Since the first EMC World in 2010, EMC has made many acquisitions to help bolster its offerings to its customers. This includes moving into what they call the third platform, which includes the cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data.

EMC has also introduced the Federation, a conglomeration of companies including Pivotal, RSA, VMware, and EMC itself, that seek to provide solutions and software for their customers. To kick off this year’s EMC World 2014 conference in Las Vegas, theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down and discussed some of EMC’s big announcements and upcoming plans.

Cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data

Where the tagline for theCUBE at the first EMC World in 2010 was “The journey to the private cloud starts here,” EMC began putting out a clear message about how it wanted to be a part of the cloud and Big Data. Initially, EMC didn’t have a lot of products to address this budding sector, but since that first conference, it has built its brand, making numerous acquisitions, most notably Pivotal, XtremIO, and most recently DSSD.

Looking at EMC now, it is an entirely different company, taking a leadership role in the development of flash and the cloud.

EMC innovation

When asked how EMC had been able to innovate, Vellante replied that one of the areas EMC had innovated was in the development of ViPR, a lightweight, software-defined storage solution that makes managing data automatic and simple. Whether or not ViPR is the “future” remains to be seen, however. Some wonder if it is more of a way to placate customers who are frustrated with the sheer number of silos by bringing all of those silos together. Or, is it a combination of providing a solution and allaying those frustrations?

Another area that EMC has innovated is in the development of Elastic Cloud Storage, a private cloud alternative that can provide an economical alternative to companies who would otherwise use public cloud storage as opposed to a private server.

According to Vellante, “it is all about economics. The economics of services are changing with the cloud. Services used to have diseconomies of scale. In other words, as you increase the volume, your marginal economics got worse. Cloud services are changing that.”

• EMC and SAP

Furrier and Vellante also discussed Oracle and EMC’s collaboration with SAP in an attempt to go up against competitors, though it’s more of a friendly rivalry. This is because EMC and SAP are closely tied with Oracle, with EMC spending $1 million a year sponsoring Oracle OpenWorld or SAP shops running SAP on Oracle. Their solution for Oracle has been SAP HANA, though the jury remains out on whether HANA is the answer to Oracle that EMC and SAP had hoped.

EMC in the coming year

When asked about EMC’s plans for the coming year, Vellante responded, “EMC has put forth some very aggressive financial targets. I think it’s going to hit those targets. And the way it hits them is it brings all its customers and partners into EMC world and it starts laying out its roadmap for the year, its innovations, and getting a sales plan essentially locked and loaded for the year.”