 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 here live in Las Vegas with the CUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and they check the system of the noise. I'm John Furrier with my coach Dave Vellante. Our next guest is the president of the EMC, CTD Emerging Technologies Group. I mean, I'm sorry, the core, what's it core? Technology Division, which is the bulk of the assets, churchward, welcome back to the CUBE. You just gave me CJ's assets as well. Just to know this. So, okay, first, because we've been coming on later. The best part of the CUBE is like, we get the piece of it. Yeah, just let him know, don't worry about it. We'll reorganize it anyway. But you got to explain to the folks out there what you're holding on to the assets. VMAX, Stream.io, you have a chunk of the major bread and butter. So, if you think data protection plus, I would just call it primary, primary. And on data protection, it's the usual stuff that I have before, which is D-pad. So, data main and network or Avamar, and then the cloud assets we have, a couple of acquisitions that we did, Vplex Recover Point, and then into the primary storage, then it's VMAX and the VNX and Extreme.io. So, enterprise block based execution, plus the, you know, obviously you got the work course around the VNX. Okay, so everyone wants all flash arrays. That's clear from the markets you see out there. All flash arrays are going to be the big growth engine and you've got the core business over here, which is the bread and butter, but also not necessarily declining, but some will say, is that challenged by the growth? Explain the dynamic between like, say, VMAX and Extreme.io, and the opportunity on the integration side, because Stephen Mann was on earlier, talking about the benefits of multi-architecture. Explain, is it a mutually exclusive situation? Does one eat the other's lunch? Are they co-existing? So, I'm following Stephen, and I've really got to kind of ratify what he said. Did he talk about Quidditch? We played Quidditch, you got some or not? Is that a new product? So, it kind of goes like this, which is, and again, I've got a blog where I wrote on cameras of all things, and the point was I saw an article that said that on Flickr, the second most popular camera brand was the iPhone, and you think it's kind of natural, right? So therefore, why isn't everything just iPhones and cameras? Well, because there are certain circumstances and situations that you don't take a photograph of just an iPhone. You're not going to take a photograph and I'm printing a dance ticket on your wall. Similarly, if you're going to go to the new baby, the royal baby's born, you're not going to see the paparazzi literally with iPhones hanging them over the window trying to take the photographs. Look at the DSLRs, the high-end cameras. This, so that's the point. So, DSLR, where you've got the separation of basically the lens and the body, think of that like a large gallery, and that's what VMAX 3's done. You separate the two and you can get the value. Then you look at things like Mirrorless, which is really cool technology, and it looks like it's going to take the world by storm. That's the extreme I owe, dedicated to what it does. Very high performance, very agile, very small, compact, executes extremely well, and then you've got the other side, which is really into the conversion, hyper-conversion. This coexistence, but last year, it was a software message. What's going on with software and has that relate to this information generation messaging? What's your take on software innovation in your group? What's going on? Can you share some insights? Yeah, so I mean, you've also got to look at, I mean, I asked the question just before I came out here to each of the team members and said, what percentage of your engineers are hardware engineers? Because I thought it was an interesting question, because EMC's seen as being a big tin shipper. If you look at the stage, I still have big bits of iron sand on the stage. Less than 1% of my engineers are hardware engineers. Wow, I was going to say 80% software, I was just saying it's 99% software. Less than 1%. Wow. So you look at it and you then say to yourself, you're either a company that believes it's all about the hardware, and software's there is a necessary evil to make the hardware work, or you're a software organization and you need to embody it in something to extensiate that. So what you really do is you say, we're a software organization, but at the end of the day, you have the instantiation hardware, but we have a clear directive to say everything we produce, we have a software version of it. So at the show, we're talking about VivianX. You know, I actually want to move towards a data domain, a software version of data domain. So you've got DDVE, and even Avamar, I mean, you guys have been kicking around enough with our products. You know Avamar when we bought it was software, right? We made it hardware, and now we've made it back software again and we use data domain at the back end. So for me, it's one of those ones that says, I can afford, because of the size and scale of EMC, to produce the solutions that customers want. That's a consumption dynamic though, because they want to buy in a composite way, service-oriented architectures to cloud. Is that the buyer behavior, or just natural margins or economics? You know the thing is, everybody has their own flavor of what it is. It's like, if I said to you, what do you believe cloud is, and I asked Dave, what do you believe cloud is, the answers will be absolutely different. There's a guarantee. And when we talk to a customer, they're basically saying, I don't want to spend as much on what I'm spending it on. I need to basically dedicate myself. I know I need to do something with cloud. I want simplification. I think maybe software is going to be faster moving and more agile, but prove it to me. So you really need to produce that. And so for instance, here's an interesting one for you. We sat down as a customer advisory. We're talking about a data domain, which is a hardware box. And I've been scared of saying, well, you know, should we pull the software out? What would it do? And so I asked the customers, I said, who put you hands up? Who wants a data domain in a virtual edition? Every single hand went up. And I said, okay, so who believes that they would replace that current data domain setup with a software version, not a single hand. And then I asked the question, which is who believes that they can actually make a virtual, you know, a system, a data domain system better than we can or cheaper than us or from a total cost of ownership? The same thing, not a single hand went up. So I said, why the hell do you want it? Maybe because back in the- That's the obvious question. Yeah, and what they basically said is for a remote, for a robot situation. Let's say I set up an office in Malaysia. I actually want to do backup from it. I want a data domain system over there. For right now with data domain, I've actually got a provision system is shipping across and I've got all of that hassle, or the other one is far one up. And then do all of the paperwork in the background then flip it for a hard system. So you're increasing capabilities then. And agile. I got to ask you, so when you took over the data protection group, you had this sort of Avamar data domain, little tiny integration problem compared to what you're facing now. As an executive, how do you approach that? You seem like pretty even keeled. You got a great sense of humor. You don't seem stressed out. And maybe that's the way you are in public. I don't know, but you have a massive challenge. How do you approach that? Now, I guess you start with the customer and work back. That's sort of a obvious answer. But still, there's a lot of integration that has to take place. You guys have been talking about architecture. How do you, where did you start? Yeah, so, I mean, it's difficult. I mean, it really is. There's no getting around that. But, you know, at the end of the day, the problem is this, which is if you've got the attitude of I'm scared of it, in other words, I'm not going to tackle it, you die. Right, so in other words, standing still, you're dead. So you have to know that you're moving forward. And then you really look at it and say, how far can I go before I have to make a decision that goes to fork in the road and I go left or right? Yeah. And what people generally do is they kind of get to the fork in the road and left and right. And they put a foot in both sides and they straddle it and then they die anyway. Yeah, fenced it in, the worst strategy. And so, for me, I kind of look at it and go, okay, so I get a hunch on the back of it, then I have idiots like Manley that I spend a lot of time with and I literally then test the theory with him and then we solicit, so we do it as a group and then we get to a disagreeing commit and then we move forward. But I would advocate that the problem is never technology and it's never the customer because the customer's clear of what they want. The problem is the people internally, it's the employees because we get very comfortable. If you think about yourselves, there's a lot of stuff you've done, like the cloud chat stuff that you've done, it's fabulous. But at the end of the day, if you believed the formula of your organization was right in the first place, you would have never got that. So you have to continually look at it and go, how do we switch it up? How do we change? How do we become relevant? So the market's moving somewhere. If I stay where we are, we're dead. I have to move forward. So for me, the decisions are easy. It's just the fact that at some point, inevitably, and most of the businesses I picked up have got to that point where they've straddled because now they have to make a tough decision and we do it as a group. And I have an absolute world-class executive maturity. So the reason I'm actually more relaxed than I should be is because I lean on them and they're the guys that are leaving all the sleep. But I sincerely- So they're stressed out. They're stressed out, that's right. Yeah, so it is what it is. Okay, so you got VMAX 3 and you seem to be positioning that as the services platform. For those who want to make a return on that asset that they have in place, you've got maybe talk through the portfolio and the strategy and help us sort of squint through. Yeah, so I mentioned on the cameras and I'm going to stay on it because I like to be a bit bizarre with you guys. But I've got a Canon EOS digital camera with the lens and the body. So you think about it. When I wanted to go into proper photography, a guy, a friend of mine said, spend all the money on the lenses and none on the back because the back's your flip. So you think of the back as a storage but you think of the lenses of data services. If you think of VMAX 3, VMAX 3 is about the data services it provides. So if you then look through the lens and I've invested in the lenses and you look through the VMAX 3 ideal, what you really want to say is, hey, could I layer those data services on top of anything else I bring through? Because I've already got the investment. And that's really the VMAX side. So I was out in Arizona last week and chatting with some customers and one of them turned around and said, so it's kind of like VCE for an enterprise. And that was their term. And it's actually a converged storage infrastructure play. So that's what VMAX will do. It's very highly resilient. It's all about their core DNA. But the idea is, can you flip the back end to be anything you want and offer that service? If you look at something like Extreme IO, you know what they're trying to do. You know where they're trying to execute. And that will be a very high-scaled, very high performance block-based workload for the enterprise. There is not now a reason of why you wouldn't deploy on it for that scale. Back to your AFA is going to take over the world. For block, definitely. Now, every AFA is rushing up the data services to try and fulfill their promise. One of the things that we have is the unique opportunity within Extreme is it's architecture such that I can run all the data services and not have a latency issue. Whereas every other AFA, if you actually load it up with the data services, put mixed workload, they just evaporate. So it'll never get there. Yeah, explain that. Let's talk about the competition. Because you mentioned AFA, all-flash array is going to dominate the world. I believe that to be the case. And I think a lot of David Floyd would agree as well. But the competition, what do you guys say to that? I mean, there's some people out there nipping at your heels, stealing some crumbs off the table from breakfast, little croissant here or there. They're trying to eat your lunch and then dinner. And EMC's always had that ability to move fast and outpace the competition. So what do you say to the customers out there who are getting knocked on the door saying, hey, we're looking at XYZ for all-flash array? So here's the thing is extreme is built as an extreme AFA. It's a very high-scale, very high performance. You know, you now get petabyte scale size. It's got 16 controllers. You've got eight pairs on the back of it. They're all active. And it will redistribute load across that. So you will never have an issue with latency spikes. So in other words, less than a millisecond latency. Every other AFA is basically a cheap and deep. A couple of controllers and then basically stack it up with cheap and deep SSDs. So it's great for bang for the buck. So you go in there and you basically turn around and say, dollop a gig is a great platform. It does the job. But that's very different because what you get from extreme will transform your data center. So if I hear you correctly, okay, I might be price sensitive. I'll go with the cheap car or the cheap camera. And then, but as I become more pro, if you will, to use your camera analogy, you have more constraints, more challenges, more need, right? So is that what you're saying is that those customers might have a headroom issue or is it? It's just, I mean, they're absolutely out of gas. I mean, the boxes that we've got now, as I said, the beast that we just launched is 2 million IOPS. At best guess, even on their optimistic side, there are 150,000 IOPS. There's a big difference between the two. Now, if you're looking at cheap and deep, then we've got things like the VNXE or the VNXF. In other words, all flash arrays, you know, file and block at the really cheap and deep side. And then even if you look at things like VMAX, over 50% of the storage media that we shipped on VMAX in Q1 was actually flash. So this is the portfolio advantage of your roadmap. You guys can address it, so you can address the concerns. Okay. And that's the point. And then you look at it and you say, okay, so now that's extreme IO, and that's where we're on the VMAX, then you look at VNX, right? And on the VNX side, the only thing I say is this, which is I don't fundamentally agree with the idea of a Swiss army knife. You know, because if you kind of think about it, everybody talks, it's a really, it's kind of like a kitsch thing that people talk about forever. But if you look in your house, you've got one, and it's got a logo of a company that you got given as a gift, and you do not use it. Right, and you know, I look at it and go, I think it's disingenuous for us to call VNX that platform. 1,292 customers net new to EMC last quarter, which is basically bang for the buck, utilitarian in the SME space, and it's with people who've got file and block. All right, so you got a lot of product there, you got a lot of solutions, you got some good competitive strategy. Dave hates this term, I call it data fabric, but there's lack of a better description. There's an overlay of data issues happening across whatever functional solution set. You got Pivotal, you got the Federation at your resources, so what's your conversation like across the Federation and your ecosystem around data fabric, if you will, those kinds of new solutions, big data analytics, because you got security, you got data protection issues on there, so you have a lot of kind of overlapping kind of interdependencies, depending on which part of your products, whether it's VNX, VMAX, or Xtreme, you're playing with data horizontally. And I don't know if you've chatted with Stephen about metadata, but one of the things, you're right, so one of the things you look at and you go metadata, metadata, metadata, metadata becomes king, but you really need to know what's happening and where it's happening, and there's multiple layers, that's your four layers that you need to kind of abstract to, and as you said, we have probably the best story in the industry from an EMC Federation point of view, and then it comes down to that same thing, which is you mentioned competition, single biggest competitor for EMC, in my opinion is EMC, because if you think about it, we've got best of breed technologies and we're going gunning after these, but customers want to buy outcomes, and the important thing for us to do is to engineer combinations and the blurs, that's why things like protect points are so important, because you've thrown all of that loop of things like the backup server out and you spit direct from a VMAX to a database. So is that a solutions answer, or is that an architectural answer? I think it goes, it depends on where you're doing, you're basically double clicking down, you just look at it and say, look, I'm an IT executive, my CIOs come to me and said, Cloud, looks like the way to go, go figure it out and if you don't, then someone else is going to do it to you, and so what they're really doing is saying, I need to buy an outcome, I've got to buy more of a combination from people, I want strategic business partners that are going to allow me to help me to counsel me through the fog, that is specifically what they're looking for, and they're tighter, we can combine and integrate the technologies, the better, and that goes from the backup pieces to the primary storage, backup and primary storage, right the way up into the metadata layers, the big data, and then up into the Federation with VMware and Arcade. So when you said EMC's competitors itself, what you're saying is there's a cannibalization mindset that if you don't cannibalize your own kind of core older transforming businesses with software, or I mean. Well part of that is yes, and part of that is the fact that it's very easy to just stay where you are, and this market's moving fast, and EMC must continue to move fast, so the great news is we're not worried about cannibalizing ourselves. So don't hold on to the sacred cows. That's the point, and that's exactly it, which is, you know, you just think that the attitude of this organization is continually moving forward, right, and we need to answer that, and we'll do acquisitions, we'll have products that overlap, but there's only one thing that's worse than overlap. Well you got a hot product, ExtremeIO's nice locomotive. And this is going crazy, this thing's just going off the charts. Share some insights. So you can't protect the past from the future, as they say. There was a little bit of that last year at EMC World, I have to say. And the mindset, well, David Coolton stood up and he was touting IDC data. IDC still hasn't changed the data, but it says that 17% of revenue will be flashed in 2017. Personally, I think it's way, way, way understated, whatever, it doesn't really matter. But that message has flipped, and you talk to EMC customers now, you guys seem to be leading, certainly not hiding the ExtremeIO piece. You're much more aggressive about that. Yeah, and then even things to the cloud. So in other words, the encapsulation is very simple for me. Here's the dead simple strategy for me, right? On a storage perspective, I've basically got to do two things, which is I need to simplify, and I need to automate, because people will want to be their own service provider. Then I need to make sure that they have a path to the cloud, whether that's ours, or whether that's somebody else. It doesn't matter. Everything I do has to be a path to the cloud, otherwise checkbox is gone. And then the next box around is, I have to protect it no matter where it is. And that's it. And it's very, very, very simple. And that's a nice differentiation for you guys, because you have software now. So cloud is remote capability. Cloud enables you to do cooler things remotely. So we got to talk to Pat about that tomorrow, right? Because the EMC, the VMware line of what is it? One cloud, any app, any device, right? Look at the agile native app thing, story. There's not one cloud. No. Now Pat'll have an answer, and it'll like school us. Because that's what Pat does. But customers, they have multiple clouds. They got their SASSs, they got their HR cloud, they got their IT service management cloud, they got their manufacturing cloud. And one of the sneaky products that we actually launched out recently is a thing called DP Search, that allows you, no matter where your data is, to do a Google search against it. So you literally can look, Dave slash PowerPoint in November. And it doesn't matter where it is, whether it's in the cloud or it's in the internally, it'll find it, you can get it, you can download it, you can email it to someone. That's basically Google search in the legacy. And that's the point. And so each of the groups are innovating severely towards that thing, which is simplify, automate, part of the cloud, protect the data. Automation, you need discovery, and you need navigation. Search concept, that's not solely a, you know. And if you don't have the metadata and you don't have the catalog, you can't search for the rich data that you actually need. The faster you can get it, the better you move on. So this is kind of the strategy, and this is why we pulled the pieces together. What holds you back, what holds customers back from getting that metadata, metadata, metadata nirvana? What are they, I mean, that's the holy grail. So what is that stumbling block for the customer? So the sad thing is I'm going to say the same thing, which is basically it's the technology, right? Because everybody believes what they do is right. So I mean, we've talked about this before with backup, which is how do you get the formats into a standard format for you to allow you to drill the information? So it's just normalizing this. So right now, Steven, one of, he's got this called the Architecture Leadership Forum, and he runs this across my group to make sure we don't reinvent the wheel anywhere. But a part of it is one of the big initiatives is to make sure that we normalize metadata so that it doesn't matter which product it is. And this is not just CTD, this is ETD, and out into the Federation. There's a whole metadata standard strategy that we're actually driving forward, and we want it to be open. So it's not going to be proprietary to EMC, but the intent is to say, how do we manage our assets better and then create a faster outcome for our customers? So what's the internal? We've got one minute left. Share with us your objectives for the year as an executive. You've got your top three things to do. What are your key things that are near and dear to your heart in terms of go-to-market, new product introductions, marketing, cloud focus, data focus? What's the, share this to your kind of like, simple back of the napkin. 30 seconds on the back of this, pretty simple. I've got a map. That's the other cube. We have one minute. Okay, we've got a minute. I've got it on the block business, which is basically VMAX, VNX at the high end and ExtremeIO, that's going to be net-positive business. Doesn't matter where it floats to, I need to make sure we do that. Therefore, we've got to articulate a portfolio message and drive the product like crazy. I don't want to constrain ExtremeIO at all, and that needs to become extremely aggressive and then into the mainstream of what you've seen. You know, we're driving that. Data protection needs to club on as fast as possible, needs to scale out model, want to get virtualized into it, simplification at the back end, and then I need to make sure that we drive the cloud. Three acquisitions in the last year, TwinStrada, cloud, Magnetics, cloud, Spanning, cloud, right? Each one of them, path to the cloud, but then Spanning's interesting because it's actually cloud to cloud. So I'm looking much further out as well and making sure that we're buying that future because I want to be the safety net for customers. So you don't just want to have the checkbox for a path to the cloud, you want to pave a road. Yeah, exactly. And then the other one is just to twist things upside down, customers really want to say, hey, if I've got something in the cloud, the place I want to back it up or the place I want to archive it or restore it, is actually to the head office. So they're going to start to think of data centers as actually their backstop as opposed to the front piece. So you'll see both models. We have to work within an environment that has this massive diversity. Great guy, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing. A lot on your plate, congratulations. All flash arrays, obviously hot, extreme IO. You get the locomotive and you got change moving fast. And you get the other stuff too. You've got a lot of stuff in your tool shed. I'm sure there's some tricks we'll hear more later. Yeah, it's going to be a fun year. Anyway, thank you guys, I appreciate it. President of the core technology to be at EMC, the engine innovation right here on theCUBE. Sharing that with you. We'll be right back after this short break.