 This is Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are at EMC World in Las Vegas. We are on the ground for three days, nonstop coverage, extracting the signal from the noise. We're in the main hall right next to the EMC TV. The buzz starts here, big signs, a huge event. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Vic Bagat is here. He is the new CIO of EMC. Vic, welcome. Thank you, Dave. Pleasure and great being part of this team, you know, and got a great ride ahead of me. Yeah, I'll say, you as an organization, I think EMC as an organization has done a fabulous job. We call it, you know, eating your own dog food, drinking your own champagne. Somebody said to me the other day at EMC IT, we ride our own waves, you know. Joe Tujicum is a virtualized mission critical app. So we go out, we're going to do that and you do it. So, you know, very forward thinking organization, very collaborative with the business units. In part as a CIO of any IT vendor, you have to have a little bit of a marketing role. You go out, talk to customers. But tell us sort of, you know, your first, has it even been a hundred days? It hasn't, but first, you know, a few days, what have you learned? Anything that surprised you? Any impressions that you have? First impressions? No, absolutely, Dave. I think I like the champagne thing much better than the dog food stuff. But anyway, 90 days into the job, you know, and absolutely loving it. You know, this gives a completely new meaning to drinking through the fire hose. You know, this is a company that's at the leading edge of trying to drive transformation. This is kind of what I got excited about. I spent a lot of my career, my two thirds of my career, in large conglomerates. And this is something that's moving, you know, the pace is probably quickened 100 times, right? Really have to understand, how do you leverage your own product, your own solutions, your own capability inside? Because you don't want to go to a customer, you don't want to go to a client and say, you know, use my solution, use my product, right? And the customer comes back and say, are you using it in your shop? And you're like, I don't know. No, yes I am. Here's the throughput I'm getting. Here's the results that I've delivered. Here's how I'm moving the needle for my business, right? That's how you build credibility by leveraging your own capability, your own solutions. And then going out of the customer and demonstrating to them. So what EMC has done, you know, as you talked about drinking your own champagne and eating your own dog food is, we have leveraged our own capability inside. And we have given it code names like propel, right? Where we are probably the largest shop that is running SAP, a total ERP system on a virtualized environment, right? Leveraging our own solutions that we can now go to market with and demonstrate to our customers and say it can be done, guys. Excellent. Vic, I want to ask you a question. Obviously, you're new to EMC and you have a range of experience looking at your bio. You've seen transformations before. Obviously, that's the theme of the show, is transformation. So my question to you is, what have you seen in your track record and your history? You've seen a lot of the movies before. We're in your career, can you point to saying, wow, this inflection point matches a lot of this era? And some of the challenges then and now that are different. And just as context, on the intro segment, we were saying, back in the day, multi-vendor was the big buzzword. I got to have a lot of choice of different boxes, support multiple vendors. Now it's about open, and the speed has changed. So do you agree with that? And two, what points in your career have you pointed to saying, wow, this was a big challenge, inflection point, here's how it transformed. And today, John, great question. So transformation right now is the key word in most of my peers outside of, you know, in the industry. How do we really drive that? And what does it really mean, right? You could talk about transformation is, am I really transforming IT? Am I transforming data centers? Am I transforming network, right? Or is that a more holistic, right? How do CIOs really absorb the word transformation, right? So great question. So here's the challenges that I have faced in my past, right? As I ran data centers of large companies, specifically at GE, data centers over time have grown by bolt-ons, right? Multiple vendors come in and say, hey, buy my storage, buy my network, buy my rack, buy my servers, right? And we as CIOs have run our applications in containers, right? Individual container, individual application. The transformation is now going to be applied to how do you take those containers and truly drive a optimization use of your resources? So right now, if you look at, you know, how much am I using the resources of my servers? It's probably anywhere from four to 12%, right? When you drive virtualization environment, you drive convergence of infrastructure, leveraging the word transformation, you are going up to 80%. And that is what EMC is trying to prove because we're doing it internally. We have taken our own capabilities and we have driven a utilization north of 80% of our assets, right? That's a huge win for the CIO. That's what they want. That's what they want to embrace because no more is CEOs willing to give money to IT and say, go spend on capex. We got to figure out how do we really rein in or spend and be an accelerator to a business rather than with a tin cup and say, give me more money, give me more money, right? That's how the game is changing. So what does that mean from an organizational standpoint? And I'm interested in your philosophy as a CIO. So you talk about this movement from container to this new era. How does that change the organizational role and can you maybe dovetail that describing your philosophy of how you manage? Now, Dave, I mean, one of the key things that I will highlight is the role of a CIO is changing if it hasn't already changed. A CIO is no longer a chief information officer. I think a CIO now is called a chief innovation officer, right? Companies, CEOs are trying to leverage their technology expertise to really drive growth and enable their capability out in the market. A lot of the CEOs that I hear are talking to the street about data analytics, how they're going to change the game in analytics, how they're going to leverage big data. Well, guess what? All of that resides within IT's purview, right? How do you take unstructured, structured data and make meaning out of it to accelerate your business growth, right? That's the role a CIO has to play, right? Gone are the days when I was just trying to run my data centers, the pipes, the bandwidth, right? I have to look at it and say, all of that I'm going to partner with some key partners that are going to help me enable a lot of my pipes but I have to focus on business acceleration. And that's kind of what I'm trying to take this IT into an innovation road map versus a purely a productivity play. And a lot of organizations, that innovation is happening, you know, talk about shadow IT. There's a, you know, the meme in the industry about the CMO is going to have more money to spend on technology than the CIO. What you just said, I infer from what you just said is you don't believe that, I'm inferring. You're saying, no, it's the CIO's job to put together, for instance, a data architecture so that the organization as a whole can leverage it, not just the marketing department or the sales department. Talk about that a little bit. Exactly, and you know, what's happening right now is, you know, when you look at a lot of the SaaS companies, right, they're not going and talking to the IT person. They're going to the business leaders. They're going to the decision makers and saying, here's a solution we're bringing to your table, right, because what they got in the past from an IT is, oh no, no, no, don't come talk to us. We know how to run our shop, right? Gone are the days when business leaders had patients for five, six year ERP implementation roadmap. They don't. They want instant gratification. And if the internal IT is not going to change our thinking, our capacity and our capability, right, this is where the business is going to bypass and we're going to be completely- So what gives you confidence that CIO's will actually take that road and take the mantle and win that battle? Yeah, and I think, you know, from, and again, you know, you're highlighting some of the things that IT is extremely capable of, because when IT develops solutions for the business, guess who knows the most about that solution in IT? They know how it operates. They know from end to end how to deliver that solution. And if we just be very protective about our turf, we're going to lose the battle. We got to be extremely open. We got to look at it and say, how do we accelerate business performance? Not about how we accelerate IT, right? It cannot be internal. It's got to be very external focused. And that's why the innovative mindset, innovative culture is extremely important in a CIO's DNA. Now, versus an archaic CIO that I was looking at and saying, the more data centers I'd run, the bigger my job is. Vic, right? You were talking about the transformation, which is a great message. And the CIOs see the transformation. They have to be business-driven. The 10 cup example, IT has been over the years kind of bone down in terms of resources, do more with less, consolidate data centers. But now we're living in an era of exploding investment. It's a pretty much a no-brainer. Apps are there, mobile, acceleration, catalyst. So, okay, that being said, there's really no debate. There's a lot of now new money in the table to do the transformation. So I had to ask you a question. So Dave and I talk all the time about this term that I coined called ITIQ. Meaning that even though CIOs want to do it, the team doesn't potentially have the IQ to do it. Meaning that they're so stuck in the old ways, managing ports, I'm a DBA for Oracle, all this stuff's going on, then all of a sudden they have to be stood up to do new things. There's a lot of training, a lot of, in the transformation, you got to get the army of people to deploy. The consultants of the old, I won't name names, they made a lot of money for slowing things down. They charge a lot of money. So a new era of services firms out there. So how do you talk to a CIO who says, you know what, I want to up level my IQ, my team. And I want to move faster. How do you talk to that transformation execution? John, great point, I'm almost to a point where you should be the advisor to CIOs to really think differently. I think it's absolutely a very valid point. So let me cut it down into those phases that you talked about. First, let's talk about the money. The money is being spent on IT, but it's being spent on forward looking IT, not the backwards looking IT. Money is not being spent on data centers. Money is not being spent on buying more storage and more money is being spent on transformation of a business and how IT is going to enable that. That's where money is being spent. And that's where the CFOs, CMOs, the C's level suites are really focused on in saying, I will give you money if you help me transform my business. If you help me accelerate my business. Not if you want to buy more data center space or CAPEX and all that stuff. So that's how I look at the money being spent. The 10 cup thing was more, if I keep focusing on my old archaic data center, I have to go with the 10 cup. The old philosophy, the old ideology has IT is a black box. The more money you put in it, the more money it wants. And that's where the ERPs used to take five to six years. Give me $20 million and I will completely automate your supply chain. Those days are gone. But now IT's looking at Amazon, OpenStack, mobile apps, low latency infrastructure, SANS, commodity scale out versus commercial. So all this stuff going on. How do you get your teams to execute? You know, the CIO's like, I want to do it. Yes. Where do I start? Exactly. And that is where you raised that point about IQ, right? Do you have the right intelligence, right? That's driving those solutions. Do you have the right behaviors? And this may require changing and changing of the guard, changing of people and getting the right thought leaders, right? And engaging with the business. How much does the business really want to embrace you? So great points, right? And it is going to be a chasm that IT will have to really seriously think about how do we really cross this? We were all over that investment that GE made in Pivotal. And of course you worked at GE for many, many years and we talk about the industrial internet, the internet of things. Obviously things today are being driven by consumer, the whole mobile and social trend. Are the activities that are going on in the so-called internet of things, in your opinion, Vic, are they relevant in the near to midterm to enterprise CIOs? Or is that sort of a different vector of growth in our industry? You know, Dave, the proliferation of data capture and data generation is completely, generation is not people generation, but just generating of data, right? Whether it's from machine, whether it's from humans or our activity on Facebook and all that stuff. There's an enormous amount of data being generated, right? What we do with that data and how do we grab that intelligence to really give us a predictive capability is enormous, right? So as GE starts looking at it, GE is into poor things about infrastructure. I mean they are developing things of power generating, aircraft engines, healthcare, right? They do business with nations where they could really help with the infrastructure of a nation, right? But in order to be extremely predictive about how do I service my solutions that I'm going to install in a nation is an enormous task. So for example, you know, a GE, a 777 that flies on a GE90 engine every time it takes up and lands generates about terabytes of data, right? In machine, what do you do with that data? Can you do more predictive analysis of fuel burn that's going to help the airlines? The biggest loss of revenue for an airline is aircraft on the ground, right? How do you address that for a customer? How do a customer being a Delta or, you know, USA or American Airlines, how do you address that? Now you are helping them be more productive, right? So when you start peeling the onion and you start looking at how the data play happens, it's about information technology. How do you leverage information? How do you leverage technology to deliver information, right? So there's an enormous play for Pivotal and the things that you mentioned of how do you really accelerate that? So in this post-Y2K world, the theme has been do more with less, cut, you know, IT doesn't matter. You know, we saw that book from, you know, in the early 2000s, we laughed, but, you know, but it had an effect. And we've seen just the percent of revenue that's spent on IT decline and so forth. The things that you're talking about now, these analytics, the big data pieces, the value potential, do you think that that will change that mindset at the corner office? There were CEOs who say, you know what, we can use IT as a competitive advantage. We actually want to start spending more. Do you think that will give an uptick to the IT economy? I think the companies that are really going to evolve are going to demand that out of their IT. They're going to want the IT to be more competitive. They're going to want their IT to be front-facing. They're going to want their IT to be customer-facing, right, those days of backroom IT are extremely limited because if that's where you want to play, you have a very limited capability of really partnering with your business leader. And you got to, if you, you know, it's not about getting a seat at the table, it's about, do you have a seat at the table or not? Right. Vic, what, switching gears a little bit, sort of getting back to sort of EMC IT in your new role, how are you going to judge yourself? What are the milestones that you want to hit over the next, let's say, 12 to 18 months? How should, you know, observers, what should they watch for? Yeah. I think from an EMC perspective, you know, I'll give you an EMC perspective as what attracted me to this company. You're going to find EMC be a phenomenal player in solutions about transforming not only your IT, but helping transform your business, right? How does, how can IT become more front and center for businesses, right? That's where EMC's game plan is going to be. And, you know, they have been extremely smart about the acquisitions we have done. So it's not about just selling iron. This is about selling solutions, right, to the businesses. What I see from an IT perspective, right, what my role is going to be, is going to be how do I help my customers, not internal, but also my external customers, EMC's customers, to really understand how to contemporize information technology, right? How do you really change the game? How do you have that conversation with the C-level suite in saying, here is how IT can actually deliver, right? So we have a lot of irons in the fire right now that we are looking at and saying, how can IT really accelerate our ability to deliver? How can we get more intimate with our sales team that can leverage our capabilities from IT and our global solutions team, right? And then help develop a joint go-to-market capability that says, yes, I want to do business with EMC because they're doing it internally. Excellent. Vic, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for spending the time. First time on theCUBE, we really appreciate the candid conversation. And your job is a challenge. As we've always said, it's like changing the airplane engine mid-flight, 30,000 feet, you know, you have a huge organization within EMC. You guys are drinking your own champagne, more importantly, taking it to customers in an era where, you know, we are moving to a modern infrastructure. And it's exciting, but also there's a lot of risks involved and but reward as well. So without risk, there's no reward. So again, we believe in the transformation to the businesses, great mission, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. This is theCUBE, our flagship program throughout the events. I'm John Furrier. I'm with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest to hear about Flash, EMC's Flash products right after the short break.