 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for the final wrap up segment. I'm John Furrier, and I'm Coach Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, live for three days of wall-to-wall covers. Man, what a world win it's been. Our sixth EMC World, EMC World 2015. Great event, a lot of new stuff, a lot of changes at EMC. Again, upfront, front-row seat in the action, talking to all the executives, partners, entrepreneurs. Dave, great show, I mean EMC, Stream.io, the locomotive of change, having an impact on the portfolio, open source, two different divisions now organized, decoupled, highly cohesive core, and emerging. Software-defined rendering products, really, really interesting show. What's your take? Well, EMC is a bit of an enigma, in a way, to me, because here's a company, they're now quite large, $25 billion company. They're growing faster than their peers. They've got some really key strategic assets, like VMware, and obviously many others. They're investing in new technologies, and they're proving that they can bring in new tech, acquire in new tech like Stream.io, and make it work. They've got, they're very well-positioned, at least for the conversation in big data. They're building that out. They're positioning better for the conversation in cloud. They're clearly well-positioned for converged infrastructure, and they've got a big install base. The enigma is, it's like we was talking to Joe Tucci that day, for three years, the stock's been flat. The street doesn't recognize it, even though they're growing faster than their peers, and they're throwing off increasing amounts of profit. They've got strong free cash flow. They're investing in the future, all the things that you want out of a successful company, but they're not getting rewarded for it. So, it's a bit of an enigma. It's a strange sort of dynamic to me, it's sort of the first point. The second is, while they're doing very well in a lot of different areas, the old stuff is going to decline, and the new stuff is not going to grow fast enough to offset that decline. This is a classic problem. So, they've got to keep putting gas on the fire for the new stuff, and try to do a managed decline for the old stuff. That's always a tricky transition. But, if you're going to be a company in transition, you better recognize it, eat your young, and cannibalize before others do. EMC seems to be doing that. The big question, John, is, are they moving fast enough? Are they moving fast enough in cloud against the likes of Amazon? And, do they have the right platform to build out the next round of big data apps? I always call Pivotal a bunch of misfit toys. It's coming together, is it coming together fast enough for them to continue to grow? And, the key to success is, can they work out the wrinkles between the federation companies? You know, there's a seams, obviously separated companies, but there's synergy there as a competitive strategy and differentiation for customers, scale at cost and product now. So, it can be very interesting to see how they do that. I would say that I'm really pleased, and I think it's a brilliant move to break out the two divisions. Guy running core products and CGA running emerging. It gives, as Jeremy Burton laid out, clearly is sales motions aren't baked, and they got to understand it more. You get the core over here, platform 2.5, which is basically existing market, Xtremio, shipping, sales force, great stuff. And then you go in and you understand the new world. You know, so, but in that emerging, you got big data, you got cloud. I mean, you got power players in that group. And how does that translate for you? I mean, it's got to render for sales. You got to invent the future, but you don't want to kill the past too early. What's your thoughts? It's interesting how they've organized that emerging technologies division, because they've got Isilon in there. Isilon's throwing off, it was a good business for EMC, it was a profitable business for EMC. So, you know, what's emerging and what's core? We sort of had that discussion with... It's more creative and emerging, they can do more, move the ball down the field. I mean, we were asking Jeremy on the crowd chat, and the comments from the crowd was, you know, buy box or drop box. Well, that's just so small thinking, but it teases out a direction. Do they become more like cloud services? Even Jeremy Burton said that. So, I think Jeremy Burton's thinking a little bit different than the core EMC machinery, because he's like thinking ahead, like Apple-like or cloud-like. So, again, not faked out, emerging. The question is, when will it emerge? Well, so, my question yesterday, of course, to Tucci, and I still have a question on my mind. So, we know for the time being, they're not going to go big in services. You know, Scott McNeely used to have a saying, is services is where large companies go to die. Now, you know, IBM maybe proved them wrong, but they may be the exception that kind of proves the rule. So, EMC wants to do services with an ecosystem play. I think that's the right move. The big question is, okay, what other moves can they make? You know, your question in the crowd chat was a good one. What other moves can they make? Because the street is not rewarding EMC. Are there moves that they could make that could really change the game? Maybe go further up the stack. Obviously, orchestration and management, Tucci sort of threw us that bone yesterday, but are there moves that they could make in the application space? Well, I mean, I got opinion on this, of course. You know my opinion on this. So, obviously, I think they have to kind of take care of their current situation. They're building a platform. I mean, Viper Open Source is interesting and Scale.io available for free for download. They got to get out of the box business and they're moving, hiring engineers or more software. At the end of the day, they have competitive market pressures today to execute. One, two, they got to build an operating system for the data center and for the enterprise. That includes enabling some sort of disrupting asset for the customer. That has to be in the app business. Now, they could differentiate side by side with Pivotal. And Pivotal is just tooling and building apps, but I think EMC has to become a utility platform with a business model that can grow in the new era. And I think that's this whole platform three or emerging is not baked out. And I think it's smart. Put it on in a special group, move the parts around, make a new engine, get a business model behind it, and that's super smart. I think that's very creative. And I think they do have to have a game-changing move and it's going to look like API-based, real-time, really, really fast horsepower, unlimited compute. And I think it's certainly the app business. So we always talk about platforms and products. And platforms are winning over products. EMC is a product company. VMware obviously is a platform company. So EMC owns VMware. So I guess by default EMC could claim to be a platform company, but the EMC core is a product company. Will that company transform that core AI into a platform? Is that what software defined does? Is that what Viper does? Is that what VMware essentially does for them? What do you think? Well, here's my take on this. We always use football analogies or sports analogies. You really can't score a touchdown unless you throw a Hail Mary if you're on the side of the 50-yard line. You got to get in the red zone. So to me, with David Gould and teams doing, they just got to get it into the other zone. They got to get it close to the red zone. They got to get the company in a position to be successful. And the risk, taking the risk out is moving the ball down the field as fast as possible. So they have to build a platform today that's on their core base. That is the core product. Stream.io is a total game changer. I think from a customer standpoint, they're not buying the new Platform 3 mindset because they don't even know what they want. So I think there's a services opportunity, but yet that decision is too early to make right now. So I think what they're going to do is you're going to go in with the platform with Stream.io and produce value for the customer as fast as possible. First company that can provide that kind of game-changing value to the customer in whatever configuration, that puts EMC in the zone to do something different. And I think if they don't, then when Wall Street sees that, I think it's going to be the cat's out of the bag. So to me, if I was on Jeremy's team, I'd say, look at Jeremy, let's get in the red zone. Let's get downfield with our current revenue. Stream.io integrates some baked, federation pieces, puzzle pieces that are not so much lock-in, but add value fast. Go there and then bang. Yeah, and I think what they're trying to do with the federation is create new opportunities. I mean, very clearly, the federation allows EMC to have discussions at sea levels that they never could have had as just the storage company. So I got to ask you, Dave, we always talk about M&A. When I told them the crowd chat, Dave and I will speculate on the cube, wrap up, M&A, who should EMC buy? So it was one of the popular threads on crowd chat. They got to do M&A. And I think they have a strong leadership team. They have good organic capability, not in my opinion, super great compared to maybe other R&D organizations, a small of the bigs, if Joe Chichi says, but they got to buy companies, I believe. Stream.io's proof points that they can go to the well, get something emerging and plug it in mainstream. That formula totally works for me. I think they got to go out there in this bubble market as it starts to get tighter. Companies going to be looking to sell EMC. I see them backing up the truck and doing M&A. Well, what do you think, no doubt. I mean, I think that you got to continue to do M&A. Chichi calls it the string of pearls, these tuck-in acquisitions. I mean, Extreme.io was part of the string of pearls. The interesting thing about Extreme.io, they paid, I don't know what they paid. Let's say they paid 500 million. I can't remember the number. I'm not sure I ever knew the number. I'd say they paid half a billion for the company with no product. Zuckerberg move, a WhatsApp move. That is going to be a huge payoff, even if it's a billion and a half, two billion, right? I don't think they would clearly pay that much, but the point is they bought a company with no product, and they brought that in, and now are exploding it. The more they can do that, that's a way better return on investment, I think, than going out to try to swallow some huge company. So you always brought this up. They're really good at integration. Data domain was an example. So now you see a diverse pattern. Why are they doing these tuck-unders now? Is it because their products are better? They're good at, let me clarify what you said. They're good at company integration. They're not great at product integration, right? They got more products that really don't work together, right? What's the joke that only time the products come together is on the P.O.? I mean, that's the truth. Now, what they're trying to do is solve that with this sort of management layer, this sort of orchestration layer, or software-defined layer. Okay, that's interesting. So, but they are good at bringing in companies. The question is, are they going to make, is there an analog to Oracle's move to buy PeopleSoft with EMC? To me, there's nothing obvious out there. Do they want to go up the stack, does EMC? You saw the rumor Microsoft might buy Salesforce, halted trading yesterday for Salesforce. I mean, is that the kind of move they make, or? Well, do they make that kind of move? I mean, I don't know, throw some names around. I mean, does EMC buy Splunk? Would that make sense? I don't know. Would that make sense to you? Would EMC buy Hortonworks? I think they would. Hortonworks, MapR, Splunk, Tableau. ServiceNow. EMC ServiceNow, I'm going to kick that around in my head. Kind of interesting. Rich, talking about 12, 13, $14 billion, $15 billion acquisition, they could do it. It's their peeps. It's a good rich deal. I think people would go, whoa, what's that? Frank Slibin might say that he might buy EMC, but I mean, that's a whole other story. You know, the best handicappers, they go to the racetrack and they sit there and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. They don't just make a bet on every race. That's why I'm a bad handicapper. But they find value. Best examples, VMware, 635 million, people thought it was a huge mistake at the time. Extreme IO, wow, they're paying so much for a company without a product. So that's the kind of move that I think they have to make. I don't see an obvious big move that's game changer. Now, if companies, if Oracle and Salesforce merge, that might change things a little bit. But right now, the way the industry structured, EMC can play in that cartel, and I think play very successfully. Well, if digital transformation is the future, they got to get into the edge of the network. That includes end to end instrumentation. That's marketing cloud. This is the new infrastructure that's going on. So, you know, crowd chat. Get deeper into networking, get deeper into networking. Well, EMC's got a lot of assets. VMware's got end user computing business. So there's a lot of action on the table. I want to wrap up, Dave, the show by going to you and asking you a personal thought. I mean, we've been here six years. We're a six EMC world. theCUBE started here in 2010 in Boston EMC world. Two topics. How EMC's changed over six years. And two, Joe Tucci. Obviously Joe, legend. We've had great one-on-ones with him. Sorry, I'm yesterday. He's going to retire. And, you know, thoughts. EMC over six years, the transformation. We've seen Jeremy Burton rise up to president. Pat Gelsinger be in the mix and then go run VMware. Great management team. Thoughts on EMC and Joe Tucci. Well, I think that if you go back to our first year at EMC world in Boston, the Chowda conference, the audience was, you know, hardcore storage guys. Now the audience here is still a lot of hardcore storage guys, but the conversation has shifted quite dramatically. We're talking about this digital world, what they call platform three. We're talking about DevOps. We're talking about open source. It's a whole different tone at this conference. So I think it underscores a couple of things. One is when we first talked to Jeremy Burton, he said, hey, we're, you know, almost a $20 billion company that's at the time. And he said, we're going to start acting like one. And that's what's happened. I think the Federation has really changed the nature of the conversation that EMC is having. And I think the product set has just dramatically expanded. At the same time, VMware has completely solidified its position in the enterprise. So you have all those factors, you know, working to expand, you know, EMC's footprint. Joe Tucci, I think, you know, you called him the CEO of the decade. You know, he's the greatest CEO in EMC history. I think unquestionably, he's created more value than any CEO. And I think that the thing that he said he's most proud of, and I totally agree, is his ability to attract and retain great talent. He loses Donatelli, who's he picked up, Gelsinger. He's able to attract Paul Moritz, who's in the hinterlands doing some company called Pi, where it stands for personal information. People are like, ah, who, what? Brings Moritz in to run VMware and now create the next big data platform. So he's able to attract really great talent. And that's translated to a modern Jeremy Burton, for instance. And then look at Jeremy Burton. We are Jeremy Burton, basically reiterating the Joe Tucci culture. Is there a better marketing turned into product executive in the industry? Well, he was an engineer. Don't forget, he's an Oracle. But he's a hard charger. He thinks differently. He does things new. But he's got a little Joe Tucci, and I asked him about emerging. He said, I mean, he said the CEO answer, which is I'm going to bake it out and get it mainstream and understand it. So I mean, I see Joe Tucci's DNA. I mean, do you agree? And yes, he is enabled. Jeremy said it on theCUBE. I've made a career out of being a change agent within organizations. Think about the impact that he's had on this organization. It's pretty substantial. And I think Tucci's enabled that. Tucci attracted him, was able to keep him, enabled him, and look at the- Thoughts on his CEO, retirement, and your vibe yesterday, him at the end was feeling. I think it's clear. He wants out. He wants the board to find a replacement. EMC board, what more do you want from this guy? There are people out there, qualified people. They got to find them. I think that was, not that Joe was like saying, okay guys, I'm done, but he's not mailing it in. He's not mailing it at all, but okay, but you're asking him every day to go out and fight the fight. It's time, and I think he could see that it's time. And there are people out there. Favorite Joe Tucci moment. Favorite Joe Tucci moment. I think there's no question my favorite Joe Tucci moment was on theCUBE in 2010, when you asked him, how was storage sexy? And he goes, storage sexy, I don't know. I don't really think it's that sexy. Hot, you said. He goes, hot, I'll agree with that. That was- That was the best moment. The great Tucci moment. Also, I've been on the hallway doing a social cam, which is now a periscope of its day, with getting evil eye from- From Bill Tuber. Yeah, I don't think he's stealing. He will not forget that. But I think that there have been a lot of Joe Tucci moments. He goes in front of the Wall Street community and the industry analyst community, very transparent. I mean, obviously it doesn't open the hook to Kimono, but straight shooter. And I think that straight-shootedness underscores Joe Tucci's career, great people person, very smart guy, sharp strategist, really appreciates and understands technology and the importance of technology differentiation. This is from a sales guy, former programmer, yeah, like everybody in this business, but quite a career. What's your bumper sticker this year for EMC and takeaway? I think my bumper sticker for EMC this year is transformation to a new era, the digital era. I mean, that's really, and it's the infrastructure for the digital era. That's what this, that's the company's opportunity and challenge, because they're not there yet, right? But there's a lot of money to be made getting there. My summary would be locomotive with ExtremeIO is going to essentially power the new train of innovation with EMC. And I think they're going to execute their scale of sales leadership, change their portfolio with their products off of the lead of ExtremeIO. And the secondary story is the emerging EMC. There's a new emerging, open EMC. They got this new group that's really well-defined. They got Iceland, they got some of the top key jewels in this division. And it's all about faster, smarter, better, kind of Moore's Law mindset, you know? Just be nimble, be agile. It's cloud-like. I mean, it's funny, Jeremy and I were chatting and cloud means big data. It's relevant today from six years ago. So, Dave been great, great two days cube here. So we're going to go to .tv. I want to thank the guys who are on back at the ranch. Leonard, Patrick, Andrew, Jeff, Sam, Greg. Got it, most of us got Greg, but everyone back at home, thanks for watching. This is a wrap from EMC World 2015. This is theCUBE. See you next week.