 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live at EMC World 2015. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, and extract the seeds of the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jeremy Burton, President of Products and Marketing at EMC. Jeremy, welcome back. A whirlwind. You're doing the keynotes. You're doing all the schmoozing. You got all the race car drivers here. Formula One, motorcycle guys, customers. How you feeling? I'm feeling great, even better though is that. There's a guy called Jonathan behind that. Just all this stuff. I actually claim credit, but really Jonathan has done a phenomenal job this year. I mean, I love what's going on with the Trek bikes, the Lotus F1, the Markham Missile, but yeah, Jonathan and team have killed it. I mean, I love the kind of general applicability of the content, you know? We always talk about this. Six years ago when you started at EMC, you did the Cube and EMC's changed so much. I mean, it's really fun. The community's growing. You're doing open source now. What's your perspective of the six years? I mean, what's your personal view of how it's changed? What's going on as the President of Products and Marketing, you control the messaging and you got your hand in core business and Emerging's all coming together. What's your take? No, it's a journey, you know? And it used to be that, you know, I think once every three or four years, you'd have to change things and shake it up. And I mean, it's kind of a cliche, but the world that we're in right now, I don't think you get like three years to sit and kick back and look at the changes that you've made. I think you make a set of changes, then you look, all right, what's coming next? And this is why I think the kind of people that we want in a workforce over time are the ones that are adaptable because every year is going to bring about another set of changes. And the companies that make it, I mean, Joe spoke this week about probably the biggest disruption in the tech business ever. To get through that requires massive amounts of change. It can't be done in a single year, so it has to be done every year. So I mean, looking back, I mean, I've enjoyed it tremendously, but the job is not done and probably is never done. So the open source thing, the free downloads and changing the DNA of the development organizations and keeping your eye on the ball with the business today versus the business tomorrow. I mean, they're all the new challenges for the coming year. You guys, we always compare EMC to VMware in terms of like social media community. VMware's got a massively rabid community. I mean, I was blogging, tweeting. EMC's now massively changed. You've done that. The community's growing. Get open source, you mentioned. But you guys ran a DevOps conference, kind of threw that in, probably, you know, see how it would play sold out. You guys are building a real community around EMC. The old storage, hardware box image is over. You've crossed over. What's your next act on that front? I mean, how are you going to expand that? You know, you're tweeting, you're very transparent. That platform three is a whole nother world, this new emergent area. Yeah, I think the reason why we didn't have a community is the culture of the company, we were very protective, right? I mean, very proud of the technology, but we never really gave anything away. And you guys know better than anyone in this world, you know, content is king. If you can give away rich content, you're going to attract people, they'll want to interact and you've got a chance of building a community. And so I think, you know, first base was kind of, you know, giving something to the community for free. And I think over time, you know, the, you know, what you give, you've got to up the stakes. I mean, I've been on it, our product documentation teams really questioning, look, why are we bothering doing this? I document, nobody reads books. It should be all online. It should be indexed by Google and we shouldn't have a doc team, right? We really want something akin to Wikipedia, but for the EMC products. And the same deal with the guys, you know, in the education business, it's really challenging to say, hey, what is the YouTube-like how-to videos on EMC products? What does that look like? So, you know, it's certainly about community and we've got some great guys building the online community, but the content in the community is king. And what we've seen over the years is what people want is they want free software, they want free education, they want free knowledge. And we've got to put it into a format that is very digestible, because folks want to search on Google, they want to find what they want quickly and they want to get going. And so we've got a re-tool, if you like, a lot of things that we call, you know, documentation and support and education, that's got to be blended in the online world and we've got to make it free and frictionless to access. So Jeremy, it's, you know, one thing to say, okay, we're going to spend 12% of our revenues on R&D, you know, a bunch more, 8% on acquisitions. It's the harder thing to say, all right, we're going to place our bets. You have an ever-expanding portfolio. Yeah. You know, talk about how you decide where to place your bets and more specifically where you're placing them. Yeah, I mean, I think the benefit of working with, I think some of the biggest brains in tech and I'd put, you know, Paul Merritt's probably up there as one of them. By the way, I'd say about Paul Merritt's, he's a guy who's seen Platform One, Platform Two and Platform Three. Yeah, I only thought about that this morning when I was answering a question that you asked, and just goes to show you, you know, change is purely a state of mind, right? Paul's a guy, kind of an old guy who's leading the charge into Platform Three, but I think folks like that, you got to listen to their perceptions. They've seen the industry in the past, history as a habit of repeating itself. And I love what Paul talks about now around the world moving to catching people in the act. And the examples that come to mind are the consumer examples, you know, I'm in the grocery store and I've got my phone and I've been directed to offers and things like that, but it can be equally as applicable to a bank where you've got fraudulent activity taking place. And I think the world increasingly is moving to this, you know, kind of real-time operation. And so you think, well, you know, therefore streams of data in memory databases, you know, massive responsive flash capacities. A lot of what you saw today from Bill Moore, I mean, that's a huge bet that we think the world is going to process streams of data in real-time and then, you know, huge analytic data sets which, you know, data scientists will get after later. I think the one thing that's changed maybe from a couple of years ago where we were talking about cloud and big data, we actually, I think, forgot about the app. And if you look at 20 years ago, we built OLTP systems before we built data warehouses. And I think this time around, maybe we got, maybe over the end of our skis talking about big data before we talked about the software and the sensors and the applications that were going to generate that data. So, you know, I think the big bets, I mean, clearly pivotal, but they've made more of a move towards the application development platform with Cloud Foundry. I still think big data is a big deal, but I think just like in the world of kind of OLTP, then data warehouse, you're going to see these new real-time apps processing streams of information before, maybe you see the heyday of big data analytics. And look, we've got to provide the high-performance infrastructure and the capacity-optimized infrastructure that, you know, the software defined on commodity to support it. So we're placing pretty big bets, you know, in those couple of areas. I'm really impressed with how you guys lay out core and emerging technology divisions. And you guys talk platform two and a half, platform two, platform three, which is really just old world, new world, right? Kind of thing, and oversimplifying it. But how do you tell when it's emerging as a merge? I mean, we were joking on the chat. You said, you decide. But big data in Cloud and open sources in CJ's group and there's a lot of good stuff in there. It's developing fast. I mean, I asked Goulden, I'm like, when do you know? Do you move it over? Is it merge? Is it fly from the nest? What happens? Yeah, it's a great question. And by the way, a lot of people think, you know, platform two and the old world therefore, you know, send me out to the glue factory kind of thing. It's like, no, no, the platform 2.5 thing is in recognition that in order to realize the cost savings in IT today for the existing applications and data sets, folks are going to have to transform that IT infrastructure. It is going to be virtualized. It is going to be private clouds. It is going to be automated. You are going to see all flash arrays. You are going to see block storage on commodity. But that's running a set of applications that we've seen in the data center for the last 10 or 15 years. The emerging technologies, we really wanted to have a clean slate. Don't encumber these guys with the design points of the systems of the past. Let them think freely about the future. And I think, you know, really, we've got to make a call on those products. You know, I can't always like use the kid analogy, right? When's your kid ready to leave home? Right, I have my eldest, you know, 14 years old. He's going to go to school in Boston, right? He's leaving home. But you know, he's the oldest. He's kind of sensible and he's probably ready for it. You know, I look at, you know, Henry was here this week. I'm not sure at 14 years old, he's going to be ready to go. So we, you know, we'll hang onto him a little bit longer and that's the judgment call here. We felt like Extreme I.O. That was a rocket ship. It had critical mass and it stood everything to gain by being a part of the core technologies group. But the customers aren't moving fast either. So they're not ready. So isn't it a balance between like Extreme I.O. is kicking butt and that's in that core 2.5 platform. But the customers aren't really shifting anyway, the dollars and or their infrastructure, right? I mean, is it the same kind of balance that you have that they have? Yeah, it is, right? Because the, and this is the slide that maybe you've seen all too often this week is the poor old CIO saying, hmm, I've got to invest here. I've got to cut costs here. How aggressively do I cut here? How aggressively do I invest here? So it ends up really been a balancing act. But I don't know, I view like when the product has reached a kind of critical mass, when it doesn't need special attention and focus, then it's probably ready for the big bad, you know, core world, if you like. But then the hope is we can scale it. And I feel like very strongly, like once we've figured out the formula, if it's something that our core sales team can take to market, then it should be a core technology. We should treat it as such and we should get the scale because big companies often, they get depressed that they're big and they can't move fast enough and they always try and be small. Yet the one thing I know a small company can't be, a startup can't be big, right? So we have to bring the bear, our strengths onto the market. And I mean, all flash, for example, the reason why we're doing so well is we managed to mainstream it. And the one thing no all flash render can be is 50,000 people and $25 billion in revenue. We can be, so we have to bring that strength to bear. Certain other areas, like DSSD, if we tried to mainstream that, I think we would fail right now because it's a different technology, it's a different sales motion. We haven't figured out the formula, so we got to treat it special. So you're obviously moving fast in places like Extreme I.O. And it was interesting because you guys started flash and then sort of fell behind and then now you're first again. Where do you feel like you need to be moving faster? It's a great question. I would say converged, we're doing great. Hyperconverged, there are players in the market already that are established that we need to get after. Maybe in the same way as a few years ago, you had the Fusion I.Os and you had the Violins out taking a leadership position in flash and we really were playing catch up. I think in hyperconverged, you've got the same situation going on. So we've got a lot of effort going on there, the VX rack announcement. There's also some pretty interesting things up our sleeve in that area as well because I really feel we're on the first wave of hyperconverged and to the question we were chatting about a second ago, all hyperconverged infrastructure today runs traditional apps. We think that there's going to be a new set of hyperconverged for the new apps that today's hyperconverged vendors don't address. So I mean, you saw a little bit of a glimmer of it with Caspian this morning. So we've got a lot of investments in that area and look, I still think the world of object storage, which is the foundation for cloud storage. I really feel that world is set to explode. We have a good product there. And that one, again, I don't think we can move fast enough. We're moving fast. I don't want to beat CJ up too much, but I think we can move faster. And the final area, I mean, I'm really pleased that we've got the Maginatics technology in the portfolio that we're able to now offer the backup to the cloud because I think really one of the killer use cases is archiving old backup copies to cloud storage and we've not had an offering in there until this year. So I think we've been playing a little bit of catch up there as well. We always say on the cube, the sizzle on the steak, where's the meat on the bone, is a phrase. Software Define, I mentioned in the chat, I was kind of, you know, being tongue-in-cheek here. I was saying, you know, maybe I'm missing the buzz. I mean, there's not a lot of hype on the Software Define because it's actually meat on the bone, right? So you're rendering products now in the Software Define area. Share with the folks out there the debt journey because that's been a very interesting model because it's everyone's hyped up and it's software defined data center. And you go back two years and say, it was hyped up but there was a directional vision, right? So talk about how you guys got products into market and what's going on, give us the update. What's coming up, what's the meat on the bone? Yeah, I mean, probably two years ago we were part of that hype curve when we announced Viper, right? I mean, that was our Software Define storage play and it was an organic development. We had a lot of the Azure development team working on it. We talked about the controller which we've open sourced this week but then what a lot of people I think didn't realize is that we had then the data services underneath, you know, the object storage, HDFS store which today is called Elastic Cloud Storage and then also Scale IO. And I tell you in the last six or nine months that the adoption rates have turned from being like a telco slash SP phenomenon to being a mainstream enterprise phenomenon. So big financial institutions really looking in earnest at deploying those big homogenous block environments software defined on commodity storage. And I think we're going to see, not just hype, I think we're going to see actual real deployments and people using them in anger at scale. I mean, the Scale IO session eight a day was packed out in brand names all over the front row. So I mentioned this morning in the demo, I think that's one of the, maybe best kept secrets in the portfolio and I think that's going to surprise a lot of people. And open source is a big strategic move. CJ was really proud, historic moment. I had to ask him the question, what was it like inside the sausage factories as a term we kick around in Silicon Valley? But EMC's not really, hasn't really gone through this process. So what was it like, I mean, legal banging down? What do we do? I mean, you mentioned documentation freeing that up. I mean, to get something open source inside EMC, give us some color. Let alone hiring Randy Baez, I mean. I said a second ago though guys, I said, look at our company culture, we didn't get much away. The company was founded on Israeli engineers and Irish salespeople, right? So, I mean, think about that for a second, right? We have some of the best, smartest, but most secretive engineers in the whole wide world. And see, there's obviously then, you know, cultural change, right? Because of that history, you've got then a legal department that sees protection of intellectual property a certain way. And that reflects on the culture of engineering. And so part of it, I think, you know, Randy, it was an education process. And he went to the team and said, look, just because you're open sourcing something doesn't mean to say that you can't generate revenue, therefore you should give up. This is not an end of life strategy, right? This is a development strategy. And some people do that by the way. They say, I'm done, I just give it open source and hope something happens. Yeah. That's what you mean by that. Yeah, I mean, and I think in a lot of segments that that has been the perception which is, hey look, if we don't want to have engineers internally support it, we'll just give it to the community. But, and all of those projects fall flat. But I think in the case of Viper, we're saying, look, we certainly want to make money here, but from a development methodology standpoint, we believe in community-based development. We think we can move the product more quickly. You know, we think that we can drive it maybe to more of a standard more quickly. And yeah, do we put some revenue at risk? Sure, because other people can take it, they could potentially sell it. But I do believe, and we've seen this with Cloud Foundry, if a customer sees the value and they want to do play in production, they're more than happy to pay. So about the Federation, you know, it's always a challenge, you know, you got separate entities, but all under the family, if you will. And you got the partner communities and ecosystems in each company. How's that evolving and how do you manage that? I'll say there's some synergies involved for customers. We heard that all through the show. What's your take on the Federation? And where's that going? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing we've tried to do in the last 18 months is really quantify the value for customers by delivering solutions. And you know, I hate the word solution because it's one of the most overused terms in tech, but it's really putting together EMC products with VMware products, with pivotal products to deliver an outcome for the customer. So that outcome could be a private cloud with hybrid cloud on ramps. And it sounds like, well, of course you would want to do that, but until we sat down and ran it up in the lab and documented what it would take, I mean, we didn't really know what it would take to do that. And now we know, we're acutely aware of what we can do. And it turns out, I think we surprised ourselves how quickly we could do it. And I think last year we did the, you know, the hybrid cloud in 48 hours. We were pretty nervous about that. It turns out we were done in 17 hours and the guys were twiddling the thermals. But the fact that it was a surprise, we had no idea how long it was going to take. And the more of those solutions we can put together, and you know, David talked about three or four of them that we think are going to be key, then I think the more we'll be able to show the value to the customer base. And then a lot of the questions about why the federation and does it make sense, you know, they disappear when the customers vote with their feet. Dave asked Joe Tucci yesterday, as I'm motivated to meet with the crowd chat question, to ask you to Joe Tucci question, what you would do differently, what you were proud of and what you can go back, not do a mulligan, but we could change. So I asked you on the crowd chat, if Joe Tucci asked you to make one big move for EMC, something game changing, you know, I mean, you got to think differently. I mean, you were talking about platform three, the whole different animal, different world. What would you do? I mean, if you had the magic wand, boom. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I was kind of joking on with you this morning. I was like, oh, well, let's go buy Apple. Wouldn't that be great, right? I could, you know, go run the iPad or I don't know, the Apple watch or something like that. But no, seriously, I think some of it would do it. I mean, I've made a career out of driving changing organizations and you really want the freedom to go execute on this move to the third platform. And so what does that mean? It means going and buying companies. It means building high quality teams. I mean, I think you saw Josh Bernstein coming on the team who's really been instrumental in building out the Siri infrastructure over the last few years. You want to be able to attract and then work with talent like that. The move to open source, right? I mean, at all levels of the company, that gets questioned. But I feel like, you know, I've got the, you know, empowered to make that call, right? And so- It's kind of like Formula One. They used to do four seconds to change tires. Now it's two point and one. I mean, these edges you could take, you could leverage, you can use. Yeah, some of these things. I mean, look, the DSSD move we made. I think the open source move we made, I think, you know, getting big into software that we find on commodity, even saying the commodity words and getting on the front foot around it, having our sales team go lead with Extreme I.O., these are bold decisions that, you know, I say I've been allowed to do, but I really look at it as I've been empowered to do, not just me and the team. And I think if I didn't feel like that was on the table and I didn't have the ability to change the way we operate, then I'd probably go do something else. But, you know, so far, so good. Well, we're getting the hook here on time. Thanks for spending time. I'll give you the last word here on the cube here. For the folks out there watching EMC World, what's the Jeremy Burton takeaway? What's the tagline? What's the big vibe? What's the big takeaway about EMC moving forward where it's customer, partner, employees? What's going on here? What's this show all about this year? And what's the main takeaway? I think the term I've heard more in the last year than probably ever in my life is this term digital transformation. And people, they frame it in different ways. I want to become a software company. I want to take my business online. I want to offer new consumer experiences, but that's gone from being a thought to a real action. And, I mean, really what we're trying to do this week is explain the urgency of executing on that digital transformation. And then earn our customers trust that we can provide the infrastructure for that transformation. I think they know that we're well capable of running the business as it was known in the past, but we're kind of earning that trust to provide the infrastructure for the business in future. And transparent, you can do the crowd chat you're tweeting, a leading by example. Congratulations. Jeremy Burton here inside theCUBE, president of EMC's products and marketing. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.