 Continuous coverage of EMC World 2011. We're here in Vegas. I'm here with my co-host John Furrier And we're here with Sejal Patel who is the president and founder of EMC's Icelon division or founder of Icelon is now running EMC's Icelon division and Sejal welcome to the Cube Yeah, we had you on back at the at the mega launch you guys I think it just closed the deal and And so you're in here for a few months now and so what's it like tell us about the the culture shock that is EMC coming from the startup Well, it's really interesting. So we are just about four months into our acquisition the deal closed in December of last year And it's been really exciting, you know first and foremost EMC is in the unique position of being the market share leader in the storage industry It's the largest storage company and is the broadest distribution footprint that we could have for our products and technology And the second thing that's really exciting to me is that if you look at what Joe and Pat have been talking about today with the With the journey to the cloud and the assets that EMC has to prosecute on that vision It's one of the most exciting Opportunities if not the most exciting opportunity that I've seen in IT and for us to be plugged into it is really Exciting and then you know, of course, there's always a little bit of adaptation. We were a 500 person company now a 500 person but moved to almost 700 people division inside of a much larger company and you know, we're adapting well Joe Joe Tucci talked about the evolution the waves of disruption and data domain green plum Iceland were highlighted Obviously M&A is a big part of that and you guys how do you feel about the big data story because that you guys are big data So can you talk about what's going on your look to in the industry as you know that I don't say big iron, but big file big Infrastructure, can you talk about what's new with you guys here at EMC world? And what's the big disruption point that that's going to make that big data cloud work? Well, so I think to answer your question the first thing that you need to think about is that the nature of enterprise data has changed Dramatically over the course of the last decade. So Iceland was founded in January of 2001 at that point 90% of the data produced in enterprises was block-based 10% was file What Joe talked about this morning was that in the next 10 years? 90% of the data is unstructured and it's going to grow 50 times So the question is how do we adapt traditional storage architectures into private cloud architectures? And then hybrid cloud architectures that enable you to deal with that avalanche of data And so for us, you know this EMC world is really the coming-out party for Iceland This is really our first opportunity to explain the products and technology We have the scalability of our solution to solve this problem for enterprises, you know and listening to Tucci this morning talk about the journey to the private cloud moving to now the intersection of cloud and big data I was here last year and I think a lot of people in the audience last year seen a private cloud that's okay Not really starting that yet, but and then in the past year they have and I think you had a similar dynamic this year And maybe it's even more forward-looking where they were hearing terms like big data And I'm getting a sense that they really weren't sure what that meant to them So maybe we could talk a little bit about what big data means Well, so you bring up two really interesting points there So what does big data mean big data is essentially Unstructured data that has grown to the point where traditional architectures can't meet the needs of the data's scale or Requirements from a timeliness perspective or a geographic distribution just a type of perspective And so a new architecture is needed and you know Iceland's been selling products in the market for eight years now when we started this problem was prevalent Largely in environments that were vertical niches things like media and entertainment and film production And then it eventually became a problem in genetic sequencing and manufacturing and semiconductor And now we're seeing more and more that every enterprise environment every fortune 1,000 company is now struggling with the fact that this unstructured data is growing at a rate that is Astounding and the business is deriving value from that unstructured data And so now the question is how can you nurture that environment? How can you effectively scale it so that you can derive value from the information that you're storing? So one of the other attributes of big data is it's it's dispersed. It's just sort of distributed Do you envision a situation where you know the software that's going out to all that data and operating on it? Let's say in parallel brings data back into sort of a centralized location or is it going to live out there? How's that going to change what architectures look like in the future? So I think that when you think about the architectures to deal with big data You have to really think about the fact that the data sets are getting so large that it Really doesn't make sense in many environments to transport them to a central location So the question then becomes how do you leverage technologies like virtualization to be able to push Applications closer to the data and as Pat Gelsinger mentioned in his last keynote Really even then go a step further figure out how applications can marry up directly with storage systems for high bandwidth Requirements and I think that all of those architectures are going to have to be employed to deal with the fact that big data can't be transported to a Central repository operated on it and results shipped out. It's just inefficient. Suja one of the things that's That inspires me to think about is the innovation And you've been an entrepreneur and you've been in the trenches you've grown your company and now you're an emcee The big company, but emcee feels like a startup with a lot of little sub-pockets of innovation. You got the VCE Startup 900 person startup You get the green plum announcement with Hadoop you're talking about data and the impact of data to our society It's creating a huge entrepreneurial boom and there's a lot of intrapreneurship within the big companies and there's an ecosystem with open source maturing What's the opportunity out there for entrepreneurs and for emcees and companies like emcee to play in that sandbox together? Because partnering is a big theme for the company and there are entrepreneurs out there and It's lower barriers to entry to start a company with cloud and big data is like a development environment And the entrepreneurs and the geeks are really having a frenzy with the opportunity Working on huge data-scale platforms, so can you share your opinion and view on that? Yeah, so there's two parts of that question that I think are really exciting to touch on first and foremost In the morning keynote Joe Tucci touched on the fact that cloud computing is a huge disruptive wave And that disruptive wave creates opportunity There's two types of opportunities here one is something that I think you mentioned which is near and dear to my heart Which is this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create new businesses that add value for enterprises in ways That couldn't have been conceived of three or four years ago And it's exciting to be an entrepreneur right now the cost of the barrier to entry to bringing a new product to market is coming Down the capital is available in the markets very receptive on the other side I think one of the most exciting things for EMC's opportunity is that EMC is the the innovation engine of EMC is the very rare marriage of two major forces one is that EMC is exceptionally good at Buying technologies and companies they've done it over 60 times with companies like Iceland data domain and of course VMware which was an acquisition many years ago and They're able to integrate those acquisitions together and to knit a very nice strategy around them But also EMC's astra is a company that has employed a strategy that's enabled You know pockets of entrepreneurship within the company and the result of that is things like project lightning Which which Pat Gelsinger introduced just about an hour or two ago And that's really a very rare thing in large company IT space something that certainly is differentiating for EMC so You know you mentioned of the acquisitions that EMC has made a number of them 60 including VM where the probably the greatest acquisition in the history of the IT industry. I mean, I don't know if it remains to be seen I mean, I think it probably definitively is there are a couple others that might be up there, but not at that scale but EMC has done a great job of Taking those acquisitions letting them kind of do their own thing they're doing with Isilon now and then succeeding Would say for example dated the main appliances Do you see EMC long-term being? sort of an appliance You know approach that fills holes and just executes on that or can it tie it together as a as a systems company? What's your vision tell you there? So Dave you you ask a really interesting question there Certainly EMC could make a really big business In almost what you described was a portfolio of best-of-breed great products But I believe that the opportunity that EMC has is much bigger than that the opportunity To take the companies that we've purchased the organic projects that we've had that reinvented many of our storage platforms and take all that that that Innovation and bring it together into a coherent platform and a strategy for customers For the next generation of data center and the next generation cloud architecture I think that opportunity is absolutely in front of us and it's going to require us to To bring those those products together to really knit them together tightly But I think we've got that a great shot at getting that opportunity really executing on that opportunity Okay, we're here with Suja Alpatel from Isilon. We have to wrap final question What's the prediction for next year for you within your group? Obviously a lot of things happening around Fusion IO and storage is changing but you mentioned data and cloud What's going to happen? Give us a little preview of your vision and execution for this year So if you think back to EMC World 2009 I was not here with EMC But you probably asked somebody that question and what Dota told you is that the cloud is really big And guess what we're here and the cloud is really big I think that as you look at one year I think that there's going to be a few major things that I would highlight. I think that Virtualization in the data center has already reached the tipping point and More applications or more more virtual servers are being deployed than physical servers I think that you're going to see that for what we're what Joe and Pat defined as the cloud architecture We're going to see a tipping point in enterprises where they're thinking about their infrastructure as private and public clouds They're thinking about this broad shift to a new paradigm And then I also think touching on the conversation that we had earlier that big data Environments are going to proliferate throughout enterprises in a broad range of verticals and applications in industry And I think that when we're here a year from now We're going to be looking at big data and talking about the opportunity and we won't have to Struggle to say oh in this type of environment these things are big data Everyone will intuitively know what big data is and what a problem it is We're going to see a tsunami of applications massive amounts of innovation EMC big company good strategy good acquisition of companies. Thank you yours was one of them a big one Thank you for coming on board the queue