The biggest takeaway from EMC’s messaging is that it’s in the middle of an attempt to redefine who it is as a company and its place in the industry. Some of this undoubtedly comes from its pending merger with fellow industry giant, Dell, Inc. The rest stems from a view of the future where traditional tech solutions are dead and buried. EMC wants to be a new company for a new vision.

To gain some insight on these changes, John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined CJ Desai, president of EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division, during the EMC World 2016 conference in Las Vegas.   

Preparing for growth

The conversation opened with a question of this year’s highlights for EMC. Desai responded, noting that in the past 100 days EMC has refreshed all of its  product lines to new versions. The company also announced Neutrino, a new type of hardware-software node for the VCE VxRack platform. “When looking at these products, always when it’s an issue of scaling, we’re the only game in town,” he said.

Things turned toward Isilon, a massive-data storage system. Desai said they’ve had phenomenal growth, and they want to keep up Isilon’s momentum. Meanwhile, ScaleIO is becoming a major financial services scale-out product in production. He said it’s about defining real-world use cases with these products, getting them deployed and seeing happy customers.

Dancing with the Internet of Things

Desai then spoke about the Internet of Things, another direction for EMC. They are so many files, he said, that putting them on traditional storage is too expensive. Past a certain size, object storage is the only answer. If a company wants global sensors, global data centers, elastic Cloud storage is the only solution.

The talk brought up rack-scale flash systems. It’s a new category, and according to Desai, people scratch their heads and ask, what does it mean? If a company has an application where latency and power are absolutely critical, that’s where it matters.

EMC is serious about software, software-defined storage, and extremely serious about next-gen flash. “We’re there for you,” he said.  

Stay tuned for the full video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE