Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL) Q2 2011 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the EMC Second Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would like to introduce your host, Mr. Tony Takazawa, VP, Global Investor Relations of EMC. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to EMC's call to discuss our financial results for the second quarter of 2011. Today, we are joined by EMC Chairman and CEO, Joe Tucci; and David Goulden, EMC Executive Vice President and CFO. David will provide a few comments about the results we released this morning, He will highlight some of EMC's activities this quarter and discuss our outlook for 2011. Joe will then spend some time discussing his view of what is happening in the market, EMC's execution of the strategy and how EMC is positioned to help customers on a journey to the cloud and in their efforts to handle the growth of Big Data. After the prepared remarks, we will then open up the lines to take your questions. I would like to point out that we will be referring to non-GAAP numbers in today's presentation unless otherwise indicated. The reconciliation of our non-GAAP comments to our GAAP results can be found in the disclosure today, in our press release, supplemental schedules and the slides that accompany our presentation. I would also like to point out that we are using a new basis of presentation this quarter and while it takes a bit of a different format than the previous schedules, I would like to assure you that all the reconciliation information is still available or calculable for your analysis purposes. All these are available for download within the Investor Relations section of emc.com. As always, we have provided detailed financial tables in our news release and on our corporate website. These schedules include a lot of financial information, so we do encourage you to take a look at them. The call this morning will contain forward-looking statements. And information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ can be found in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. And lastly, I will note that an archive of today's presentation will be available following the call. With that, it's now my pleasure to introduce David Goulden. David?

Thanks, Tony. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to report another quarter of record results. We achieved record second quarter revenues of $4.85 billion, up 20% from last year, as revenue growth improved from Q1 across all of our reporting segments. We achieved record Q2 non-GAAP EPS of $0.35, up 25% from Q2 of last year. And we continue to improve both non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP operating margin, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. These results are further evidence that our strategy is on target, and we continue to execute on our triple play. We're gaining market share, investing for the future and improving profitability. Our unwavering focus on providing customers with the right technology to transform their IT and get the most from their data is resonating with our customers and winning us new ones. We have innovated and invested to stay in front of these needs and continue to do so day in and day out. It is this focus on innovation that has earned us our market-leading position, which continues to get stronger. There is no other company in IT with our combination of best-of-breed technology for both the virtualization and infrastructure layers that enable cloud computing and for unlocking the value contained within Big Data that surround us. Given that we're still close to the beginning than at the end of this fundamental shift to cloud computing, we continue to invest and innovate in the right areas to ensure we take full advantage of the massive opportunity that lies ahead. Now let's take a closer look at how these opportunities are driving the financial results across our various businesses, starting with Information Storage. Growth in our Information Storage revenue was strong, up 19% to $3.6 billion. Within Information Storage, we saw the year-on-year growth rate changes we expected from the high-end and from the mid-tier, as our high-end product growth moderates to 15% while our mid-tier product growth accelerated to 27%. This acceleration was driven by the strong results from our new VNX Family. We're clearly gaining share across our portfolio for traditional data center workloads, for cloud deployments and for Big Data workloads as well. As we continue to seek out the most efficient and intelligent ways to handle these massive volumes of data, customers of all sizes and across all industries look to us for the best solutions for their unique IT storage requirements. In the high end, it is our unique suitability for emerging needs that is driving our share gains. While customers continue to choose VMAX because its capabilities for mission-critical uses in traditional data center implementations, they're increasingly selecting VMAX for new use cases as well. VMAX's enterprise class reliability, availability and serviceability appeal to service provider customers who're implementing VMAX to cloud services where its service levels are mission critical. VMAX's tiered storage capabilities, leveraged by fully automated tiering software, offer a total cost of ownership that competes with and is displacing incumbent Tier 2 vendors. VMAX is also finding its way to new customers through VPLEX. VPLEX's ability to full storage resources from multiple data centers is a value proposition competitors cannot match and which opens doors for additional EMC solutions. As we continue to innovate, our solutions remain leading edge, meeting the emerging requirements of a growing number of customers. This was demonstrated with the announcement of VMAXe last week. VMAXe packages enterprise-class functionality into a smaller and simpler array that comes preloaded, preconfigured and virtually provisioned for rapid deployments. Designed for organizations with limited storage expertise and IT resources, VMAXe extends the value proposition of VMAX to customers across the globe. This was the case with Heritage Auctions, the third largest auction house in the world. Heritage Auctions knew it needed something more than a dual-control architecture to achieve the highest levels of availability possible for its online customers. But it also wants a system that's easy to use and would take up as little footprint in the data center as possible. The 1.3 petabytes of active storage VMAXe offered was most sufficient for its needs. And FAST VP would allow them to operate this array at a lower total cost of ownership that is being offered by the competitor, in this case, HP 3PAR. In short, Heritage Auctions selected EMC because VMAXe allowed it to continue its migration to high performance, fully virtualized environments within its budget constraints and to be up and running in just a few hours. As this example illustrates, the ability to tier storage automatically with FAST software is a key feature that's very popular with customers. The adoption of tiering technologies continues to ramp as we shift more Flash capacity in VMAX in the first half of 2011 than in all of 2010 and as the penetration rate of FAST on new systems continues to steadily increase. Of VMAX systems that shipped with FAST in Q2, we're seeing Flash and SATA go out with almost 90% of these, indicating how important automated tiering is to customers. Pulling the right data in the right place at the right time maximize the efficiency of their systems and maximize the return of their storage investments. Looking across our broad portfolio in the mid-tier, we benefited from growth in each of our mid-tier product groups, from the VNX line, backup recovery systems and our Big Data storage technologies. Starting with the VNX, which just completed its first full quarter availability, we are pleased of our progress here. VNX is ramping according to plan, with VNX now accounting for approximately 2/3 of the sales of our unified storage products, which include the VNX and the VNXe, Celerra and CLARiiON. Almost half of VNX systems sold in Q2 shipped with NAS on block protocols, highlighting the value customers get from its unified architecture and from the flexibility it brings to these environments. Tiering is as much of a value preposition on VNX as it is in VMAX. As the penetration rates of FAST on our unified products continues to grow, Flash capacity on our unified storage products grew 39% from Q1 and in the first half of this year exceeded Flash ships on unified products to all of 2010. VNX is the only product that offers storage efficiency to automated tiering on a unified architecture, enabling customers to get the maximum value from their storage investments. We win in competitive situations time and again because we're able to offer what customers want. And while what we want differs from customer to customer, we're able to address all of the high-priority requirements as we saw with our Q2 wins. It was the flexibility of VNX's unified block and file capabilities that won a deal at a U.K. -based media company. It was the ability to tier with FAST on VNX that won a deal at a global agribusiness. And it was VNX's superior support of VDI rollouts within a Vblock that won us a deal at a state government agency in Missouri. The VNXe is off to a very strong start and is successfully expanding our penetration into the SMB and commercial segments of the market, as over 600 of our VNXe customers in Q2 were new to EMC. The channels that are so key to success here continue to grow in numbers and productivity. We recognize how important channels are to the success of VNX and VNXe. With partner recruitment well underway, we've added over 1,000 more partners in the quarter, and we're focusing our effort on getting our new partners ramped, trained and selling volume. We're making excellent progress here as the non-Dell channel revenue grew over 40% year-on-year for our unified storage products. Performance in our Backup and Recovery Systems business continues to be strong. After 8 quarters as part of EMC, Data Domain continues to benefit from the EMC effects and its popularity has pushed our other backup technologies into the forefront, helping to drive growth in Avamar and Networker in Q2. The combination of a large customer base with the best-of-breed backup technology portfolio in the industry is serving us well. Despite others trying to make play in this space, our wins are steady and frequent as we increasingly move outside our customer base. Now turning to our solutions being specifically developed to handle Big Data, including Isilon, Atmos and EMC Greenplum. As you know, the opportunity in Big Data is enormous. From social media to the medical field to manufacturing, Big Data files are everywhere. We're seizing the moment to help shape how the industry makes sense of this and does so efficiently. Starting with our scale-out NAS solution, Isilon is showing all the hallmarks of the EMC effects, combined with leading technology, with product revenue more than doubling year-on-year and our pipeline expanding. While Isilon strengths was driven in large part by continued strong demand from its traditional customer verticals like media and life sciences, Isilon is expanding into new segments as well like manufacturing. We're seeing these opportunities for several reasons: First is the maturity of Isilon's offering. In its sixth generation, Isilon is established, trusted and ready for use in enterprise-class applications. Second, EMC leveraging these other verticals is bringing Isilon into deals they might not have seen before, and those deals close faster. Third, enterprises now simply have more file-based data than before, and they're seeking the most efficient ways to storage. And finally, as we announced a few weeks ago, with the latest spec results, Isilon offers the world's fastest file system and is increasingly the technology of choice for any customer looking for a best-of-breed scale-out NAS solution. In short, Isilon solution is the market leader in Big Data storage because of its ability to scale performance on massive capacity requirements and this sets it up well for the EMC effect. In fact, in the example mentioned earlier, Heritage Auctions augmented its VMAXe purchase with an Isilon system for its vast amount of auction-related contents. The ability to meet a variety of need of one customer illustrates the value of such a broad and deep product portfolio. Complementing Isilon in our Big Data portfolio is Atmos for globally distributed cloud environments. Ideal for the geographic distribution of project -based data, the newly announced Atmos 2.0 is 5x faster and 65% more efficient than its predecessor. Storages of the service providers like PEER 1 Hosting Canada and Ninefold in Australia select Atmos as the platform for their self-service cloud storage offerings for several reasons, including the ability to set policies to match service levels and simplify deployments because it's available as a completely integrated software and hardware cloud storage solution. No matter how efficiently Big Data is stored, it is important to prove its worth. Organizations need a reason to store such vast amount of data that might have limited use on a file-by-file basis, but which in aggregate, have the power to present a treasure trove of valuable insights. While the immense value of these data might present is only just begun to be unlocked, EMC Greenplum is at the forefront of what is rapidly becoming a new important field in data science. In our data computing division, we're driving our Big Data agenda faster than the traditional database players and firmly establishing ourselves as thought leaders in this space as we're creating innovative solutions for customers to help them capture all the value they can from their information. In less than a year within EMC, EMC Greenplum has accomplished quite a lot. Last year, we rolled out the Data Computing Appliance, a product that now accounts for over half of our EMC Greenplum revenue. In Q1, we announced a partnership with the analytics company, SAS, and the partnership is hitting all the milestones we set out for it. In May, we announced the availability of the Greenplum Hadoop Enterprise edition available as software or as an appliance, which makes Hadoop enterprise-ready by adding features like realtime data interaction, greater reliability and improved ease-of-use and deployments. Armed with these next-generation data analytics tools, we're helping customers unlock the values trapped in all their information, structured and unstructured alike. In all, our storage product portfolio is second to none. Our differentiated technology across our entire solution set in the high end, mid-tier and backup and in Big Data is driving our ongoing stronger-than-market growth. Since we're still in the early stages of transition to IT-As-A-Service and tackling Big Data, we're comfortable continuing to gain market share. Turning to our RSA Security division. I'm pleased to report that year-on-year revenue growth in Q2 increased to 13% from 8% in Q1. Both our identity management and protection and security management compliance businesses grew in Q2. Importantly, our SecurID business grew as well. Security is one of the most important factors underlying customer confidence as we move to the hybrid cloud, and we believe RSA has a unique portfolio of solutions to help customers secure their cloud environments. In March, RSA suffered a cyber attack, resulting in some information related to RSA SecurID products being compromised. Since the last earnings announcement, increased coverage of the attack on RSA and attack on Lockheed Martin reports of use information taken from RSA and a steady stream of news of cyber attacks unconnected to RSA combined to heighten customer concern about risk in general. These events caused us to take some additional actions related SecurID, and so I want to take a few minutes to walk you through these events, the effect they're having on our business and how we think about RSA's future success. So starting at the beginning. We detected an extremely sophisticated cyber attack on RSA systems in March and determined that some information related to our customer SecurID systems had been extracted. We alerted customers within hours of determining this information could potentially impact their SecurID systems. We published recommended best practices to help customers protect against broader attacks, potentially leveraging the information taken. We reached out to thousands of customers and partners to discuss what we knew and how and why they should implement our recommended best practices. We hardened our IT infrastructure and the processes related to SecurID manufacturing and delivery. Our analysis of the attack led us to believe that likely targets were the defense sector and related government agencies. Our recommended remediation steps for these customers, therefore, also included total replacements. Our analysis also led us to believe that financial gain was not the likely motive and that the information was not as useful in targeting individual consumer accounts. However, on a case-by-case basis, we offered additional remediation such as risk-based authentication to customers protecting web-based consumer financial transactions. The suspicions that our attack was targeting the defense sector was reinforced in June when Lockheed Martin disclosed an unsuccessful attack on its systems had utilized, among other elements, information taken in the attack on RSA. Lockheed Martin had implemented many security measures, including our best practices and successfully detected and thwarted this attack. Subsequently, they accelerated their plans for total replacements to complete their SecurID remediation. I would note the Lockheed Martin incident was not the result of a new attack on RSA, and there was no change in customer risk or recommended remediation steps. What did change was our customer's sensitivity to risk. This was caused by the same news flow around cyber attacks as in addition to press coverage of the attack on Lockheed Martin, there was broad media coverage of attacks on organizations including Google, Sony, Epsilon, the Australian government and PBS. While these attacks were entirely unrelated to RSA, the publicity resulted in many customers risk tolerance going down while the level of awareness and concern went up. Given this heightened sensitivity in early June, we formally expanded our remediation programs to all SecurID customers, offering 2 additional protection options. For customers using SecurID to protect intellectual property and corporate networks, we offered total replacements. These customers represent only about 1/3 of the SecurID installed units that constitute the vast majority of the number of customers. For customers using SecurID to protect web-based consumer financial transactions, we offered additional transaction monitoring. These represents about 2/3 of the SecurID installed units concentrated in a small number of customers. So from the beginning, we focused on our customers' needs. We worked proactively and openly with them immediately after the attack and continue to do so. Importantly, customers continue to tell us that they understand what happened, are comfortable with our communication and appreciate how we're working with them to ensure their SecurID environments are effective. So that's a recap of the events. Now moving to the financial impacts of the remediation efforts. In Q1, we incurred an accrued costs associated with investigating the attack, hardening our systems and working with customers to implement our remediation programs. Given our estimates of the financial impacts of these remediation programs, based upon the information we had at that time, we included the costs within our non-GAAP results. As a result of our decision in June to expand our remediation programs, we recorded a $66 million charge during the second quarter. This charge provides for additional transaction monitoring for all consumer-oriented customers who want it and for total replacements for all corporate customers who want them. Given the increased impact of the expanded remediation programs on our financial results and its nonrecurring nature, we've excluded the charge from our Q2 non-GAAP results. Looking forward, it is likely that RSA growth will remain a bit slower as remediation efforts continue, but we're confident that we're doing the right things to maintain customer loyalty and confidence in SecurID. The best proof of these successful efforts is how customers have reacted, and I'm pleased to say that overall customer feedback is positive and increasingly, customers are showing confidence. Lockheed Martin continues to use SecurID as part of its layered approach to security. We have significant SecurID renewals in Q2 for a wide range of customers including financial services and telecommunications. And we also gained new SecurID customers, including an order of over $900,000 from a European financial institution. These are pretty good indicators we're doing the right things in growing customer trust. This trust is key as customers look to protect themselves from increasingly pervasive and sophisticated cyber attacks. Customers need advanced network analysis, realtime security events and information monitoring. The data loss prevention service is to help them put these technologies to work. RSA has these assets, and you can expect to see us being more proactive with customers who are ready to move beyond remediation to advanced protection. In summary, we responded quickly to this attack and the heightened customer concerns. We have clear customer remediation programs. We have a good understanding of financial impacts this activity will have on our business. We're working everyday to earn and maintain customer trust, and this is a big reason why SecurID remains the industry standard in multifactor authentication. Security is one of the most important facets of customer confidence as they move to the hybrid cloud, and we believe that RSA has a unique set of assets to continue to help our customers secure their cloud environments. Revenue from our Information Intelligence Group was $169 million, up 6% quarter-on-quarter. IIG continues to evolve to meet the buying preferences of today's content management customers. We took another step in that direction in May with the announcements of the on-demand availability of Captiva, Document Sciences, CenterStage and Documentum. These offerings bring together best-of-breed technologies from EMC, VMware and RSA and accelerate the journey to the cloud for customers running EMC content management and collaborative applications. VMware revenue growth accelerated to 37% in the quarter to a record $921 million. Virtualization is the fundamental building block for cloud computing and as a market leader, it is clear that customers are laying the foundation for their cloud architectures with VMware. We extended our already strong lead in virtualization with the announcements last week of vSphere 5 and a complementary suite of cloud infrastructure products. vSphere 5's processing capabilities are well beyond what even the most resource-intensive applications might need and comes just as customers increasingly look to move such mission-critical applications into the cloud. Because EMC offers the broadest support in the industry for VMware products across our storage, backup and security portfolios, we can rapidly leverage the powerful new vSphere 5 features across the rest of our portfolio. Several of the features unveiled last week extend VMware's reach. For instance, vSphere's storage appliance has the ability to turn a small amount of local disks on virtualized servers into network storage while Site Recovery Manager 5 has the ability to replicate VM's on the host. Both of these are ideal features for small and remote customers and offer an onramp for them to grow into a more powerful array-based capabilities as the tight integration of our virtual and critical product sets enables a minimally disrupted transition. Likewise, the new storage distributor resource scheduler capability of VMware are enhanced and accelerated by FAST VP, making an ideal combination of simplicity, integration, cost savings and improved performance. We also continued to integrate our capabilities to make the virtual world more secure than the physical one by embedding RSA data loss prevention capabilities into VMware vShield. This is a transformational development as it allows the scanning for confidential data within vSphere and vShield itself, meaning any workload running in vSphere inherits the same secure behavior. This is very different than the physical world where it's necessary to plug devices into network or install software on every host. What this means in the real world is that customers can ensure compliance with standards like SOX, HIPAA, PCI or PII by scanning data for sensitive information and do so with no agents inside the operating system. The power of combining the proven virtual layer with a proven infrastructure layer is not lost on customers. We've seen time and time again that the tight integration of our product set with VMware is winning us market share in virtual environments, but it's even larger than our share in physical environments where we're also the market leader. As we did last quarter, we've broken out for you VMware's expected full year minority interest, which is now approximately $185 million. The financial impact of the minority interest will only get larger as VMware grows, affecting EMC consolidated net income and EPS. Not everyone is modeling this correctly. Because this impact is meaningful and very likely to get more meaningful over time, we provided our estimates of what it will be. It is important to model it correctly. Likewise, we've again broken out our estimates of VMware's additional dilution of $16 million. This accounting convention is required to reflect the impact on EMC's earnings per share of the incremental shares included in VMware's diluted share count that are not included in the minority interest calculation. As the delta between the VMWare's basic and diluted EPS changes, so will the impact on consolidated EPS. So this additional dilution must be considered to correctly forecast and calculate our consolidated EPS. At $16 million, this incremental dilution will account for about $0.01 of EPS in 2011. Both VMWare's minority interest and additional dilution should be considered in modeling consolidated EMC's non-GAAP EPS for the full year. It is clear that EMC has an extremely powerful set of solutions to help customers transition to the hybrid cloud and to take full advantage of their Big Data assets. But enabling customers to get to full agility in their cloud environments is not something EMC can do on our own, fully transforming IT to the point where customers have control, efficiency and choice that today's technology can enable requires the combined efforts of EMC and our partners. As we look across the IT ecosystem, we've identified a variety of opportunity to collaborate in ways that benefit EMC, our partners and most importantly, our customers. To get customers to hybrid cloud and benefiting from Big Data, we're leveraging our own services organization as well as our channel service partners, service providers and with our joint venture, VCE. Through our own services organization, we provide expertise to customers on the most effective ways to get to cloud and to leverage their Big Data assets. And cloud-related engagements continue to be the biggest contributors to growth in our consulting group. In the second quarter, we won significant consulting projects in Korea, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile and the U.S., all with customers who are eagerly looking to transition to cloud architectures. We also leveraged the expertise of our many different partners to help customers transition to more agile IT, a strategy that is in stark contrast to that of many of our competitors who push their own services. Our partners appreciate this approach, and EMC is rapidly gaining traction here. Many of our efforts recently have been focused on recruiting new channel partners and getting them fully educated on all the advantages of EMC technology. As we continue to ramp business through these partners who are so important for the success of our broad portfolio, our mid-tier and SMB products in particular, we're seeing that the improvements we've made to expand our channel partner program were the right ones. Our focus on better leveraging our channel partners extends to existing partners as well, and we've seen our efforts pay off. We've been particularly focused on 3 of our largest channel partners and saw their combined revenue increased 73% from last year's Q2 for our unified storage products. This is remarkable growth and a clear indication that our reach to new markets is rapidly gaining traction. Service providers are also very important to the success of our hybrid cloud strategy. We have established partnerships with over 40 leading service providers around the world to help them offer new public cloud services. Our service provider partner community includes telcos like AT&T and Verizon, ISPs like Hosting.com, outsourcers like CSC and even enterprises extended their core business like NYSE Technologies. We expect the number of partners to grow and more importantly, the cloud services provided by our partners to flourish as the possibilities for improving the current state of IT with new and innovative cloud services are plentiful. Finally, momentum continues to build at VCE. We've seen substantial demand from small and large customers, as well as partners who appreciate Vblock's convert best-of-breed virtualized infrastructure. And VCE's revenue for the first half of 2011 already exceeds the revenue it achieved all of 2010. It's easy to understand customers' enthusiasm given the differentiated nature of Vblock platforms. Of course, there are also customers who, instead, may opt for reference architecture with parts from VMware, Cisco and EMC. And this approach is what competitors are trying to mimic with their own reference architectures. But the real differentiator is Vblock platforms, which address the very real issues that reference architecture cannot with a single converge product that can be up and running on day one, a single pane of glass of management. A clear upgrade path without worries about change control or lease management s and one point of contact for integrated services and support. As the only converged infrastructure products in the market today that's built and shipped direct from manufacturing facilities to customer sites to rapidly build out a cloud data center, we're confident that VCE will continue on its rapid growth trajectory. As VCE grows, we're seeing increasing sales to repeat customers who are standardizing their next gen data center on the Vblock are moving their enterprise workloads into full production on Vblock platforms. We will continue to improve our technology portfolio and build out and deepen our relationship with partners. This approach has served as well and is resulting in clear value for our customers as is evidenced in our Q2 results. Turning back to our financials for the quarter. Total revenue grew 20% to $4.85 billion in Q2. We reported record revenue internationally with revenue from APJ up 34% and EMEA up 20% from Q2 of 2010. The growth in North America was also strong at 17%. We improved non-GAAP gross margins by 210 basis points over last year's second quarter. Once again this improvement was mainly driven by an increased mix of higher gross margin products including VMware. This improvement helps to continue to show leverage and was the main driver for the increase in non-GAAP operating margin of 240 basis points year-on-year to 23.1%. Year-to-date free cash flow was approximately $1.56 billion, approximately $70 million higher than non-GAAP net income. We ended the quarter with $9.5 billion in cash and investments. We returned approximately $230 million in cash to shareholders in Q2 with the repurchase of EMC shares, bringing our stock repurchases to $1.1 billion for the first half. Augmenting VMWare's $133 million share purchases in Q2, we also invested $62 million purchasing VMware shares in the quarter to keep our stake at around 80%. We spent approximately $700 million in Q2 on a combination of acquisitions, strategic and other related investments and the VMware land lease in Palo Alto. In closing, given our strong results for the first half of the year and our outlook for continued strong execution in quarters 3 and 4, we are raising our expectations for the full year. We now expect to exceed $19.8 billion in revenue and exceed non-GAAP EPS of $1.48. Our success as a winning provider of technology to cloud and Big Data will ultimately be measured over the course of several years. Our strategy, innovation and continued strong execution keep us firmly on track to meet or exceed the financial targets we discussed in February to reach 2014 revenue of $28 billion and deliver EPS leverage on top of this implied strong top line growth. With our unique competitive position, strength of our strategy and model and the vast opportunity that lies ahead, we're excited about what we can accomplish in cloud and Big Data not only in 2011, but over the course of next several years. With that, I'll turn it over to Joe who'll give more color on the outlook, the quarter, and the great opportunities that lie ahead. Joe?

Thanks, David. I would like to begin by welcoming everyone to today's Q2 earnings call. As always, thank you for your interest in EMC. Overall, I am very pleased with our Q2 results. It is important to note that these results were underpinned by solid growth across all of our major geographies and across the vast majority of our product divisions and business units. Balanced results are critical to sustain success. Also critical to our long-term success is customer acceptance of our strategic vision and our ability to deliver against it. Clearly, our hybrid cloud and Big Data strategies are resonating extremely well with customers, and they see our products and services as relevant and trust us to help them accelerate their journey to the cloud and its massive benefits. I would like to recognize our 50,000 people around the world that are members of the EMC and VMware family and thank them for their many accomplishments, for their innovation, their hard work and their dedication to our customer success. Let me now comment on the global macroeconomic environment in which we operate and talk about our expectations for IT spending in the second half of 2011. Starting with 2011 IT spending trends. We still believe that overall IT spending will be up in the 5% to 7% range this year, and we still firmly believe that the core areas where EMC and VMware have leading technologies, namely, in virtualization and in cloud OS, in information storage, information protection and information security and in Big Data are all technology areas, which will grow substantially faster than a 5% to 7% average. While we believe that IT spending in 2011 will be good, I would like to point that there are several potential macroeconomic risk areas that we continue to watch closely. As you may recall, at our Q1 conference call, we talked about 3 macro risks, namely, the disaster in Japan, a potential slowdown in public sector spending due to significant deficits and rising commodity prices especially oil. Reporting against each of these 3 potential risks in Q2, I am pleased to report that our year-over-year growth rate in Japan was good and we experienced no major supply chain interruptions. And we expect the balance of 2011 to be okay. Our Q2 public sector revenues grew year-over-year in the low double digits, but this is still an area we believe has some potential risks, and we will continue to monitor this sector in the second half of the year. And as you know, commodity prices, overall, did not escalate much in Q2. In fact, oil prices pulled back a bit. Obviously, this is also an area to watch that greatly affects our economy. So all in all, no glaring red lights on these 3 potential risks to IT spending. That said, we did see some softness in Southern Europe, and we expect this softness to be with us through the second half of this year. That said, these countries make up a very small percentage of EMC's consolidated revenues, but their impact on Europe as a whole represents an additional risk factor. Although not totally related to the economy, we experienced some softness in our content management business as was evidenced by the 5% year-on-year decline we posted in our IIG business unit. We are working hard to properly reposition this business. We have a plan and a new management team in place and we do expect to return to growth late this year or early next. I assure you we will continue to monitor all sources of potential risk to IT spending. But to be clear, we are confident in our ability to produce strong results this year. This is evidenced by the fact that we raised our guidance for 2011 today. As David has already said, we now expect to exceed $19.8 billion in revenue and also exceed $1.48 of non-GAAP EPS. I said 90 days ago, the source of this confidence is based on our strong belief that our cloud computing and Big Data strategies are well placed and are underpinned with winning products on a fully committed and funded product roadmaps. This is true today, and 2011 has been and will continue to be a banner year for us with a record number of very significant product introductions. In Q1, at the EMC mega launch, we announced 41 new or significantly refreshed products. Of significant note here were the launch of VNX and VNXe, the Data Domain Archiver and FAST VP. I am pleased to report that all these products are doing well, and FAST VP is now our fastest growing storage software product. In Q2, at our attendance-breaking EMC World, again we had a series of very important product launches. For example, we launched new Isilon hardware and a new version of its OneFS operating system. An Isilon system can now scale up to 15 petabytes under a single file system with unmatched performance and ease of use. I am pleased to report that Isilon is now our fastest growing storage platform. We introduced the VPLEX Geo with the unique capability to pool EMC and non-EMC storage resources between data centers, creating true virtual storage with the ability to access this pooled information from anywhere. We also announced the expansion of our Greenplum Big Data strategy and launched our commitment to Hadoop distribution and support and its integration with Greenplum software and the Greenplum appliance. And in the last 2 weeks, VMware launched vSphere 5, along with several other major product enhancements. In short, vSphere 5 now has the performance, scale, availability and ease-of-use features to run all, even the most mission-critical applications and ensure the massive benefits of virtualization and cloud computing. Also very importantly, EMC just launched VMAXe, a new scale-up, scale-out symmetric platform with renowned ingenuity capabilities. This system closes the gap between our VNX and VMAX platforms. We actually started shipping VMAXe to customers in June, thus, we now have several systems installed and the feedback from customers is nothing short of outstanding. And lastly, we introduced ProSphere, an all new storage resource management solution for the virtualization and cloud computing era, featuring ease of use and the ability to massively scale. As you will note, the vast majority of these key product introductions are aimed to help our customers and our service partners accelerate their journey to private, public and hybrid cloud computing, and there is more to come. As I have said before, consolidated EMC is a technology company, and innovative products are the lifeblood of a technology company. To this end, we will continue to invest heavily in R&D and we will continue to acquire smaller companies who have leading technologies that enhance our strategic vision and give us faster time to market. Additionally, to assure customers get exposed to our products and receive the maximum value from them, we will continue to build out our keiretsu of high-quality partners to help our terrific sales and service organizations in the areas of product integration and solutions, product distribution and with services and support. We, at EMC, are focused hard on building out a world-class partner ecosystem, and the fruits of this effort is definitely showing up in our results. Our joint venture with Cisco, VCE continues to grow in both revenue and relevance. Customer interest in Vblock converged technology is extremely high, and the installed base of Vblocks is performing very well. For sure, Vblocks are proving their value proposition. And we expect Vblock sales to hit the $1 billion run rate mark in the next several quarters. As this business has grown, Michael, John and I have tapped one our very successful and senior leaders, Frank Hauck, to join VCE as its President and COO. We are pleased to have Frank on the VCE team. So again thank you for joining us today, and I'd now like to turn it back to Tony to moderate the Q&A portion of today's call.

Thanks, Joe. Okay. Apparently, we had some technical difficulties with the con call lines and hopefully we didn't lose anybody. As I mentioned, there will be an archive available later so in case you missed anything. So let's go on with the Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Mary Ann, can we have the first question, please?

Our first question comes from Ittai Kidron of Oppenheimer. Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.: I wanted to dig in a little bit into the VNXe. David, maybe can you give us a little bit of color on the average deal size of this 600 new customers, and how are you working to build that channel? I mean, how should we think about that number as a run rate exiting this year?

Yes, sure. I mean, perhaps the average deal size, perhaps the way to talk about it is the average transaction size for an individual system because some of these customers are buying multiple systems. VNXe average transaction size is around $10,000, so much smaller than we would historically have got from the VNX line. And it's on track. In terms of when it becomes a meaningful piece to our overall business, that's not until 2012. But you can see that with several hundred new customers, obviously, many more times that new systems during the quarter and the channel ramp-up plan, we're making good progress. We are still, of course, a little bit learning in terms of the SMB spaces and we're signing up many new partners. We have a great feedback system. But all in all, on track and expect to see it making a bigger difference in 2012. Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.: As a follow-up, if I extend that question into the VNX itself, clearly, you're doing a very good job in driving that through in that transition from Celerra and CLARiiON into VNX. But can you tell us how much of the progress you made in VNX is really into your existing installed base versus actually helping you gain new customers? I mean, how do I think about that mix?

Obviously, a little bit of both in the case of VNX. As I mentioned, the 2/3 of the total category, what we call unified, is now VNX. So that's obviously is higher if you include the VNXe as well. But obviously, the initial opportunity for VNX is the fact we have a very large installed base of CLARiiON and Celerra systems. And I would say that the majority of what we're doing with VNX is into the existing customer base. But also we are openings some new customers with VNX. And just to clarify on VNXe, while as we said we had 600 new customers, obviously, we had many more than 600 customers in total for VNXe, so a little bit of that is also going into existing installed base. But obviously, much more new with VNXe, much more existing base focus right now with VNX.

The next question is from Maynard Um of UBS.

Can you just talk about the competitive landscape, any changes either from larger OEMs or other pure plays because it looks like you're gaining share. I'm just curious where you think that continued gain will come from and particularly as it relates to the trend where OEMs are looking to own the entire stack?

I'd say the competition is pretty much where we've seen it, no big change. Obviously, as you say, there's a huge thrust out there from the systems players, if you will, who sell the complete stack. Obviously, that's where we team with Cisco in the VCE and Vblock. But obviously, there's a lot of best-of-breed selling that goes on. That's still a dominant piece and to that extent, the competition has not changed as much as you would think.

Our next question is from Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets.

Guys, when I look at an aggregate, it looks like the gross margins this quarter were actually much better than what we were expecting, but the OpEx is also much higher. I guess when we think of margin expansion going forward, do we think of the lever really being gross margins? Or do you still have room to control OpEx going forward to expand margins?

Amit, I think that what you're seeing is absolutely in line with what we said at the beginning of the year. We said to expect that the leverage we're going to get this year is going to come almost entirely from gross margin with perhaps a little bit from OpEx. And that's what, in fact, you are seeing. But bear in mind, those 2 things go hand in hand, so for example, part of the reason why OpEx is higher the year is because we've got now the OpEx base from Isilon and from DCD inside our OpEx, and that's driving some of the expense. But also -- they're also driving gross margin. So you have to kind of look at the 2 lines hand-in-hand, but it's very much in line with what we expected. And as we go through the balance of the year, you'll continue to expect that trend with the majority of our leverage coming from gross margin.

The next question is Lou Miscioscia of Collins Stewart.

VNX has obviously been doing very well and you pointed out it's now 2/3 of your unified storage. But maybe you could give us a clarification as to how much of that is a percent of the mid-tier revenue where you have a number of other things in that same category.

Let me start, but Joe can add some color. It's the biggest piece of our mid-tier, but we're not breaking that out explicitly because when you look at the portfolio, really we're offering customers choice. And in some customers, a mid-tier platform like unified can do everything for them. In other cases, they might want a more specialized backup device like the DD Archiver. So to a sense, it's a little bit fungible. We are giving you some color. We said that for unified, the non-Dell channel business grew over 40%. And to give you a bit more color, if you took out Dell OEM, unified growth was over 25%, so giving you kind of flavor of how far we're going. But we're deliberately kind of keeping our segmentation down to mid-tier category because there will always be some puts and takes, and I think we got to look at how that overall portfolio is doing relative to the marketplace.

Ben Reitzes of Barclays.

Yes. Could you guys update us on where you are in BRS growth and versus your long-term target, as well as DCD, how big a contribution is that right now and where are you versus your $1 billion plus target there? And when do you think you'll get there in both?

Let me start off with BRS. BRS is still growing at a rate that's above the kind of long-term target rate that we've put in -- I'm sorry, aActually, we have that in the 20% plus category, right? So BRS is actually in that -- is still in that category, the 20% plus range and we're pleased about that. Obviously, there's a lot of competition trying to come into that market place, but despite that competition we're still holding our own, gaining share, winning a lot of new accounts. So we're pleased with how our business is doing. And we still think it's very differentiated compared to anybody else's solution in the marketplace. And Joe, you want to talk about DCD?

Let me do it a little bit different way. We've been saying that there is massive opportunity at the intersection where cloud meets Big Data. So obviously, you've seen the VMware results. We've talked about the VMAX results. And now all of a sudden, if you look at the newer products we have, the Greenplum, Atmos, Isilon, I can tell you that each of those products, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, Q2 of 2011 over Q2 2010, more than doubled. All 3 of them. So we have tremendous momentum. And I have no doubt that we will get both the DCD, Greenplum side and Isilon to $1 billion. But this will take -- this will be measured for Greenplum in years, not -- because it's a small company when we bought it. It was $20-something million in revenues last year. So obviously, that's not going to happen overnight. The others, the DCD or BRS is already there. The combination of Atmos and way over, as a matter of fact, the combination of the Data Domain and Avamar is already there. So we'll get down those other 2 for sure. I'm very confident of that.

Deepak Sitaraman of Credit Suisse. Deepak Sitaraman - Crédit Suisse AG: David, can you comment on the pricing environment in the mid range, particularly as you ramp VNX? And Joe, maybe can you just speak about what surprised you either positively or negatively in this process of building out the channel to support the VNX ramp? And maybe just remind us of what inning you think we're in?

Yes, Deepak. The pricing environment, not surprisingly, is competitive but we expected that. I think the good news is if you go back to our launch in January, we said we expected margins for the VNX to be slightly higher than the CLARiiON and Celerra combined. And we expect the VNXe margins to be slightly below. And that's exactly what we're seeing out in the marketplace. So even though we're getting a more competitive price environment, we've also got a more competitive build, and the margin profile is exactly in line with what we expected with a full quarter behind us. It's good to be able to report on that.

You asked me to comment a little bit on what surprised me in building up the channel. I think the good news is I wasn't surprised. We put some aggressive plans in place to grow our channel, both in terms of numbers, but much, much more importantly, in terms of impact. And obviously, we had to offset the dilution of Dell going away and we've done that, I think, extremely well. And so it wasn't a surprise. It was the plan. And our guys have done a really good job and we're very, very committed to our channel partners and they've given us very high marks.

Aaron Rakers with Stifel, Nicolaus. Aaron Rakers - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: If I could delve a little bit into what you said about the mid-tier business. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you said that the Isilon revenue was up double that of what it was on a stand-alone basis a year ago, which would basically imply about $90 million in revenue. If we take that into the mid-tier business, would that seem to imply kind of a mid or high single-digit growth rate x Isilon for this quarter? Just trying to gauge the impact of Isilon here as we think about the model.

I think if you normalize for Isilon revenues, perhaps the way to look at it best of all is to kind of include Isilon in both sides, so apples to apples. If you include -- if you normalize the growth rate for Isilon revenues, the 27% is still well into the 20s. So that would be the kind of apples-to-apples run rate for mid-tier storage product growth rate. X Isilon is still going to be way above the mid single-digit number, which you spoke about.

Brian Freed of Wunderlich Securities.

Could you give a little bit more detail about your plans to ignite growth in your Information Intelligence Group? And also can you talk a little bit about your view of whether this is still a strategic business given that you embedded a tremendous amount of content intelligence in your storage systems?

Yes, it's definitely still strategic to us. I mean, the big change we're going through here, as we think said at our Analyst Day -- Investor Day is that in kind of past times, you saw the complete platform and to a customer, a big, big platform sale. And then the customer would build apps on top of that. So for the insurance company, they could build apps to do claims processing, to do policy management and to do time and expense reporting, so they buy the platform. And that's not just way things are going down today. Much more lighter weight, much more semi-finished, semi-customed where the customer just put a finishing touch and they're buying these for a specific business purpose. So we've come with this xCP technology. It's working very well. But the transition from when used to do big, big buys and via a platform to buying these point products -- a lot of these point products more and more will be bought on a SAS basis, I am positive, is proving to be a bigger transition than we originally think. But it is still very, very strategic to our customers. When I'm out there with our customers, the applications that they have in our Content Management using our Content Management products is very, very strategic to our customers. And when done right, this could be a growth area for us for sure. It's just taken us a while, but we're going to stick with it. We're convinced that by the end of this year or early next year, we'll return this business to growth.

Alex Kurtz of Sterne Agee. Alex Kurtz - Sterne Agee & Leach Inc.: David, as Flash becomes a bigger part of the overall strategy in the high end and midrange, how do you think about the supply chain around Flash considering some of the dynamics in pricing across vendors and sort of how that fits your bond costs?

I'll start and perhaps Joe can add a little bit of color. Obviously, we've -- since we're very early into Flash -- as you know, we started off with a single Flash provider. That has now changed. That's multiple sourced. We're still by far, by far, the largest enterprise storage supplier of Flash, but we do have a couple of different hedges. We have some investments in emerging Flash companies. We have a whole Flash agenda. So we're pretty comfortable about how we've been able to drive costs down to us, but also to drive pricing down to the customer since we introduced Flash. The premium between Flash and private channels has come down by orders of magnitude and it's much more attractive. And of course, with FAST on top of that, we can use it much more intelligently. So all in all, I think we're very pleased with our position in Flash and we do think that a lot of the value there is going to basically go to the foundry providers. We don't need to -- in terms of the manufacturing costs, we will take benefit from that as more people get into the Flash business and Flash component prices come down.

Yes, and I think that's a substantially right. We have done a lot to help make sure we assure availability from the Flash developers. We've made sure that we've done things to help make sure we're getting good costs and price competitive, and we've done a lot of investments and a lot of R&D internally on the technology side. So we feel very, very good with our Flash position.

Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein. Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Inc.: I was wondering if you could comment on the sequential gross margin improvement between Q1 and Q2. It certainly doesn't look like mix, alone, could account for that. My hypothesis is that RSA margins rebounded significantly sequentially, but I'm wondering on whether you can comment explicitly on RSA gross margins in Q2 versus Q1? And also on other forces sequentially that impacted gross margins?

Yes, Toni, you're absolutely right. In terms of our non-GAAP numbers, yes, to RSA. We, as I mentioned in my comments on RSA, we included some remediation costs in the non-GAAP results in RSA in the first quarter. And if you kind of look at what RSA margins would be normally compared to what we reported in Q1, you can just about estimate what the size of that charge was. It wasn't a small number. Obviously, smaller than the charge that we took in Q2. So that is a factor and actually accounts for a reasonable amount. We also saw a nice pickup in our services gross margin, particularly in the storage business. And then we do, as we go forward, year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, we're seeing improved mix from higher-margin products. I mentioned the pickup in VNX compared to its predecessor, and also we're actually getting better gross margin on the products themselves. But those are factors. You're right, the RSA is a big one.

We have time for a one more question, and then Joe will have a few concluding comments.

Mark Moskowitz, JPMorgan. Mark Moskowitz - JP Morgan Chase & Co: Real quickly here on the high end. Joe or David, could you talk a little about your expectations around the high-end growth in terms of 2Q results? Was that deceleration kind of expected due to tougher compares? Or are other factors here in terms of maybe your mid-tier cannibalizing some of the high end?

Yes, Mark, as I mentioned in my remarks, I mean, if you remember, in Q1, our high-end growth was remarkably high 25%. And as I mentioned, that was really driven by a lot of pent-up demand for FAST VP. We've been talking to our customers about it for quite some time. It started shipping and that drove a lot of new systems. It drove a lot of upgrades as well. Now we also mentioned that in Q1, we have relatively weaker results in the mid-tier because we only announced VNX towards the end of the quarter. We saw those growth rates kind of swap over in the second quarter, so we expected the 25% to come down to 15%. The good news is 15% is still higher than the longer-term growth range we have for Symmetrix, which in our modeling is in that single-digit growth range. So we do expect it to probably continue to trend back towards that single digit, but there are a lot of good things going on in the high end with Sym being used in new used cases and the VMAXe, of course, also giving us a kicker as well. But that explains the trends and the changes between Q1 and Q2.

Yes, I think David hit on it. A major thing to consider is that lines between mid-tier and high end are glaring somewhat. If you think of the absolute tenants of the cloud is Big Data centers, big scale, and of course, if you look at what we're doing with infusing Flash technology and SATA technology, into SAS technology, into the Symmetrix product line, VMAX and then having FAST VP manage that and tier that -- put that information at the right price point and the right tiered storage to get to the proper SLA and performance, this VMAX is going to continue to be strong for us and it does have one of the major tenants that cloud computing implies. So we feel very good about it. So let me to close up here. In summary, we believe we have a well thought-out cloud and Big Data strategies. Customers are receiving these strategies in our products and services very openly, very well. We a partner ecosystem in place to be successful. We have terrific people here at EMC and VMware who believe and are committed to our future, and they believe it's going to be and I believe it's going to be a future of success. So I want to thank you again for joining us today. And I wish you all a great day. And we'll be talking with you. Thank you.

This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phones at this time.