Yesterday at VMworld 2013, The Cube hosted two guests from EMC, Stephen Manley, CTO and Deepak Mohan, SVP of Backup and Recovery Systems (BRS). This particular segment of The Cube was designed to shine a spotlight on virtualization and backup.

According to Mohan, EMC has become the largest data protection provider in the world, intently focussed on delivering solutions for customers that will last them for years. The company’s goal, he explained, is to provide the future of data protection, superior solutions to customers through its two major assets: primary storage and data protection, with both integrated into a holistic solution.

Manley stressed that data protection needs to move away from traditional backup client architectures where they tend to operate on a “my way or the highway philosophy”. As data continues to grow exponentially, backup solutions need to be able to shift into the hypervisor, the application itself, and other spaces. Backup either needs to move out of the way or work better with others.

Watch the full interview with EMC’s Stephen Manley and Deepak Mohan below:

This year EMC is working on providing better solutions for VMware, leveraging intelligence, introducing a new interface, and adding more integration through data flow, efficient vm backups and restores, spin up of virtual machines off of the data domain, and a solution that will give the backup team enough tools to help with disaster recovery and all other protection services.

EMC is also making a big push toward open formats, which will help customers avoid vendor lock-in. An open format, Manley said, “lets us elevate backup from where it is today, which is really an insurance policy, to something that can really have a more active role in your business and drive revenue.”

Mohan explained that in the future, EMC is in a unique position to write the story for tomorrow, offering next generation protection of primary storage apps, with automatic primary storage protection. He believes the company can accomplish that with its primary storage and virtualization assets, giving EMC an edge over the competition.

Manely concluded by offering three key focus points for EMC over the next 6 to 12 months:

1. How to easily manage protection for a virtualization interface so that a VM administrator does not have to log into a backup console

2. The opportunities to bring backup and disaster recovery together

3. The ability to automate the integration of protection environments, having it already bundled together and easy to manage

You can watch more interviews and view continuous coverage of VMworld 2013 at SiliconAngle.tv.