 Set this up for the folks out there about Brian Gallagher. Brian is the president of ENC's Symmetrics Division. I have known Brian for a number of years. Back when EMC was just a tiny little company. And he's been there since the early days of Symmetrics. He's the president of the Symmetrics, which is the high-end storage. Brian is Napolitano's counterpart in Symmetrics, right? And we've had Brian on before. He's been a great guest. The Cube alum. Hey, Brian, how you doing? Excellent, thanks. Welcome back to the Cube. Welcome back. We're here in Vegas. All right. Year ago, we were in Boston. We were in Boston. It seems like just yesterday. I got my Boston Celtics shirt on. Let's hope they can pull it off. We need some help today. We'll be the sportsbook, Dave. What time's the game on? So as I was saying, Brian, you've been at Symmetrics since the early days. You know the history. But it's really changed dramatically, hasn't it? I mean, it doesn't even look close to what it used to. Other than you've got some great customers and you're top tier. But the technology has changed dramatically. The underlying infrastructure is changing in the IT business and the whole cloud thing. So first of all, start with, what's the event all about for you? Talking to a lot of customers. Tell us what's on your mind these days. Yeah, so clearly from my perspective, the whole IT as a service, the model, the landscaping is changing dramatically as we speak. And it's just phenomenal about the rate of change that's occurring in our industry. And it's not just the model, but also the technology. Pat talked about it in his keynote. Kind of some fundamental shifts in terms of multicore, flash, virtualization. We're taking all those fundamental shifts and embedding those types of technologies into our products at EMC. And it's just tremendous. I expect change to continue. It's the most change I've seen in the industry. It's a great industry to be in right now. How is that change, Brian, affecting your management style with your team? Obviously, we're seeing M&A play a big role in some of the new additions. Going way back to data domain, but more recently, last year, Green Plum and Ice Lawn. We heard from Rich how he sponsored Ice Lawn. So you got the change. You got massive growth. How is that changing your management approach? Yeah, great question. So you talked about Rich. He helped to drive a lot of the Ice Lawn strategy. Back in, I think, December of 2009, Pat asked me to look at the data warehouse and analytics market. Spent a lot of time in that space, helped to drive the acquisition of Green Plum. Did you sponsor that one? Yeah, I sponsored that one. And just it's tremendous in terms of the capabilities. So we looked at the market. We said, hey, you know, it's a big market. It's very large in terms of products, software and services, great market. And very adjacent to what EMC does in terms of our core business. And so when we looked at the technology players in the market, we kind of did a broad canvas of what was going on. And the market was kind of, I call it, trifricated. So I don't know if that's a word or not, but I just made it up. It is now. When was that, what day was that? When you guys started scouring the landscape and you found Green Plum, what time frame was that? How fast did you move on that? Yeah, so basically Pat said, hey, let's go look at this in December of 2009. And it took us about six months to go through that whole process. So you said the market was trifricated. Trifricated, there were, you know, if you look at the big four, it was Oracle, IBM, Teradata, and I'm drawing a blank. Somebody else. Oracle, IBM, Teradata, and Microsoft. And then directly in the middle was Netiza. And then there was an array of, you know, kind of a merchant. Vertica, Astrodata, Green Plum, Paracel. And what we looked at was a lot of the guys in the emergent player space were, you know, they had left some of the bigger companies because they couldn't solve some of the architectural problems with the older models of DBMS systems. And so when we looked at Green Plum, they were the most compelling technology out there. MPP shared nothing, mixed column, neural capabilities, and just, it wasn't just about the IP. The intellectual, you know, the IQ of the people was just tremendous. You know, guys like Luke Longren and Scott Yarra, the two co-founders of it. So, you know, these guys bring a lot of energy to, you know, to EMC. It's great to have them as part of the team. They got some mojo, too. I mean, they got a swagger. Yeah. They're cocky but not arrogant. Right, yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, like, they have a good, and it's a little bit of a Silicon Valley vibe, but clearly they're taking on Hadoop big time. And there's an array of competition now, Cloudera being the leader in that area, but data stacks and a bunch of other startups are in there. So Pat was very straightforward. He said, hey, you know, we're just going to, we're entering the market and we're going to go there. Right. And so he didn't really want to address the competition issue more in the sense of, that's what our customers want. We're going to have it integrated. Right. Well, what impressed me about Pat, yesterday we were talking about this, and he said he was getting some, a lot of questions around, you know, why Green Plum. Right? And he said he put that to bed by saying, look, we had the pick of the litter we chose Green Plum. You were sort of involved in looking at that. Absolutely. So it was sort of interesting to see that you guys lobbed on them. They weren't necessarily the largest of those companies. No. But, you know, a couple of them around the rough, you know, same size, some smaller. Yeah. But net-net, they were by far the best technical, you know, best IP, best IQ, you know, in the market. How are you guys handling the change in the marketplace? Obviously, on one end of the cloud, you got Amazon, recently crashed, and, you know, PlayStation Network, and, you know, it's crashed. Big problems, train wreck over there. And then on the kind of emerging entrepreneurial side with open source Hadoop, it's a sandbox. And there's a lot of innovation coming out. That's early. EMC's going to play nicely in these sandboxes. You guys have expanded your partnership, aggressive. How are you guys going to play nicely in that environment or it's not even an issue for you? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, fundamentally, we, you know, EMC's has been and will be a technology company. That's our play. You know, we want to make sure that we partner with the best in the industry. The industry, you know, right now as we look at it, you know, the big players are verticalizing. And that's not our strategy. Our strategy is to be, you know, best in class in what we do and drive the technology in as many places as we can and make it as pervasive as we can. You know, so I think going forward, you know, but it's tough. I mean, you do have to, you know, make sure that you've established yourself as a presence in the emerging markets. And so you will be, you know, competitive in a lot of different environments. And that's just the nature of the business. Dave and I were joking about, you know, Pats on the West Coast, Jeremy's on the West Coast and then got this West Coast offense going in. You see, his marketing has picked up. Cloud meets big data. It's great messaging. Kind of builds on last year's theme. So it's got good trajectory. Is that the new EMC, Nimble, West Coast offense, run and shoot kind of a faster? Ryan's like the star running back. That's right. Yeah, we got a great staff to definitely help. But yeah, great shift. Jeremy's brought a lot on, you know, on board. You know, just he understands what marketing's role is, does a great job at it. And you can see a transformation of EMC. And it's been great. Yet another one. Yet another one. I mean, this is actually a really good, you know, addition. You look at who Joe's brought on staff. It's been great addition to the team, overall EMC team. So yeah, you'll see that. In fact, I just hired a guy from Brocade, Bob Bram, to be my VP of marketing. Bob's on the West Coast as well. So we do have a center of gravity out there. And he'll be, you know, joined up with actually the Green Plum guys are in San Mateo. So yeah, I mean, big West Coast powerhouse. I mean, EMC is always, in my view, being from the New England area has been that New England culture. But now it's just so diverse. You got all the acquisitions under your belt. And we're wondering what's exciting for you these days in terms of obviously, you know, the shift to the Lightning project and fast data. What's exciting you these days? There's a lot. You know, as I mentioned, the model is transforming. The technology is transforming. You know, you look again back to the rate of change in the industry, a lot of people, a lot of companies are afraid to change. EMC's never been afraid to change. It's all about change, how we go forward, you know, how we make a difference, how we've been reinventing ourselves, you know, over the past 20 years. You've seen the progression year after year after year. And we're now in this next phase, you know, really driving the model of IT as a service. And that, to me, probably is the most exciting at this juncture. You know, you're talking about project Lightning, and I know it's sort of this, I'm actually not sure exactly where it fits, but it looks like it's designed organizationally to try to accelerate. And I said to Rich, you know, and Rich Napolitano, in some ways, I see you as a chef. You've got all these technologies in EMC, then you bring them together and you do a lot of that as well, I'm sure. But I don't know if you remember, so it was maybe a couple years ago now, you had invited me in to say, all right, what are you guys seeing? And one of the things that I talked about was this whole, you know, movement of data in the last 15 years of function, rather, out into the storage array, and now we're starting to see it move back, you know, and flash and persistent flash and that whole thing. And so Lightning is sort of a very interesting instantiation of that model, that vision. It's changing again. You know, we're seeing that pendulum swing. What are your thoughts on that? What's the balance? Where do you see that going? Yeah, I think there, you know, as you look at, if you look at some of the fundamental technology shifts, Pat talked about multi-core flash virtualization, you know, these create, you know, opportunities to change the game. And when you look at server flash, there's a lot of great opportunities with that to optimize, to take advantage of that, to exploit that for the IT model. But it also presents challenges, right? So, you know, I think a lot of times, people in technology tend to be short-sighted. EMC, having decades of experience in the data center, in the IT industry, understand the challenges. And what we're all about is how do we solve those problems in a very thoughtful manner, delivering, you know, best in class capabilities but also do it in a way and a manner in which, you know, we can bring the quality and reliability standards to the market. And so, when I look at things like project lightning, we think they're very complimentary to our strategy overall, you know, in terms of, you know, our overall strategy in core storage and what we're doing in terms of block file object. And we think these are very synergistic and help us, you know, deal with the problems of technology within the stack. And so, this is, you know, if you will, an important critical building block for us, you know, as we start to transform and as we get, you know, down these paths of, you know, that Pat talked about related to multi-core flash and virtualization. Yeah, so Symmetrix is obviously the flagship product of EMC. You've seen tremendous changes over the years. And then, you've introduced some innovations. Vplex, you know, Vplex Geo now is, you're not as a previously, but now you're actually going to market with it. So to solve the speed of light problem for some use cases sometimes. It helps. Talk about, you know, what you're doing there and how customers might be using it, just at a high level. Yeah, we see three predominant use cases. First is for data mobility, whether it's within the data center between disparate parts of the infrastructure or between data centers. So the ability to actively move information and applications dynamically. The second is all about availability. So we've enhanced it for zero downtime, zero data loss, added automation, added additional protection with the witness and also with Cross Connect. So we can tolerate multiple failures and still maintain the quality of service to the application layer. And then the third is, I think, going to be the next big thing, which is all about distributed data collaboration and making it seem like people are, you know, literally within the same office when they may be at different locations around the globe. And so we're driving a lot of new thinking in this space in various industries, whether it be oil and gas, healthcare, you know, intelligent systems, as well as media and entertainment and looking at how do we, you know, cut down cycle times of collaboration? How do we save time? How do we save money? And now with Geo available, you know, our capabilities with Geo, we enable, we kind of shorten the distance around the globe. And with our collaboration with our partners, with our, you know, WAN partners like Silver Peak in Sienna and Brocade in Cisco, you know, and the cash capabilities that we have inherent in Vplex, we can not solve the speed of light, but we can, you know, kind of soften the blow of the speed of light through optimization, layer two, layer three, virtualization as well as the cash coherency. Sounds like a lot of software. Absolutely. Invention. Pluses, and they're, you know, it's in the like. If you had like $100 of resource to allocate or let's say, you know, let's take your whole resource and let's assume it's $100, how much of that would be in software versus hardware innovation? For my organization, 100% right now. 100% If you look and Rich, you know, Rich and I are in the same boat. Between the two of us, we have about 4,000 engineers worldwide. Between us. So net net of it, I think EMC is about 16,000 worldwide and we've got about 350 that are doing hardware development. So we're leveraging a lot of the common componentry of our technology and it's really about software, software IP. Brian, what has been the biggest, you mentioned the change and transformation of EMC and the massive change. What has been the biggest surprise for you relative to your organization around this change? Anything that you want to share? Is it the people issues? Is it the software? What biggest surprise or aha moment have you had over the past couple years or a year? Yeah, I would say the biggest challenge is how we scale the company globally. So EMC, clearly global company. We've gotten much more global over the past several years. If you look at our sales mix that we've announced in our recent earnings announcement, we've shifted that mix to more towards the international side. We're still over 50% domestic in terms of our sales mix. So it's really about how do we work together as a company globally and then as we have acquired, how do we assimilate and integrate the new companies in EMC without destroying the culture of the acquired company. So I think EMC probably has done the best job in this area about getting finding best in breed, getting them plugged into the EMC engine without putting too much burden. I think if you talk to some of the acquired companies, they might say it's still a burden. It's not a burden but it's like drinking from a fire hose when they come into the EMC. You guys have executed pretty well, and I'm going to go to the other side. At the analyst meeting in January, Joe Tucci said we're the littlest of the bigs. And Dave Vellante asked the question about valuation. We still think you're undervalued relative to the VMware component. And we're not just saying that because we're fanboys of EMC. We really legitimately see that in the research. Joe says we're the littlest of the big. And Pat, our two days ago said we're going to take more share. It was all about taking more territory. So you guys have to grow, right? So your growth strategy, how are you going to take your high end product, your crown jewel and scale that up and take more share? Is there new markets? Is it product line extensions? Is it more acquisitions, all of the above? Yeah, I'd say there's just basic fundamentals of growth. Obviously taking share is one. Second is increasing total addressable market is two. Disrupting the disruptors, which is really protecting yourself is the third. And then we could always take the Exxon mobile case and raise prices. But we won't We lose customers. We're not in an industry that can do that. But not prices per terabyte, right? But oil and gas, they're in a different industry. It's all about supply and demand. But IT has not historically been like that. As we look at it, in the high end, we have taken share. Last year clearly we jumped a new swim lane in market share. There's new competitors trying to get into the market as well. But we expect to take more share this year in the high end. We've seen Hitachi with their channel start to struggle, clearly with Sun. The Sun channel and we expect the same with HP. So we'll take share. As we look at expanding TAM, I think there's some growth opportunities that we see clearly with new routes to market with VCE. Also the cloud service provider markets, we see opportunities in that for high end storage as well. And clearly Vplex has been a door opener for us. So we expect to have some more opportunities in that space as well. How about this big data trend? I think one of Bob Graham's big challenges is going to be how to position for big data now. I wrote a piece beginning of the year and actually I put a line in that. I said that when Brian reads this, if he reads it, it's going to take him off. I said Symmetrics is not big data. I narrowly defined big data around disperse, to make a dupe like data. So is Symmetrics big data? Am I wrong about that? Yeah, I think it plays in both space of cloud and big data. If you look at where we've been historically is in data warehousing and analytics in the past, we expect to be there in the future as well. And I think there's capabilities that we bring to that space. Clearly the acquired companies of Green Plum and Icelon are just perfect fits for big data. But we think some of our enterprise capabilities in both VMAX and VNX. So I don't think there's a single product answers all questions in this space. I think it's a matter of the requirements for the applications that we serve. But if you look at where Green Plum has been playing clearly has been in this space since their inception and then Icelon's capability of scale out is just a perfect fit for this space. Somebody said, it might have been rich, said don't get so caught up in defining what it is. Big data is in the eye of the beholder I guess. Having said that, I think one of the things that we see is that the so-called emerging big data, the Hadoop-like stuff that's distributed and dispersed and unstructured, eventually will find its way into some kind of aggregated system. Symmetrics has always been a leader in the traditional data warehousing marketplace, hasn't it? We see those as complimentary. Do you see it as well? I would say I'd kind of simplify it and put it this way. We don't believe the answer is or either this or that. We think the answer is and. Meaning that it's the sum of the parts. I think in this space, clearly we've got now best of breed technology to go. It helps out some big problems in the big data space. I think fundamentally it's an area of opportunity. Again, when we looked at the data warehouse and analytics market we said this is just a natural progression of EMC. To extend a lot of our core capabilities and then bring new capabilities to market. You had some interesting dynamics going. You've always been very strong there, as I said. You had Oracle elbowing its way in with Exadata. They had to grab your attention and great move. We've been following that for a while with Green Plum. The question I want, Dave, is that it's interesting as you mentioned disrupting the disruptors and you mentioned high-end. What does that mean high-end with software being a part of the equation and you're talking about Vplex and Geo. What does high-end mean? It seems distributed and that's what Pat was talking about. The question is, what is the high-end going to look like? It's not just gear and iron, right? It could be other things. Two, I'm fascinated by your comment disrupting the disruptors. Who are they? What does it look like? What do they look like? Obviously, Hadoop was one. You see companies like Cloud Era and the ex-isolun guys at data stacks are out there. Are they the little guys like that or are disruptors like IBM? What does that mean? Let me answer the first question. As we look at the high-end, historically we've segmented the market and that's how we go quantify our business as we look at it. Traditionally, as we've talked about the high-end, it's been by customer size and by IT spend of that customer. And in that space, that's what we call the high-end. The price performance kind of thing? Well, it's not the technology, it's really when we say high-end, it's really at a certain number of employees of a customer and a certain IT spend per year. And then we have the mid-enterprise, then we've got small to medium and so-ho. When we look at high-end market, obviously a smaller number of customers and a lot of our technology fits into this high-end customer space. We've got obviously SIM that's predominantly where we play in the high-end segment of the market with those customers. A lot of video on demand stuff, right? A lot of customers with big needs in that space are other products like VNX also play in that space as well. And then when we look at disruptors there are clearly, as our competitors have seen EMC and our results that we've been able to achieve year after year after year they wouldn't be able to get part of that market, right? And so we see some newcomers into that space clearly 3-par XIV some newer entries, compelling into the space. Now they've been acquired by other bigger companies so in that space in our traditional core we see disruptors and then we see technology disruptors as well. Hadoop is a good example of that. We want to be the leader in that space. And then we also see You're getting in early too. You're seeing early movement there. Right. And then we also see business model disruptors that we need to make sure that we're aligned to cloud service providers and making sure that we're part of that and supplying technology into that market and also as we look at the competitive space with Google and Amazon and others we got to make sure that we're focusing our resources in the right area. Are you guys I know Pat mentioned it and Joe talks about this Joe is a great strategist you can see his mind he's working great CEO obviously the acquisitions that you sponsored and Rich sponsored Pat you guys are a great team but you got this EMC acquisition machine what about EMC ventures? I mean there's been some talk lately about EMC ventures, big Silicon Valley West Coast offense that we've been saying with marketing but also there's been some discussions about investments is that going to be something you guys will continue to do is that going to be internal to EMC is it going to be strategic investing can answer it how much under management can answer it on a number of fronts Intel Capital Intel Capital was early on a strategic now they're a little bit more financially motivated with their but they were strategically doing great deals and seeing all the early deals yeah I think it you know obviously we're looking at it as complimentary to our business and helping strengthen EMC overall but again I really can't we stay away from that space Dave you try nice try I don't know how to Joe answer that Brian's going to say I can't answer it don't say anything I mean innovation is interesting Hadoop thing was for me is a great signal for you about the new EMC because that's something that traditionally is not an EMC maneuver that early and play in the sandbox like that so I'm finding that to be an interesting and aggressive move by EMC to get in there early like that yeah I think you know again great opportunity in a great market you know that there's going to be tremendous growth and so you know I think it's a great you know this was perfect timing EMC world you know announcing the Hadoop strategy with green plum in the Hadoop appliance it's really going to be I think a big you know help to our customers with big data problems and a big help to EMC as well alright we're here with Brian Gallagher president of EMC's enterprise storage division and cube alum Brian thanks for coming back and talking to us you've been two years in a row man yeah two years in a row we've seen the transitions I mean you're sort of you of all people have seen the original EMC sort of evolve into what we have now it's just been phenomenal we appreciate all your support coming on the cube thank you thanks for having me I appreciate it