Within every company lives the driving edge of its future product line. For EMC, this division is called the Emerging Technologies Division (ETD). Sam Grocott, SVP of marketing and product management at EMC’s ETD, explained that his division is mostly comprised of 1.0 or 2.0 products, with the exception of the Isilon Business Unit, which is on its 8^th generation.

Grocott explained that ETD exists within EMC to orchestrate the opportunity for two things: innovation and growth. “That’s what we are judged on; it’s what we are measured against,” he said. Grocott sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas.

Grocott mentioned EMC’s DSSD products, ScaleIO, Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), ViPR, and the new VCE VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino Nodes (announced May 3) as part of ETD’s enterprise product repertoire. He also called ETD’s product line “a family of four products”: ViPR Controller, ECS software-defined object storage system, ScaleIO software-defined block storage system, and IsilonSD Edge.

Making ViPR simpler

When asked about ViPR’s initial release, Grocott stated, “We confused the market,” but “we heard the feedback from customers. … We tried to glom too much into the ViPR system, so what we decided to do was make it simpler.” ETD focused ViPR on the “controller aspect” and open-sourced the core IP in Project CoprHD (copperhead).

EMC announced on May 2 it would release ViPR 3.0, which will feature all of Copperhead’s “up to 50 different arrays of storage,” according to Grocott. Thus, ETD has worked toward “a truly heterogeneous environment.” Grocott remarked that “simplification, automation, ease of use” is “absolutely what ViPR is focused on.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE