 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World, live from Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Paul Gillan. We are joined today by Sam Grokut. He is the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Storage and Data Protection here at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be on the show. Yes, a CUBE veteran. So, lots of product announcements this week, Dell EMC. Lots going on in the storage and data world. Tell us a little bit about the new lineup and what most excites you. Yeah, so it was very exciting yesterday to see the opening day keynote with Michael Dell and David Goulden talk through all of the new announcements that we rolled out. And this by far has been the biggest set of announcements we've ever done at EMC, now part of Dell EMC. So it was very exciting to see that come out. When you think about the types of offerings we rolled out across the high end, the unstructured space, the mid range and then data protection, we really hit every single major product we ship today with either a refreshed, bigger, faster, stronger offering or a ground up re-architecture like with the X2 and the ISLON. So it's just awesome to see all this hard work over the last few years come to fruition and ultimately the customers be delighted with those new products. So very, very exciting times. How important was timing of this announcement given that the acquisition closed eight months ago. There's always a question about whether a company can preserve its innovation during a time like that. So was it important, how important was it to get something out at this time during this first year of integration? Yeah, I think EMC historically is really well known for its rate of innovation. And as we come together as Dell EMC, I think it was really important we demonstrated that rate of innovation and that cultural heritage continues going forward. So again, with our biggest end of the end announcement, I think we've paid that off in space, showcasing yet despite one of the largest mergers in IT history happening, we've been able to demonstrate rapid innovation and then look for more to come in the second half of the year as well. So how do you keep it up? I mean, I think you raise an interesting point about people will be looking to see if you can maintain the edge. So how are you, particularly when you are merging to powerhouses, two different cultures, how do you come together to remain creative, to remain cutting edge, to remain innovative? Well, we first and foremost, we invest heavily in the R&D organization. So I think this year is four and a half billion dollars of investment going into R&D. We're continuing to focus heavily on the large products that continue to drive the customer adoption and meet the customer market needs that are required. So first and foremost, large scale investment continues. Second is we hire the best and the brightest from an innovation standpoint and they're continuing to challenge ourselves and challenge our products to make sure we're innovating and meeting the, not today's customer's problem, but really where the puck is going for tomorrow. So I think we've got just some of the best and brightest engineers, product managers, and teams that are really figuring out the next generation of products that we need to do. I think those are really the two key elements, the investment for people. Where's data protection in your title? I assume it goes beyond simple backup and recovery. How do you envision data protection as a distinguished and traditional backup? Yeah, so backup, archaic, old tapes, technology, blah blah blah. That's not what we're doing. Yes, we support that stuff and that's the large part of the business today, but really the flag we're planting in data protection is cloud and cloud native data protection. You're going to see us continue to innovate in bringing our data protection portfolio into applications and products and offerings that never land on-prem. Cloud native applications, we introduced our first one this week with the Data Domain Virtual Edition in the cloud for AWS. So you can back up and restore your data and your applications that are cloud native in AWS and have that same great experience, storage efficiency, data reduction that we provide on-prem, now exclusively off-prem. That's a hint and a down payment of where we're going, but you're going to see more and more of that as we go forward. Talk to me about customer concerns, particularly when it comes to budgetary constraints. How do you help the customer make new technology investments while also managing all the other challenges he's facing? Yeah, so we talk a lot about the curves of innovation and investment where costs, the pressure to reduce costs on-prem is shrinking to self-fund innovation in the future. So I think it's dramatic macro trends in the industry such as the shift to all flash, shift to hyper-converged, getting better storage efficiency and data reduction technologies. That's basically reducing your total cost of ownership of traditional infrastructure that then you can reinvest in your next generation cloud applications, cloud native applications or just investing in higher efficiency on-prem storage, which we provide. So it's a constant trade-off of, we provide best of breed choices for all of your storage and data protection needs. At the same time, we're making it more efficient, we're simplifying, making it be able to consume in different models and financial models to create that space to invest. There's no CIO out there getting larger budgets. That's just not happening. So you have to self-fund. So we have to provide technology that allows our customers to self-fund. What, how important are the cloud providers becoming to you? How big a part of your business is it and how fast is it growing? Yeah, so in the data protection space, that's a good example. We have over 150 petabytes of protected data in the cloud today. That's 2x bigger than our closest competitor. So we're leading the way in some of these applications and use cases data protection being one of them where we're partnering directly with the Amazons, the Azures, the Googles, obviously Virtus.Screen service providers. So I would say it's probably one of the most strategic partnerships we have in the entire ecosystem. So it is very, very important, very strategic. The days of not having a clear cloud strategy are long gone and over. You have to be able to do both. And at Dell EMC, we're very much focused on providing bridges and workload transformation in the cloud. But at the end of the day, we're very focused on providing world-class on-prem hybrid solutions for customers. Sam, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. Good luck this week. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan. We will have more with theCUBE at Dell EMC World after this.