Coming from the conference floor this time…yesterday was the EMC Elect lounge. Live orchestra again today…this year is interesting with all the small podiums set around the front. Different dynamic but makes it harder to see presenters…

Yes, when you’re inside the bass pulses…feel it.

Jonathan Martin, CMO

• Recap of highlights from yesterday – attendees, VCE CEO, shots of the Village and folks biking, Solutions Pavilion last night.
• It’s amazing how high energy an IT conference is…or is that just the music? 😉
• Joe Tucci starting off today….then various others. Maritz from Pivotal, Gelsinger from VMware. 2 customers – BMW & NBC Universal. Motorcycle racing champion.
• Lots of things in the village –
• Broadcasting live on Periscope

Joe Tucci, CEO of the Federation

• Starting with talking about the Federation – a bunch of Storm Troopers walk on stage…Joe – “let’s try that again” – now light dancers on stage to classic movie music. Thanks to Illumenate.
• My job is a bit lighter today…more other folks talking.
• “May you live in interesting times” – you’re living in unprecedented times.
• Opportunistic part of the current wave is far bigger than the disruptive side of the wave.
• EMC has made their choice…how do they help partners and customers do that too?
• Business don’t want to get Uber’d/Tesla’d/Nest’d/Amazon’d to death.
• Business Imperative #1 – Go on the offense and become digital.
  • Means have to look at new digital era apps.
  • Each app has 1000x more users and each user has 1000x more data.
  • But…..thousands of legacy datacenter, millions of existing applications, cost $billions to build/deploy, generating $trillions in revenues. If take those away, most businesses stop.
  • Challenge = how to lower cost of existing apps/infrastructure/data center while dramatically increasing innovation and performance + new apps.
• Business Imperative #2 – Laser focus on cybersecurity.
• Giving choice while not locking you in – it’s expensive and also needs scale.
  • 70,000 in EMC family of companies.
• Acquisition cost for Nicira/NSX, Airwatch, Pivotal, ViPR/ScaleIO, XtremIO, DSSD -$6B total. It’s negative earnings this year and next year…..serious investment by EMC.
• Spock (look a like) on stage – Live Long and Prosper – cool end for the first section.

Customer Profile with BMW

• Jonathan Martin interviewing Dirk Rüger on side stage – BMW IT
• Discussing BMW integration with phones – manuals, etc.
• Am close enough to read the teleprompter….it’s interesting how it’s not quite verbatim.
• Discussing back end analytics as well as accelerating release cycles.
• Seeing up to 12 times faster development cycles.
• Predictive Maintenance – very important and something they’re pushing much further into…..sounds like big data analytics to me.

Paul Maritz – Pivotal – Main Stage

• Going to continue the theme of digital transformation.
• Must be able to catch changes in flight….and react fast enough to affect that soon enough that it matters. This is “real time” requirements.
• 5 big focus items – 2 are product/tech driven – 3 are culture/people driven.
  • There are certain technical things you need to learn, certain ways you need to learn how to operate as an organization.
• 3 big value proportions for Pivotal
  • How to build a new culture – how to get right people and processes to use the underlying new capabilities – Pivotal Labs
  • Apps around Cloud Foundry
  • how to anchor the technology using in major open source initiatives
• To unpack those…
  1. Pivotal Labs – unique custom apps and data service business
     1. 450 person, best-of-breed custom apps and data team
     2. “Teach customers how to fish”
     3. High demand for deep transformation!
        • Every customer has realized they need to participate in this digital world….and you can’t buy it off the shelf.
        • Business rediscovering product development…which means rediscovering software development.
        • Hospitals realizing they can’t be in illness business alone….but must also be in wellness business. That requires much more integration with peoples’ daily lives.
        • BMW (and other car companies) realizing that the app matters more than the car. Car companies realizing they need to learn to build compelling digital experiences….and do it fast.
  2. Pivotal Cloud Foundry – open source apps platform portable across clouds
     1. Open-source “operating system” for the cloud
     2. Governed by Cloud Foundry Foundation – Federation, IBM, HP, SAP, Intel+40 others
        1. Trying to keep this open with many other companies
     3. Pivotal offers a distribution that is 1) based on open source and 2) subscription business model
        1. This starts to take the ops out of DevOps….makes it easier/faster.
        2. Replace many metrics with one price – per app, per year – any cloud – hybrid/multi-cloud, managed/unmanaged
  3. Pivotal Big Data Suite – comprehensive Hadoop-based open source suite
     1. Suite of software to analyze data at scale
     2. Exploiting powerful, lower-cost infrastructure (appliance and cloud)
     3. Offering collection of data paradigms, present and future
     4. Based on ODP platform:
        1. Common binary-compatible core to Hadoop
        2. Supported by: Pivotal, EMC, Horton, IBM
     5. Open Data Platform – group of 11 vendors – “enabling Big Data to flourish atop of a common core platform”
     6. Highly fragmented world – trying to help you unify over time the many pools of isolated data, data architectures, license models, etc.
        1. Simple, open data suite.
     7. One price – per core, per year – any/all components – Open Source (ODP) – Appliance or Cloud…..this goes into the Business Data Lake
• Big 3 themes – People & Platform, Open and Open-Source, Federation-aligned
• Discussion on stage – Maritz and John Roese (CTO of EMC and also Chairman of Cloud Foundry Foundation)
  • How do you avoid getting trapped in the wrong clouds? (since everything will run in a “cloud” something)
  • Lot of competitors teamed up in this….different than anything John Roese has seen before.

Next profile – Jonathan martin with John McGuinness 

• Motorcycle racing legend –
• Isle of Man race – little island – get up to 200 miles per hour
  • Time trial, 90 riders
  • Has won Isle of Man Time Trial 21 times…absolutely insane.
• Why are you so fast? Has something to do with the size of my….well….
• He wears a biometric suite with a couple hundred sensors –
• Gathered 700,000 data points from John and his bike in Spain – open-sourced the data set and trying to figure out what makes John so fast.
• Also using it to help drive motorcycle safety.
• Collecting first ever data set from this race – he’ll be wearing this suit for the actual Isle of Man
• Jonathan Martin rode the bike off stage….cool.

Pat Gelsinger – VMware CEO

• 6th year at EMC World – 3 with EMC, 3 as guest with VMware
• Brave New IT – no Orwellian references here. 😉
• This is a good walkthrough….but at the same VMware’s primary vision (not much new here ;-).
• 3 Industry Imperatives and matching key VMware initiatives
  1. Hybrid Cloud – it’s not a stop along the way, it’s the world we will live in for years to come.
     • We must build the bridges for this.
     • VMware is focusing on this with vSphere on-premise and vCloud Air.
     • “Outside-In Consumption” – New Apps can start in vCloud Air but move back on-presmise. Old Apps can move to vCloud Air and/or have DR in vCloud Air
     • Handled by common underlying architecture – Software Defined Datacenter
     • Showing a customer list of vCloud Air – I love to see customer logo lists but really need to see actual customer use cases and customer spend amounts (we’ve seen very slow adoption of vCloud Air — the price point is too high relative to the features).
     • VMware is taking their next gen SAP and running in vCloud Air….ok, that’s impressive.
     • EMC World application backend is running on vCloud Air.
  2. IT teams that still focus on assembling piece parts are destined to fail.
     • How do I take solutions and quickly productize them.
     • This is the thesis behind the whole Software Defined Datacenter Strategy.
     • Themes are…
       1. Expand virtual compute to all applications
       2. Virtualize the network for speed and efficiency
       3. Transform storage by aligning it with app demands
       4. Management tools give way to automation
     • Vblock, VXRack, VSPEX Blue – see my notes from VCE Partner Advisory Board yesterday (if you’re Sirius/Varrow)
     • Pre-defined services and workflows – goes on top of all the things from VMware/EMC
     • VMware integrated Openstack – trying to take the stability of DRS, HA, SRM, etc. and combine with the innovation and speed of Openstack
     • Will also be available in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud opportunities
  3. Every business must strike a delicate balance between openness and security.
  • VMware NSX is the first answer here.
  • Proven networking for SDDC
  • Agility and streamlined operations
  • Platform for advanced networking and security
  • Microsegmentation – about half of customers are buying NSX for this. This is HUGE.
  • Cloud native application development and new security approaches.
  • Lightwave – Identity & Access Management for these apps.
  • Photon – lightweight Linux OS in the middle of the stack to enable this stuff.
• That’s a wrap for Pat Gelsigner.

Customer Profile – NBC Universal

• Deb Gesimondo, SVP Strategy and Architecture – Jonathan Martin interviewing
• Customer profiles are hard…must make it specific enough to mean something but general enough you don’t lose people.
• Summary = we’re doing next gen apps + data analytics, it’s cost-effective relative the benefits – we love how Pivotal & EMC are helping us with that.
• EMC is helping with the engineered solution side so we can focus on the applications.

That’s a wrap!