Brian Gallagher, EMC, with John Furrier and Dave Vellante at EMC World 2014 @thecube #emcworld At this week’s EMC World 2014 Conference, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, hosted by Dave Vellante and John Furrier, welcomed the President of the Enterprise and Mid-Range Systems Division for EMC, Brian Gallagher. Over the course of the interview, Gallagher discussed his role at EMC as well as EMC’s longevity and dominance within the marketplace. The Enterprise and Mid-Range Systems Division mission is to not only present the VMAX and VNX products to their respective markets, but, according to Gallagher, to facilitate a coordination of innovation to the two products. “Both of these systems have been purpose built for the markets they serve,” Gallagher explained. “It’s always been about best price performance in the market. Our strategy has been to bring these ‘Best of Breed’ together.” This strategy was born as a result of frequent customer requests the EMC do so. “Best of breed is apparent,” Gallagher stated. “But what they [customers] want to know is what we are doing to make them work better together.” This, he notes, is likely due to the fact that they have a significant overlap in customers who are utilizing both products in their business. “What we are driving at is a common user experience. We are moving to a common service level objective management policy.” Gallagher and his division are working with the ViPR team to meet this mission. EMC’s ViPR Poised To Strike With the mention of ViPR, Vellante inquired if Gallagher could expound on whether or not he believed ViPR was intended to simplify and consolidate stovepipes or if it was, in fact, the future of storage. “What’s your take on that,” he asked. ViPR is, according to Gallagher, comprised of two individual components: ViPR data services and the ViPR controller. He spoke about the advancements in both and how those innovations were providing significant value to those organizations that have adopted the technology. Watch the interview in its entirety here: “When we look at ViPR data services,” Gallagher stated, “there’s the access data services around block, file, HDFS and object. And then there’s advance data services around data protection and availability.” He continued, “Our strategy is to provide data services. We can run ViPR HDFS on VMAX or VNX.”And, according to Gallagher, this can be deployed across EMC products and non-EMC products. “At the data layer, it builds out the capability so that we can serve our 2nd platform customers with existing applications around SAP, Oracle, DB2 and SQL, and all the applications that we have served for years and new applications around object and HDFS that are more emerging in this 3rd platform,” he said. The second component of ViPR, the ViPR controller, is driving a strategy for Gallagher and his team to provide self-service provisioning, reporting and automation meant to simplify the overall use of EMC products. Gallagher claims their work so far has yielded a broad base acceptance so they can “provision an outcome of an application” rather than provisioning the hardware of an application. Bring It On Says EMC Innovation on the part of EMC has made them, as one of the leaders in the market, a company that is often targeted by established competitors and young upstarts alike. “The industry has been licking its chops to get into your install base for a long time,” noted Vellante. In light of market disruptions like Flash and others, he asked, “What gives you confidence and what is the strategy? Is it to keep putting those data services out to the marketplace faster and with more robust services than the others can do?” “For years, even decades, EMC has had a big target on our back,” Gallagher stated. “And that target is only getting bigger. When you look at the new entrants into the market, they are all after EMC.” Gallagher believes the answers to Vellante’s questions reside both in the topics of technology and service. “Let me talk about service first,” Gallagher began, “because we always talk about technology. EMC has, by far, the best Global Services capability in the market, bar none,” he stated. “It took us years to develop best-in-class professional services, delivery services, implementation and migration services and support services,” he explained. “That is a differentiator in our market today.”