Interview With Chuck Hollis, Global Marketing CTO, EMC

 Chuck Hollis
VP, Global Marketing CTO, EMC Corporation
There are many CTOs at EMC, one for each business unit, and Global marketing being a group inside EMC.
A 16-year EMC veteran, Chuck, 53, is a member of management team, working on strategic aspects of marketing, business development and technology. He is an industry blogger and also leading company’s social media proficiency initiative.
Previously, he ran EMC’s Technology Alliances organization, building partnerships that deliver customers multi-vendor solutions. Prior to that, he was VP of Strategic Marketing, where he helped map out key aspects of EMC’s transformation strategy, messaging and field execution.
Chuck has also been EMC’s VP of Storage Platforms Marketing, responsible for overall platform product strategy and offerings across all major market segments. He has also had significant field roles, including director of Sales Operations, leading the Professional Services and Systems Engineering organizations in Europe.
Chuck originally came to EMC as part of an initial team to help the company enter the open systems market. Since then, he has been at the forefront of many go-to-market initiatives, including specific application markets (ERP, NT and DW) as well as storage-based initiatives (enterprise storage, storage software and enterprise storage networks).
Prior to EMC that he joined in 1994, Chuck worked at Convergent Technologies.
He has received degrees in Computer Science and Economics from University of California at Santa Cruz, CA.
Hobbies: “I’m a piano player. Rock ‘n’ roll baby! I have a bar band, I play in bars every week-end, we do rock ‘n’ roll from the late sixties, early seventies, blues, jazz.”

StorageNewsLetter: EMC was pushing ILM years ago, not anymore. Now it’s big data. Who invented these words?
Chuck Hollis: It was a guy back in 2004 who wrote an article about big data and the new value from information.

An analyst?
Not it was an academic. They talked about the world of big data. Notion about big data first came from universities, then they grew up and found echoes in Wall Street, casinos, things like that. We didn’t start to call it big data until 2010, and then there was a series of articles from McKinsey, Harvard, The Economist. Everyone was talking about big data. So as we got in 2010, 2011 it was about the cloud, everybody wanted to talk about it.
[Look at “Big Data” Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting, by Francis X. Diebold, University of Pennsylvania and NEBR, July 2000]

What does ‘big data’ mean?
Here’s the thing, we look at it as a new way to make money from information, we’re all familiar with BI, with queries, spreadsheets. We found this new business model, we found people using information to make money by building predictive models. Crystal balls if you will.
It’s a very different style of IT, most IT is about saving money, reducing costs. Big data and big data analytics is about making money.

What’s the difference between data warehouse and big data analytics?
We all know data warehouse. Typically we’re using small amount of information. It’s very clean, very standardized and you’re asking about history. Big data is many data sources, some of them clean, some of them dirty. The goal is to build a predictive model about the future. Use many forms of uncorrelated information to build models and to use these models to predict the future. Guys who are good at big data never came from the BI world, they don’t understand big data.

Why EMC never entered into tape?
We saw tape as a flat, declining market. For the last ten to fifteen years tape market has been declining. We worked with tape, we interoperate with tape but again our investment strategy is to invest in growth market so -for example – we were very early in flash, in virtualization, in security, in big data analytics. It’s a nice business. If I remember well StorageTek went to Sun, it didn’t work out, some went to Oracle, that didn’t work out. We tend to invest in growing, not shrinking market.

These past years, we didn’t see EMC inventing any disruptive technology like scale-out NAS or de-dupe being your more successful technologies in term of growth, but you’re just getting them through acquisition (Isilon, Data Domain, Avamar). Is your R&D only updating current hardware and software?
Right now we track close to four hundreds startup companies, so we’re working on new technologies. There is no way that we as EMC can be smarter than four hundreds start-up companies. We’re very comfortable with seeing a good idea, buying it and then adding it to EMC: Data Domain, Isilon, XtremIO. And at the same time we are doing some of our own engineering. I look at VPLEX as a disruptive technology, cache coherence. Atmos is three, four years old, it was the first commercial scale-out object technology in the industry. I consider that disruptive.
But I’ll agree with you, more disruptive technologies come to us through acquisition than organically. It’s true for lots of big companies. We have our own technology that we do but you can buy good ideas on the marketplace, you buy good people. It’s kind of a mix of both.

Can we imagine an integration of VNXe and Isilon into a single platform?
We will end up with something as NetApp and the market doesn’t like that. When we look at the VNX, it’s very good at being one storage array. it has dual controllers, I need some blocks, I need some files, maybe some snaps and stuff. There is a great mid-market for that. These people don’t get very big though. When people start getting big they want scale-out, they don’t want a product that’s adapted to scale-out, they want a product that’s built for scale-out. You’ll find common features in both. For example the last Isilon release, known as Mavericks, you’ll find some good snaps, good VMware integration, all the stuff you find on the VNXe. But for an Isilon I need five or six nodes and an Isilon for it to work right.

Yes but these nodes could be VNX hardware.
Hardware is commodity, and I think we have to separate the hardware discussion from the software discussion. The hardware almost looks the same, Intel chips, etc. When you look at what’s NetApp doing with their last OnTap 8.1.1, it’s not a good scale-out system. We go to head-to-head in competition and the customers put the 8.1.1 next to Isilon and they want Isilon. Our belief is that when you get to things like scale-out or big data, you need an architecture that’s built for it. It’s very hard to add-it on.

What will be the next storage killing application?
It’s going to be big data analytics.

When will you have a dedicated all-flash array?
We announced our XtremIO acquisition last year. We demonstrated it at VMworld and EMC World. It’s an all-flash design. Native de-dupe, scale-out architecture, all flash. It fits very precise parts of the market.

Do you sell it?
No, right now we’re in what’s called ‘early access’. Test with the customers, make sure it works right. You’ll probably see it in the first half of 2013 as a general product. It’s got a very specific profile. Random IO/s, places where extreme performance is needed and tiering won’t work.  a data set where everything has to run fast.

Will it be integrated as a cache with several tiers behind?
Nope, pure flash, no need for tiering. And because we have the latest de-dupe, the cost are pretty good.

Will it be possible to connect disk arrays to this platform?
No. Isilon does scale-out for files. We need a scale-out block device for flash. That’s where XtremIO fits. Now within flash we have tiers, MLC, SLC. So you get the tiering in the flash world but there’s no disk arrays.

What’s the percentage of your storage sales in virtualization environment only?
The challenge is that people are doing virtualization but they’re also have physical stuff. They bought it for VMware but they still have these old smart applications they put on the array. The percentage of our customers using virtualization is I guess over 80%. With Solaris and AIX virtualization it’s probably at 98%. VMware, HyperV and Zen, over 80%.

You are not a big actor in the growing sector of HPC. Will you invest in this market?
We’re starting, we are investing in this market, we see an opportunity to bring flash technology to HPC.

With the VNX or Symmetrix line?
Right now we’re assembling things out of a VNX portfolio because it’s closer to what HPC needs. But we have you know eight different boards, six different stacks, a lot of pieces.
Our current HPC solution is basically a flash-cache plus a VNX with a lot of flash in it. It’s very good at check pointing.

And do you offer the Lustre platform?
Yeah. We use mostly 10GbE but we’re starting to do more work with Infiniband. Storage are becoming servers and I think in the next two years you’ll see far more discussion about Infiniband not as a storage connect but as a memory to memory connect.

Several competitors are doing better than EMC in backup software (CommVault, Symantec, Veeam, etc.) in term of growth, even if you invest in some companies (Dantz, Legato) in this sector in the past. What’s the problem?
We see it as a backup market. Not as a backup software market. Let’s take Data Domain: is that software or hardware? Well if you look at the hardware it’s servers.

Yes but you don’t have a product like CommVault Simpana.
Avamar is doing quite nicely, Legato hangs in there, it’s not taking the market. We tend to look the market as the data protection market hardware to software. If you want to cut it into software we do all right with our backup software products. But what our customers tell us is that they want a backup solution. They want the services, the platform, the consulting, they want all of that. So we tend to look as the market a little bit differently.

What’s your current acquisition strategy?
We have publicly announced that we’re very interested in investing in next-generation security. In the storage world we’re pretty good, there’s no space in storage where we think we’re underexpose. There’s a couple little pieces that are interesting but if you look at our storage portfolio we got two, three flavors of blocks, two flavors of files, object, three management stacks, we got data protection.

You lost market share vs. NetApp for last known fiscal quarter (storage sales down 1.4% sequentially for EMC, up 2% for NetApp). What’s your explanation?
We’re in a lot of different markets, high-end enterprise where they’re not, consumers with Iomega …

Yes but they are growing faster in storage sectors than you are.
On the product side, NetApp growth is flat. I think we’re showing pretty good growth. But keep in mind we have many storage segments. Some are going quite fast like scale-out NAS, growing incredibly fast. One of the opportunities when you have a portfolio is that some things are hot some things are not.

What’s your opinion on the more recent acquisition of Cache IQ by NetApp?
NetApp is under pressure to expand their market, if you go to Wall Street they’ll ask “Where the growth is gonna come?“.
Interesting acquisition, very few NetApp acquisition have worked out
well. But the question for me in on the NetApp side, less about the
technology.

Why did you sell the majority of ownership of Iomega to Chinese Lenovo?
We’re very interested in the Chinese market. And you have to partner your way into the Chinese market. Lenovo has a strategy to grow from the bottom up into the storage business. We saw it as a two-fold. One: it’s a great way to partner our way to the Chinese market. And second, most of the consumer electronics comes from China. Strategic play but also a business Lenovo wants to invest in, getting better into the Iomega range.

Is EMC going to continue selling Iomega products?
The higher-end. They also do consumer stuff, we’re not so interested in that. But for example they do a very nice single controller.

What’s your reaction if I tell you that the best quality of EMC CEO Joe Tucci is to recruit around him at high price excellent executives?
Joe has done a amazing job in building an executive team. I work with all these guys, they are amazing. It’s like a dream team. Do you want a cheap team or do you want a good team? And they work together as a team. I get to work with some of the best executive team in the industry. I don’t think there is such a thing as cheap leadership, we’re in a very dynamic part of the industry, very competitive and changing very fast. This is not a stable, predictable industry. And we’re not just storage and a lot of our executives came from other company and we’re glad to have them. Certain vendors out there are not doing so well.

What’s your bet concerning the successor of Tucci as CEO?
Anyway we win, there are so many good leaders there that I think our stockholders, our consumers, our employees win for any of these executives staff.
No bet. Do I have my own opinion? Yes. Does it matters? No.
We’ve got six or seven guys here, any one of them could be the next guy and we’d be good. Dave Goulden, Pat Gelsinger, Howard Elias, Jeremy Burton, Paul Maritz, every one could be the next guy.

You were at EMC when Moshe Yanai, Mr. Symmetrix, was there? Why did he quit as he appears to be later the founder of remarkable start-ups in storage technology?
EMC was growing from a single product company to a multiple product company. Some people are comfortable with that, some people aren’t. As soon as they were multiple horses, Yanai was not so happy. He didn’t like any of the acquisition but we had a situation where we, as a company, had to buy a portfolio. We couldn’t be a single product company anymore. He always liked SRDF that was his baby so it’s no surprise he’s involved with Axxana.

What are more precisely your relation with Axxana?
We have a program called EMC Select where we will sell on the same purchase order third-party products. We don’t support them, we don’t engineer them, but in creating a solution with EMC product and non-EMC product, like tape. It’s a nice value add on top of SRDF with little extra protection.

Full Interview

EMC Hollis (23,5MB)