Yahoo Finance

New applications though they are going to be built I think very differently, they are going to use a different application platform, they are going to use a different data platform and that then is going to drag a different set of infrastructure. So, in the past, we, EMC, typically have gotten involved from an infrastructure perspective, but I think increasingly and as I said pivotal been the tip of the arrow here has really pulled it into these business conversations, where we really see what is driving the change, not just in the datacenter, but in the storage environment as well.

Now, specifically, drilling down the level into the product strategy for a second, we have never believed that one storage product was going to solve all used cases. We have been fairly loud and proud about having a best of breed strategy for storage and expect that to continue. If I look at some of the more disruptive trends within storage, I mean clearly flash we think is going to be disruptive in many transactional or latency-sensitive used cases. We really start to adopt flash in 2008 within our hybrid arrays. We couple of years ago went and acquired XtremIO, which is all flash array. And we start to see VDI and again latency sensitive database workloads, that’s starting to play very, very well. And then most recently and probably at least known to many, we acquired a small company called DSSD that really is playing in the world of service side PCIe flash.

And we haven’t really disclosed the whole lot of detail around that presence, but I think when we do it’s going to be fairly shocking, there is just a fantastic team working on that. And so as much as we think this flash thing is going to have a big impact, the smart guys IDC tell us that through 2017 approximately 3% of the data are in the enterprise is going to be flash, which means that 97% is going to be sitting on hard drives technology. I don’t know extreme that kind of multi-hundred petabytes and exabytes scale. We think a lot of those display systems are going to run against commodity storage hardware, why I mean think about it if you got an exabyte of data if you can save $0.10 a gigabyte that’s $100 million you save right there. So commodity drives that kind of scale do make a difference.

And we think a lot of the new applications the new web scale applications that are going to be build, the way they are going to be architected is different and they are going to be able to be more easily deployed on that kind of an infrastructure. Because we didn’t think of that new architecture for storage should be managed through the silo and the same way is the mainframe is really managed with the silo within IT, we really had this kind of vision that the existing storage of state wouldn’t it be nice if you could manage that right along the side this new architecture that’s going to run a lot of the new applications. And that really was the genesis of the ViPR project.

And so ViPR really is going to allow you manage your existing storage of state and provision it in a very, very similar way to the new storage of state potentially running on commodity storage. And so we think it’s going to provide a great bridge between the world of today and the world of tomorrow. Now one of the unique things about ViPR is not just that it is a control plane and a management of a (blocking) layer, it’s also a new storage system, it’s left 20 years, it’s been about blocks and files in the world of storage. We think the next 20 years is going to be increasingly about things like object storage and HDFS storage.

And so ViPR actually provides a new object and HDFS storage system that can be run against commodity hardware. ViPR is also the thing that is going to allow us to plug very, very seamlessly into the VMware software defined datacenter. So VMware one of our federation companies today you can manage all of ViPR from the VMware environment. So if you are a VM app and you want to use VSAN and you want use vCAC, you wand use a VCL, you can access everything that is in ViPR today right through the VMware environment.

By the way you can also do it through the OpenStack tools as well but that type degree of integration with the VMware software defined datacenters is that today. And we think that’s going to be the basis for what a private cloud environments. We also think it’s going to be the basis for a lot of public cloud environments including vCHS which is really the – a federation level service provider entity that ourselves and VMware apposite on in order to provide this public cloud services to folks who want to move workloads off premise.

And finally, once you got that cloud based infrastructure I will kind of finish where I started, people are going to want to build a new set of applications and that really is where Pivotal comes in. So Pivotal where the people are building an application and deploying is in cloud foundry I think cloud foundry is one of the most strategic assets that we have in the portfolio or whether they are looking for help on building these next generation applications that was really the rationale between the acquisition of Pivotal Labs. So when you think of Pivotal is helping people build applications on a new platform, deploying them to cloud environment, hey we would love it vCHS, VMware EMC and then really staring vast quantities of data on the new storage architecture that we think we can provide from within EMC. So I hope well that gives you a flavor of how the various pieces of the federation hang together. And with that I will turn it back.

Scott Craig - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Yes. It’s great. Let me kick off with a few questions to start with when I am out meeting investors obviously the feedback on the product portfolio is generally quite positive. And yet I am trying to connect that with the fact that the storage growth just hasn’t been there from a revenue perspective and there is obviously a bunch of different buckets you have got the high end and the medium end, then you have got the new initiatives emerging markets, well, whatever you want to call it. And so I think people are struggling with why we are not seeing more growth even out of that core storage if you want to call that. So, I guess they are very vocal at EMC World this year more so than in the past that some of the issues that the industry is sort of wrestling with right now. So, maybe take us through your thought process on what we are seeing from a near-term perspective and how we reinvigorate the revenue growth back in the company and hopefully you get the stock price going?

Jeremy Burton

Yes. It’s a combination of cyclical and secular type of issues. I mean, I think on the cyclical side of things, we have this big spending boom after the recession, where I think there was a lot of pent-up demand. I think since then the certain industries that have just never returned to their former spending levels, look I would say financial services is one and the federal government is another. And those are two pretty big sectors. I would also say that even outside of those two industries, because there has been somewhat of an uncertain environment with the economy, we have seen kind of how it evidenced that folks are sweating their assets more and that’s not just using more aggressively using data reduction technology compression dedupe and so on. It is also the deferring tech refreshes that used to be religiously that folks would refresh their infrastructure after three-year time horizon. We started to see that stretch out to four years, five years. So, people are sweating their assets. At the same time and I think you guys would probably appreciate this as investors in the storage or infrastructure business in general, there is a lot of noise.

I talked to flash earlier, that’s a point of thought I think for a lot of folks in IT infrastructure. The software defined and commodity storage thing, well what role is that going to play, what workloads can I run, is that a viable strategy? Should I start forming relationships with an ODM in China to go buy my own drives, converged infrastructure, should they even bother buying storage at all? Should I go straight to server storage network and buy it as one converged block or should I go public cloud? And I think we don’t see at least evidence in the enterprise, which is really our core market of unmatched people moving to go deploy interest applications in public clouds, but the fact that it’s out there is absolutely a point of consternation and I think is causing people to pause. They want to make sure that if they are going to embark on a strategy for the next X number of years that they are not going to go down a dead end. And so the pause is twofold. I think one has been economic or macro related. And I think at some point we know in the storage business that people have to buy at some points. The other one that I think is playing at the same time is this kind of consternation over the secular trends and folks really trying to understand what is the right way forward and what is viable at this time.

Scott Craig - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Okay. And certainly to follow-on to that though when I am out marketing and talking about your stock and business, one pushback I get is on the ramp that we have going for the back part of the year here from a revenue perspective. And so take us through that and does this pause that we are going through right now is it starting to come to an end if they have been slating their assets too long, etcetera, etcetera, because again I am getting some pushback on that revenue ramp as I am sure you guys are as well, so?

Jeremy Burton

Yes, two things. And I would separate the two. I mean, Q1, we were pretty happy with the product bookings. So, they were very much in line with what we had hoped to hit the – so, for the year we are actually feeling like everything is in line, nothing moderate. We also in the back half of the year have got some pretty good product refreshes coming. I think everybody is probably the worst cap scenario is going to be a refresh of the VMAX. That always gives us a path. I see no reason why it won’t this time around, but it’s not just the VMAX. We also are right in the middle of a good cycle with the VNX. The backup products continue to do well. Isilon, we have got a refresh coming there. That continues to do well. And XtremIO, we are very bullish on XtremIO. I think that is going to make a meaningful contribution. So, as much as revenue in Q1 was certainly well below what we expected to be for the year, we think there is enough indications in the bookings rate than also in the products portfolio coming down the line that would get us back for the year.

Scott Craig - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Okay. And then in the context you guys made a change to your business back relating to quarter ordering and steps like that, some people are still a little bit confused as to that as why now and sort of why at all, so maybe just go through that and how that fits into some of the guidance for 2014?

Jeremy Burton - Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing

Yes, it’s good question. I mean it’s one of those things that I am sure internally focus that we will be saying pretty soon why didn’t we do this five years ago. The real goal is of changing our end of quarter practices was to try and take some of the pressure off of the factory. And actually some of the pressure of the deals at the end of the quarter and never is that more a Q1 than in Q4 at the end of the fiscal year. And you never wanted to do natural acts at the end of the quarter and our sense look if during the year we can build bigger backlog then we can better manage the business at the end of the quarter and also at the end of the fiscal year. And we wanted to give some indication of what impact that was going to be when we did Q4 earnings because obviously that was first time that we are going to be introducing the change. And I think we would have liked to have probably build a bit more backlog, but this is not an exact science, if at the end of quarter you get a bunch of software ELAs or hardware orders that are easy to fulfill, you are going to fulfill them. The revenue is anything was a little bit higher than we expected, backlog a little bit less, but we expect that during the course of this year, we will continue to build the backlog. And again the big hope there is it takes the pressure of the factory and of the business at the 11th Hour.

Scott Craig - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Okay, that’s one more and then open it up. Flash, you mentioned is the big opportunity and XtremIO has started out very well, what’s been the key selling point on XtremIO versus some of the other competitors that have already been out there for maybe a little bit longer and what’s been the customer feedback on that so far because you could argue you are probably the number one player in the market there recently right?

Jeremy Burton - Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing

Yes. We would argue definitely I mean look XtremIO we took a little bit longer to get out the door than I think most would have hoped. But there is a big difference between it’s been a like XtremIO was the startup and it’s been EMC. There is a certain expectation of quality and field service that we have got to really hold ourselves to and so we held on the product a little bit longer. And we felt back when we made the acquisition XtremIO of the available players at that time had the best architecture. And by that it’s a scale out architecture. We shared memory between nodes in the cluster which means that when data comes in we can do everything in memory. So if we have to dedupe, if we have to compress, if we have to perform any kind of action we can do that in line in memory at the time the data comes in.

Most of the other guys have a dual controller architecture. They can’t process things in line. They write them to the flash and say okay I will come back to that later. Now that’s fine when the array is not busy, because you can get back to it immediately and it appears as if it is in line. It’s kind of like if I said, hey can you get me a cup of coffee or if you got nothing to do you can process online go get me a cup of coffee. But if 10 people asked you, you put my cup down until I will get back to you. And if people could keep coming to you saying, hi get me a cup, get me a cup, you will never get back to my cup of coffee. And so it’s not processed in line and so then what happens well if that’s deduplication the data store coming in you have got to write it to the flash, but now you are writing non-deduplicated data.

And you get this massive contention for resources which results in many of these old flash arrays going into where I can only describe as a pathological state. I mean they go – latencies go from like a millisecond to like 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds. And so our value proposition is very, very simple. When data comes in we process it and we do it in line and we do that for all data. And so whether the array is empty or full, whether it’s busy or idle, we will always deliver that millisecond signal a second latency. But that is not the case with almost every other old flash arrays.

And one of the reasons why we are so bullish on XtremIO now it starts to hit its stride. There is a series of very simple benchmarks we could run against the competition. We fill the array up, we delayed a few things, we have run at 80% and weird things happened. So, we are increasingly bullish on our win rates and we don’t have or have not had all the data services of some of the others out there, but it’s relatively easy to put data services on top of our architecture. What is really hard is to go re-architect your product to deliver that consistent performance. So, yes, we are very, very bullish on XtremIO, had a great start. And I think it’s just going to get better from here and that is another one of those products that we have a refresh coming a little bit later this year.

The one that we said least about is the DSSD. We think all-flash arrays is a big business there, but if you look at the world of in-memory databases, SAP HANA for example and also a lot of the high end big data analytics. We think there is a huge opportunity there. So, think of something which is server side flash. It’s a shared storage. It’s connected into every server in the rack through multi-lane PCIe connections and yes, something which is really going to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in latency over the very best of flash array. And that is what we saw in the team and what they have built. And sometime next year, we will be bringing that out as well. So, we don’t think it’s just a hybrid array play or just an all-flash array play. We think it’s also a server side flash play and which of those that you are going to use is going to depend on what you are trying to do. And in the same way, they are started saying look we have never believed that one size fits all in the world of disc. We don’t believe one size is going to fit all in the world of flash.

Scott Craig - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Let’s open it up for questions from out here in the audience.

Earnings Call Part 2:

• Q&A with EMC Corporation CEO