 Inside the Cube, siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv's exclusive coverage of EMC World 2012. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Siliconangle.com, and we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise as an independent organization to get the scoop and signal from the noise, extract and share with you, join with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante, wikibon.org, we're very excited to have Scott McNeely, who is the chairman, CEO of wayan.com. I'm the chairman, not CEO. Good job, what am I saying? Much better being. Much better being chairman. I'm not an opinionator. Who's the poor CEO? Tom Jessam. All right, okay, good. Well, welcome, Scott. Thanks for taking some time to stop by. It's great to be here. Good to see you again. So EMC World, this is different. Years ago, they wouldn't let you in, right? Yeah, I feel like I'm inside infiltrating enemy lines, but you know what, I don't own any Oracle stock, so I'm free and clear to help out whoever asks. And Joe Tucci and Pat Galsinger and Bill Cook and all the guys are utilizing me a lot and I'm enjoying it and it's kind of fun. Yeah, we saw you at the chorus launch and what was the line you had yesterday? It used to be famous and now you're on the Cube? Is that right? Yeah, there you go. What do you think all the action in tech now is being that you've had a major player and that for years going back and my generation, the uni's generation, and I actually have a computer science degree and like other people out there claiming they do. But what's changed, what are you seeing right now? Obviously, distributed computing is making a comeback of its systems. The network is a computer, somebody said that a lot. Yeah, I mean, yeah. And now they call it cloud. I should have just said one word, and it would have been a lot easier. I mean, seriously, this network is a computer, you got the edge, you got virtualization happening. What's your take on all this? And we said a long time, any device, any time, any place, anywhere, that's all, I hear people saying that EMC was saying that yesterday in their Area 51 conversation, all of the stuff we were talking about, wearable computing, mobile wallets, your wallet gets replaced by your phone, that's all happening. It's all good, it's all wonderful and it's a positive step forward. You mentioned on the opening, you're excited to work with Joe Tucci and Bill Cook, who used to work with you at Sun. Kind of the old school guys kind of leading these, this comes through the transformation. But now you're also excited about social data and social infrastructure really. And so, obviously we're big on the social cloud and mobile, we love it as well. And a lot of people think it's like a very gimmicky PR kind of thing going on with social and likes and fan book pages, fan pages, but underneath it's infrastructure and the network is the computer but we're all distributed and connected. So it's really a distributed computing problem. So share with us why you're excited about social infrastructure and share some insight into that. Well social is where you're capturing the demographic, the sentiment, the confirmed buying intent and the knowledge as well as capturing the interests and the gaming component. So if you look at the internet, it started off with AOL, you got mail and then Beanie Babies from eBay and then you got into Google PageRank Search and then you got into iTunes and then you got into Facebook with their relationship status. And then we got into Zynga with gaming and Twitter and Tweets. And we think there's another new phase that is a one to many conversation phase and that's what we're pushing with way in. And the difference between way in, I believe, besides the fact that we're kind of going after something different and a new wave and everybody thinks all of the past waves will, remember AOL was going to be- They were the granddaddy of the internet. It was never going to, nothing ever was going to beat them, right? Facebook gets compared a lot to AOL. Right. And we are looking at Facebook since they went public and they're already one with the hack. So, Time Warner is going to buy it. Yeah. They might merge with MySpace at some point here. But we wanted to build something that actually had value in the media space, in the social media space for enterprises, for celebrities, for brands, for enterprises and for governments. Because they all wanted to have client engagement and Twitter is a great one to many broadcast. YouTube's a great one to many publication. This should be some media outlet. They're all kind of one to many, push the shout outs, right? And we said, why don't we close the loop on the conversation with real-time feedback, real-time content. Filling handshaking in networking protocol. Yeah, being, right. And doing it in real-time and everybody gets to see it. So we built this architecture. So now how did we do it? Well, there's companies out there that have huge website traffic, but they don't really know how to engage them. So we put an iframe in that talks back to the way-in database. There's a whole bunch of people that have, we're talking to a soccer team that has 22 million people on their fan page. They don't know how to, so we built an application of way-in on their Facebook page that again talks back to the database. Twitter is, I mean, Twitter's the hottest thing, I think, in social media right now. They own events and we did Twitter polls here at EMC during keynotes, during events, during broadcasts, all the rest of it. And it allows, it's basically an application that resides on top of Twitter and uses Twitter infrastructure to allow tweets to basically be collated, tabulated, reported on, and creates a Twitter conversation, not a Twitter broadcast. And boom, now all of these inform the way-in database, which is why we're here at EMC. Green Plum is a big data analytics partner of ours, and we're going to be going to market with them. What's your partnership with Green Plum? Are they providing gear, software? So basically we're using them to take the data that we have and make it manageable, organizational, analytical, do the analytics on it and the business reporting. And so we'll go out to verticals like human resources and go to companies and say, listen, we can give you real-time polling and cinema gathering with your employees. And Green Plum will here provide you with the analytics and reporting for all of this big data that you're going to be capturing with your employee base. So what other guys have tried this poll anywhere and you guys are different, how so? Well, we're different because we've gone toling mobile, it runs on your iPhone, your iPad, your Android, it runs on your Facebook page, it runs in your Twitter feed, it runs in your website as well as our microsites. But it all informs one common database and we built the architecture from day one to be manageable and reportable with analytics, that sort of thing. What do you do with all this data? So there's lots of marketeers who want to do with the data. What's different about our data, you think about the old days of Nielsen, they put a set-top box up there because they wanted to find out what channel you were watching, but they had no idea of anybody's in the room, how many people were in, because they're trying to get a demographic because a demographic might drive a sentiment which might drive a buying intent. So then a little later on, they tried to figure out who was in there, how many people were watching, what were they watching, do they like what they were watching, and they have very, very small numbers. Well, now we can basically get hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of people, and we skip all of this demographic and sentiment stuff, and we ask them a very simple question, are you going to buy a long belly putter this summer to play golf? And the guy who votes yes, you've now gone through all this, no more inference, no more analytics, you got very clear, you know, I'm guessing. It might have been a 98-year-old grandmother who doesn't play golf, and you would never infer that from any of the data, any of the shows she did, she just happens to have a great grandson who plays golf and wants a belly putter. But now you know how to advertise a belly, you know, you have confirmed buying intent, very different than... Scott, so share with the folks out there your insight, because obviously you have a unique perspective being in your role in the industry and then acting as a chairman of a really cutting-edge company that explains to them why social's not passé right now. There's been some write-ups in the journal I actually had with Forbes, Rich Carlegard at Forbes Roto, it's on the Journal Optical, yeah. Social's a silly word, and we love silly words, and we find new ways to make something old sound new, because when I started at Sun in 1982, we were talking about distributed computing, and the Vax was distributed computing compared to the mainframe, and then Workstations was distributed computing. And you know what? Distributed computing is nothing more than... Connection. Yeah, it's networked computing. The network is, it's cloud. Actually, social is bad, and you go outside the US to work social, means socialism, you go against social. You know what social is? It started off, social computing was TCPIP, then it was NFS, then it was email, then it was HTTP and HTML, and then it went to SMS, and it's... Actually, if you look at the most successful social media companies today... It's SMS, it's SMS on steroids. It's networking, all the best products out there have guys from networking background. It's all TCPIP. It is all, that's all social is, it's TCPIP. It's just, it's a GUI built on TCPIP. That's about as technical as you're going to get out of this. All right, but I did get a Harvard degree, I promise you, I did. You can prove that, okay, good. And I'll even show you my transcript. I have my transcript, a birth certificate. I got the whole deal, I got the whole deal. I asked Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloud Air, I interviewed him yesterday at the HBase conference. I said, Michael, do you have a CS degree? Yes, he was, I got two of them from Berkley to prove it. Uh, mine was a golf degree with a minor in economics, so, I didn't even know, I went to North East Union, I knew what my degree was in. Anyway, so, it's like I see the Dartmouth guy next year. You an alcoholic? Sorry, I'm going to get letters from every Dartmouth guy. I resemble that. So let's chat about, nice, nice one there. I'm not a CEO of a public company anymore, I can say stuff. No, that's good, it's a cube, say it. Oh, you had the gloves on the whole time. So, while I was showing that out, what do you think about HP right now? I mean, what a disaster. I mean, you know, you've worked with that company. You know, Larry has some, he's trying to take them down, Mark Hurts it with Larry, and Meg Whitman's up there, it's just falling apart. I don't think HP's falling apart. I think it's a really solid company. I think they got great product, they got great. I'll tell you what, I'd kill to have the printer business, and I said that for the last 25 years. It's a great franchise, they've got a global footprint that very few companies have. They have a solid brand out there, and I think they've got one of the great leaders that I've ever known, and I support Meg Whitman, 2,000%, she's a great lady, she's a very high integrity. She's got a tough job. You don't, it takes as long to fix something as you spent screwing it up. Yeah, so let's talk about that, because she's been a few years on her. It's been a few years. Yeah, you can't put this on her. I mean, California's changed. I mean, I moved out here 12 years ago, and I live in Palo Alto, and Silicon Valley was magical, but now it just seems that the government is just like, starting a company in California is a lot harder. She didn't get the governor nod. Maybe we wish she had, but what do you see her doing at HP right now? Because laying off some people, they need to lay off some people, so I'm not really harsh on that, but it's just they have too many people to begin with, but what is she thinking about? You know her well. What's her mindset right now at HP? I think she's doing the right thing. I mean, somebody asked me, what would you do if you were, give us some advice to Zuckerberg. I said, get out of California fast. That was my advice. Do it now. We started weighing. Where did we start it? In Denver, Colorado. Beautiful place. Lower town Denver, right downtown Denver. It's a spectacular place. Low cost, great skiing, beautiful weather. People go there. Well, we were the largest employer. Son was in Colorado when I was chairman, so there's lots of great golfers skiing over there. Great outdoors, it's spectacular. So she can't move out of California, so she's got that problem. She also has a huge number of over 300,000 employees. That's a big city. Huge, and she's global, so she's dealing with all. I mean, there's more constraints on her than it's a Fortune 9 company. I think she's doing exactly right. She's settled things down. There's no more intrigue. There's no more. This is not good news that you got to lay off 25,000 people, but you know what? It's got to be done. Yeah, it's got to be done. So I got to tell you, John, so last time you may not remember this, I'm sure you don't, but it must have been late 90s I was interviewing you when we were talking about, you were doing your thing and bashing HP and everybody else. What? Yeah, and it was good, it was good stuff. And you said, I said, Scott, you got printer envy, you said, no, I got ink envy. Yeah, printer ink envy, yeah. And so a lot of people talk about, oh, this guy's got to spin off that division, spin off the PC division. What do you think about that? Do you think that's the right way to go or keep it all together? You know, that's probably a full semester business school case study. You said you went to Harvard. Harvard undergrad, Stanford Business School. I never got into Harvard Business School. They wouldn't have me. I was a legacy. I was a legacy, why would they want me there? I did get to Harvard, never mind. So, you know, there's three places you can set up your company. You can be a broker, Amazon's a beautiful broker, and Walmart and Amazon are beautiful brokers. You can be a services company and then you can be an asset-based services company like AT&T with fiber in the ground. Or you can be a headcount-based services company like an EDS or IBM Global Services. And then there's products companies which do heavy R&D. And you can be on any one of the triangles. There's a fourth, which is the pyramid, which you can be a media company where you actually create content like a news corp or whatever. Now, you can be one or two of those or you can try and be three. It'd be impossible to be a four because then everybody hates you. And you have no friends. And what we always tried to fight at Sun was a one-front war. We were an R&D company and we tried to work with the integrators and the service providers. We tried to work with the media companies and we tried to work with the brokers to all use our product. But we were focused on R&D and building product and it was very easy to organize the company. They were organized by chips, workstations, operating systems, middleware, and services. Car maker. It was, yeah. That's your analogy. Yeah, exactly right. You can listen closely. And the problem that Meg is inherited is she is EDS services. She's printer and what was the OS that they, WebOS? Oh yeah, WebOS. WebOS, right. And then they're a broker because Compac and the PC business is basically brokering. Car dealer. Intel and Microsoft and Asian power supplies. So she's got a very complex business and she's got to figure out how to make, and so she's fighting a three, four, five. One of the other great lines you had was the innovation of Dell. Tell Michael, I said hi, his greatest innovation was the W and the keyboard. And you're seeing Dell change the model. Tough earnings today, but it's interesting to see that transformation, right? I mean, bringing in IP, getting ready to EMC, doing their own storage. Our big transformation at Sun was that we've, I always talked about the big frigging web tone switch, right? And it was a natural for a company that had the database and the applications to run and integrate. And I think Larry's doing the right things of integrating and creating that big web tone switch that has all of, has web tone and database tone and app tone. I got a direct message on Twitter from someone who just wants to know what your handicap is. My handicap? Yeah. I'm 57, I'm married, I have four boys. I spent way too much. Golf handicap. No more scratch goals. Those are my handicap. Those are my handicap. It's interesting when I was a little younger, I was a plus two, but it's 7.5 index and rising right now. I went out and snuck out this morning and played golf with my wife. She beat me, so. How many strengths did you give her? I didn't give her any, she beat me. She got to play up the front teeth, I played the back teeth, but. Well, okay, well, thanks for having me on theCUBE here. We're excited to chat with you. Anytime you want to chat, we'd love to have you on. Everybody, go to twittpolls.com and wayan.com. Sign up, it's really cool. It's fantastic, twittpolls is unbelievable. Start having conversations with your key constituencies, even if it's just your kids. I think it's exciting that someone of Scott's background recognizes that the distributed computing of social networking is really some science and some opportunity, so there's more there than you think and that's a great message for other entrepreneurs out there, so thanks for sharing that and we believe in it as well. We'll be right back with a wrap up right after this break.