Okay, we are back live inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm here with my co-host Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. This is the end of our time here at EMC World 2012. Dave has been a long run. We've had massive sets of interviews. Amazing week. Mark and I were just talking on Skype. Over 120 guests this week on theCUBE. Combination of a shock and awe here at EMC World and also our trip to go out remote back to San Francisco to capture the H-PACE conference, which was a seminal moment around that industry, first-ever conference. We've had great guests. We've had Pat Gelsinger on here, the CFO of EMC, President of the Division of Consulting Services, Howard Elias, Jeremy Burton, interviewed Joe Tucci. We've interviewed the next CEO of EMC. Presumably, right? If it's true, it's going to come from internally. And I thought, well, let's see, we talked to Pat and he referenced Joe's statement that he's staying on. And Pat said the Beatles are staying together longer. So that was sort of his angle on that. You asked Dave Goulden, what about the GE of technology? Could you be that? And he gave an answer. I asked Howard, what's his dream job? And he said, making customers happy. So I just love the interaction. These guys are very candid. But you know what? There's no arrogance. And I'd say, like I've said earlier today, I think EMC has probably the strongest management team in technology right now. From a pure skill set, experience, execution capabilities, and overall integrity. And if you look at them, any one of those guys, Gelsinger, Elias, Goulden, all could be CEOs in any company. Maybe you've seen CEO of HB or any company that needs help. Those guys are amazing. So EMC's lucky and they got over on the VMware side, you've got Paul Moritz. So I think there's going to be some shakeup going on with VMware, with Moritz getting more deeper. He loves the code, if you've been watching Moritz's signals, he doesn't like the limelight. I mean, I guess he's the CEO technically, but you know, you talk to anyone within VMware, Dave, he's been moving more and more into the, and getting into the technical weeds, because he loves it. And so I think, I'd be curious to see maybe a change there.  But here's my take on this whole event. EMC continues to out-execute the competition. I mean, that's the bottom line. And they put forth a vision. Howard Elias said it, you guys, the customers tell them, you say what you're going to do and then you do it and you don't over commit, you get it done. And that's what this company's all about. We, you know, they think about VMware. I mean, in a way, you know, when EMC bought VMware, they really weren't sure what to do with it. You know, they were trying to integrate it. It was the Diane Greene tension. And they always seemed to somehow figure it out. I mean, there haven't been like a long list of damaging failures for EMC. I mean, you know, Invista was one product that didn't fly. Okay, and everybody points to that, but it's so irrelevant. I think Goulden really was a really good interview. I'll tell you why. One, we never had him on theCUBE before. Two, we get a chance to meet a guy who's a meat and potatoes manager, managing obviously a really big company in EMC. And he talks about, you know, the three-legged stool for EMC, market share, investment and operating leverage. And you can see that the discipline within EMC is pretty strong. And to your point about not making a lot of colossal mistakes is they don't really put themselves in a position because by balancing those three dimensions of operating philosophy, there's an inherent balance of risk management in there. So no matter what they do, they just can't really hurt themselves as long as they stay disciplined. And he said, the risk is not to invest much to increase the overall market share or operating leverage, but you're stealing from Peter to get the pulse of that. Balance, he mentioned was critical. Also, the other observation from Goulden that I thought was really incredible today was his mention, Dave, of the M&A numbers. We looked at the, he ran the math and said he went back and looked at all his acquisitions. They all were not a lot of revenue.  Investment, obviously market share, leadership and leverage. So I mean, and that last point is, so I, it was very intriguing and he has a really great command of EMC's numbers and the internal workings. The one point I would make is that, you know, the VMware acquisition, while it may not be throwing off the preponderance of revenue for EMC of the $20 plus billion that EMC does, the leverage that they get out of VMware is just absolutely phenomenal. And I said it with Chad, when VMware really dealt with that whole storage API problem, the industry has exploded and EMC has been the biggest beneficiary of that because they've done a great job integrating and you know, you're seeing NetApp hit, hit a little speed bump.  You know, IBM continues to do well and it's storage business but it's storage business needs to reinvent itself. So yet now here's EMC and everybody's saying, oh, their products are outdated. They're, you know, they're popping on all cylinders. And then now what do they do?   I think you're right. They're executing the competition. Then they bring in data domain. They bring in Isilon and those things are throwing off, these are companies that did 1.4 billion in free cash flow last quarter. They have free cash flow machine. Their market cap's over 50 billion. They're growing very rapidly. They're growing faster than the marketplace with what everybody criticizes as an outdated portfolio. Well, guess what? The portfolio's not outdated anymore. And everybody says, well, that's because they bought companies. Well, that's what big companies with cash do. They identify gaps in their portfolio. They fill them, they manage them. You know, Pat said, name a company who's better at doing acquisitions than we are. And I put them right up there with IBM and Oracle. Dave, I got to say, EMC is so well positioned. Watching them transform from an IT only company now to IT plus business solutions and having those conversations. And we heard from Tom Roloff, another president of their division, talk about some of the vertical focused executions with their customers. They have two separate organizations now, territory, geography on IT, but also vertically business line managers force. And they're talking to customers and their mid-language is changing. So that, to me, is where EMC is right now. Moving too quickly, they're moving towards a very credible player in the consultant services business where those conversations are not about speeds and feeds, top of rack, tech, jargon. It's about business conversations. And we brought this up at SAP Sapphire. That's those conversations that are in the C level suite. I need to increase the top line revenue. I want to maintain good operating budget. I don't want to be 70%. I want to take my data warehousing and do it for a third of the price and have more functionality. I mean, there's not a lot to criticize. We heard from some of the users that they're, they didn't like the gooey in certain products and they wished their management systems were integrated better, their infrastructure management. We saw them address some of that today. I think, John, the one challenge that I would point to, Rich Napolitano on yesterday asked him about this. He said, I want to talk about it. That's internal plumbing. We asked Brian Gallagher about it today. He really didn't give the, my opinion was the strong answer about their organization. EMC's organization of essentially high-end, mid-range, and kind of everything else, if you will. I mean, backup is pretty clear, data protection. But even that's somewhat muddled because you got products and data protection, then you got other things that aren't in that group that are data protection related. I think in the next couple of years, John, that EMC is going to have to sort out its organization. I think there's going to be some real challenges it has. And right now it's not problematic for them, but I think increasingly as they start, you know, cross-sharing. Well, Kooledin gave the political answer. Okay, when I asked about the G, it was a loaded question. The loaded question was, where will he take that? Because, you know, and he really gave a really professional answer. Yeah, essentially, let's not get into the tactics of all the corporate governance kind of conversation when the reality it's about the customer. Okay, cool, but throughout scaling the organization has to be discussed. And that is interesting will be a pretext of how they organize.  I think in companies that organize incorrectly, you know, it's been shown historically in the industry I've had troubles. And I'm not saying EMC's organized incorrectly. I'm not saying it's what they're doing is a mistake. But when you look at Flash and how Flash is permeating the entire portfolio, EMC essentially has Flash everywhere. They got a Flash business unit. They got Flash in the high-end division. They got Flash in the mid-range division. It's everywhere. Let's talk about what we learned this week. So I want to share with you, Dave, what I thought was reading the tea leaves here that might not have been discussed. Well, certainly I have not discussed in the blogs for anyone else because they weren't on the ground for three days. Like, we were. But I want to try to connect the dots from things that are outside that aren't that obvious. First thing is that EMC obviously is more relevant, I just mentioned that. But you saw a lot of acquisitions happening. True Ventures just sold one of their portfolios. You saw the deal with Puppet. And what's interesting is that since EMC bought Pivotal Labs, since Green Plum really kind of pivoted from going after Teradata to being much more of an open, cooler, relevant company with their big data strategy, and Icelon picking up a bigger piece of the load there on the positioning, you saw the company change. They're getting cooler and more relevant. But what's happening, Dave, is that people are realizing that EMC is a gateway for sales. And what EMC is, is a very strong company when it comes to go-to-market. They have an army of consultants, army of sales force. They have a core competency in servicing customers. And we heard from Goulden, their M&A strategies to take companies in that don't have a lot of revenue and make them successful faster using the assets of EMC. I see that happening on the startup community with startups, Puppet, the acquisitions. And I see more business deals coming down. So I will see EMC doing a lot more business partnerships in the ecosystem. So that's something that I'm connecting the dots on. And the other one is that EMC has the leadership and recognizes that they're willing to go into new markets like Hadoop and play in this new data. And I learned from Pat Gelsinger that he sees Red Hat model not working. I thought that was a very interesting observation from Pat Gelsinger, that he said, quote, the Red Hat for Hadoop is not a workable model. So a couple of comments there, John. So first of all, I think EMC has taken a page out of VMware. I mean, VMware is all about, we've heard it for years, that every dollar spent on a VMware license translates into some multiple of ecosystem dollars. It was 15 and it went up to 17. I think somebody said it's up to 19 now. And I think EMC's realizing the leverage that they get, that their big channel play is all around gaining leverage and increasing its breadth and distribution. And second point there is there's a vacuum in terms of partnerships. IBM's vertically integrated with services, HP, Dell, there aren't a lot of alternatives for the partners whereby they're not going to be competing with a large services organization. EMC is a very partner friendly organization right now. It just so happens that EMC's at that right size, they're still growing fast enough because they've done a good job of putting in growth engines. They don't have to go big on services. I would predict after they get over the $100 billion valuation mark and their revenue starts approaching $50 billion, that's when they're maybe going to have to look to get deeper into services. That's what happened with HP. That's what happened with IBM. But right now EMC doesn't have to worry about that. They can grow in that amazing trajectory. Great product portfolio, great work in the ecosystem. I love their M&A strategy. I want to see more from the startups next year. When we come back to the EMC world next year, what I want to talk about and analyze is how well did they extend the business conversation in the marketplace from a solution standpoint? How well did their products get more integrated and deliver more value? And third Dave, I want to hear more about more actual startups, acquisitions, investments, and so on. Yeah, and I'm watching a couple things there, John, for Next Jimmies. You know, they talked a lot about business transformation and that's all about big data. That was a lot of marketing. Most organizations really don't have a handle on what their big data strategy is. I want to see how much EMC can affect that. And the second is this whole converged infrastructure play. EMC and VC, Cisco they put down there, the Gauntlet in 2009, others responded. You saw NetApp with FlexPod doing very well. IBM made three years later its big move into integrated systems. I'm really interested to see how that plays out. And I think EMC's got a good lead there. VC has a good lead. So that's a big, big engine of growth. I think you're going to see them continue to invest in that. And I think it's going to pay off in a big way. Well Dave, this was year three. We kicked the cube off with Mark Risen-Hobbkins and Michael Sean Wright, me and you at EMC World 2009, right? Nine? Nine, 10. 10, 2010, damn. And we're in Boston and that was fun. That was an amazing kickoff. Chowder. We did it, the Chowder post. We had some legal seafood. We had a lot of, it's great, exciting. But what really happened was that started a journey for us. Now, this is our third EMC World, all started here. It's been great, Mark Risen-Hobbkins, now Keyin. We have a full team, Alex Wilcox, and we got another team in San Francisco just kicking it off yesterday. Stu Miniman did a great job. David Floyer, Jeff Kelly, props to them. Chris and Nicole back at the ranch, Art Lindsey dealing with the videos. Hi, everybody. We have David Floyer, Kit. But we want to thank EMC for supporting us over the years, SAP for us over the years, and thanks to all of our spotlight sponsors over the past years, we've really endorsing the format of independent media coverage with the independent analysis. We want to share knowledge, and we're transparent about that. And we want to let the social media sphere take it from there. David's been great. And I want to say thanks for watching everyone and looking forward to EMC World 2013. Bye for now. Okay.


Now I was going to start by saying that I had been looking forward to this all day and then after that last talk I didn't want to go at all because it was so good. And then all this stuff happened and this morning I adjusted the slides so the folks in the back would be able to read them and now I don't have that adjustment anymore. I'm really sorry.  This computer stuff is really complicated. Actually Leo told me I can go right up until 5 o'clock so if I take a couple extra minutes that's cool. Let's see. There we go. All right. So there's this class of problems called NP for which what it means is that if somebody hands you a solution to the problem it's, everything cool? Well I could have just stepped back.  And lots and lots of problems are in this class. Kind of a dopey example is sorting. So like if you're not doing the sorting yourself somebody comes along and says well here's the sorted version of the list you're trying to sort and you just got to kind of make sure that the elements are all the same in both lists and then you check the one that the other person gave you and make sure the elements are in ascending order and say okay yeah that is sorted you can do that efficiently. And there's actually an easier way which is since sorting is not hard to do efficiently anyway you'll learn maybe how to do it in sophomore data structures class. You take the list that you're handed and you take the input list and you sort the input list and then you compare it to see if they're the same. So that was kind of silly. Problems that are easy to solve necessarily are easy to check the solutions to. You solve it and then you see if what you got is the same as right. So but there's more interesting NP problems that we'll see in a moment. Some people are probably wondering what is NP stand for or why is it NP and the NP stands for it's not important. Okay but not all problems are easy to solve like sorting and it's it's quite possible that that you have a problem where it's it's hard to find a solution but if somebody hands you something they claim as a solution it's easy to check whether they're telling you the truth and my my favorite example of that is this is terrible is moving van loading okay so you've got all your stuff out on the sidewalk and the question is does it all fit into the van and you start loading it in and when you're all done there's seven things left on the sidewalk and is that because you have too much stuff and the van is not big enough or is it because you messed up somewhere back on item 15 and if you'd only put it in sideways everything else would have gone in well okay so it can be really hard to pack a moving van who's moved yeah okay right but but if somebody comes to you puts the stuff into the van and says look it's all packed it fit it's really easy to verify whether they're telling the truth you just shut the door and if it shuts all the way oh my gosh thank you so so there's a familiar example of another NP problem and let's see what else now all the text is too small crossword puzzles right could be could be really hard to solve the crossword puzzle but if somebody hands you one that's already filled in you just got to check to make sure each word matches the clue and that the words all line up and that that'll be quick conference scheduling I'm not going to go into that at length because we've only got one room here it's kind of a trivial case if you've ever done homework you know you can toil over the homework problems for hours and hours but the greater can check the answers in seconds sometimes so it's a lot easier to check to see if you get the right answer than it is to come up with the right answer so there's a lot of these problems where it's hard to find a solution but it's easy to check if you're given one right so of these NP problems there's one that is super special called sat which is short for satisfiability and the problem is that somebody gives you a formula involving ands and ors and knots and variables and the question is is there a way to assign true and false variable values to the variables so that the formula comes out to be true and it's clearly an NP because if somebody came and magically said oh yeah make this one true this one true that one false this one true you could check just by evaluating the formula to see if it came out to be true or whether they were telling you correctly that it was a solution but it could in least in principle be very difficult to define what values you assigned to the to the variables to to make the formula true and there might not be any you could of course try every possible assignment but that takes too long if there's a lot of variables it takes exponential time and in fact nobody knows a good algorithm for this problem that works in every case efficiently now here's the thing that's magical about this problem if you did have a good algorithm for solving it you could take any problem in NP any NP problem whatsoever and you could take your algorithm for SAT and you could convert it into an efficient algorithm for solving whatever your favorite NP problem is so solving solving this one SAT problem finding an efficient algorithm for it would solve every other problem in NP and so for this reason we say that this this SAT problem is NP complete a solution for SAT would completely solve NP another thing we sometimes say is that SAT is the hardest problem in NP because it's possible that you might have a good algorithm to solve your favorite problem but not be able to solve NP but it is not possible to have the reverse so and SAT is at least as hard as whatever your favorite problem is and this this discovery was was independently by by Cook and Levine Levine was in Russia so he didn't hear about Cook he solved it around the same time but then didn't publish I don't know I don't know why I'm telling you this is not important all right who's that let's see the other thing that's interesting about this NP complete is it turns out not just SAT is NP complete there turned out to be a large family of NP complete problems and this mathematician named Karp discovered the following year there are a whole bunch of them and he gave a list of 21 NP complete problems one of them is SAT one is this thing called Hamiltonian cycle which is can you find a path from that hits all the cities and returns to a starting point but doesn't touch any of the edges more than one I'm sorry doesn't touch any of the cities more than once and and then 19 others of you know various interests and so these things actually turn out to be common and a solution to any one of them an efficient algorithm to solve any one of these 21 problems would completely solve NP and therefore would solve the other 20 they're all very well studied problems and still nobody knows a good algorithm for any of them because if they did they would know a good algorithm for all of them it's kind of surprising since then people have discovered hundreds of NP complete problems is a huge huge family of these things and we can't solve any of these we can solve them in special cases we can find almost optimal solutions we have algorithms that are really good except for a few weird examples where they blow up and then everything goes wrong somehow which is kind of weird all right so my favorite one of these we have to have a little digression now hey Leo how much time have I got awesome this this little guy here is is Elmo who knows Elmo okay because Elmo has dominated Sesame Street for like the last 30 years if you're if you're old and bald like me then you can remember a time before Elmo and so this is Elmo who is beloved of toddlers and wait a minute where might there we go this is my toddler from she's now 11 she was a very demanding kid she's like some kids you can just like leave them and you know then you come back later they've they've amused themselves they were like you know put their foot in their mouth or whatever kids do she would if you left the room for like 30 seconds you would make this noise that is is optimized over millions of years of evolution to be the most unpleasant possible sound and since I had a day job my wife was left doing this and she would like like take care of the kid all day and then she'd have to eat lunch and she couldn't eat lunch so she would take this is iris she would take iris and prop her up in this this device you see which supports the kid and it's got a bunch of entertaining things the kid can revolve but can't actually go anywhere and would then park her in front of Sesame Street to watch Elmo's world which lasts 20 minutes and during this 20 minutes she would be able to sneak off and make lunch and eat it and that was her like 20 minutes away from the kid this thing I have we found out is is called by parents is called a neglect those saucer iris was obsessed with Elmo and it turns out almost like everywhere and we were going up the stairs once for example and iris is like it's Elmo and this is what she saw on the stairs all right so what what is almost world about it's 20 minutes long as I said and every 20 minutes segment is about some topic that's of interest to toddlers such as can you folks in the back actually see this list or should I read it aloud I got I read it read some of it babies bananas baths bicycles birds birthdays books brushing teeth bugs cats dancing dogs drawing ears exercise families good yeah so this is a typical this is not by any means the complete list but it's a good it's a good sample all right then you don't have to catch these live they also distribute them on it used to be video cassette now of course it's DVD and since they want the video cassettes and the DVDs to be uniform length I guess an hour they would parcel these out in groups of three three episodes per video release so for example and we of course owned many of these so that they could be delivered to iris on demand they always have three so here we see this one's dancing music and books and that's the title of the video really dancing music and books and then here's one called hands ears and feet and you can see there's there's a common thread each one has like a theme right hands ears and feet they go together and sorry sometimes they they have you know a different title like this one's wake up with Elmo but it packages together the three related segments on sleeping getting dressed and brushing your teeth and this one is called people in your neighborhood and it packages together the three segments on firefighters lifeguards and nurses two minutes we're gonna be cool you don't you can stop telling me I'm gonna finish on time in fact I could digress at this point okay so so here's the constellation of of Elmo's world segments a small fraction of them and I've circled the the related groups right and so some of these are related some aren't if you you put together a video release called on shoes bugs and drawing people would be puzzled and that apparently is considered a no-no so you got the question if you're if you're designing these video releases how do you pick the groups of three and it should be clear there's some some constraints on this you can't put the same segment onto two different video releases because then the person who pays for it is gonna say hey I got cheated I paid for three but I've already got this one and similarly you've got a certain number of segments you'd like to include every one of them on some video release so the question is you have a bunch of groupings which I'm gonna show you let's say here's a hypothetical collection of acceptable groupings and each acceptable group of three is now surrounded by a colored wiggly line and you want to say okay well I want to pick the the groups of three that make the acceptable video releases but no two groups of three can overlap because that would put the same segment on two different videos and and we have to include all of them and so there's a kind of a weird interplay of constraints here right because if I decide to put the getting dressed in with shoes and jackets that forecloses the possibility of doing getting dressed brushing teeth sleeping right and so I can pick some of these but they have to not overlap and they have to somehow hit everything and where are we going with this I know Leo's getting nervous but so my favorite NP complete problem is this one from carp from 1972 the original paper that identify these 21 problems called exact cover by three sets which the computer science people call x3c because xc3 would have been too obvious x3c and at this point I would stop and I would I would explain in detail what x3c is except I did it's that exactly and there isn't anything else to say about it so one of the canonical original NP complete problems from Richard Carp's original paper in 1972 is the problem of how to plan almost world video releases and since it's NP complete there's no known good algorithm for it not in 1972 and not 30 years ago and not today and so how did they how did they solve this problem and the answer is they couldn't they couldn't because this one is about flowers bananas and hair thank you very much