TheCUBE is attending its fourth EMC World this week to bring you the latest news and analysis from the storage vendor’s annual three-day event in Las Vegas. SiliconANGLE founding CEO John Furrier and Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante wrapped up a long day of broadcasting yesterday with a recap on the main highlights of Day 1, including the top keynotes and the debut of a new software-led storage platform.

Furrier gives credit to Jeremy Burton, EMC’s EVP of Product Operations and Marketing, for putting together the company’s strong sales message. Vellante agrees and throws in his own impression of the event: he praises the customer-led demo of the software and notes that the conference has doubled in popularity since 2010.

Furrier says that EMC is looking to strengthen its hold over the storage market by introducing AWS-like capabilities to the enterprise, an objective that the firm hopes to reach with ViPR, its newly announced storage management platform. The solution streamlines infrastructure administration by separating the data and management layers, functionality that Vellante predicted several years ago.

EMC touts that ViPR can run on commodity hardware from competing vendors, but Vellante stresses that the platform is not as open as the vendor would have you think. He explains that EMC’s end game is to become the Cisco of storage, and adds that only a few players will come out ahead in the race to the software led data center.

Later in the discussion, Furrier notes that EMC is beefing up its flash portfolio. This comes as no surprise for Vellante, who estimates that solid-state memory will disrupt the way apps are designed over the course of the next 10 years.

For the full day’s recap, check out the video embedded below.