At this week’s EMC World 2014 Conference, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, hosted by Dave Vellante and John Furrier, welcomed the President of the Enterprise and Mid-Range Systems Division for EMC, Brian Gallagher. Over the course of the interview, Gallagher discussed his role at EMC as well as EMC’s longevity and dominance within the marketplace.

The Enterprise and Mid-Range Systems Division mission is to not only present the VMAX and VNX products to their respective markets, but, according to Gallagher, to facilitate a coordination of innovation to the two products. “Both of these systems have been purpose built for the markets they serve,” Gallagher explained. “It’s always been about best price performance in the market. Our strategy has been to bring these ‘Best of Breed’ together.”

This strategy was born as a result of frequent customer requests the EMC do so. “Best of breed is apparent,” Gallagher stated. “But what they [customers] want to know is what we are doing to make them work better together.” This, he notes, is likely due to the fact that they have a significant overlap in customers who are utilizing both products in their business. “What we are driving at is a common user experience. We are moving to a common service level objective management policy.” Gallagher and his division are working with the ViPR team to meet this mission.

EMC’s ViPR Poised To Strike

With the mention of ViPR, Vellante inquired if Gallagher could expound on whether or not he believed ViPR was intended to simplify and consolidate stovepipes or if it was, in fact, the future of storage. “What’s your take on that,” he asked.

ViPR is, according to Gallagher, comprised of two individual components: ViPR data services and the ViPR controller. He spoke about the advancements in both and how those innovations were providing significant value to those organizations that have adopted the technology.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

“When we look at ViPR data services,” Gallagher stated, “there’s the access data services around block, file, HDFS and object. And then there’s advance data services around data protection and availability.” He continued, “Our strategy is to provide data services. We can run ViPR HDFS on VMAX or VNX.”And, according to Gallagher, this can be deployed across EMC products and non-EMC products. “At the data layer, it builds out the capability so that we can serve our 2^nd platform customers with existing applications around SAP, Oracle, DB2 and SQL, and all the applications that we have served for years and new applications around object and HDFS that are more emerging in this 3^rd platform,” he said.

The second component of ViPR, the ViPR controller, is driving a strategy for Gallagher and his team to provide self-service provisioning, reporting and automation meant to simplify the overall use of EMC products. Gallagher claims their work so far has yielded a broad base acceptance so they can “provision an outcome of an application” rather than provisioning the hardware of an application.

Bring It On Says EMC

Innovation on the part of EMC has made them, as one of the leaders in the market, a company that is often targeted by established competitors and young upstarts alike. “The industry has been licking its chops to get into your install base for a long time,” noted Vellante. In light of market disruptions like Flash and others, he asked, “What gives you confidence and what is the strategy? Is it to keep putting those data services out to the marketplace faster and with more robust services than the others can do?”

“For years, even decades, EMC has had a big target on our back,” Gallagher stated. “And that target is only getting bigger. When you look at the new entrants into the market, they are all after EMC.” Gallagher believes the answers to Vellante’s questions reside both in the topics of technology and service.

“Let me talk about service first,” Gallagher began, “because we always talk about technology. EMC has, by far, the best Global Services capability in the market, bar none,” he stated. “It took us years to develop best-in-class professional services, delivery services, implementation and migration services and support services,” he explained. “That is a differentiator in our market today.”

Where technology is concerned, Gallagher sees EMC’s holistic approach to addressing issues faced by organizations as being a deciding factor in their dominance in the market. “We focus on the entire problem,” he said. Continuing on the aspect of technology, Gallagher noted it is a very interesting time in the field of IT, from both the model and technology perspectives. He cited the disruption being caused by Flash, virtualization and the leveraging of multi-core technologies for this renaissance in IT currently being experienced.

Alluding to questions sent in via the new CrowdChat app, Furrier asked Gallagher to address, with specificity, how EMC intends to react to the emergence of agile startups. “Are you going to carpet bomb them? Ignore them,” he asked.

“We’ve been in the business for a long time and understand the requirements of our customers,” Gallagher stated. “The need for speed is there. But the need for sleep is there, too. People can sleep when they put their applications on VMAX. We’ve proven that day in and day out. We’ll put our guys up against any other guys any day of the week from both a technology perspective and with our service offerings.”

Wrapping up the conversation, Furrier asked Gallagher if he would share why he thinks this year’s EMC World event is so important.

“It’s really time to value,” he said. “They drove cost out of the data center. That was critical to ride out the great recession. Those that were maniacal about it were able to survive.” Now with the emergence of the 3^rd Platform, Gallagher sees EMC’s role in having spearheaded efforts to provision and spin up new applications in record time as being a driver for their future.

photo credit: Frederic Poirot via photopin cc