 Welcome back to EMC World, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of EMC World three days of live coverage. We're in day three, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We'd love to talk to the entrepreneurs, the executives, anyone who has the signal, and we'll share that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Bill Cook is here, he's the chief operating officer of Pivotal, and Bill, welcome back to theCUBE. Good friend of theCUBE, great to see you. Good morning, good to see you guys. Yeah, so obviously, huge news down in New York when you guys announced what Pivotal was. Got a lot of action here at the show, but tell us, how's it feel? What's the reaction been to the customers seeing this new initiative? Yeah, it's been great, and thanks for having us here. As you know, you guys have been a terrific supporter of ours from the Green Plum days when we came and talked about Green Plum and what we were up to, and as you guys recall, even back then, we had pretty big ambitions about what this market opportunity could be, and it wasn't just around about big data, I think we talked about that, it was about analytics, but it was also about turning data and analytics into something that is customer facing and in the moment, and driving business value and outcomes, and I think the journey we've been on over the last year around Pivotal and the announcement of Pivotal has been the culmination of really that vision, right, around how companies, businesses, partners were going to start to leverage data in different ways, and Pivotal has really set off to provide that capability to our customers, that they have a platform that they can write to and depend on for this next generation of applications that are going to get built, and as you've said, I think the reception we've received on the story and the vision has been terrific, so we're pretty excited. We've been following you guys honestly since the days, you guys have been great supporters of theCUBE, you helped underwrite some of our early work at Strata, and we really appreciate that, and Hadoop World, when it was an independent show with Cloudera, you guys have been great, so I want to thank you for that. We've also been watching EMC World and EMC World 2010, I believe you might have been on there. We saw the vision, Paul Maritz laying out the stack, internet operating system, I called it. Pat was just getting into EMC, and it was a natural, great story, but the markets changed a lot since then, and we've been talking on this show here about making comparisons to the old inflection points of, as Joe Tucci calls it, Wave 2 or Era 2 with Client Server and TCP IP, and how the stack was hardened below TCP IP and that expanded huge growth, and the old OSI model you remember from your Sundays, the top of the stack just was always in flux, but that was a good thing. So to me, we're kind of making the comparison and let the pivotal is like taking the original vision of Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger and the team and putting it out separately, decoupling it, hardening the lower end of the stack, if you will, in this modern era, pass, et cetera, data layer, all that stuff, and then allowing you guys to accelerate and be highly cohesive in this modern app world. Is that, would that be a clear, kind of like oversimplification of it? I think it's perfect. I think they got it. So with that, Green Plum is a nice little nugget in that equation because you guys had revenue. You were, you know, when you were on your own prior to the acquisition, you were competing against some pretty large data management players. Sure. Okay, so now that you have all this cobble together, you have built-in revenue, what's happening? What's orbiting around the Green Plum? Because Green Plum and Gemfire seem to be a key part of the acquisition. What's orbiting around that, and what's going to consolidate and stick together? Yeah, I think, well, I mean, the one thing we've done, and you guys watched us do this, is really commit to a Hadoop HDFS-based stack, right? Take advantage of the optimizer that we had built over the last 10 years, i.e. Hawk, that we introduced in February, and leverage off of a common file system HDFS. And we think getting to a common, you know, data tier, data fabric, if you will, is really going to be important, right? Because what our customers are telling us is getting to a shared infrastructure for their data that they can start to build different solutions and use cases on top of, is kind of the next step for them. And it's early, right? And I think Hadoop has been early, right? In part of that underpinning, but we think it's an important step in the right direction, so customers can get to that level of clarity, if you will, of having data in one spot that they can start to leverage. And so what we've done with Green Plum is really build that stack, and our Pivotal HD distribution. We're doing the same thing with GemFire and SQLFire. How do we get that onto a common, substrate data fabric, if you will? And so what it means to our customers is you have a broader opportunity of use cases that can leverage that stack. Now on top of that, now we're building off of the application fabric as well. So the assets that we've inherited with the Spring community and the V fabric community of layering into an integrated stack from a data fabric and application fabric perspective, and then building all of that on top of a common substrate, being the PAS offering that we've inherited from the work that had gone on at VMware and Cloud Foundry. So the story has gotten much more compelling, much broader in handling different use cases that I think are- And there's differentiation. So Green Plum's not the sole piece anymore. No, it's an element. Now you can continue to buy Green Plum and we continue to encourage that. We'll continue to support that for those specific use cases, just like Hadoop has specific use cases, just like GemFire and SQLFire have specific use cases. I think what's different now is on top of that, you have a vision of how it all integrates together. And I think that's the story that I think customers have been looking for, right? I think from, you know, if you look from the standard CIO's perspective, they've got a deluge of opportunities and issues facing them about how do they keep the lights on running the tier two infrastructure, wave two infrastructure, and think about this next generation of platforms that need to be bought. Keep the lights on on the wave two and build wave three, as Joe says. And it's hard. I mean, we try to be obviously very respectful of that and build those connection points so it's not this big bang theory. Like do I have to throw out everything I've done over the last 10 years? Obviously not, that never happens. And so how do we make that evolution as seamless and as painless as possible for our customers? And I think what people like about us is that we have a bit of a track record of being innovative and trusted on the technology side, but then with the backing of both EMC and VMware and now General Electric as being a member of the family, believing in it, investing in us and encouraging the transformation that's going on. I want to talk about GE in some depth, but before we go there, you talked about this common data tier. And when I listened to the Viper announcement, I said, wow, that kind of looks like a common data tier. How did you guys decide where to draw the line as to what assets go where? From EMC, VMware. Like I say, Viper looks like a common data tier. I could talk in HDFS, an object store, I said, whoa, why couldn't that be part of Pivotal too? Yeah, I was talking to Paul and Scott about this, that we've come a long way in a year and a half. I mean, when we first showed up, when we were still green plum on the Hadoop path and talking about the bat and the commitment we were making to Hadoop community and HDFS specifically, I think a lot of EMC people didn't know what that was, right, in the early days, right? It was a- What's a dup? What's a dup and why would we be doing this? We just bought green plum and what does all this mean? And now when you see Pat up on stage talking about the VMware direction and their commitment to virtualize Hadoop and to your point, you hear the EMC story with Hadoop as a prominent position in the strategy. I think we've come a long way. And so more work to do on leveraging the different types of storage. And I think to answer your question, EMC comes at it obviously from a storage footprint, kind of up the stack with Viper, thinking about the control plane of how they leverage storage capability. We would want to seamlessly tie into that. We would view that as infrastructure underneath our platform as a service. Brothers and arms, yeah, I mean, you have to be. And, you know, not to knock my brothers and parents but also be open about it, right? We have to play across the market, across the tiers of different vendors and be very open and open source based in our technology. One of the things that we hear from customers all the time at Wikibon, we have the peer insights talk to CIOs and, you know, they want integration. I think that integration message you just said is really kind of key. Having these point solutions on use cases is great. You can develop the market there and you can go vertical, so vertical's key. So you can get beach head and expand but ultimately, holistically, the integration is key. But with that, because of its orientation, OpenStack has really, really resonated with enterprises. Mainly for two reasons as we were analyzing. One, AWS, Amazon web services is coming down the tracks like a freight train, full throttle, right to the enterprise, clean stack, very efficient, a lot of shadow IT, enterprises are seeing it, some are using it aggressively, some are want that functionality. So OpenStack is appealing to enterprises as a security blanket, a potential bridge, not yet fully capable. So it's basically Amazon. They want Amazon, so OpenStack's got that messaging. A clear run. I mean, they got a clear run right now and uncontested marketing lead in terms of the mind share of enterprises. How are you guys going to get back in that game there? Obviously you're involved with OpenStack, we know that. So James Waters out there, friend of the cube and so we know you're contributing code but there's a balance there, a balancing act between hey, we want to get a position because you guys are basically offering a comprehensive integrated solution that you can support. So how are you going to balance the freight train of Amazon with the developing of great messaging of OpenStack? Well, I mean, as James probably explained, I mean, we need to stay up a layer if you will, right? So our pass offering needs to fit into an OpenStack framework, into a VMware framework, into an Amazon framework and the whole idea of our objective is to give the application developers kind of independence and be able to count on choice and options about how they want to deploy the technology and not really have to worry about that, make that a non-architectural discussion, right? And so insulate the developers from that world that want to develop for this new world, leverage these new data fabrics that we were just talking about but then have independence of the underlying infrastructure and where it gets run, right? Whether they want to run in a more hosted environment or behind their own firewall, it should be the same technology stack and that's really the mission we're on to really prove that out. So let's riff on that. So Dave and I were just talking with Jeremy Burke, we brought this up with Galsinger and others, is that back in the 80s and 90s, you remember during those box days, data center days, multi-vendor was the big discussion. If you were in multi-vendor, that was table stakes. That was a minimum requirement to work with different vendors, but that was kind of a box, speeds and fees ports, et cetera. So what you're basically saying and what we're teasing out in the cube this week is that the new multi-vendor is the frameworks because what you just said is in essence, you're contributing to open source by contributing code. So you're playing with these open source communities and frameworks. At the same time, you guys have some proprietary technology, you're going to have hardened underneath the covers. So is the open source frameworks the new multi-vendor? I think it is. I mean, I think you have to, I think the customers and the community more broadly is going to require it, right? They just don't want to end up down a path locked into a particular vendor, a particular hoster, and they feel, and I think the other thing that's helping in this mission is that the technology adoption for this new world and the way a Google or a Facebook would tackle a problem like this from an application development perspective, they have to have that agility, right? They have to be able to take their business and their applications where they want to go and not feel locked in and not feel constrained. And I think we've learned a lot over the last 30 years about what that means. And so we're going to try to be a very good citizen of that, good contributing back to the open source community, also providing value add on top of that, that is our differentiator, right? That's got to hold the test of time. It's got to bring value to the enterprise to pay for those things, but not feel locked in. And so we've been very careful about, when we talk about the data tier, when we talk about the application tier, when we talk about the past tier, that all of those are independent of each other. We will build it as a holistic solution, but if you just want pieces of it, that's fine. So I've got to ask you a question about the business side. Obviously the new startup is awesome, great feedback. People are really excited, the employees, like well over 1200 employees and throw over 300 in revenue. How does that revenue get reintegrated? Because actually we can speculate where the revenue came from, a green plum and some other places, but not everyone was thrown off a lot of revenue at CEDIS in spring. Those were initially somewhat revenue driven, but the bulk of that revenue is going to come from sources. How are you going to rein that in so that it's cohesive where you can actually put it into a central pool? And how do you reintegrate into the holistic offering? So all of those pieces fit into Pivotal One and that story, I mean that's what we're aimed at for the end of the year. So from a revenue perspective, I mean we're a software company in our core. That's what Pivotal One is. We will wrap services around that. We have a professional services team, we have a data science team as you guys know, but longer term our strategy as you know is to leverage the broader ecosystem, right? I don't want to create IBM global services per se. Right? And this was just in the analyst meeting I'm watching on Twitter. Obviously amplifying the channel partner strategy. Yeah, I mean we have to. I mean we have to, if we're going to play that game of being very open and transparent, it has to be a platform that attracts the best and brightest application developers and the new software solutions that are going to be built for this next generation and so we have to be that platform of choice and so how do we enable that world to evolve? We will, there is more than enough growth in this market as you know. This is a huge wave that we're, you know, being very ambitious about building the platform for and so this will be more about market adoption candidly for us because we think if we are a good citizen, a good provider of capability here, you know, the revenue will come. Let me ask you just to clarify for the audience that revenue will be recognized at EMC, right? EMC's got I think about 70% ownership, VMware had 30% prior to the GE investment. Yeah, I mean. It's part of the EMC's P&L. Yeah, absolutely. I mean we are. Like VMware it was. Yeah, like VMware it was. We're owned by EMC majority and VMware and GE took a 10% stake in us and so it will be pivotal revenue but it will get consolidated. And then Tucci said at the financial analyst conference, look the intent is we want to execute and go IPL. That's why we're doing this. That's right. And we have a lot of work to do. And that's an important point. I mean obviously we want to grow this into a bigger company, be able to spin it out publicly as we've stated. And you know, besides the obvious reasons we want to do that of it being a major platform for our customers, it's also the way we are able to attract the best talent, right? The people that feel like, boy that's a great ambition as a company. It's something I want to be a part of and I have some upside, right? From an equity perspective to be part of that ride and part of that journey. Now it's a lot of hard work as well so I don't want to minimize the challenges in front of us but those are the right challenges you want to have which are about execution and driving real value out in the marketplace. Bill let me ask you a personal question. Sure. Because you've had a long story career. You've been in the go, we're all. Well you've seen the errors, right? Your error too was there, you had a career there. But with the green plum and through the acquisition you've seen the trials and tribulations of the growth of the big data space as well as you're putting your fingers in other kind of data management space is kind of on the legacy side. And now you're part of this new Pivotal One. What are you most excited about? Looking back and I mean you're in a new comfort zone or uncomfort zone and you're pushing yourselves. You guys got a great re-energized vibe. We're seeing that. What are you personally most excited about about this new journey? Well I think for me personally to the point you made it's really about the mission. I mean when you look back on your career I had a terrific time at SON still very fond memories of SON and what we accomplished. And if you talk to any of the people that came out of SON it was all about the mission and the excitement about really making a difference in the world. And with the technology platform and just feeling part of that momentum that you're doing something meaningful and it will make a difference with your customers and your partners and your employees. Just that shared experience of accomplishing something. And I think Pivotal has that same opportunity if not bigger. And great leadership in Paul Moritz. Yeah I mean I'm obviously blessed to be part of the leadership team here and have a guy of Paul Moritz's caliber and Scott Yarra's caliber sitting side by side helping drive our vision and our strategy. I would argue two of the top technologists in the world. And your operator so you got the three trifecta there going on? I think so. I think we're very complimentary in skills and then Rob Me as well as the founder and CEO of Pivotal Labs and what he's brought to the table around agile development and taking over the Cloud Foundry effort. And it's just a special time, it's a special place and we take that responsibility seriously that we've got this opportunity, we want to execute against it and at the end of the day it's about attracting and retaining great people that want to be part of that mission. And one of the cool injections into your mission outside of the coolness of Cloud Foundry, Green Plum and doing all the stuff that us geeks get all excited about and then the space that we're in is the injection of the GE investment which brings a really mainstream new global effort to the internet of things, right? So that is just a major boost. So let's talk about that a little bit. So when you guys announced Pivotal you saw it with Green Plum, we got CEDIS, we got this Cloud Foundry piece and all these misfit toys I called them inside of VMware and EMC and it was, even Pat said, he didn't like it when I called it misfit toys but hope, but he did say I didn't have enough time to pay attention to these sort of outliers, Pivotal Labs, okay great. Now you put them all sort of together, okay great, that's good, Wall Street loved it because you stripped out a bunch of expense, you gave this sort of IPO vision, beautiful, but still we said, okay, but what's the differentiation? And you put up charts on HAWK and how it's faster than in PAL and you go, okay, that's cool and then all of a sudden bang, GE makes this investment and you start to think about, wow is this the next wave of big data, this internet of things, the quality of the industrial internet, so talk about that a little bit and what you have to do to make that a reality. Yeah I think to your point, people did think about it as different technologies and people coming together, I mean certainly part of that's true, but I do believe that this is not just a rationalization of those pieces, I mean we really believe that you have to have that holistic platform to kind of pull this off, right? You have to solve the bigger problem here from how applications get built and deployed and so covering all those pieces are necessary and the fact we had assets in those areas and people that had expertise in doing this before was really critical. I think the exciting part for me around GE was that it was a very natural evolution, meaning we were talking to Bill Rue and the team when we were Green Plum about data and analytics and the things we could do. They were also talking with VMware right around the VMware assets and how that would leverage into the portfolio and it was a very natural discussion that led to the announcement that happened in April of GE making the investment because if you think about it their expertise is really around understanding their businesses, understanding their industries, understanding what they want to do with technology and why should they have to build that whole end to end stack themselves. I mean that was the conclusion that Bill and the team came to and it just, you know some of these things just happened at the right time the fact that Pivotal was being formed that had a big bold vision and ambition about what we were going to build that mapped perfectly to what Bill Rue and the GE leadership team felt was necessary for them to realize their vision. And then it's just a matter of getting together are we aligned culturally? Are we aligned at the leadership level? And that happened very quickly, right? Them deciding yes, strategically we're aligned, culturally we're aligned and then it was just a matter of putting the financials together to get them kind of part of the team. And they launched their software development level into 2011 and I think my sense is they saw and talking to them and others, wow there's a lot of stuff that we have to build out that has taken us off our main focus which is improving the world and the whole thing called the internet. So we thought, you know what we thought of the announcement, we're very positive on it but specifically what do you guys now have to do to make that vision a reality? A lot of work. Yeah so the steps now that we've kind of formed the partnership, if you will and they're an investor is really lay out the specifics of the points of intersection and the use cases. So we're talking to Bill and his team about what areas do they want to tackle first, right? Obviously we need to get alignment on the architecture. I think that will happen fairly quickly and is happening now. But it's going to be what are those first use cases that we're going to go build with the GE divisions that actually derive business value for them? I mean that's going to be an important element of success here over the next, you know, let's call it three quarters, right? And then build on top of that once we get that use case. Yeah so despite the fact that they have a clear financial incentive to standardize on Pivotal, you got to earn the right to do that. So you got to go use case by use case and get some wins in the marketplace. Absolutely and that's the way it should be, right? I mean I think when you try to impose something from the top and you declare this is the solution, right? It's fraught with danger, right? Because human nature is to push back and say boy that's not going to help me in my respective businesses. Now I will tell you, I've had a few meetings with some of the GE divisions around you know, how do they think about this, right? Just step back and say, you know, how do you think about this centralized group helping you, right? And they, I was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming and receptive they were to not only, you know, Bill Rue and his team, but Pivotal being part of that. Because at the end of the day they did feel like they are missing the elements that they need to have in this data platform and the application tier. It's been holding back their business. And so if they can expect from a business requirements perspective, what's required to go compete and win and they have a trusted partner that they can count on between Bill's team and our team as an integrated plan, they were very encouraging by. So that was encouraging to me. Do you think this is the next big wave of big data applications or is it a little too far off to say at this point? I don't think there's any question that's the next big wave. I think there's no, I mean, it just makes intuitive sense. Yeah, we're talking about making Hadoop more enterprise ready. That's kind of nice. I would do that more feature. See how it drives business value. This is a new one of this business value that we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, you just think about the world. I mean, you go from healthcare to telco to retail to financial to government. I mean, every ending industries. It's for many industries and how people think about data and putting it to work kind of in context of the moment. That's going to happen. I think there's no question in my mind that it's a wave that we're all going to be a part of. I think the question is how and who and when, you know, all the normal stuff. The why is clear. The why is clear. And you know, certainly there's obstacles we need to get over, things like privacy and security and getting that balance right as you've leveraged data in this new world. But you know, I'm confident we will work through that and get the right balance. And technology will help with that story. And I think you know, you see IBM's smarter planet. Great ads, you know, great vision. But they were sort of the lone wolf. It's like, you know, the old saying if there's one lawyer in town, he goes broke. If there's two lawyers in town, they both get rich. Right. And now you've got two, you know, giant conglombers kind of pushing that messaging. It's very exciting times. Yeah. So my final question real quick is to get the last word in your top key metrics because you're the chief operating officer. You got to, you know, steer the ship and you know, play DJ and orchestrate across. And get this integration, our integration, I guess, done. What are your key metrics for the year? You know, when you look back next year and when we talk or when we see you at VMworld, what are the metrics you want to point to? So hey, this is what my top goals are. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things. Obviously on the product side, Pivotal 1 coming to reality, right? So showing kind of, it's the prove to the world that that integrated stack does exist and does provide value. We will do that this year. The second one for me that goes hand in hand with that is really customer adoption, customer and partner adoption of use cases. Not, and obviously we need to make our business plan and revenue and all the normal financial metrics that are important. But to me, you know, this is a momentum story, right? I think you want to get in front of that momentum to show the industry what's possible. And so having customers and references across the different industry segments saying, yep, I bet on that technology stack. I bet on Pivotal and here was my outcome. That's going to be the big story in the next 12 to 18 months. And then we will be, you know, essentially on our way. Well, Bill, you didn't disappoint. I really appreciate you coming on. I'm not Paul. Paul Moritz will be on soon. Not today, but he had to fly his plane back to Seattle. Bill Cook, the chief operating officer from Pivotal. Congratulations on the success and the excitement and the re-energy and the cohesiveness of this new organization. We're going to be looking forward to tracking you. Of course, Analyst Day, VMworld, a bunch of other stuff outreach. Richard Snee and all the team over there, James Waters, great, great group of guys. And we're looking forward to it. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and try to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Exclusive coverage from EMC World in Las Vegas. We'll be right back at the short break. Thanks guys.