 Okay, we're back here inside theCUBE with EMC World 2012. We are in Las Vegas, where all the action's happening around this year's kickoff of EMC World 2012. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is our exclusive coverage of theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, tell the smartest people we can find, and whether they're CEOs, entrepreneurs, customers, whoever we want to extract the signal from the noise and share that with you in a very independent way. So I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm Joe, I'm my co-host. I'm John Jay Vellante of wikibon.org, and we're here with BJ Jenkins, who's the president of EMC's BRS division. BJ, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. I keep breaking the smartest people in the conference premise, but I'm thankful you invited me back. Definitely. He's a Red Sox fan, folks. Good. Everybody's got crosses to bear in life. I've got a bunch of them. You would have liked our interview at Sapphire last week of Reggie Jackson. He was there, and we actually had him on. I talked about the 78 series against the Dodgers. It was kind of a fun, normal break from the action. I would have been crying every time I see Reggie. I was too, but so John actually asked him about the hip-check play, you remember that? And he went into it. He gave about a five or seven minute dissertation on it. It was kind of a good, fun segment. That's beautiful. That's good. Hey, so it's your second EMC world now, I guess, is president of the BRS division, right? Unfortunately, I couldn't make it last year on this interview. I had an analyst thing going on with Tucci, so I missed that, but so how you doing? How you feel? You must be excited about the growth in the market share, but give us an update on what's new and what's changed. Yeah, the business has been great for our BRS division that focus on protecting customers' data. We formed in 2009 when we bought Data Domain. We brought the Avamar Networker and DPA Assets in and try and give customers end-to-end data protection. I think the drivers for our business, the trends are right in our favor. You've got customers dealing with extreme data growth. That never goes away. I think you hear it at every EMC world. On top of that, their budgets continue to say stagnant or not meet that growth. And then you throw on what you hear here, cloud and big data. They've got these new challenges they got to deal with. Go to full virtualization or build a private cloud internally or go to a public cloud and all of those things stack up. And then you may want to just throw regulation, compliance and governance on top of it. And we have customers just going, I can't protect my data. And the technologies we're bringing to them, give them that efficiency and cost reduction on the backup side. But most importantly, you don't make any sacrifices in the keeping your job part of it which is recovering when you have an issue. And in fact, some of the announcements today, specifically around Avamar, help you recover up to 30 times faster in VMware environment. So we're excited about what we're doing for customers. They have huge challenges in these areas. So let's talk about that. So obviously the world backup and recovery has been around for a long time. You guys have the acquisition, as you mentioned. Data domain, Avamar and we've got it. We're going way back to get some of the assets in there with software and some hardware. But the infrastructure's changing. We've been talking about the modernization of the data center, modernization of infrastructure. EMC's got the big cloud meets big data, which is IT and service providers and then big data for the business transformation. And then the whole people message around data science. But the job and labor market, it's interesting, it's changing. But with virtualization, all this is kind of really turning everything upside down. So what's your vision around these challenges and the complexities? What are you seeing out there around these new challenges and complexities? And what have you guys done and what are you guys delivering? Well, I think complexity is the key word there for an IT user with all of these new things building on top of them. What we try and drive back into them is a set of tools that can solve some of these new challenges. What we're trying to do for them is simplify and integrate our portfolio to make it easier to deal with some of those complexities they have. So if you can have a device that helps you in virtual environments, in physical environments, in an i-series environment, because people still have i-series in a main frame, right? Can you find a set of tools that can help you simplify what you're trying to do around data protection and backups? That's one of the ways, no matter what the challenge that IT person has, we want to make it easier for them to protect their data. Within that though, they have to start somewhere. And that sometimes is the problem because you have a business process and sometimes you have to break it to get to the solution. So whether it's just start with simple tape replace or you need to give your DBAs a little more control over protecting their databases. Okay, we integrate with Armand. We can let you use your native Armand tools, your native Microsoft tools, and protect your data. You give the user some control and you give IT control. It's a bit of a threat. So there's two threads that Dave put out this morning that we're going to be pivoting on this week is the role of the labor market within the IT organization. What skills, two questions, what skill sets do you see that are evolving, that are augmenting the existing data protection and recovery side of the business? And the second question is, what is the role of big data analytics in the notion of advanced security? So those are two hot areas right now. Can you talk about that? I think when you talk about data protection and the skills around it and people's concerns, I would tell you when we meet with a backup administrator, their concern was my job's going away. The storage administrator wants to control protection. I've got a VMware administrator. I've got a DBA who says, I suck and get me out of there. And our vision and our belief is that you actually need all of these working in harmony. You need to give them a set of tools that allow the user flexibility to work in their native environments. vCenter, Armand like we talked about. So the user can actually offload some of the challenges that the IT group has, but then also give the IT group central control to help so you don't have the inmates running the asylum. You have all these users doing their own thing. And this is what our tools can do. You can run, the users can run natively and will continue to integrate and work openly with them. But then we'll also give the IT department tools to manage the entire backup process, get efficiency out of it, report on it and bring efficiency and standardization there also. So the job market there and the skills needed is definitely evolving. You have to, as an IT person, be much more in tune to those end user tools and the end user requirements. And hopefully we're giving them a set of tools to do that and evolve. On the big data side and the security side, big data for us is opportunity for protection for customers and we announced today support DD Boost for Green Plum. What we didn't announce today, but what we have an agreement that just came out is Teradata now supports data domain. So we're traditionally in their large warehouses, it was tape and then when you had recovery, it was awful. Now you have data domain and teradata environments and you can do fast backup with efficiency and recovery. So big data for us is just opportunity to help those customers protect that data. The security side is challenging when you think about deduplication because we need data in its native format to do that efficiency. We can't have it encrypted or changed. But what we do do is help you as you're replicating over WANs or data at rest, encrypt that and then we're integrated with RSA key manager and we're trying to give, again, those customers' native tools, security tools they can use to make sure that their data is protected in a backup environment. You know, PJ, I want to share some data with you. So we just did a Wikibon, we just did a large survey around IT transformation and we asked them what's their single, these are IT practitioners, what's the single biggest challenge you have in 2012 from an IT challenge? And the four or five things that came up, one is budget constraints, you mentioned that. Two was data growth, you mentioned that. Three was data protection. Four was the inability to respond to the business. You talked about recovery and doing some things to prove recovery and the fifth was security. I see the targets for your portfolio right at those four items. And I wanted to ask you about, when you go back to the data domain acquisition, I thought, I didn't understand it, I thought it was a purely defensive mechanism to keep it out of the hands and net app. Now maybe it was, but it appears to me that it's much more than that. It's driving your business, propelling your business. It's now, I mean, you know, a multi-billion dollar business over the cumulative life of that asset. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Did you know that, was that the plan that it was going to be actually not only a defensive play, but an opportunistic play, a growth play for EMC? I think there were a couple of things at play when we made the acquisition. Obviously, given the timing of the net app offer, I think it's fair to say there was some defensiveness in wanting to keep that asset off out of their hands. I think very quickly once we got the asset in-house, we already had a lot of experience. We've been in backup for, you know, 15, 16 years, going back to a product called EDM that EMC has. And what we found out quickly was that customers want end-to-end data protection. They want a single approach. It isn't about just putting a repository of storage, efficient storage device in. It's actually how, from the backup application or from when you make that point in time, I've got to protect my data till the integrity that it's at rest, it is somewhere and I know how to get it, that is what customers were struggling with. And that drove huge growth for us. So I think the simple thing is people would look at it and say it was defensive against net app and then it was distribution. We just wanted to get it into EMC's distribution channel. And on the surface, those look like good explanations. I think underneath it are these customer drivers that you're talking about right here that data growth, budget concerns, you know, security, data protection that all came together when we brought Avamar network or data domain together. And if you remember back to when we did that acquisition, I think the speculation was this will kill Avamar. There was always the hey, they both do deduplication. I never speculated that by the way. Data domain. I never felt that. But I don't think anybody knew exactly what was going to happen. But when we, I would tell you the first week when Frank and I sat down, because there were arguments at the time to bring archiving in and it was no, data protection backup is a focus area for customers that is a huge challenge and there are multiple use cases that these products solve independently. We know we've got to bring them together but we can reach the market with both of them. I have to say, I did take some of your early messaging was somewhat confusing. It might have implied that but I never felt because of the VMware play that Avamar was a good fit for that. And so, but now you mentioned end to end and your detractors would say, yeah, that's right. End to end is required. But the naysayers would say that you can't get to end to end because you got too many stovepipes, you got Avamar, different technology from data domain, then you've got your software, the network or software, and it's just this multi-flavored portfolio. Great that you can solve any problem at any point but how do you achieve the end to end? How do you respond to that? So I think there's a, the proof is in what we deliver. We talk about a vision with a single backup application and for fun right now, we'll call it Avalworker or Netamar or something like that. And then a single repository which is data domain and the proof I guess I would give people that were down this road is, every EMC world and points in between, we've announced boost for network or boost for Avalmar, you'll see in the second half of the year more enhancements for Avalmar to write to data domain, more types of data sets, our client teams where we used to have an Avalmar and the network or client team, there's one client team now. We're building a single data management catalog framework and all of this comes out piece by piece in the releases. It takes time to do. But we're on that path and detractors could certainly look at it and punch holes at it but we tend to focus on the customers and they give us good feedback. We're down the path. The one thing on top of that when I say end to end that I think is absolutely critical though, it's services up front in assessing environments and designing environments and just importantly it's a service on the back. And we are a one throat to joke when you deploy all those tools. You one call, you got software, you got hardware, we fix it. It's an EMC either a validated partner or an EMC person coming in. We own those problems end to end and I think that's what differentiates ourselves. When I look at software only providers who say, hey, you're paying too much, you can use it on disk. One of the things I talk about is how do you know what they write to that disk is actually there? What if you have a drive failure? What if you have corruption? How do you deal with that? Well, we deal with it with data domain and vulnerability architecture. We confirm with every software application that what you wrote is there. And you've got reporting infrastructure around it. You know, we love the services play. We think that's actually EMC secret weapon. I mean, it goes back to the heritage of the company. So the other piece I wanted to mention is the proof is in the numbers. I mean, the IDC numbers just came out again. Your market share held a little bit, actually might have even increased a little bit. I mean, 66% of the revenue share in the purpose built backup appliance market which is unbelievable. Is that sustainable? We believe so. I think we have to execute on our roadmap and our goal is to continue to perform the way we've performed. I think there's certainly, the competition in this market has certainly increased. Symantec is certainly trying to make moves here. And I would say, quantum is making moves and trying to use price as a tool in certain instances. So the competition has increased, but we feel differentiators like boost and what we're doing with end-to-end services allow us hopefully to keep performing like that. The other thing I miss BJ, and I wonder if you could comment on it, is I underestimated the total available market for disk-based backup, because I assumed it's the tape market. And the mistake that I think I made was, let's say tape's about two to three billion, it's clear that the purpose built backup appliance market is going to be larger than that. And I presume what I missed is that nobody wanted to pay money for tape. There were use cases that were very limited and you've maybe found some new ones, whether it's replication or other types of archiving. Talk about that a little bit. Why is the market for disk-based backup actually larger than what one would presume would be the market for tape? Well, yeah, to start I would say, tape's a good place to focus. In fact, in the keynote today, one of the things we'll tell the crowd is, through our conversations and estimates, we have over a thousand customers who are tape-less in backup today. So this, for us, we feel there's huge momentum there. Tape-less in backup. So they might still be using tape for archive. And I want to go after that, too, by the way, but they're tape-less in backup, which is one of our goals. And then you're right, there's this whole, I would just call it incremental, right? It's, how do I have a more thorough DR strategy for my applications and data sets using a really efficient backup product? So traditionally we would just think, okay, they do an on-site backup and then three years ago, they'd offload the tape and tape would be their DR and they'd send it to a facility. Now they look at it and say, I've got either a service provider or I've got my own secondary center. You know what? I'll just replicate that smaller set of data to the secondary center and do I have enough to protect myself? And in many cases we see them doing multi-site replication back and forth. Well, you've just tripled the amount of available market for you there and doing something like that. So I think that is definitely out there. And then I think really the growth of unstructured data has been an end to our market. Whether that be just be growth and general purpose NASA and organization, directories, it's grown I think much faster than we anticipated. So Dave and I love to talk on theCUBE and we like to handicap the horses on the track and talk about, we obviously share our opinion. We also like to speculate on the market segmentation around growth areas. So I'll see you guys have market leadership and back up in recovery going way back. But really let's talk about the customer perspective. So when we talk to customers, this is like almost like a feature area that was a feature you got to have as part of your business, you know, stove, pipe, silo. But you mentioned competitors coming with other solutions. Talk about the reaction you get from customers when you have to roll out the differentiation package to these customers. For example, if someone says, hey we're less expensive than EMC and they throw out some fud around that. It sounds good on paper, but you guys are nested in these companies, right? So there's a really nested position where there's some critical operations now being discussed, you mentioned compliance. Talk about those factors. You just can't unplug back up in recovery. You can't just say, oh I'm going to switch. So talk about the switching costs involved in going with another solution. And then talk about the consequences of that, relative to say compliance, multi-tenancy in the cloud, things of that nature, security. It's not trivial. It's not like popping out a box. One of the interesting things we've seen as the division has grown and it's kind of a reverse what you would normally think is usually software is the sticky thing and the hardware is the interchangeable part. What we've found with backup, which has been very interesting for us is once we got data domain installed, we actually, network has started growing in double digits again for us. And it's done that because most of the time we're selling it into data domain environments and this is this notion of I want to end end, I want a single service approach from a customer. So now I think that's the today story, right? The tomorrow story and the reason why if you're going to handicap, I want you to put your money with us is it's really going to be about integrating even more closely, not just with VMware and Microsoft. It's going to be with primary storage. The game is going to be how do I eliminate some of the backup infrastructure? No media servers, the proliferation of media servers out there, wouldn't it be great if I could just snap from a VMAX or a VNX or use RecoverPoint to move data seamlessly from a primary device to a data domain device. What if fast had another tier that was just sitting in right there which was optimized storage? To me, that's a game changer. I think EMC is the only one that can really go. It's like a time machine for the enterprise. Yes, yes. So we think that's where we're going to go. If you're going to put money, hopefully you're going to put it on us. So we'll keep delivering for it. Okay, BJ Jacobs with that EMC. I mean, this is an area that has not talked about mainstream press, but it's really critical infrastructure. It's changing, it's evolving, it's complex, it's nested, and thanks for your perspective. And it's a hot area with cloud and big data. It's only going to be more important with compliance, et cetera. So BJ, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back at this break with our next guest.