EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden laid out EMC’s plan for success during the keynote address that kicked off EMC World 2015 in Las Vegas. That plan includes incremental R&D investments and a stronger focus on cloud. It also includes the recent acquisition of VCE from Cisco Systems, Inc., which turned the EMC Federation into a $25 billion company, according to theCUBE cohost Dave Vellante.

Radical technological shifts

Over the past six years that theCUBE has covered EMC World, the company has remained at the forefront through radical technological shifts. Will it continue?

“EMC always transforms,” says cohost John Furrier. “They are at the intersection of storage, conversion infrastructure and a lot of platform change. We’re seeing a lot of technological shifts at the network level with SDN; we’re seeing shifts in the data layer with Pivotal developers; and the cloud has certainly changed the game.”

The Information Generation

EMC and Intel Corp. brand themselves as the Information Generation. Will they actually stay ahead of the curve in this new era? “The business is under pressure,” says Furrier. “Everyone is shifting to near real time and ultimately real time, and that requires heavy-duty compute and flash on the storage side.”

“They’ve got to transition,” says Vellante. “The profit engine is under attack — from within and without. They are a company in transition, and they have to navigate that transition. They’ve got to accelerate the new so that it grows faster than the old declines.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more wall-to-wall EMC World coverage from theCUBE and SiliconANGLE.