unbelievable day. Congratulations on the announcement. Thank you very much. Really, really impressive. Intel. We haven't had Intel on theCUBE. David Tui.