TheCube hosts John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Winston Edmonds wrapped up Day 2 EMC World 2013 by sharing their perspectives on the latest news from the Las Vegas conference.

Vellante kicks off the session by emphasizing the correlation between the software-defined trend and Big Data. He views Pivotal Labs, a joint venture between EMC and VMware that focuses on creating the core platform for high velocity Big Data apps, as the former company’s attempt to become the Red Hat of Hadoop.

Data-driven security and the decoupling of software and storage infrastructure are also two top priorities for EMC, Furrier notes. He says that the goal behind the company’s software-defined storage push is to deliver a scale-out, open storage platform that supports multivendor environments.

The way Vellante sees it, enterprise vendors have to maintain a degree of lock-in to generate revenue, and EMC is no exception. The ViPR platform can run on competing solutions, he admits, but it leverages a controller-based architecture that is hardly open.
Edmonds enters the fray and brings up his recent interview with Bill Schmarzo, EMC’s “Dean of Big Data.” The executive told him about the progress the industry has made in the last 4-5 months and discussed the benefits of analytics for both consumer-facing companies and B2B vendors.

The last subject that the panel tackles is NetApp’s reaction to the buzz surrounding EMC World. A representative of the company stated that ONTAP, its flagship storage operating system, has featured Big Data capabilities long before ViPR made its debut. Vellante agrees, but he says that EMC packaged its offering more “crisply” than its competitor. He adds that the firm’s ability to compete on the long run will depend on its ONTAP scale-out clustering initiative.

See the entire segment below: