I had the opportunity to sit down with Charles Fan in Shanghai in December 2012. Charles is well known in China for having set up R&D facilities for EMC and VMware and for having created a world class integrated team at record speeds. Charles is currently a senior vice president and Chairman, China COE at EMC and is working on the Data Fabric of the future at VMware. During our interview I was struck by his vision and wanted to share his thoughts as I am frequently asked about the future of Big Data and how it relates to cloud.