Brian Gallagher, EMC President Enterprise Storage Division, discussed the company’s recent growth, future plans and forecasts, as well as industry trends with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier live at EMC World 2013.

Commenting on EMC’s double-digit growth, Gallagher said, “we’ve been in a well-established market for years,” especially with the focus on enterprise and high end storage. “We had a strategy around expanding our TAM, total addressable market,” focusing on  how to get new customers, how to increase the customer base – reaching 14k and how to address the global market.

Asked how EMC blends in the strategy to expand TAM with the transformation currently going on in the storage market, Gallagher explained that “one trend that’s been consistent is data growth, that does not slow down.” The company saw data growth rates of 60 percent across all industries. When one looks at the disruption that is occurring, it is obvious that it’s happening everywhere, thus EMC is trying to help customers deal with the changes in storage.

In terms of application growth, Gallagher said apps are expected to grow by 70 percent in the enterprise by 2016, while Big Data apps will report a 700 percent growth through 2016.

EMC’s growth strategy revolves around product range, function, geographies and cloud. Speaking of the adoption of cloud, Gallagher pointed out a TAM shift occurring from data centers to service providers, mainly for small to medium businesses. “We’ve been all about share, how do we get share, how do we innovate, how do we differentiate,” he added.

Speaking of their ViPR launch and theri storage strategy ,Gallagher said the highest level strategy for the Software-Defined Storage aspect, is to abstract, aggregate/pull and automate. The second part is leverage – the industry is going to spend billions in innovation at the data level. There is still a lot of innovation in data storage, and EMC plan to leverage all that innovation. What VIPR achieves ist to simplify SDS and take advantage of differentiation.

EMC plans to continue to innovate, the market should expect to see great capabilities in data and data center management in the future. “When you look at environments, it’s a matter of scale,” Gallagher said. Larger enterprises entail a lot more complexity, a lot more scale, and this is where ViPR is essential. “We are enabling an ecosystem around it,” but what’ you’ll see from the product is more integration that allows seamless IT workflow.

Asked how long it would take for an open source developed alternative to match to EMC’s VMAX, Gallagher said the company invested a lot of time in its stack, but with open source communities you leverage the scale. It would still take years for such an alternative to emerge.

Highlighting ViPR as a whole different model of storage delivery, Gallagher concluded that “at the end of the day, our customers have a lot of other challenges than pulling and automating storage,” so ViPR is designed to simplify the process.