Doc D’Errico, VP of EMC Solutions Group, Big Data, joined Dave Vellante in The Cube for Silicon Angle’s ongoing SAP SAPphire coverage to discuss important trends over the last two years in the cloud, big data, memory and EMC’s new strategies (full video below).  D’Errico stated: “The cloud has definitely become real. More and more customers are putting things out into the cloud either as a platform [or] they’re using cloud services…As this all starts to come together…people have to mine not only what’s in their data center, but they have to go to all these other sources for information and pull it altogether into one place that’s aggregated.”

Referring to what Vellante called a “little tiny slap at Oracle,” the panel discussed an earlier speaker’s thought experiment: “Imagine a world where all data is in memory.”  D’Errico noted that while the idea presents some worthwhile considerations, the speaker was forecasting 40 years out and data companies need to focus on the next 3 to 5 years. As memory technologies continue to shrink at an accelerated pace data becomes easier to mine.  D’Errico suggested that the the IO that can process information is more significant in this sense than the evolution of memory.

Furrier suggests that an important part of the data and memory conversation is Flash, which is a disruptive enabler around speed and IO.  D’Errico said: “In memory is kind of this illusive term, yet it powers cloud and mobile.”  Furrier asked about the emerging proof of concepts and architectural configurations.  D’Errico responded: “[EMC] is actually taking VF cash technology and integrating it with the storage back-end…so you’ve got the persistence in the sharable environment and you can replicate it…and flash technology is evolving as well.”  He added that next generation technologies (coming out in the next 3 to 5 years) would allow faster storage and access.  The most important thing is that this new technology be integrated in a way that allows for manipulation and control from a certain central point to be managed seamlessly for the overall environment.

Furrier suggested that SAP and EMC have the same vision in the sense that “it’s a lot of cloud meets Big Data” even though may not use that language.  Referring to how EMC differentiates itself D’Errico explained that for his company, Big Data has multiple meanings as it can be structured, unstructured, other types or combinations of types. D’Errico says: “The use-case for us is [to] take all this information [regardless] of different types, bring it together, mine it…and then perform analytics on top of it, regardless of where it lives.”

As far as expanding EMC’s processing capabilities, D’Errico stated: “There are many situations where we’ll have to take some of the processing capabilities and move it down to the data because you don’t want to move that data every time you need to process it.”