 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Okay, welcome back everyone live here in Las Vegas for EMC World 2014. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Today, I might go as Dave Vellante. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise and we're proud to have Jeremy Burton here, president of products and marketing of EMC. Cube alumni and when we started the Cube, it was our first event was EMC World in Boston. Jeremy, you just started at EMC. You were on the Cube as a guest and it was a great time. And since then, lots of change. Welcome back to the Cube and congratulations on all your success. Thanks, my, it's great to still be invited back. Yeah, I mean, you're a legend. I mean, Dave and I were speculating on our opening yesterday about how much EMC has truly changed since you came in. And the great thing about the Cube is because it's open source, we're documenting all the conversations. You were on the Cube and you told us, I want to be global. I want to control the narrative. And you basically were like to use a baseball because American baseball, Babe Ruth, you called your shots. So tell us, are you happy where you are right now? I mean, cloud meets big data. I mean, it was, you know, during the private cloud was, I think you kind of inherited that, but you then quickly moved to cloud meets big data. And since then really the EMC narrative has been spectacular, you know, great conversations around that. Are you pleased with it? And what's your, what's your take on what's changed in the past four years? Yeah, so I mean, I think first things, you want to be part of the conversation. I think in this business, you know, if you're at a company that customers don't believe you're relevant to the future, you might as well not exist. And so I think, you know, although there's a lot of great technology within EMC, I think the first, you know, kind of objective is to establish relevancy in these new areas like cloud and like big data. But, you know, right now, what you see is that the customers that they're a little bit past the top level headline of cloud and big data, they really want a little bit more, well, okay, how do I do that? And what are the products and services that I should use to move in that direction? And the reality is a lot of these new applications that people are going to build are going to be different. And the infrastructure is going to be different. And so when you see the theme around here today around redefine, that's not just kind of redefining the perception of how people think about EMC. It's really challenging the attendees at the conference. They've got to redefine how they look at their infrastructure, if they're IT guys, they've got to redefine that relationship with the business. And, you know, underneath all of that, you know, I think probably closest to their hearts, they've got to think about redefining the storage infrastructure, which is what most of the people at the conference do on a day-to-day basis. In following your career, CMO, now president of the product, you quickly moved into the product space as the market was very dynamic. What's different now than a few years ago? In terms of the product mix, obviously Flash is heavily at the center of it, software, what key knobs of the EMC product portfolio do you have your hands on the most right now? Yeah, well, I mean, my entire career, I've always kind of dabbled a move back and forward between, you know, be it marketing or product management and running development teams or product teams, so. You're a visual basic programmer. Yeah, well, yeah, back in the day, yeah. It was, you know, C++, that seems a long time ago. It's because it was a long time ago, I'm getting old. But now, I mean, what are you, in the portfolio, I'm in clearly Flash, right? Whenever the media changes, you know, tape to disk, disk to Flash, that's a big deal. You want to be on the front foot there, which I think we are. I think we've got a great portfolio, not just the traditional products, but ExtremeIO and now DSSD, but the thing you can't ignore and as much as I think we're well equipped for that transition to Flash, the reality is, is that in the next four years, you're going to see 3% of the world's data on Flash, which means that still 97% of the world's data in the enterprise is going to be on hard drives and we're moving much more to this architecture around having a hot edge, which is the performance here based on Flash and then a cold core, which is the capacity to, you know, predominantly based on hard drive technology and those two things, you know, really need to operate and orchestrate together. So at the conference this week, when you've seen things like DSSD and ExtremeIO, and then you see things like Nile turning to the elastic cloud storage appliance, capacity optimized workloads, you can start to see where the hot edge and the cold core is coming from. What's a quick update on some of the stats here at the show in terms of just the data, in terms of some of the customer activity that you're involved in. Now, as President Frost, not just overseeing the marketing, there's a lot more customer engagement here. We've had, so a lot more engaged customers talking. What's some of the stats and what are some of the customer conversations you're hearing? I mean, the customer conversations are pretty wild. I have to say, and actually interestingly enough, a lot of the customer conversations then they're not just strictly taking place at like the EMC office, Pivotal and VMware offices as well. And I think the Pivotal guys in particular, they have business people coming to them and saying, look, we want to become a software company. So these are retail clothing companies. These are pharmaceutical companies. These are banks saying that we need to be a software company. And a lot of those new applications and that new software that's written is going to drag a different set of infrastructure. So we've found ourselves at the table now, not just with the IT teams, but actually with a lot of business executives and a lot of the time, they actually don't bring the IT team with them. But obviously what they're working on is going to have a profound impact on IT. Jim, I'm going to ask you some product questions if I may. Viper, obviously big announcement last year, focus this year Viper 2.0. Is Viper the future of storage? Is it the future of software-defined storage? Or is it a way for EMC customers to consolidate sort of the different platforms that they have or both? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I mean, this is, I think, probably one of the magical but also confusing things about Viper. It is our software-defined storage platform is the way I describe it. The control plane is the thing that is really the cloaking layer that's going to allow the storage administrator to treat all different kinds of storage in a very, very similar way. So you can automate provisioning and a lot of storage operations in a very consistent way. But the data plane of Viper is really what's given rise to the advent of truly software-defined data services that can run against existing arrays or they can also run against commodity storage hardware as well, so it's a weird beast, which is what makes it unique. And I think more to the point from a product strategy standpoint, you got to think of it as almost the architectural backplane that all of our portfolio will hang off. So I have to ask you another question. So I was in the session this morning, the analyst session, and Bill Richter was talking about how a dupe is just smoking on Isilon. And I had texted our big data guy who happens to be somewhere else. And he said, that's interesting, he's not a hardware guy, he really doesn't understand that business. He said, I'm surprised, dupe is all about scale out, low cost, commodity infrastructure. And I said, yeah, that's what Isilon actually is, relative to everything else that was out there. So my question is, does Viper change that game even further? Is it going to be just a dupe machine or is it more going to be towards service providers, a combination, help us understand where it's going to go? Yeah, like everything. We think the world of Hadoop, it's going to take place at different scales and there's going to be different performance requirements. And in the same way as the traditional storage world, we've never believed in one size fits all. I don't think that's going to be the case in the world of Hadoop and data analytics. I think at the hundreds of petabytes in exascale, I mean that's really what Viper was architected for. If you look at the cost, it's going to be the cheapest. But the reason why Isilon's doing well is in the data center, if you've got data sitting in Isilon today, it could be hundreds of terabytes and you want to access that data through Hadoop, it's easy, it's right there, you don't have to move it. And so, Isilon's going to be one of these very interesting kind of general purpose big data machines. If you look at what say the VNX does on the transactional side of things, you got to look at Isilon being that kind of Swiss army knife on the big data side of things. At massive exascale, it is absolutely going to be more expensive. You are going to go to this very distributed kind of shared nothing architecture. But then I'd also say, I mean we saw DSSD yesterday. Hadoop over time, there are going to be use cases where it's not an offline batch thing, it's going to be a real time thing. And so you're also going to see DSSD, surface things like HDFS out of their infrastructure to do these super high performance, but also more expensive Hadoop kind of workloads. We've got a number of customers in the Wikibon community of actually bringing transactional data and analytical data together. Ad serving is a good example obviously, but there's other use cases. I want to ask you about Nile. You announced Nile I think in the fall, right? July last year, yeah. It was a July last year, I think somebody's going to hit the launch. It was a mega launch, okay. Imprinted on my brain. Yeah, okay, good. Okay, Nile, the biggest river, bigger than the Amazon, okay, great. So now you're really starting to bring that to market. It's called the Elastic Cloud Storage. Talking about 28% lower TCO than public cloud services. Talk a little bit about that and sort of what customers are telling you. Yeah, if you do the math on that, I mean a lot of people don't realize that your storage is relatively cheap, right? I mean you do the math on the Elastic Cloud Storage. It's a couple of cents a gigabyte a month, which is not a whole lot. And now for a certain class of workloads, that's what's required because the data volumes are massive. And we see not just kind of enterprises building out, starting to build out these massive, capacity optimized storage tiers, but also the service providers as well. And we think the Elastic Cloud Storage appliance, it's going to go in both places. It's going to go into the enterprise. It's also going to go into service providers as well. So Jerry, we had two questions. One, redefine, words like redefine, Elastic, sound familiar to me. Amazon has reinvent, you guys have redefine, they have Elastic in there, Elastic Cloud, Elastic Beanstalk, you guys have Elastic Storage. Was that by design or is that just coincidence that sounds familiar? I mean, why reinvent when you can redefine? You know, don't fight fashion, right? I mean, there's one of my old bosses, actually a funny story, I spent a lot of time at Oracle over the years, right? And Larry Ellison, I was fortunate enough as a kid to kind of watch that guy at close quarters. One of his great lines was, I spent enough time in Italy to know that fashion matters. And it's the same in the tech business, right? If the term that people understand for storage pools to grow and shrink is Elastic, use Elastic, I've never been the person that thought, we've got to go reinvent or recreate our own segment in order to be relevant, right? There are relevant things out there that we want to be a part of. So, speaking the language that customers understand. Yeah, exactly, don't create a new term, no one understands it. Well, great, I knew this Jeremy's, but fingerprints were all over that. Very clever, it's awesome, by the way, totally agree. Second question is about developers, right? So, right now we're living in a modern C change, Joe Tucci, cause it's software-defined enterprise. Clearly, DevOps and Cloud have shown that way. The Federation's all set up with VMware, certainly, with Pivotal. Yeah. A lot of chess pumping on, we're going to win the developers, it's hard, right? So, how are you guys looking at that at a federation level? Obviously, it's not that easy. You can't just throw a Barney deal together. You know, I see, you know, some are saying that the Cloud Foundry deals are very much Barney deals. You know, we love each other, but where's the meat on the bone? And certainly it's a good strategic direction, but where, how are you guys going to win the developers in this new and modern era? Yeah, so I think, you know, you're banging on the right door with Cloud Foundry. I mean, I actually happen to think it's one of the most strategic assets we've got in the entire federation. It's probably an asset that we've not played as much as some of the others, right? I mean, certainly, you know, NSX and Viper and the certain other things in the federation have gotten more play over the last year or so, but Cloud Foundry, I think, is one of the most strategic. We look at it as, you know, as we produce the, you know, the HDFS interfaces, for example, that are going to, you know, plug into Hadoop and so on. We've got to surface those things up through Cloud Foundry. So, you know, EMC ourselves, we're probably not going to go direct to developers. We're going to use Cloud Foundry as the vehicle to go to the development community. And what I think a lot of people are starting to realize is that there is room for an independent, truly community-owned platform as a service layer. And the way the pivotal guys are setting this up is your influence in the community is going to be based on how much code you contribute. So look, anybody can sign up and whether they're Barney deals or not is, to my view, is neither here nor there. He who commits has influence. If you don't contribute anything to the community, your name will be on a logo, but you'll have no influence. If you commit a lot to it and you move the ball down the field, you'll have a lot of influence. Well, one of the guys involved is from Piston Cloud and he also was involved in setting up OpenStack. So, and that's a lot different than OpenStack in terms of a community-led infrastructure. Do you see our community-led software environment? Is OpenStack in conflict with that? And how do you guys view OpenStack? Is that a complimentary? Yeah, to me, it's a level lower. It's only, I don't think OpenStack is trying to be any kind of pass layer. I think really what they're trying to do is create a framework for which folks can deploy infrastructure to make it easier to manage and provision. The cloud foundry push to me is really a pass layer to developers and then an automation layer to simplify the deployment to any cloud which could be OpenStack or not. So what kind of contribution do you guys make? Well, so the main contribution to Cloud Foundry right now is through the PivotalGuys and actually the secret sauce in all of this is Bosch is the name of it and that is the magic that does all of the deployment of applications to third-party clouds and so on. But over time, I mean, look, we've got IP within the EMC community. I mean, the APIs that we've surfaced northbound, the HDFS layers there, potentially as well. I mean, it is a source of huge debate internally whether we should go for it and open source the ViperController, right? I mean, there's a whole bunch of northbound APIs there which would be useful from an automation standpoint. We've not pulled the trigger on that yet, but as I said, it's a source of vigorous data internally. Yeah, it would be a big move. I got to ask the marketing question because we've always been big fans of what you've done as a CMO now as president, especially in the social media area, which you've been a big supporter of theCUBE, which is what I never know that you've done that, been great champion of our effort of open source social media. But you've made some good calls around how you've invested your dollars in terms of social media, paid media, earned media. What is your take on the current trend right now out there in terms of marketing? You've got obviously the paid media, owned media, this whole earned media, you guys have invested heavily in a lot of that. It's still early. What are some of the things that you see that are working that need development around this new social fabric? I just, I'm kind of a broken record in this stuff is, I still feel like 80% or 70% of what marketers do, I wouldn't say it's a waste of time, but it needs to change, right? There's a big move back to quality content. Content is king. If you've got something interesting to say, people will listen and they'll listen in the thousands. If you're BS in people, you've got nothing interesting to say, you're spamming people. You've got no voice. And that is the harsh reality of the world that we're living in. It's very noisy, but high quality content will win out. And so one of the things that we're looking at, and this is now Jonathan's Martin's job, as well as playing the guitar, he's actually got a great mind for the online and the digital. And I think a lot of this is retooling the organization so that we can, within the marketing team, generate the quality content and then have that content and appear where the people are. Because what we really want is inbound. We want people coming to emc.com having known a bunch about our products, maybe even downloaded our product for free. And that eliminates friction in the sales cycle. It makes it easier for our sales guys. And I think it actually puts the customer in a position where they want to be, which is a position of knowledge and therefore a position of power, right? Who's your team in the Premier League? My team actually isn't in the Premier League, right? So unlike the U.S. where these football teams can kind of give up on their hometown and move somewhere else, in the U.K., if that happened, that would be a civil war. So my hometown team is Middlesbrough. So they were a Premier League team six to seven years ago. They're now a championship team, but my dad's a Newcastle fan, so that's as close as it gets. Okay, Jeremy Burton, Cube alumni. Great to have you on the Cube as always and congratulations on continued success. I'll give you the final word. Put the bumper sticker on EMC World this year as the truck leaves Vegas. What's the bumper sticker say that summarizes the magic of EMC World this year? I mean, it's really about a bridge to the third platform. We realize everybody coming here has made a career out of running the second platform applications. There's a new dawn emerging and if they stick with EMC, we'll take them there. Jeremy Burton here, this is the Cube. Be right back with our next guest live in Las Vegas. Be right back.