“Big data is where cloud was three years ago in the market,” says EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton in an interview from EMCWorld 2012 on the SiliconAngle Cube (see a slideshow here).  “So there will be confusion, with new technologies brought to market and more ideas appearing over the next three years. But when things begin to become more clear, we need EMC to be positioned as a leader in big data.

“As you grow into a large company, you can get trapped into only selling what’s on the truck and positioning your company to sell what you have today,” he says. “To be a leader you have to see where the technology and markets are going and focus on where you will need to be to establish yourself as a leader.”

Part of that is messaging, but marketing without substance is hollow. “The Greenplum acquisition gave us that substance,” he says. And by allowing it to run as a separate operation, EMC avoids smothering it.

That strategy has paid dividends for EMC with a series of acquisitions including Data Domain and Isolon as well as Greenplum. “We tend to buy these smallish companies and use our cash to accelerate their growth while letting them run as separate units.”

The next big step for EMC in positioning itself as a big data leader, he said, is to establish clear business use cases for big data. “To b a leader you need to show those use cases and the technology and how to apply the technology to the use cases.”

Real time will be an important step for big data technology. It does little good if the personalized message to the customer arrives five minutes after that customer has left the store.

However, he said, “you always need friends. For instance Cisco is a friend, and VDI is the embodiment of that.” VDI also benefited from being a separate organization, he said. These ventures can be crushed in a large company as different groups step in and try to help. VDI struggled at the start, but now it has taken off and proven to be a stroke of genius, with a near-$1 billion run rate in the last 18 months.

As EMC moves into real-time big data, it can work with VMware, which has some nice technology such as Gemfire that can compliment Greenplum.

VCE also gives EMC an opportunity to open the door to making SAP another friend. “If we can go to SAP and say VCE will give them less complexity and lower total cost, that is a big deal, because that is what they struggle with,” he says.

And HANA and other SAP technology works well in the big data space, even through SAP itself does not yet seem aware of big data yet. In fact, SiliconAngle CEO and Cube Co-Host John Furrier said that when he asked SAP Co-CEO Jim Snabe about it, he said, “Big data is hype.”

Burton says that comes from the more conservative nature of SAP’s market. “SAP is very good at talking business value to business executives. While we are more of a scrappy technology company. Big data is a big technology concept, which is why I think we are there a little earlier.” But SAP will get there.

“We are very excited about where big data’s going, and converged infrastructure with Cisco and VMware will only get bigger and bigger,” he said. “And we’re not through with flash yet. But if you want to see what’s coming in the enterprise, look at what’s happening in consumer. Two-thirds of all objects in Amazon S3 come from Dropbox. That is what will drive us going forward.”