UPDATED 18:00 EDT / MAY 08 2013

Open Source is the New Multi-Vendor, Says Jeremy Burton of EMC

Jeremy Burton, Marketing Messaging Savant How exactly do you align and transform the new EMC brand with different companies: EMC, VMWare, and Pivotal? Hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante had Jeremy Burton, EVP of Product Operations and Marketing at EMC stop by on the final day of EMC World 2013 to discuss his transition from marketing to production operations. As the brains behind EMC’s marketing messaging, Burton is the best interview of the week, in my opinion.

EMC World is still a technology-driven show according to Burton. There had already been over 500 technical sessions and 1,500 people passed through the EMC certification program. With only a 50 percent pass rating, that means over 3,000 had already attempted certification. “People come to shows like this for education,” said Burton. He candidly said that it’s more important than ever for people to understand what EMC is doing and who EMC is. In a joking manner, he explained how EMC World is sometimes the best forum for getting its employees on the same page.

As the Cloud meets Big Data, Burton wants to simplify what both mean. Security in particular has been the biggest impediment of both the Cloud and Big Data. So at EMC World, Burton says that the security world has been the Belle of the ball in conversations. Mention the words “IT trust” and you’d be assured to get some CEO’s attention. There is plenty of conversation forming around next-gen apps and new architecture too — both being more attuned to deploy in the public cloud. It is the belief of Burton and his team though, that you will see a large portion of applications deployed first in a companies private cloud.

EMC’s largest announcement by far this week at EMC World was its software ViPR.

With ViPR, data centers can manage storage infrastructure and the data residing within it. The ViPR controller uses tdhe underlying storage infrastructure for traditional workloads, but can also provision ViPR Object Data Services by accessing them via Amazon S3 or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) APIs. Amitabh Srivastava, president of EMC’s newly created Advanced Software Division, stressed that ViPR Object Data Services integrate with OpenStack and can be run against enterprise or commodity storage. As you can imagine, EMC ViPR integrates tightly with VMware’s Software Defined Data Center through industry standard APIs and interoperates with Microsoft and OpenStack.

ViPR is the first commercially available software package that is going to allow data centers to adopt this web scale model of data storage infrastructure without hiring thousands of PhDs. ViPR will support the Amazon APIs and ViPR is definitely a platform play. EMC is attempting to create a storage platform with ViPR — a notion of a platform changing with the way people consume and program to storage. Burton says that EMC has identified growth in embracing third party storage and commodity storage.

“If we don’t do it, someone else will do it and we’ll be playing defense instead of offense. I’d rather be driving the train than following it.”

But with this software-defined, or software-led as we like to say here at SiliconANGLE, where do you draw the line with all of these open source technologies? If everything was free, then engineers couldn’t be paid to tackle new problems. EMC’s position is that the interfaces to all of its products and softwares be open, but there is some level of IP on the back-end or underneath. This is where the transformation of EMC as a company becomes very apparent. On the go-to-market side, EMC is going from selling product to selling more of a solution. EMC aims to be more solutions-led than product-led.

As EMC’s former CMO, Furrier asked Burton before he left what was the future of marketing — what did he see around the corner? “Marketers are more data driven, let the data drive your activity,” said Burton. People’s attention span is that of a goldfish these days, social and video are going to remain huge. Delivering content in new ways with consistent messaging: clear, what it is, how it differentiates.

“If you aren’t into the science game of marketing, you’ll be out of a job.”

Wise words. Again, I highly recommend watching the video. As far as EMC World and how he thought they did? He had one objective: lay down the groundwork for software-defined storage.

I’d say he succeeded.


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