 Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back at Austin, everybody. Welcome to Dell World 2014. This is theCUBE. Matt Wolken is here. He's the Vice President and General Manager of Dell's Information Management Business. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much. I'm very excited to have Matt here because a lot of the people who are here don't know about Dell's software business. It's about a $2 billion business. People don't think of Dell as a software company, you know, traditionally, but you helped build that company, that part of the company, that software business. So let's talk about that a little bit. We started a few years ago. We looked at Dell as a company and wanted to be able to solve more of the customer problem. We were being asked by the customer, hey, we're providing part of the solution here. Can you help us out even more? And we looked at where we can help the customer most and it was in the software area. And so we, about four years ago, worked on a strategy to sort of create a software group that was relevant to Dell, that was going after the problems that customers were seeing and that experienced a lot of challenges for customers and hence growth for us. And so we really concentrated on systems management, security, and then information management to the group that I run. Okay, so you break down that multi-billion dollar, what I'm calling almost a $2 billion business into three areas. Security, systems management and information management. What's inside of information management? So information management, we do everything from managing the data in its raw state at a database tier, the database itself, up through integration of the data and or of application data, and then up into the database tier with Dell as our main partner on the hardware side and the great partners we have there into advanced analytics. One of the main things we look at as data grows in this environment is it's going to grow beyond human scale and how do we help customers take advantage of data management? How do we help customers take advantage of data through systems and capabilities in order to reach that state? So we look at how do you manage the base tier of the data? How do you integrate the data from either your applications and or data sources? And then how do you take advantage of and drive analytics to actually have actionable insights that really change your business? And in today's day and age it's not a cost setting issue to do analytics, it's actually a revenue generator to find new customer segments, save customers from leaving your service and reaching new heights for the business. So I was walking the floor last night and I saw some Oracle integrations that you guys are doing. It caught my eye. Oracle's an interesting partner for you guys because Oracle basically said we want to get out of the low-end X86 business. You guys love that business. Oracle competes heavily with IBM, HP, and Oracle have this year and area Olympics so they're like not talking to each other. And so you guys make a perfect partner for a company like Oracle. I wonder if you could talk about Oracle specifically and I want to talk about other database integrations. You know Oracle's been a great co-op petition for us over time. We actually had developed the strongest database environment, the developer environment in the Toad appliance, the product which is actually called Tool for Oracle Application Developers in its origin. And since then, of course, we've been really supporting the needs of our customers which includes Oracle and all of the other database variants. So as we've built our business we've tried to remain neutral to the database here because each company will have its preference for the vendor, his or their choice and where they're going to need help and what type of database they will need. So we've preferred to stay at the database tooling business to where we help enable each one of the database variants that is possible. So all we started out with a Tool for Oracle Application Developers. We've quickly broadened that to every database variant because we're at the largest database tools vendor in the world. We're looking at how do we service people with multiple databases in their right. Psybase, DB2, NoSQL variants, Couchbase or MongoDB as well as Cloudera or Hadoop. All of the places where Dell partners with our hardware brethren to bring to customers those great databases that they prefer in their own customer environment. So that's interesting. So you mentioned all the NoSQL stuff, DB2 even. So you guys got a lot of customers wanting to run DB2 and of course we know DB2 is alive and well, Sybase, tons of mobile stuff, right? We've been running on Sybase since the SAP acquisition. That's a big focus. Database is really interesting again. It used to be kind of boring. Yeah, it was quite a boring play. It almost was a number of variants shrinking down to about five variants and that was it. And now there's been an explosion that Database Engine's website will track something like 140 different database variants right now across the major sectors. So graph databases and key value stores and documents as well as relational. And we think we can help with that complexity. Our business is understanding the tooling to leverage those databases and that's what we do best and so that's what we spend time on. How do we manage across those different database variants and help people make advantage of those? So in the old days you had to do some really serious heavy lifting to integrate to databases. So TOAD allows you to sort of float. It's obvious you're able to very quickly integrate with other database environments because it's really hard to pick a winner out of those 140. Yeah, I don't think you do, right? I think you've got to follow the customer and they're going to have multiple databases in their environments so we want to make sure we can enable them to take advantage of that. In some cases we're really doing DBA functions. In some cases we're doing development functions. In some cases we're doing performance and other monitoring as well. Now what about the Statsoft acquisition? I want to talk about that a little bit. Where does that fit into the portfolio? So as we looked at the data management and then we have integration and then we have the database and the second of the data warehouse here and analytics here. We really looked at what was the big challenge for customers and it was the volumes of data are so excessively large that you can't do this by hand anymore. You really can't even do some of the discovery by knowing what the answer is first. You're going to have to utilize your data and look across the data. So what statistical brings is pattern matching, data mining, machine learning and broad statistics to the play to be able to help the human scale understand the web scale of data. And that's really where we think the challenge will be in the future. Now when you move forward even further it won't only be in backwards looking analysis you'll be embedding such algorithms into a code or into your operational processes and that's where we want to help customers and that's what we see from the challenge of our existing customers is they'll be reaching this state and we want to help them get to that and manage that state while they're there. So how do you package that into solutions? Is it part of the other hardware or service? Well right now we ship it separately so it can be a desktop version it can be an enterprise version where the enterprise itself collaborates across tiers for those people who are handling the client-client. As we go forward we're actually looking at customers who are maybe in the customer service environment and their customer service reps online don't need to know statistics but they need some sort of website where they ask the question about complex statistical math and it comes back and does a protective analytics for them. So what we're enabling is the organization and the average user to use predictive analytics to make the company better but they don't have to know analytics specifically so there's an interface abstraction there that we're also... So was that sort of the motivation to make the acquisition? I mean you got R out there you got SPSS, you got SAS you got all these packages that are pretty popular what led you to the notion that everything Dell does is customer driven everything is customer driven But help us understand that move in the chess board. So when we looked at where we wanted to go we saw a panoply of players in the self-service BI space just lots of players we thought either we dive into that space or we go above that space and add value even above that stage and that's where we decided to go first was go up stage go up to the higher tier of real value visualization alone won't solve the big data problem and so as we looked at that higher stage I needed a company that was really helpful to customers had a great reputation and had a very usable environment many of the environments in this advanced analytics stage are command line interface tools whereas the statistical product was a web based sorry a Microsoft kind of environment based so that you had very much the usable form factors of buttons and drill down menus that's much easier for people to learn I was looking for a team that was known for bringing the customer through the problem as opposed to jumping off technology and this team had just outstanding scores for that and then the third thing that I was really looking for was a customer vertical capability and since statistical is about 30 years old they have a number of vertical solutions that they built over time and solve customer problems so pharmaceuticals financials manufacturing and several other verticals across almost any vertical where they have the stories and the expertise where they said look I've helped out this peer of yours I can help out you because I know the space I know what they needed to achieve and I can help you do that as well and so I needed that expertise since I dealt to help customers through these problems complex problems and we need to help to make sure we can help the customers I'm wondering if you can talk about the development and analytics strategy you made a number of acquisitions of course Quest a couple years ago just talked about stats off and statistical what should we be thinking about how Dell fits in that ecosystem are you guys building really just a suite of software products for the customers need how should we think about Dell in that kind of big data space in the big data space we look at the raw capabilities of what we need what a customer needs to compete what capabilities to manage the data that's raw base and tier how do you then aggregate the data pull data out of these various spaces that you have data so in some cases you have it on-prem in some cases you have it in one of your favorite databases in some cases it's in an application in the cloud say salesforce.com or NetSuite and how do you repatriate that data or even a process in that one of those applications where you have your data inside your environment and then you need to be able to do that for backward looking analysis as well as looking forward into an actual transaction enabling that to happen faster at the speed of the web and at the speed of the data so when we look at that tier how do you manage it, how do you integrate it and then how do you actually develop the capabilities to inform somebody or change their decision or speed their decision making process that's where we're spending our time so I'm wondering if you explain for us why someone would partner with Dell they really have some of the data ownership or clones the database IBM has a whole portfolio, SAP has their piece in the marketplace, why do customers turn to Dell for their analytics problems what we try to do is be agnostic agnostic to the database agnostic to the data type agnostic to the data location because I don't own a database I'm not going to ask you to buy it, I'm not going to shoehorn you into a shift and lift and move it out environment I'm going to allow you to take advantage of the environment that you have and to be able to leverage that and because we were so strong in databases what we built is that capability to be agnostic to whoever you want in your premise, whatever you're using for whatever application or environment we will work with you and we can work on top of that, we're not really into shifting your whole application stack and trying to remove everything else so because I acquired businesses in this time frame what I built were actually I brought together companies that had to work in agnostic settings they had to assume that they were deployed alongside many other technologies now it's an accident of fate that I'm doing this now in this time frame versus somebody else who may have done it 10, 15 years ago when you dedicated yourself to a single environment but we like to think because we're doing that and because we're investing in this time period we're addressing today's customer problem which is data is going to live all over the place you have to be agnostic to the problems of the customer and you have to help them achieve data reuse that data and use it for leveraging across any environment I wonder if we could talk more about the whole big data meme which probably cuts again across the three businesses the security related topics the certainly system management and information management one of the areas that big data practitioners struggle with is you see all these Hadoop clusters being spun up and nobody's paying attention to data quality data governance and the like now there is this emerging role of the chief data officer emerging in certain industries like financial services and health care and government but what's specific how do you look at that problem it certainly fits smack dab in your bucket do you have solutions there is that sort of white space we have a little bit of both so inside Bumi which is our integration product it's the number one iPass product in the market integration platform as a service what it allows you to do is really integrate across different environments but when we go back to trying to figure out what do we do there for cleansing we saw that as people pick up data out of these environments it's often not in the pattern they want to land it in so it might be Matt Wolken instead of Wolken, Matt and so what we've allowed the ability to do is build MDM into the platform so not only when you integrate with your point of the database you can actually land the data as you intended to be inside your environment so I can pick it up as Matt Wolken I can land it as Wolken, Matt and that's really one of the capabilities inside MDM inside Toad Proper we've actually built a capability to look at the data while you're trying to return it to the for analysis and be able to scan that data and find out where are their errors where are their null values, where are their empty cells and then be able to clean those up and address those if you go forward we're not truly historically a database or a data cleansing environment but we're building those capabilities into the tools as you use them across the world well that's a good data quality example now how about governance, is that something that you'll leave to the ISVs or do you see yourselves being dragged into that space by customers? well governance is a big part of it and we can go all the way into data ethics and how do you control data and how do you do proper use Dell has an identity and access management business inside the software group where we try and make sure we restrict the right use of data for the right reasons into the right owners hands and that would be one major asset where we would bring to the table to sort of collaborate around how do we actually govern the environment make sure that the right people have the right access to the right data that the data that is sensitive is protected and allow people to have allow the government of the organization to work well so that it happens automatically so I guess I may ask it differently so if you look at the software business in terms of the stack you're the furthest up the stack I'm close to the application tier so how far up what kind of latitude do you have how far up will Dell go TBD or do you have some sort of hard swim lanes well I think right now we've got the capability around dealing with data going up through the analytics and being able to pass that off to people with Bumi we actually have the capability of people with their APIs in their application code and integrating the code we're trending to see is I think there's going to be a boundary crossed really analytics are going to sit in a lot of code really analytics are going to be embedded into operations and how do we enable that to happen right now we're providing the user interface to your database to your understanding to your understanding of the code and your insights and how far we go beyond that we actually take it to the tier of where I think the average user who isn't the data scientist can use something so I think the number of users who are data scientists is very small the average analyst is a very large population and so how do we enable that population to use analytics without becoming an analytic expert is where we'll probably take some time analytics as code is a powerful sort of concept and so I guess it depends how far the industry takes that as to how much you can leverage I don't think analytics will be separate for long there will be a tier that it does we have the proper analyst community but in order to progress at the speed of where we need to and looking at the data scale that we are it will end up a lot of the code Matt can you talk a little bit about Hadoop and Dell's place in that ecosystem we had Cloudera on the keynote this morning you have partnerships with Cloudera and Hortonworks obviously Dell provides infrastructure that Hadoop could sit on how much you're integrating your analytics into Hadoop and where do you see Dell adding value to that whole Hadoop solution? We definitely have to look at the Hadoop environment and have that part of the capability there's not many customers who aren't currently thinking of or already have deployed Hadoop now whether they deployed it as a technology or as a problem a solution to a problem is another issue but we definitely look at Hadoop as being part of the environment that you need MapReduce or any other form in order to be able to take advantage of the data there's an economics problem here you can't store everything on tier one database it would be too expensive for you you also need the scale of MapReduce and functionality in the environment as well so we definitely see Hadoop as fitting right smack dab with databases as proper historical OLTP or OLAP databases in the environment it has to be there has to be leveraged if you're going to in any way approach the large scale it has an economic advantage in that space and it has a purpose long term retention data lakes and other advantages it is one of the key capabilities there we do very much leverage it so toad decision point data point will actually reach into those environments be able to query those environments statistical will now be able to do that Katanga which was a product we bought early in the days was actually built to explicitly leverage the usable GUI that allowed people to gain advantage to that as well so we're merging Katanga with statistical and so that capability will sit inside the statistical platform and be available to statistical use it seems like a lot of the Hadoop projects matter are focused on reduction on investment that's where they're getting the ROI today we see a base lining of a lot of traditional data warehouse and business intelligence spend moving some of that resource into Hadoop but it's less expensive so for every dollar they might spend on traditional data warehouses might spend 30 cents on some new Hadoop projects they're experimental now presumably you can make that up in volume I wonder if you can comment on that are you seeing a similar dynamic are you seeing something different so I see two things one is if you're familiar all with the storage paradigm of information life cycle management or putting the hot data on very expensive resources that are very fast very expensive and the longest term data historical data that's the slowest on disk or slowest capability it's turning into that but the same thing what we see is there's two capabilities inside an environment for analytics there's an exploratory process which is I don't know what I'm doing yet and I don't know if there's any value here but I need to play with two pieces of data mash them together and see if there's a correlation right or machine learning for that and then there's sort of the other stage which is I know what I'm trying to do I'm honing down the data to a few specific streams and I need that to be as fast as possible now you you generally have different capabilities over here than you need over here and so fast time reduction of delay is what's required in this OLTP transactional environment what's required over here is flexibility scale cost and so there are different environments in which Hadoop has its home and is very very proper and is the thing to use and there's other places where it may not be now some of the new Spark capabilities coming out with Dell in memory and capabilities like that will greatly affect what happens to the environment and bring some of that capability over so you have a panample of sort of solutions out there and each one has its proper home just like ILM did and so some are faster some are more expensive because of that some are heavier on compute and memory which is the more expensive side of an environment some are more heavily invested in disk which is cheaper and so those separate environments and those natural capabilities of each drive a different economic return and a different capability and we think all of them have a home in today's environment well you're credible because you don't have a database in this hunt so you don't really care whatever the customer wants to do Omar Awadallah has a great analogy which is the traditional data warehouses like the SLR camera and the new stuff on Hadoop is like your smart phone but of course that leads to which business do you think is going to grow more or what's going to grow faster where's the innovation coming from so that's when the discussion gets kind of interesting but I think again from Dell's standpoint if I understand it correctly let the customer decide and you'll bring a solution. I want to be agnostic I want to make sure that Dell is agnostic to those problems specific where we do want to build great capabilities for them and we want to make sure that customers see great value in what we can do for those environments but we don't want to force the customer into one particular environment we want to enable them to use their choice of great technology partners that we have at Dell. Any surprises we're running out of time here but any surprises in Dell's software business and the way it's progressed anything that really shocked you or you didn't expect that was an outcome that's been pleasant or exciting. I think the thing I get most excited when I came to Dell there was almost no software in the environment we had made a few investments and they were sort of scattered to the wind across the organization bringing them together and acquiring all of the new assets has brought us sort of a strength and capability of management skill sets and capabilities but as Dell has grown too it's now part of the conversation and the first conversation was a forced conversation make sure you say Dell and software together. Now we're seeing that line almost just disappear and just now there's an end-to-end capability here and Dell will help you with it. Even here at the Dell world there's a whole set of lanes of just information and data management tools and how do you derive insights and get data out that wouldn't have been here two years ago three years ago and so that chained in seeing the thousands of people here at Dell world to have that overview as they're just walking around the floor as an equal participant to the technology that Dell has has been the most pleasing and rewarding factor across that time. So sort of last I'll give you the last word and it sort of relates to I think the comment you just made what are we going to think about Dell next five years and what role is software going to play? How will observers be looking at Dell five years on? I think it will be much more instead of an individual technology we built our business on laptops and servers and that should in no way be taken away from us but also think about the larger environment and the larger problem that the customer has and how we can help solve that I think that will be the sort of the change instead of a single or a couple of technologies it'll be more of a company an entity that can help you through the challenging problem. Alright Matt, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE we have to leave it there really appreciate the update and the progress that you've made. Thanks Dave, thanks Steve, appreciate it. Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this, this is theCUBE we're live from Dell World 2014, we're right back.