The second day of EMC World 2014 proved just as eventful as the first, with the storage stalwart and its subsidiaries launching another barrage of product announcements in a pivot towards the elusive “third platform for IT”, the next evolution of enterprise computing beyond the client-server model. SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon CTO Dave Vellante recapped the journey so far and discussed the future of the EMC federation in their live Day 2 opening segment on theCUBE (see full video below).

The first day of the event centered primarily on EMC itself. The vendor unveiled the latest version of its software-defined storage platform, introduced a new scale-out module and, perhaps most notably, announced the acquisition of DSSD. The stealthy startup was founded in 2010 by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of the ZFS filesystem, and claims to have pioneered a unique approach to accessing flash memory that had apparently caught EMC’s attention from the very start.

“My sources indicate to me that EMC was an early investor in DSSD, and I would suspect Pat [Gelsinger, the CEO of subsidiary VMware] even made the investment. I also heard that SAP was an early investor in DSSD and EMC bought out SAP’s shares as part of that, so the key is that SAP has the inside track on DSSD and vice versa,” Vellante says. The support of one of the world’s largest enterprise software vendor represents a stamp of approval on EMC’s efforts to capitalize on the startup’s technology, he explains, and a significant advantage over rival Fusion-io.

Watch the Day 2 intro segment here:

Shortly thereafter on the second day of the conference, SAP revealed that it had teamed up with VMware to optimize its HANA in-memory database, which has been explicitly mentioned as a prime use case for DSSD’s technology, to run in vSphere 5.5 environments. The partnership marks a step in the right direction for both firms and further underscores the importance of the acquisition to the entire EMC federation going forward.

“VMware is taking an offensive position, clearly that’s a case. To me, just on the mojo and orientation it’s offensive, I see VMware still disrupting. But I just don’t see them having the big bullets like they used to,” Furrier notes, citing increased competition from Red Hat, which is successfully riding the open source tidal wave into the enterprise. Nonetheless, the alliance with SAP highlights that the virtualization giant continues to play a central role in EMC’s long-term strategy, not just in regard to its technology roadmap but from a financial standpoint as well.

As Vellante points out, EMC’s single-digit growth rate is hardly enough for the company to keep up with nimbler competitors such as Amazon, which saw revenue from AWS soar nearly 70 percent in the first quarter on the back of accelerating demand among enterprises scaling back on infrastructure investments in favor of cloud services. The storage vendor’s subsidiaries are helping to balance the odds somewhat. VMware witnessed sales climb 15 percent last quarter, while cloud analytics spin-off Pivotal, the newest member of the federation, reported nearly thrice that growth.

“The federation model is a really savvy way for [EMC CEO Joe] Tucci and co to navigate through this turmoil. Companies that are in the previous platform get disrupted, and this is their angle on not getting disrupted. EMC is one of those companies that will always survive, always find a way to win, always gain share. It’s just in their culture,” Vellante remarks during the closing segment for the second day of the event. He adds that although EMC is growing slowly, it’s throwing off cash faster than many competitors, focusing not only on keeping shareholders happy but product development as well. That puts it in a good position to deliver a “lightweight glue layer between rapidly growing cloud development frameworks and the data fabric layer.”

Watch the Day 2 closing segment here: