 Live from San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to VMworld 2014 everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman and we are here live, this is day three for us, we've been doing wall to wall coverage, we set a record in the last two days, I think it was 42 interviews, is that right, 41 interviews in two days, it's a new single cube record, of course at EMC World we had the double cubes going, we broke all records to make Jeremy Burton happy I guess, but where Stu and I are going to really get into the Federation conversation, Dennis Wilford is here, he runs sort of evangelism worldwide for EMC and is really staking a claim on the whole Federation model and messaging, so Dennis welcome, we were talking last night at the EMC World event, EMC event, it was fantastic, so it was a good little preview for what we're going to talk about today, so welcome to the Cube, thank you, I'm very glad to be here, it's awesome, great show. So we've talked in the past, we talked a little bit last night about how the whole Federation model sort of changes the way in which you guys go to market, it allows you not to just talk to the sort of storage admins, everybody thinks that EMC is storage, but that's not what you want, so talk about sort of your role, your goals, what you've been charted to do. Oh absolutely, so my job as you pointed out is to tell a holistic story around all the stuff we do, and you're right, we have a lot of perceptions that are like, the first thing you say if you say, hey, what do you say, EMC, they say storage, but storing data is just a small part of what we do, why is that? Well because it's definitely more exciting to do something with the data, right? So to do that, you have to actually crack some packets and look inside. One of the things of course that's very important when you are computing on data, is that you have a good compute environment, and if you start looking at that, you go, oh, so that's my VM where it fits in, and then you say, you know, what do we do with Pivotal? We'll be adding more value to the data, right? But you can also imagine, why is that a federation? Good question to ask, right? It's a federation because of course the different individual focus needs different organizations. If you're building a storage system, that's one way of doing stuff, right? If you're building a virtual server environment, that's another. And if you look at, finally, on one side you say, hey, we're actually going to build applications. Well, that's still another culture, right? You need to have focused in the individual parts of the federation. So that's why, you know, they're all just different design centers for the way people work together. So in thinking about sort of your traditional approach and go to the market and the roles to which you sell and interact, obviously the storage admin, you know, is a big proponent of your technology, is a big buyer. But I keep hearing at this show that that role is going away. The non-differentiated heavy lifting is going away. Okay, so. Who tells you that? VMWare. VMWare? Essentially we're making storage invisible. So if you're, put it this way, if you're an infrastructure admin that provisions storage, your job is going to get easier. As a result, you're going to have to move up the value stack, spend more time with the business, spend more time maybe talking about cloud brokerage and so forth. So I want you to talk about how the roles within each of those worlds are changing. So storage admin, traditional for EMC, VMWare admin, traditional for VMWare. And Pivotal is kind of the developer community. So that's sort of new in Greenfield. That is true. The first two evolving, I think the developer community is pretty clear that you, that's critical for you guys. Very critical, adding value to the data. And now with the whole Docker thing, that's extending, cloud foundry, fantastic. So that's pretty solid, but the other two roles are really in transition and you're driving a lot of that transition. Oh we are, absolutely. And it's intentionally. So where are you taking that bus? Well, it's very simple. So I need to start, so I'm being the storage guy that I am, right, I need to start there to illustrate what we're really talking about here. If you're the average storage admin, you're having a big system, be VMAX, could be VNX, and you have thousands of virtual machines. That wasn't one thing we hear from every single place. Hey, I'm up to here with doing requests from everybody. They want lunch, they want to spin up. There's more agility now in any business out there that has ever been before. And how do you create agility? Look at the internet, right? It didn't, it could never have scaled to the numbers if we weren't empowered to do what we want to do on the internet. This is all about empowering the people who are actually running the business applications. The way it used to be was, hey, I'm going to spin up a VM, I go over and talk to my storage admin, he gives me the loan I need to work on, and now everybody's happy. Well, that works in smaller numbers, but when you're talking thousands and thousands of VMs that need to be able to spun up at a moment's notice, we need to empower the VM administrator. And how do we do that? By provisioning him virtual volumes. And that's really funny, there was actually a lot of internal conversations around that, right? You may know that our storage systems, they would pool the resources that they have, whether it's solid state, mechanical drives, whatever, in a big pool, and we parcel that pool out and say, you get this much, you get this much, that's how much storage admin typically would do. But he still does that. He provides a buffet, if you will, of resources that now the virtual administrator, the VM guy, can come in and say, hey man, I need to spin up a two terabyte loan for whatever I'm doing here. But he's doing it through the top-down VVol abstraction. So they're actually coming together, they're just two sides of the same exact equation. But it's demand driven, driven by the VM administrator himself, or herself, not by the, hey, we have to get together, have a meeting, figure out how much loan, how many loans and what volumes I need. They're already there, it's self-service. So I feel as though a lot of your, the federations, the individual companies within the federation, I feel like a lot of their marketing and sales motion has been organic. And I think a lot of it, I would characterize as bottoms up. It seems to me that the federation enables you to have a top-down messaging, the umbrella messaging and marketing sort of motion. So what is that brand of the federation? What do you want the brand to stand for? And how should we think about the umbrella messaging? Right, so since I just got to my new job just the two or three days ago, right, I'm working on that. That's exciting what I'm working on. I'm trying to figure this out, right? And you're right, it has been pretty organic because each individual building block has a design center and it's very important people understand what they can and cannot do with the building blocks. But you're right, there's so many building blocks now, we got to time together and create an overarching story. And if I have to give you a bit now, like two or three days into this thing. Right, put me on the spot. Yeah, put me on the spot, that's fine. That's okay, dude. You're used to it. No, dude, get used to it, right? Man up, okay? I tell you, it's very simple. All you have to do is focus away from the storage system and worry about what's on the storage system. It's all about the data, right? The data, if you start thinking about what is the EMC federation? What's the one thing that ties it all together? The compute, the retention, the protection, the actual refinement of what's going on with the data, right? With Pivotal. You start going, well, wait a minute, this is all about being a data management company. That's what we're doing. And it might have a more refined answer for you when I've had a little chance to polish it, but that's really, at the essence, what it is. And I'll tell you one more little thing. There's not a stick of, you know, a palette of diapers that's moving in any supermarket, unless there is a data entrance somewhere, right? Data is, someone said it perfectly the other day, says, man, everything is data. Yeah, and data is everything. Data centricity is going to be the best thing. It is, it is, it is. And that's precisely what ties the federation together. Dennis, I wonder if I could pivot off that. Sure. Can we talk about kind of the changing application models and how that's impacting, you know, everything throughout the federation? Yes, yes. So, I want to jump into what we, I think we have confused everybody by calling third platform, right? So what's third platform? It's really just been around us. It's been around us since Google started building this stuff, right? And they sat around and said, we need to build a big data center here for our application. And then, you know, Facebook came in and did the exact same thing. And eBay did the exact same thing. These are big, single applications. Now, I'm not trying to belittle what they do. There are a lot of little bits and pieces in their machine. It's a big machine that serve one constituency, right? That's, and they start going, well, could they buy something from Microsoft? They would do that? Or would Oracle have had something off the shelf that they could install on the server? The answer is no, they have to build it themselves. So, if you look at their operational model, right, there's a very important thing. And a lot of people, they don't see this because they look at it from the top down. They don't look at it sometimes from the bottom up. And that helps a little bit to look at it from both sides. If you look at the actual hardware today, what's the big difference between where we have been in second platform and now what we call third platform? Well, let me take second platform first so you know what that looked like. Because that's actually really key to understanding the question you're asking, which is, what is the different models? Well, second platform was very simple. It had a web tier. And what was the thing we did like 10, 15 years ago in a web tier? We stacked pizza boxes, right? And what was inside a pizza box? One core, one CBU, right? And the only way to get scale was to buy more pizza, right? So what happened in the second level that people typically had, that was the front of the shop. Then there was an app tier where the server's got a little more expensive, a little more powerful. And what happened at the back of the shop? That was where you had the big database server. And then in those days, EMC would come in with a symmetric and that'll be where the data landed and got protected behind that. So what you had was essentially a funnel effect where everything come in the front end, goes through the back end and the back end is where data gets monetized, so to speak. Now, you take that whole thing and you say, well, what has changed between that model, which is second platform and the third platform we're talking about today? It turns out the third platform we're talking about today is that whole thing mushed together like so, right? And then it's scaled horizontally. And why is that? Well, thanks to folks like Intel, where you buy a socket, one single socket today has 12 cores of CPU and it's very fast, right? So you can build systems now that are scaling in a horizontal compute layer, which of course means that underneath that has to be a horizontal data retention layer. Again, it's about the data, right? There are two pieces of the puzzle here. We keep the data from when you're ready to eat it and we make sure it's protected. And then what you do is you obviously take it, chew on it, create value, and then whatever that value was created needs to then be stored again. So what do we have more dealing with? It's sort of like snakes and ladders, right? We have like transformative compute engines, right? And we have retention layers underneath and it's all networked together. But the difference is not a three-step process anymore. It's actually the horizontal scalable C of compute, C of data retention. And that means that we have to write the software differently to pull that off. Does that make sense? Was that a long answer to a short question or something? It was, no, but it was very useful. Okay. Absolutely. I mean Moore's Law and the software changing the way we do things. Completely. I've got spare compute cycles so there's much more I can do with it. That's right. It's these massive step functions when I have just so much available because I've now got hundreds of thousands of cores I can put in some of these environments so it does fundamentally changes. That's right. David Floyd, our CTO at Wikibon always said, when databases were originally built there was just those physical limitations so you architected it a certain way because otherwise you were just wasting code. That's right. And now we can fundamentally rewrite all of those applications and that's that big transition. So do I hear right? It sounds like you're kind of stepping back a little bit from the pure taxonomy of second platform, third platform. What, what, what, what, what's the, uh... No, I don't think, no, that would be too much to say I'm stepping back from it. I see it as a continuum, right? We are moving, we're moving. This is a classic case of what we've been doing in our business all the time. We moved from paradigm to paradigm. There was a mainframe paradigm back in the day. There was the B's and E's, right? And that has changed. There was a tape paradigm that was everything, right? That's how we did archive in the back. You don't do that anymore. Like for instance, on storage, disk is the new tape, right? And flash is the new disk, right? Everybody's going to show here. Everybody wants to have flash. So if I could jump in there, Dennis? So in one way, I agree it's a continuum, because of course, mainframe's been replaced, but it's still, it's now a niche. Yeah, but it's still around, though. And so usually we see kind of what's big today becomes the niche. So EMC has a lot of big pieces today. What becomes niche and what becomes the new thing? Well, so if you look at it, and I need to put it in sort of a, if you look at it from an investor's perspective, right? I mean, we're running a business and we're running business with a bunch of stuff that our customers are saying is valuable, right? And we're investing, according to where customers vote with their feet. That's fair, right? So we have different products that are different points of maturity. There's stuff that is actually, that coming from a second platform needs to start changing to be relevant in the third platform. So you want one that blows your mind, I know we're running out of time, but one that really blows your mind, what we're hearing from all the folks that are doing third platform, that grew up in third platform, they're coming over, knocking on the door at EMC and say, guys, do you have some shared stories for me? And we're going, what, are you crazy? Shared storage in Hadoop? What's going on? And the answer really is, yeah, we want some of the operational efficiencies of scaling storage and servers independently of each other. So it's really interesting to see that what you are seeing, some people would say, well, it's the same old wine and new bottles. Right, it's really a evolution, right? You're seeing, I mean, you can argue that I had a terminal back in the day, right? For our mainframe? Well, isn't that what cloud computing is all about? Is that what VDI is all about to a certain extent? Do you really care anymore? No, right? You just go, dude, I have a need. Click, here I got the answer, right? That's where we're at right now. And that's a democratization, if you will, of compute. I mean, if you look at it, I mean, you saw what happened to Microsoft, right? Those cats were running around struggling a bit because they were stuck in a PC paradigm. They're changing now, because the PC today, the personal computer is in your pocket, right? That's your smartphone. So is that, that doesn't mean it's not a personal computer anymore? No, it just meant it changed the form fact. It got smaller, and it did things when it didn't have a keyboard anymore. But do you want to give up your laptop you have there? I'd be happy to give up my laptop. Would you really? Absolutely, sure. Maybe we can talk about that offline. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Clarify all my apps, I'm all good. That's all right. But let me ask you a simple question, right? So things are changing all the time, right? This was so exciting about this business. Would you like a laptop that didn't have a flash drive in it? Yeah, no. No, all right, so we're done there, right? Yeah, yeah. So you see, so, but does that mean you don't have applications that all of a sudden don't work because you're running a flash drive? No, you can argue with that. The killer app of NAND gates, the chips, where actually they could be implemented as an SSD so they can be slid in underneath all the software, all the OS, all the stuff we already have created. So it's an evolution. I'm with you, Dennis. Okay, good. So Dennis, I wonder, as you get into this, I know you're just a very couple days in, but I want to understand who the consumers are of your messages. Is it a new class of consumers? Is it the CIO, the CTO, the CEO? Who are you trying to reach? Good question. So in the past, we would say that we were probably guilty of selling a lot to the storage admins, the whole army of folks that did storage, and no one loved them, right? But because what we just thought about a minute ago, which is really the shifting towards data and data flow equals business flow, what we find now is the consumer of what we're building is actually the business owner. Okay, so that's really ultimately who you're trying to reach. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, no doubt about it. I mean, and the biggest challenge, frankly, is that you're a big organization, right? What are we now? We're like the more than 66,000 people working for EMC, right? And you go, that's a pretty big shop, and getting all those guys to shift their behavior from being just, hey, I'm selling you a box to saying, let's have a conversation around how we can help your business. That's the change we're in the middle of. And the good news is I was just, before I ran over here, I did have a conversation with one of the very passionate people at EMC that said, man, we got to get much better at this. So you're right, we are shifting the focus. We don't turn our back on the storage admin, of course not, right? But we are starting to broaden the conversation. And that's again, because everything is data, and data is everything. Well, one of the things that we've had Tom Clancy on a number of times in the team, one of the things that I think you can help the storage admin do, because you've got such a strong relationship with so many, is help them in their careers. With the education and the training, whether it's data, whether it's cloud ops, cloud brokerage, you guys have excellent education in all of those. And so I'm always encouraging my storage admin friends, hey, time to update the skill set. And make more money. Yeah. And isn't it true for all of us, when we get outside our comfort zone, it's when we grow. That's when it's fun. That's when like, man, I'm doing new stuff, right? You get passionate about what you do, right? Doing the same old, same old, that's just boy. How are you going to measure success? Am I going to measure success? Yeah, how are you going to measure success? My success is EMC success. Your success in this new role. Oh, in this new role? That we have the ability to actually have that conversation. And the way I would measure whether I'm effective or not, and with all the people I'm going to be working with, is that we continue to grow EMC revenue. Because when, and I was trying to teach my kids this, so I have two teenagers, right? So I was saying, listen, value is all that matters, right? Going to late night TV and thing, you can make millions with some scheme. It's not how it works, okay? In the real world, right? Let the old man tell you, right? Because what it really is about, you create value. What is value? Value is what you perceive it to be, right? It's not going, well, wait a minute, that sounds pretty esoteric. No, because you're actually exchanging money for what you perceive the value to be, right? So if that's the case, then I must say, EMC continues financial success. Yeah, that's why I'm after, right? And that's only because I'm providing value. We are all providing value to the end user, to the business that use our gear to run and benefit their businesses. Denise, thanks for coming with me. Hey, man, it was a pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you all. It was really cool. Thanks, man. All right, keep it up, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2014. We'll be right back. Cool.