After a whole day of unveiling EMC’s latest initiative ViPR, the reaction of customers was extremely positive. theCUBE hosts John Furrier and  Dave Vellante sat down with Amitabh Srivastava, EMC Advanced Storage Division President, during EMC World this week to discuss ViPR’s monetization strategy.

EMC had an early adopters program, focused on enterprise and service providers. While there’s a lot of overlap between the two, their needs are somewhat distinct. Amitabh goes on to explain how the vision of ViPR and software-defined storage meet these distinct needs.

How ViPR works

ViPR decouples the control plane form the data plane. That part is common for both the enterprise and the service providers. But data services can be added on top, and by doing so, enterprises and service providers can use it in different ways. Service providers can offer distinctive services, which can be different than what the public cloud offers, in the way that they address handling of Objects. Enterprises can use the same facility to build cloud services and use them as a path to move to the cloud.

In a way, it is a monetization strategy for the cloud services providers, and a migration strategy for the enterprise.

The forecast that the cloud will be offered only by a handful of companies has some really tangible support. Public clouding is a very costly business, data centers need to be built, and there’s only a couple of companies with the financial power to do that. But then there’s a massive numbers of service providers. They will offer a different set of possibilities, they all have scale, they certainly have muscle, but it remains to be seen if they can keep up with the technology or if they get left behind. Amitabh agrees that the main thing that they miss is the technology itself. They may have scale, but they lack IP, and here’s where EMC can help them.

There are 3 places where value can be added to ViPR:

1. The number of arrays that it supports. API will be open, so anyone will be able to add to that, just in the same manner they plug in a device driver.
2. The interface for Viper into different management stacks
3. The data services that can be written on top of Viper.

The end objective here for EMC is to increase the market that it can serve. “ViPR is open, but it’s not open source”, clarifies Amitabh Srivastava. There are three vectors: performance, availability and function, and that will determine the price.