This is a presentation delivered by Major General (ret'd) John Custer III of EMC, delivered at the RUSI Defence Information Superiority Conference 2013
http://www.rusi.org/events/past/ref:E5150473580C0C/
We think that in this new world everybody is driving toward a stack. If you look at what we mean by stack, well it’s everything from the applications right through the data base and application server down at the service storage network. IBM and Oracle have got one view that they’re going to provide all the software and hardware for that stack. Microsoft—clearly it’s Microsoft software, but running on x86 hardware.
We have a slightly different view here at EMC. We have a stack too by the way but we do not believe that customers in the new world want the lock-in problems of the old world. They want to stack but they also want choice, and so we’ve organized our company around these natural seams in the infrastructure. EMC provided the information infrastructure, VMware providing the software based data center infrastructure, and Pivotal providing the platform for the new world. And this is all underpinned by our RSA organization, really providing that foundation of trust. So we intend in the new world to provide a stack, but we also intend to provide a stack that offers the customer choice, and we think this is what is going to move EMC effectively into this new world of the third platform. Thank you very much.
And it’s going to access massive quantities of data. What do we mean by big data? Well data within your enterprise, data within your partners, location data, credit data, shipping data, all manner of information that your partners may hold, and also information that’s publically available out on the internet. It’s also fast data, data coming off these internet based devices that drive toward the application in streams. They need to be reasoned about in real time, so telemetry data from an aircraft engine would be one example.
This is exactly why we created the Pivotal initiative and now we’re the Pivotal company. It’s the best technology from both EMC and VMware and it really delivers a platform for building these next generation big and fast data applications. It is also cloud independent. It would be great if everybody runs on top of an EMC/VMware private cloud but we’re realistic to know that some of these apps are going to be deployed at service providers, they’re also going to be deployed out at the web-scale public cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.