Bill Richter, President of EMC, Isilon Division, spoke with theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante during EMC World this week about Isilon and the EMC strategy and boasted a billion dollar run rated in the last quarter of 2012.

Richter believes that customers tend to gravitate rapidly towards the technology that adds value to their business, the technology which improves their agility and ability to scale and makes their life simple.

Pivotal and Greenplum are further up the stack from Isilon, because they are basically analyzing data and turning it into business value. Isilon focuses on Big Data infrastructure.  And so, the way programs are organized today, they become quite complemetary.

Company vision

Going back to Isilon’s original value proposition, when the company was founded the view of the future was that the amount of unstructured data and file-based content would grow to such an extent that it would break traditional architectures. The EMC vision was to rebuild an architecture from the ground up, to address that problem with that specific design in mind.

Traditional architecture is breaking

Isilon, this supercharged piece of infrastructure that EMC acquired in 2010, is becoming a fundamental building block in the company strategy in a lot of areas. When it acquired Isilon, there was a hole in the EMC product portfolio around scale-out NAS. A lot has changed since the arrival of Bill Richter on board of EMC in 2006.  Back then the revenue was at $50 million, while for the Q4 of last year, the Isilon product portfolio reached the billion dollar run rate.

Big Data has reached the heart of enterprise IT, and enterprise IT itself has become a big data problem. In this exact environment the solution proposed by EMC and Isilon thrives. The growth is organic, the customers buy Isilon first for their personal archives, they try it, they like it and then advocate using it for their business.

The fact of the matter is that in today’s economy, customers need to readjust their IT needs with shrinking budgets. “The only way to do more by using less is by transforming the way you do business and the tools that you use”, advocates Richter.

Scale-up commercial software vs. Scale-out open sources

There’s rooms for both scale up and scale out, Richter believes — they are not mutually exclusive. The large portfolio of EMC products simply ensures that the customer gets the right tool for the right job, instead of a one-size-fits-all kinda product.

How flash is changing the industry

The world of flash is definitely changing the industry. For the past few years, EMC has incorporated flash into their products.  And now, many next generation products are built considering a flash-only storage layer. The transformation of technology is incredibly rapid. Scale-out NAS was missing 3 years ago, and in just a couple of years it went completely mainstream.

Customers have adopted EMC’s products, with great reception, but they want now to automate more.

“ViPR is giving customers a brand new level of automation, helping them manage heterogenic storage solutions in an efficient and simplistic way,” said Bill Richter.