 Backup and recovery president for the division data domain and all the variety of products. Welcome to theCUBE with David Floyer, analyst co-founder of wikibon.org. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. So let's just jump right in. Backup and recovery, a lot of changes have happened. California, you've moved to California. And you've taken over as president. It's a lot of pressure, but California's laid back. Is it, how are you feeling? I love California, first of all. Compared to New England winters, it's much, much nicer. We had a very nice winter in California this year, but I think in anything we do, there's pressure all the time. And I think when you think about backup and recovery, it was formed when we bought data domain, which was a hostile takeover. And when I flew out there for the first day to meet the data domain team, that's pressure. You've never met them before. You've invested over $2 billion in a business and you've never met the management team before. So right out of the gate, it was a little bit of a pressure cooker, but we've come through it pretty well. And Frank has moved on to, went to a VC firm. Went to Greylock. And then went to a new job as CEO. So he's cutting his teeth back into another company. He's moved very quickly. I think he was at Greylock for a couple of weeks when he realized he really liked being a CEO more than a venture capitalist and started last week at ServiceNow down in San Diego. So EMC World 2011 is about big data, cloud. Backup's a big part of that. And we saw the big tape ball at the mega launch, which we actually came in handy because when the Google Gmail failed, it was because of tape backup. And we had some handy photos of a big tape ball. So tape backup's changing. But a lot of the virtualization technology, things like flash are becoming more strategic. And big data is obviously a big trend that's a thermal in the marketplace. What's your view of what's happening right now in the marketplace from your perspective? You're leading the division. What's your vision? Well, I think one of the beauties of Joe showed a slide today of the transformation and disruption in technology. And no matter what it's been from enterprise storage to, you know, it was virtualization and now, you know, cloud and big data, every one of those waves, you got to protect that information and information keeps growing. And he put up a slide that showed back up in recovery down at the bottom. It's a fundamental necessity than any customers, you know, operation. They've got to protect it. It's the lifeblood of their business. So for us, it's really keeping ahead of those trends, right? Understanding that shift when, you know, we went from, you know, direct attached into sand and, you know, storage started getting collected now to virtualization. What impact does that have on data protection? Big data, when you're talking about huge files, huge data sets, what can you do to make that efficient for protection? But what can you do to make it efficient to get back? There's a paradigm out there. Jim Bampos was on. He runs the customer quality, total customer experience. And, you know, he's in the internal big data business. He's trying to figure out customer loyalty, social data. We heard him talk about reports going from hours to minutes, days to weeks, weeks to days. The backup business was old and slow. You put stuff out there and D-Dub came along. Now things are happening faster. What's the next big trend beyond, you know, the D-Dubes and, you know, lower latency? I mean, would have put a little more color in that. Well, you've got competitors like Symantec who are wanting to go to appliances or suggesting appliances are the way to go. It's, what's your strategy in that area? We're going to talk a lot about this at the show. But, you know, if you look at both Avamar and Data Domain, they're appliances and they've been out there for, you know, four plus years now. And we have our competitors actually coming towards it. I think acknowledging it that you got to have appliances. So Symantec, who had been a software only approach now is delivering appliances into the marketplace. And, you know, we're going to talk about this. We feel, you know, today for data protection the appliance market is over a billion and a half dollars right now. We think it'll go up to three billion by 2015. And I think it's, you're seeing the shift where it was backup software and tape. Now it's really almost equal backup software and purpose-built backup appliances. You know, appliances are giving customers, you know, greater efficiency in their backups, but they're also giving them a way to enhance the recovery strategies that they never could before. And if you think about tying that in with VMware, you know, how are you moving your protection data? How are you creating multiple sites to recover from? To an existing, you know, VM or to a new VM. There's a whole bunch of new protection strategies that customers are trying to deploy. Appliances are a perfect, vast, affordable way for customers to get the benefit. And, you know, we've been happy that someone like Symantec's coming in and validating that for us. And we feel like we're on our, you know, this is fourth generation of the Avamar hardware, sixth generation of Avamar data domain, you know, it's been out for over four years. We're in a really good position from that standpoint. I was talking to Tom Whelan this morning. He's from Asperis Health. And he was very excited about some of the new features, particularly because that allowed him to use his traditional software, network software, together with Avamar in multiple different ways. Is that part of your strategy, is blending these approaches? So today, we, in our portfolio, we have five, actually, we have five products. We have data domain, Avamar, networker, disk library for mainframe backups, and then DPA, which helps you manage report on your backups. Our customers always tell us, you know, it's great, you have five products that cover every use case. And then they say, hey, that stinks. You got five products, you know, can you make it simpler? And so if you think about technologies like Boost that we announced last year at EMC World, this year with, we announced that Avamar and Data Domain can now work together. It's this idea of bringing the portfolio together in a simple way for customers. And where you'll see us go, long term, is that, you know, Data Domain will become the repository for all our backups and data protection. And you'll see, and we're going to talk about this, the keynotes, Stephen Manley and I, Avamar and networker will continue to, you'll see them blend and overlap in many ways, whether it's the client side, what you're doing there, it's VMware integration, you'll see a lot of that overlap come together over time. And the portfolio becomes simpler for customers to deploy. We're trying to give them investment protection right now, though, which is, you know, if you bought Data Domain and you've bought Avamar, guess what? Now they can work together. Networker with Data Domain, you got Boost, it can work faster for you, so protect that investment. But just looking ahead, if you heard Tom talk about his problems, the major problems is backup window, there's traditional way of doing things, I mean, his was 18 hours, it went down to 12 and now it's down to four again. But I can see the look on his face is, he thinks it's going back up again. Right. What's the alternative to this? I mean, what about strategies which allow you to do backups on a snapshot basis every 15 minutes? Are those part of your strategy? We're going to talk about this. It's a good lead in for the keynote and I won't give it all away, but, you know, there's a lot of customers right now saying, hey, can I just use snapshots for backup? And, you know, while there are some use cases where snapshots are good for data protection, if you want file level recoverability, if you run out of storage with snapshots, how do you expand that pool to work in? You run into a lot of different issues with snapshots as an overall backup strategy. We actually think coming from where we're coming from, which is, you know, a backup application which gives you the cataloging and the detailed information you need on the files, along with the efficiency of DDoop, we'll get to a point where you'll get those benefits you want on snapshots, you know, very quick, maybe incremental, you know, change data, but even faster recoverability down to a file level or down to a piece of data level that you want. So we're going to, in the keynote, show you, you know, the limitations of snapshots versus the approach we're taking and I think we'll get customers quicker to a better path for data protection. Okay, it sounds a little defensive because there are, you know, some people out there with quite good solutions and semantic, sorry. We're one of them, EMC's got great snapshot capability so I actually see it coming together and we actually use, if you look at Avamar, it's got snapshots, you know, we have it in the product, so not defensive, I think, emerging of the things that people want when they use snapshots in a, you know, backup framework or a data protection framework is what we're trying to give them and, you know. I understand it's very slow to move these people because they're very, very cautious about moving. You know, I think the other, this is what we see in the customer base all the time and you may see this as, you know, what, when you think about job functions and job categories in a data protection world, you've got backup admins, right, who are used to working with backup software and, you know, a tape or a disk base format to backup. Well, now you've got storage administrators who want to use snapshots, right, to protect that data and then layer on top of it, I've got VMware admins now who want to do things in virtual environments and then on top of it, I've got application owners, big data owners and traditional database administrators who want real-time access to information and protection strategies and where it was very simple, you know, an application created some information, you know, the storage guy stored it and the backup guy protected it. They are all on a crash course right now. Isn't this a big time of inflection, though? We, huge. That really there is an opportunity out here for some totally different ways of thinking about all of this. That's where we want to get offensive rather than defensive. We think we have light for these people. I was thinking that you needed to be more aggressive because if you aren't, there are a lot of people out there who have some good ideas out there. You'll hear this in the keynote. We really talk about those four job descriptions, what's happening between them and how our technology can help them all create a better IT service level for the business. So, you know, again, I think bringing this portfolio together and simplifying data protection for the customer base, they're asking for that. They're asking for help me, you know, do my job, you know, the way maybe I remembered it or the way I want it to go. This is things we can provide to them, we think with the portfolio. There are a lot of people coming after you. I mean, you know, the application vendors want to come in and, for example, what about archive versus backup? I mean, they're trying to split off the archive, reduce that problem of the backup that way. Yes, we view that as an opportunity. And, you know, I'd actually start out by saying, you know, if you look traditionally at backup and data protection, it was a market that's semantic for a long time at a, you know, large market share and a relatively slow moving market. We think it's a dynamic market. That's why we formed the division. You know, we've been growing tremendously and we think we're taking a lot of share there. We think customers are seeing that change. On the archive side, we view that as another opportunity, extension of backup and data protection. We announced the DD archiver in January. We had a great first quarter with it. And we see these customers, as we've deployed this, we've seen application owners working together with backup and storage administrators to say why buy a separate environment to put this data? Let's keep it all in one area. DJ, you were talking about the products kind of coming together, investment protection. How's the product market for you guys changing? I mean, appliances, as we're hearing a lot about appliances in other areas of EMC this week and around Hadoop, et cetera. What appliance strategy works best for you guys? I mean, obviously it works in backup. Talk about the product market. Are they coming together? Is it going to be pure appliances? Well, I think, you know, we look at- Purpose built, obviously it's working. Purpose built is working. It's growing phenomenally fast. Both Avalmar and Data Domain are enjoying high growth. You know, we've looked at it and we will, for our business, you know, we have both today. We have them now talking to each other with the idea that Data Domain is really, we think, the ultimate appliance for us for storing that data, for that protection data. And, you know, we're going to continue to evolve the Data Domain file system to be able to handle more workloads. And we think there's great extensibility there for it. But appliances are a foundational element of what we do for our customers, and they like it. What about competition? Like, obviously there's a lot of startups come out, we're here, startups changing their strategies from primary storage to, you know, disaster recovery, which is essentially backup and recovery. So that's kind of an entry point for competition. How do you continue to have that insurmountable lead that just keeps on growing? And also you've got Oracle out there with their approach and their category. So how do you deal with competition? Again, we view it as a platform and we continue to extend the benefits customers get off of that appliance platform. So, you know, fundamentally, the differentiating points are, you know, de-dupe and how you do it, variable versus fixed. We think variable, we prove it every day and customers has been a differentiator for us in terms of efficiency, replication. So now how do you take that platform and make it a DR platform and reduce the number of copies that you have out there and be able to recover quickly? Data Domains had replication first to market as multiple replication topologies that you can deploy and work very well, and then you add archiving to it. So we continue to like expand the uses of the platforms for the customers and, you know, the data comes starts moving its way in. Do you think that vision is the right one though, going forward, because data domain was very successful by just coming in, solving one problem in the traditional backup mode. So if we add on the fact that you want to go to 50 minutes as opposed to a day, you want to include archive, you want to have applications, the ability for them to provide their own capabilities. Isn't all of that going away from that back it up once a day model to a very different model? Can data domain go that direction? Well, we continue to increase the scale and performance of every, you know, January was a new refresh of the DD line and greater performance and scalability. You know, our customers who we see here in the thousands keep telling us, but they push us too. I mean, they're never satisfied and that's a good thing. And, you know, we have not reached the upper bounds there, they want us to continue to push the platform from that standpoint, but they're the ones who actually drove us into replication. They drove us into, you know, archiving capabilities in the platform and, you know, this ability to simplify their environments and their protection strategy is really important to them. The complexity they face is incredible. I think, you know, it's another reason why you see converged infrastructure taking off. It's, you know, get me what I need in a more simpler package. And, you know, so I think I look at the data domain platform and it's a relatively young platform and I think it's got, you know, a rich, rich road in front of it. We've got, you know, great engineering prowess still, you know, delivering products to the marketplace. This is the second refresh of that line since we bought it in July of 2009. So they have really been, you know, pushing it hard. And customers, you know, keep pushing us to do it. So I feel really good about where we're at. And, you know, again, I think, you know, the others who are incumbents in this market maybe are flipping and trying to follow in our footsteps here. Cool. How's the cloud and big data theme resonating with you guys? Obviously, your business is, you know, some would argue mature, but you're still seeing massive growth that's changing. But how does cloud and big data impact you? Is it on the integration of the products? Is it additional management software? I mean, you guys aren't really playing in the cloud big data. I mean, obviously big data, you're backing it up and recovering it, but how does the big data meets cloud theme affect your group? I think we probably have to do a better job of saying how we play in those because the beautiful thing is it's huge growth and information that needs to be protected. So we do have a play. You know, we vary from just the tactical, which is, you know, work with the VCE sales teams, find out where V blocks go in, and guess what, we're going to back them up to, you know, what, and the driver for us really has been virtualization, right? I think when you talk about customers having struggles, it's really, as they've deployed 30% of their applications virtually, then 70 and 80, you know, backup, windows shrink, your, you know, your window to do anything has just gone away and your processes blow up. And that's been the entry point for us with technologies like Avamar to say, look, here's how we can, you know, take an image back up very quickly. Here's how we can help you recover granularity very quickly so that you hit your uptime, that you want, or your recovery levels. So, you know, we've been laser focused on virtualization and VMware. The nice thing is they're very close to us in Palo Alto, we're in Santa Clara, so we have, you know, great working relationships and we do a lot with them there, but, you know, virtualization, cloud, big data, all mean big backups or big protection and we've got to help them, you know, do that efficiently. It's like the market, it's like you're in a market that just never peaks because I don't think data is going to be going down. More data is like piling up every day. They have a little meter here in the blogger lounge that says, here's the data passing through the show. We're contributing part of it with the broadcast here. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, BJ. We appreciate it. Congratulations on your new role. Got a great product group over there. And a growing market, congratulations. David, great insight, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks very much, thanks guys. Great seeing you. Thanks everyone. And we're here inside theCUBE at E&M.