 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the seeds of the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Joe Micose, Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon Research. It's exciting. It's live at IBM Interconnect inside the Go Social, InterconnectGo.com, digital experience. The Cube is here, the VIP is here, the executives are here. Again, we're bringing The Cube action. Talking to the top players. Our next guest has been on The Cube a bunch of times with EMC, Violin, Eric Purzok, VP of Storage Marketing at IBM, just left Violin memory to come join and lead the IBM team. Congratulations. Welcome back to The Cube. It's like New Jersey on, they pulled the new sweater. Back on the Bruins Jersey again, or it's not, it's the Rangers, I guess, New York. Meet the trading deadline. So congratulations. Congratulations. Well, thank you. As always, IBM loves to be part of The Cube. And we want to thank you for working with us over all the years, Wikibon and everything you've done to help IBM Storage Systems Division. Yeah, so we've been tracking this. Edges coming up have been in multiple edges. IBM's had a roller coaster day because it can go into a long list of where it's been, where it's going. But, you know, Jamie Thomas is just on. She just said, quote, we're serious about storage. Billions of dollars of investments. Exilient patents, they've taken a French focus. You were enticed to come over, and you're a hard nut to crack in terms of convincing. What was their sales pitch to you? What got you excited to come in to IBM and help these guys drive this bus to their destination? Well, I think the key thing is that IBM is sort of the understated member of the storage world. We have incredible technology, incredible customers, a great set of business partners across the globe, and we've sort of undersolded as a company. So, as you remember, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the largest storage company in the world was IBM. IBM invented the disk drive. IBM was critical in the development of tape infrastructure. And now, with software-defined storage, with our spectrum release, our focus in all flash, and with our more traditional products, the DS8000, the store-wise products, emphasis on hybrid arrays leading with flash, we have a great opportunity to move the ball forward and reclaim what had been for tens of years, really, an IBM business in the market space. So, we're going to work on that and move things forward. Take before I know Dave's time. No, no, no. Dave's showing a bit. I'm just taking the high-level questions, because I've only been involved with the storage group for about five, six years now. You've been watching the whole history. They seem to be doing really good things, technically. I have a lot of chops, but they're inch by inch, and they do quality inch, moving the ball inch by inch down the field. They don't get credit for big moves. They have good technology, but now we're hearing big. So, what's your take on, do you agree? What could they, what's your plan? What's your vision? I mean, you came, you made a big career decision to come here. What's the big play for you here, with the IBM? What's IBM's big play that got you excited to join your team? Well, I think the key thing is a recommitment to storage. You know, a billion dollars invested in flash, a billion dollars invested in the software-defined storage market space, continuing to invest in the traditional technologies, even the tape businesses. You know, from some of the analysts that do the numbers tracking, IBM is still number one in the tape space. And there's still an opportunity there. It's, you know, a large business. What's going to happen for us, tape or spinning disk? No, tape's not going to die. No, we know that. Flash is hot. I mean, this is why- Tape plus flash is a winner. Mark my words. So, the easy tier technology we've got, everything we've dealt with our spectrum virtualized, the former sand volume controller, delivering enterprise class data services, not only to the IBM infrastructure that you just bought, but actually on your older legacy infrastructure, because IBM with spectrum virtualized can virtualize that entire storage farm for you. Why not get a sync replication, synchronous replication, application consistent snapshotting, all from one console, whether it's IBM storage or your older heterogeneous technology. And IBM has done a mediocre job of pushing that technology into the market space and we're going to be much more aggressive in doing so. Well, so I wanted to ask you about, so I mean, John's right, I got the history, I've watched it. IBM squeezed the R&D spigot. For years in storage and what that's like, you pay the price. And then made some acquisitions, XIV, bought TMS. And now it's taken the billion, I call it the billion dollar playbook. Let's put a billion dollars in software defined, let's put a billion dollars in flash. We understand how that works, we're committed. Okay, so you have sand volume controller, which was actually a bright spot in the R&D. That's worked out great. And then you buy TMS, no stack, put it together with sand volume controller. Smart, gives you a stack, although you got to have a sand volume controller. Now you come up with a new announcement last week. And you're now heading in a new direction, a evolution of that sort of what I just described. With a billion dollars behind you and a new leader, visionary, fighter, wrestler. Okay, so give me the IBM spin on that story. What's really happening there and where are you guys headed? Well, I think the key thing is on the all-flash site in particular, which is a white-hot market, flash is now at the same price of disk. And that means you've got to have the feature sets. You can't just walk in and say, hey, tier zero for that high-performance SAP or Oracle workload. It's got to be now across the boat. Which means zero, one, it's no longer niching. Which means enterprise class data services. With the latest release of the V9000, we have an integrated stack. You don't need a separate sand volume controller. The stack with the old TMS product, right? And the sand volume controller are now merged together in the V9000 family. So you've got better performance metrics. You've got integrated enterprise class data services. When you move from tier zero into tier one and possibly even to the upper end of tier two, you've got to have those data services. And IBM's through the older sand volume controller now spectrum virtualized is unmatched in delivering those data services. Now they're on flash. And they're on flash with an integrated solution not by the SVC and then put the 840 together. Now it's fully virtualized in the integrated stack. Stack is critical, right? It's not just nice to have. Stack is critical in enterprise, is it not? It is absolutely critical. You need to have that differentiation. You don't want to, of course, put all kinds of different appliances together and manage them separately, right? That's extra time and money for the IT team. And as you know, close to 40, 50% of storage these days in the enterprise being bought by line of business owners and app owners. And they clearly just want shove it in and make it work. Which, by the way, is great for the software defined world as well, our spectrum software launch, which also was last week. We did two large launches last week. Okay, so how does your stack stack up to the competition? Well, I think from the all flash array, there's no close competitor. There's guys that have Ddupe. There's guys that have Ddupe with local replication. There's one of the largest competitors out there. Obviously one of the big boys in the industry. If you want to do everything that we do with the V9000, you need to buy their base all flash array, then their recover point appliance, and then their Vplex appliance to do everything that we can do with the V9000. So why would you put all those three pieces together, loose parts flying in close formation, we get a tightly integrated home stack that integrates right up into the application layer with the V9000 on the all flash side. In the storage defined side, we've got everything from protect. So we have the backup integration, the archive integration, again the same technology that's in the V9000 available as a software standalone, software defined technology, which allows them to use their existing physical server infrastructure as well as use existing storage infrastructure and buy just a software play. And that A is the way the world is going, not just in storage, but you've got software defined networking and other software defined technologies that are starting to take hold in the enterprise. So that launch allows us to execute on that strategy to again, being a Californian, don't fight the wave, ride the wave. And we're going to ride the wave right to winning that surfing contest on the software defined side and on the all flash. I love waves, waves are on the ocean and the ocean is where the action is. And so that, you know, if you look at that wave, what is that wave you're riding? Just flash, just software defined, expand the difference between the two and what's the next wave behind that? So we see a couple of things. First of all, we've also announced jointly with Cisco our versus stack technology and we will continue to focus on using that stack for a converged infrastructure play. We have talked about recently in the past about going to converge and then going beyond converged. Software defined storage allows you to move to converge and then into the hyperconverged market space. That's your hyperconverged play, really. You can use the software defined, you can work with a multitude of vendors that allows them to use off the shelf componentry to fly it through a distributor or of course you could go to some of the big x86 vendors. They could use our software create, basically hyperconverged action take on, you know, some of the smaller startups that are trying to make a play in that market space. So I got to ask you, I asked Jeremy Burton some questions and he did a crowd chat, I asked him anything. I said, what's the, actually Ariana asked us is our social engagement manager. What innovations are coming? He talked about in memory computing, real-time apps, pretty obvious, we know that's going around the corner. Right. Data will be persistent from memory into server-side flash. That's why they bought DSD, et cetera, et cetera. And this is talking about the infinite address space concept. So real-time, you know, that's why I joke about the data ocean versus the data lake. Data lake's more batch, it'll warehouse and kind of be smaller, slower. But when you're dealing with real-time data, new types of data flying in, the data tsunami or drowning in data, as IBM sees clearly an opportunity. Customers are drowning in data. Yeah, absolutely. So we've got, of course, our scale technology, spectrum scale, hundreds of petabytes of information that's available. It's perfect for big data analytics workloads. Or, of course, the old data warehouse, big data analytics, to me, is the new word for data warehouse. So whether it's a traditional data warehouse or big data analytics, whether that's a Hadoop infrastructure, a Mongo infrastructure, Cassandra infrastructure, you know, we're ideal for that. If you're using the older Oracle or SQL or SAP or DB2 data warehouse, it's ideal for that technology as well. From the inline compute capability, as you're probably aware, our all-flash products are certified with SAP HANA. So if you go to the HANA certification table, you will see that our all-flash arrays are there. So one of the key things that's preventing some of the in-memory technology from taking off is, of course, the amount of physical server infrastructure, particularly DRAM you need, and that's inhibiting it. That's a bottleneck, or not? It's a cost bottleneck. It's a cost inhibitor. So now if you can go with a flash solution and that flash solution has almost a minimal impact on performance compared to DRAM, but much less expensive, and have that be extensive of the original server DRAM cache into your all-flash array, with almost no performance hit, yet you dramatically reduce the hardware cost of getting into the space. It's all right to ask you a question, give you a breath there. On a kind of like a, outside-the-box conversation, like integrated stacks in the cloud generate a lot of new opportunities. We just had a guy with mobile syrup on, talking about mobile apps, and Dave was talking about some apps are only used during like NCAAs. So we were bringing up this notion last night, Dave and I were talking about integrated apps. Most apps don't even share data, like even Twitter, Facebook, they hate each other on data. So like, you know, these kind of interoperable data models are emerging as a next opportunity. So if this integrated app concept happens, workloads will mix like currents in the ocean, and what will happen is you'll see a new type of data, sort of a tsunami of data. What is that opportunity like? That's beyond the data warehouse. That's beyond the systems of record. How does Flash play? Flash plays a key role there. It's not enough to make a zillion copies. You got to set up a metadata index. Yeah, Flash is critical. Oh, it's awesome. Is that where the Flash, you see? So Flash is in the traditional enterprise today. Tier zero, tier one, and the upper end to tier two, it's at the same price of traditional enterprise upper end storage, and the upper mid-range storage today. Flash is right there, okay? When you go to these concept of these incredible sets of merged infrastructure with large metadata, caches that you need, huge search engines that you need to do, all that can sit on the Flash. And obviously now with the cost of Flash, with data reduction technology, such as our real-time compression, shrinking and being completely cost-effective, you could put a fair amount of these new, what I'll call these new world data structures, or the merging of these data types onto all Flash arrays. So it's critical because as you're putting that together, the last thing you want is the latency you see in a spinning media farm, inhibiting the ability of these data types to work together. And so Flash is critical in that infrastructure. You said new world data, so I love that term. So expand on that a little bit. You mean the confluence of this data-thinking- All these different data types coming together, right? Structured, all kinds. Structured in a structured in a mixed configuration. That's a process in real-time, manipulated, and then integrated, right? So Flash is critical there, and then obviously as these data types become larger and larger, okay? And you're starting getting exabytes and exabytes and exabytes and exonites, then having our spectrum scale technology allows you to use Flash on the front side and be able to scale to the back, and quite honestly, even in some of these areas, tier it with our easy tier technology right onto tape, if that is something that- So spectrum scale is a data ocean product. Surf those big waves. It is. We are all about riding the waves, and we will be the first to win the surfing contest in the storage business. Would you rather surf the ocean or lake? I mean Lake Tahoe's got some nice waves, but- So you wanted the longboard, is for the big waves? John wants to know, data ocean or data lake? What's the better term? I actually would say it's a data ocean, because the volume of data is growing so exponentially that when you think of a lake, even a big lake like the Great Lakes, and I'm a native Californian, but I do know where the Great Lakes are, they still pale in comparison to the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean. So it is an ocean of data. It's growing exponentially. All data types, whether it's structured, whether it's unstructured, whether it's a hybrid. Speed, slow, tide pools, rip currents. I mean, it's a more better metaphor. A flash smooths out some of those rip tides. So that is a server infrastructure and cloud infrastructure is dealing with those data types, especially when you're going over the cloud. You are over the laws of physics over the network side. So when you land on the beach, you want the fastest possible storage solution and all flash or certainly hybrid arrays in the near term are what you need to have. Things that are just traditional spinning disks, not worth it. So last week, the guy at Google, who's a tech geek, totally agree with you, is by the way, he said, if you can get your arms around the ocean, then you're, it's amazing, you're God, right? His name happened to be Eric Schmidt. His real name was Eric Schmidt. His real name was Eric Schmidt. He wasn't a billionaire, but he's in the data flow side of the Hadoop, so he understands the large volumes of data. So what you're saying is, flash is that flexibility technology to smooth out those really powerful, potentially unexpected experiences? Well, remember what you're trying to do is, as those data types come together, you're processing the structured and unstructured data. And even with the power of today's server infrastructure and server farms, whether it be virtualized or un-virtualized, the problem is, the enemy of all software is latency. And spinning disk has incredible latency, no matter when you short stroke it, even if you use some of the hybrids out there. So all flash is where the market is going. And in the short term, it's all flash and hybrids. And anything that's not a hybrid, really the customer should really think about what they're trying to do and why they're trying to manage with a technology that can't deliver and can't keep up with their new server and virtual server infrastructure, let alone what they're trying to do with cloud, be it private or hybrid. Right, it's just like, it's cheaper, but you got to be willing to go faster. And you need that speed, and again, all flash arrays today are basically, certainly for zero one, and at the upper end of the tier two and the large global enterprises, it is at the same price. So there is no cost of moving. You know, it's interesting, it's moving fast. A year ago, I probably spoke for like 12-1-1, 15-1-1, 30-1-1, you know, road show type of thing. Maybe 500 customers. Everyone I asked, who's got flash? Very, all flash, all flash arrays. Very few hands went up. It's changing just dramatically in the last year. Now it's like everybody's kicking the tires or actually putting in a production. So what do you see people doing with it? Obviously they're extending the life of their existing arrays with, you know. A flash front side, flash on the front side and tier and then tier it to. Right, okay, so that's happened. That's clearly been happening. They're reducing the number of cores that they need in database-intensive applications. Right. Cutting costs, moving faster. You hear people, some people talking about all flash data centers, right? Maybe you heard that. We would see all flash data centers as coming into the foray this year. This year. This year, you're starting to see that. And again, I wouldn't say all flash all the way into the backup and archive tier, clearly. But when I look at the primary storage tier for a larger global enterprise, thinking tier one for sure, tier zero where it's already been sitting and in the upper reaches of tier two and maybe even into all of tier two, given the cost structure of an all-flash array configuration and for example with our 9,000 v-product, the ability to virtualize not only the existing storage infrastructure to optimize their investment in the past, tier off of that flash into what I'll call cheap and deep for certain functionality, but also when you go into zero and one, or sorry, when you go from zero to one and two, you better snapshot that data. You better replicate that data locally. You better replicate it asynchronously remotely because earthquakes really happen in California and fire is still the number one cause of data loss other than human beings and floods and all the other things that could happen in data center and the all-flash arrays when they first came out were tier zero, so I was like, yeah, we use this, we'll use Oracle replication or we'll live without it. And once you go into tier one and into the upper ends, you can't do that anymore. So enterprise data services, which we have with our v-product, we also have in our mid-tier hybrid, of course, with our store-wise products, all those technologies are critical as flash, be it in a hybrid or clearly in the all-flash space, spreads its wings and takes more and more of the data center storage infrastructure. So everybody kind of gets this now. Everybody's sort of drinking the flash Kool-Aid, especially all the big competitors. There's nobody out there says, oh, I don't really think flash is going to take off. Everybody's doing it, so my question is, we've probably talked about this before. Can the startups and the recent, you know, IPOs and the future IPOs, can they achieve what David Scott formerly of HP called escape velocity with all you big guys having flash strategies built out? So being a big guy, but a guy who's also done seven storage startups, five of which have been acquired. You're qualified to answer these questions. I can answer the question. So there'll be a couple that will hit escape velocity. The rest will falter. What'll happen in the tier one, existing tier one vendors, what I like to call the big seven. What'll happen in the big seven is at least two of them will do a horrible job at it and their storage will decline. Two of them will do a great job and we think IBM is ideally positioned to do that right now and has proven it so far in our success in the all flash array space. And now with the V9000 and the 900 product, we'll go to the next level of acceleration in our front. And obviously, there'll be then three guys that'll do okay with it. And they'll be a player, they'll be around. There's just not enough seats at the table. I mean, if you're on the M&A side, if you don't make it public, I mean, the state velocity. So what you'll see is a couple guys will go bankrupt since I've actually been there once in a startup. Thank God, not very often, but once of the seven. There'll be a couple guys that'll get acquired for low price depending on their value. I'm gonna get one or two, that will get a good price with strong value. And then you'll get one or two that'll hit escape velocity. I mean, if you think about what happened in the backup space, who would have thought that Commvault would have hit escape velocity? And while they've had a couple of rough quarters recently, if you go back historically, no one thought Commvault was gonna make it. Look at them now, they've done pretty well. And so there'll be some other guys that do that would look at that. But I think that IBM is perfectly positioned in the software defined space with everything we do, with our protection, with our tiering, with our virtual infrastructure, with our scalability to create these data oceans, not just the data lake. And with the all flash technology, and even in our traditional products, switching everybody into a hybrid mode, you know. All of those things position us to take advantage of these waves of flash, particularly all flash, but even flash in hybrids. And also this move to software defined, which is attacking the data center, not just in storage, but in other areas like software defined networking, for example. So this is the wave of the future. And again, IBM is on top of these waves. Historically, we didn't know he's doing a great job with this, but we're there. And with these investments in a number of different areas, the acquisitions we've made, and just purely investing with our own software and hardware engineering resources to create fully home, tightly integrated solutions that attach to this application stack, we're there. And so we see a new era of IBM storage with what we're done in the last month, what we did last week. And what, of course, has happened since we've had new leadership with Jamie coming on board as the general manager of the storage division. So I got to ask you that. Obviously, you've been around the block startups, so you know the ups and downs, you know the drill. Software is the key value purposes. For many reasons, we don't want to get into too much detail. But bringing a systems and a software perspective to the storage, big iron, small appliances, hardware focused kind of mindset, which is most of the storage vendors in general, is a new change in the past couple of years. And there's always been software, you have firmware, whatever, but like real software life cycle type stuff. What's different? IBM storage is all about solutions. We're not a hardware company. We've got our software defined storage, which will be software only, but even our existing products, the DS8000, the store-wise family. Store-wise family is a tight integration of our sand volume controller, our store-wise technology with our traditional hardware into a full solution stack. And that's what's critical in storage. Because it's by solutions, not products. No one buys a product, and no one buys a family. Everyone buys solutions that meet the need of the data center, particularly meeting the SLAs of the application owners and the line of business owners. Remember, I've been around a long time. I know both of you guys have been around all. Have you ever met a CIO who was a storage guy? I've yet to meet one. So your storage solutions are there. That's going to be now our cube punch of the year. They don't want to talk about storage. We will find one. That's a good mandate. It's okay, got to ask you. Now you knew the job, VP marketing. What's your philosophy? Okay, share it the world. Okay, you got the new jersey on. You got to put your running shoes on. You certainly can run right out of the box. Combine workout, pass. You're right in the field. Starting quarterback, VP of marketing. What's your plan? What are you going to do? More social? Are you going to do more stuff? You're obviously aggressive. What's the Eric playbook? What are you thinking about? So first of all, we're going to leverage the IBM infrastructure. There's a strong infrastructure around social, mobile and cloud already that's been used by the other groups, the software teams, by the server divisions. We need to get on that train. We ourselves have been remiss. There's some of the stuff that we've put out to the field into our customer base and our client base. That's been a little speedsy and feedsy. It hasn't talked about application integration, solutions said it's been a little too hardware centric. So we're going to take a twist and be very solutions and application centric and focused. Why is RRA the best product for SAP? Why is our best storage technology the best for DB2? Why is the best for hybrid and private cloud infrastructure? And we haven't done a good job of translating that stuff. We've done an okay job, but we're going to be more aggressive in positioning this incredible technology portfolio in the solution space because again, I've never yet met a CIO who ever started storage admin. So it's all about meeting the application workloads, the SLAs, enabling their cloud infrastructure. How does storage make their mobile and social better? And guess what? It all sits on storage and it sits on incredible gobs of storage. So you got to have that integration level and we're going to make sure that we talk about the things we're doing in all of those spaces. You're also social, you're on Twitter, you know the social space, you're digitally savvy. Is there new opportunities to take advantage of these new meetings? Obviously we're in this business too, so we try to manage again. You tweet, where do you see that? Is there meat on the bone there? Is this more of just bolt on, adjunct to existing programs? So first of all, a lot of people who are not as old as me, which is almost 60, they're buying their technology in a new way. So yes, you need a sales team to call on them, you need account reps, you need strong business partners, but as you guys know, especially since you're in this space, 50 to 70% of the research is done just by looking at blogs and Twitter feeds and going to the IBM website, friend references that they get from customers, right peer references, and it's all online. So we're going to optimize that. We've got a strong storage community online already, involving our clients and our business partners. We'll continue to leverage that as we push forward and continue to push the envelope and do more and more in that space. And we've got a good start in that space, to be honest with you. And IBM is a company beyond just our storage teams, has done an excellent job in moving that world. We're going to move even stronger and harder in that space. And just size, you expanding the organization, anything you're looking for for help? Well, right now I'm still assessing, I've been on the job for eight working days. So I've got to look and see what we have. We appear to have a pretty strong team, needs to, some tweaking again, mostly around the solution orientation, very strong at understanding the storage space. Now I need to twist that a little bit. How does that storage benefit that DB2 workload, that hybrid cloud workload? How does that benefit what someone's doing with mobile? That's the part we're doing okay with, but we need to amp that up and we intend to do so. And Spectrum, did you inherit Spectrum? Did you, were you involved in that? I wasn't, I've only been here for eight days. So I wasn't there yet. Good answer. We'll find out later. That's a good name. I actually liked that. Do you know the reason why it came up Spectrum? No, I don't. I don't. I can see why it's a spectrum of offerings, protect, manage, scale, virtualize. So it's a spectrum of offerings. And I think that that was probably one of the key reasons, but I'll have to check with my guys and get back to it. Competitive landscape, just give us your quick two cents. I mean, you mentioned it briefly with the startups, just on the big guys. I mean, how do you guys think you'll do, what do you think you'll need to do to be aggressive? So we're going to wrestle them to the ground. As Dave pointed out, I kid wrestle in college. It's a street fighter. So we will wrestle them to the down. You know, IBM is up to the challenge. IBM has realized with all these investments, storage is a battlefield. Storage is not for the weak hearted. Storage is not for the faint. All areas of the IBM portfolio at a corporate level compete with plenty of competitors, whether that be DB2 competing with Oracle or SQL, whether that be, you know, the Z mainframe. Although, of course, it's very dominant player there. Obviously, with the open Linux and our power products, there's other guys in this space as well, and we compete there. But, you know, from a storage perspective, it is the battlefield. You're positioned on hyper-converged infrastructure and also Oracle's engineered systems. Any comment on that? So we would see Oracle engineered systems as obviously competitor to the storage. If you buy, you know, a power platform with our storage. If you buy a Wintel, Lintel platform with our storage and all those possible solutions. The good thing is, with our all-flash solutions, we have something that could go toe-to-toe with a sort of specialized place. And there are some things that IBM has already previously announced in the converged infrastructure, as well as with VersaStack, that have some application integration. We're going to continue to push that forward. All right, Eric. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Eric Herzog, new Chai-BM VP of Marketing for the Storage Group. Welcome back to theCUBE. Congratulations on your new job at IBM. Look forward to working with you and, of course, we'll be keeping in touch. We are live in Las Vegas here on theCUBE. Live in Las Vegas. IBM Interconnect special presentation. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.