As theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, hit the ground at EMC World 2016, the team hosted some compelling interviews with women in leadership positions at EMC and other key companies. The primary findings from the interviews: Women in tech are the linchpin to some major successes.

Nina Hargus, SVP and CMO at EMC

Nina Hargus, SVP and CMO at EMC, dropped in on Dave Vellante and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, at EMC World 2016 to address the theme of the show and the multitude of product releases announced.

 Marketing challenges

“When you’re doing engineering planning, which is part of my history, you always hope that … you have things that come out in a rational fashion, not sort of everything comes together at once. But here in the real world of engineering, sometimes things come together at once.

“Some of these products we’ve been wanting to bring to market, but we wanted to make sure we brought them out when they were absolutely rock-solid. Our customers were using them, we had them in really powerful betas and so holding them back made no sense. So we pulled them all together and got them out here at EMC world. … There are a couple of products we have held back, and you’ll see them coming out in the next few quarters.”

Converged infrastructure is modern

“Maybe there is no reason to do it the old fashioned way, but there probably aren’t many businesses that want to tolerate the time and risk of doing it the old fashioned way. Everything has gotten faster; expectations of business have gotten faster. So how does IT get faster?

“Clearly cloud computing has taken off for those companies that are looking to go to the cloud; it’s not just the economics of cloud, which often aren’t a lot better at scale. It’s speed. So for IT to be effective, they need to operate at a whole different speed, and converged infrastructure and solutions that we’re building give them these bigger building blocks.”

Watch the video below to learn about the behind the scene action of product launches.

Barb Robidoux, VP of marketing at EMC Global Services

Barb Robidoux, VP of marketing at EMC Global Services, revealed the findings of a joint EMC and VMware, Inc. study on theCUBE with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. She explained how they took information gathered at IT transformation workshops and analyzed the data. The result was the State of IT Transformation Report.

The big picture

“The big picture takeaway was kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was great to get validation that most customers are thinking about transformation, they’re planning for transformation, and in some cases they’re even starting to take action. On the other hand, it was a little surprising and maybe even a little disappointing to see that most customers are in the planning stages, maybe in the proof of concept. Based on where they are today and where they say they want to get to, we have a long way to go.

“We broke the topics into four areas. One was focused on infrastructure transformation. … One was focused around the operating model. … One was focused on applications, both legacy and new. And the final area was around … overarching strategy.”

Key takeaways

“One of the things we learned was you really have to have the CIO involved in the workshop. It doesn’t really happen without the CIO because all of the decisions get deferred.

“For each one of those areas, for example, in the infrastructure, it was all about the degree to which you’re virtualized, the degree to which you’re adopting hybrid cloud, and we found relatively high degrees of virtualization. But when it comes to cloud, even at the infrastructure level, everybody wants to get there. By far the vast majority of folks are in the proof of concept or evaluations stage.”

Watch the video below and find out how 90 percent of participants have no way to evaluate workloads and what EMC is doing about it.

Fidelma Russo, SVP and GM of the VMAX Business Unit at EMC

Fidelma Russo, SVP and GM of the VMAX Business Unit at EMC, spoke with Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, at EMC World to discuss her unit’s ground-up approach to hardware and software architecture.

Old school is relevant

“We tend to take the word VMAX and Symmetrix and think old, antique and not really relevant in today’s world. I can tell you that the customers I talk to, we run their mission-critical applications, and about three or four years ago we embarked on a journey to re-architect VMAX, pretty much from the ground up to a whole new slew of new hardware. But really the core structural changes were around the software architecture.”

Re-architecting for cloud

“We took our Ingenuity operating system, which has all the reliability, availability and serviceability things that we’re known for throughout the industry and re-architected for what we call cloud scale. It was really about our metadata and making sure we had enough metadata to scale to cloud levels (hundreds, thousands and millions of devices), adding snap technology that had zero impact on snaps and allowing us to have an embedded container that could allow you to provide native files from the box, native embedded management. That architecture came out in 2014 and with the V3 launch.”

Watch the video below to learn more about how EMC refreshed and re-architected some old school technology.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE