>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering the VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its Ecosystem Partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live in Las Vegas. theCUBE special coverage of VMworld 2017, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with my co-host, Dave Vellante is also co-host. Our next two guests is Jaspreet Singh, CEO, Founder of Druva and Matt Morgan and CMO of Druva. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> Glad to be here. >> So Pat Gelsinger basically laid it out on the keynote, essentially the waves, and one of them, you're riding hard, you're a startup. Take a minute to talk about why you guys are excited about this wave, because I think data protection, decentralized, fully cloud world. Cloud, IoT, and edge. It's creating a huge data environment. Jaspreet, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, so if you look at the big wave, right? The data, as said, is getting completely decentralized. We have IoT, edge... the new cloud, and the data center is getting disrupted with time. And the more data gets decentralized or defragmented, the more centralized the data management has to be. Whether on the edge, in the cloud, and the whole notion of cloud, if you think about it is actually an interesting phenomenon where Amazon is applying retail economy to traditional IT. If you combine them together, you sort of want to manage the data as a service wherever it goes. Be it the edge, be it the core. You want the simplest ability to sort of protect it, to govern it, and to add intelligence to it over time as it gathers more and more information. So Druva provides a platform, end to end, to sort of make data all managed properly from a single console. >> Pat Gelsinger was up on the stage in his keynote, Andy Jassy came out. Big news, Amazon relationships. Got some fruit bearing already. And they had to do that because vCloud Air was kind of an interesting point. But he brings up the point about the cloud as disruption and that the conventional wisdom of the old is no longer the most relevant thing right now and a lot of customers are paying attention to that so I got to ask you as a founder and CEO on the right wave, in our opinion, and Wikibon's opinion. What should customers look for for success, 'cause we're early on this new vector. What's different? What should they be thinking about as they look at the cloud, look at the distributed and decentralized edge. What are the some of the things that's different? >> I think you would think about customers and, Matt, please, add to it. For customers, this is not just a technology stack, right? It's not a software-defined data center all over again. This is more of a... trying to see how they can consume something at a predictable and certain price wherever they go, right? That's the whole genesis of cloud, it's a complete business model shift. And so when they look at data and how they holistically manage data they understand data is likely to outlive most systems by 3X. And now when they have this notion of cloud, how can they be on the journey to sort of to consume and deliver the value of data as a service in this whole notion of public cloud. And that's sort of the delivered promise. >> So Matt, I wonder if you could talk about the brand continuum, that brand promise. The ascendancy of the sort of modern backup software in the first part of this millennium was coincident with virtualization and consolidating servers and that we sort of played that out. And now customers are saying we have to rethink the way we protect data because of cloud. So I wonder if you could address that and talk about the brand promise of Druva in that context. >> Excellent. Yes. We did a survey, 450 VMware customers and it basically underscores the VMware strategy. There are going to be three tenets to the modern data architecture moving forward. There's going to be physical servers, there's going to be virtualized infrastructure, and there's going to be VMware Cloud on AWS, or its derivatives. When you move further from left to right, moving from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud. What ends up happening is the approach to data protection of the past fails to scale and frankly is no longer compatible. You can't float an appliance in a cloud. You can't possibly put in your own co-located infrastructure within a cloud store to attempt to protect that data. So a lot of people just go without protection at all. What we found in our survey is that three out of four people surveyed really want an as-a-service solution because they're able to basically protect cloud to cloud. They're able to come in and say, "OK, if my data is going to be sitting there, my infrastructure is going to be sitting there, I want to be able to wrap that infrastructure with an as-a-service solution that will protect it. The real value though isn't just protecting in the cloud, it's the as-a-service solution is not limited by the constraints of the past. It can actually be extended backwards so you could take your virtual infrastructure and protect it with an as-aservice solution. You can take your physical infrastructure and protect it as a solution. So as a result, we see this as a sea change to this new way of protecting data. >> So Jaspreet, you were saying that you've got to have this centralized data management philosophy in order to succeed in this world that Matthew just described. Why is that? Is that because you need a single point of control in case something goes wrong and it's a recovery thing? Or is it more of a business model sort of an as-a-service business model requirement? I wonder if you could address that? >> So the traditional IT boundary is sort of shattering in the cloud world, right? If you're going to have... There's a last incident of sorts, right? If one incident happens in a company then many parties are looking at what happened there. Is it a breach, is it a loss, it is a governance issue? So data has multiple faces now. Data also touches multiple parties, be it production, be it the DevOps. You've got to have a holistic view of looking at the data versus traditional approach of I'm going to put a backup architecture, or DR architecture, or e-discovery architecture all in silos. And cloud sort of also gives an opportunity for people to not hug their hardware and say this is mine, go get yours. They can sort of break boundaries and say let's work together on this data set where I can manage the prediction part of it and someone else can pay their dues to manage the governance part of it. So decentralization, the more... I'm sorry. (coughs) The more decentralization of data is promoting a holistic view of management of data purely built from the cloud. >> Jaspreet, I wanted to ask you. You had a pretty busy week. We covered this on SiliconANGLE, and so I kind of want to ask it again since we're here at VMworld. $80 million in funding. Congratulations, big news. And the Druva Cloud Platform on AWS. Congratulations. Can you share more color to that? That's a lot of cash, 80 million. >> It's a good amount of money. It's no replacement for creativity, but it's a good fuel to have in the company. Yes, it's fortunate to have a great lead, lower capital with all of our existing investors: Sequoia and Nexus, Tenaya including EMC Ventures was a (mumbles) to be in this round. Secondary storage overall is getting disrupted. The legacy isn't material anymore given the big cloud wave, as I said. So the new wave of providers have to be in the cloud and hence, Druva. We've been building historically a very strong foundation of cloud native solution without a hardware approach. With no hardware approach, all in the cloud. In the past, we've taken a legacy architecture of a backup, DR, e-discovery into multiple products in Druva Phoenix, to take care of edge data or data center data and now we're taking a big step forward and say we're going to combine our products into a single platform. Think of it as Amazon services for data prediction. The customer logs in and can search for their workload, they want a backup VM survey, they want to search today, and then deliver what they want to the IT right from a single point of console. That's the power of Druva Cloud Platform. >> Eight years ago, we interviewed Dheeraj Pandey for the first time. It was our first time doing theCUBE 2010, and at that time, no one's ever heard of Nutanix. New-tan-nix, New-tAh-nix. A little accent from New Jersey, Massachusetts. I always get it wrong. >> I say New-tan-nix. >> Dheeraj was kind of crazy. He was viewed in Silicon Valley as kind of a wild card. No one got his model at that time. Dave, and David Florey of Wikibon, were like "This is amazing," they saw it right away. And I'm like, "This is really awesome." You guys are kind of out of that same track and invest along the same lines for secondary storage. So I've got to ask you, when you're doing your fundraising, you must've had some pretty interesting experiences. Can you share some of the, without naming names, the good, and kind of weird conversations you had around, cause you got to understand the trends to get your business. >> Absolutely. I think storage is the new F word, right? There's a lot of people who don't dislike storage for what happened in the public market recently. So you go to explain to them there's a thesis around making money on public cloud using public cloud as storage tiers, so we've had various interesting conversations there. We were lucky to have Riverwod, who got the idea, who are of the same conviction as the founder to put money behind where the market is going, but still a lot of venture capitalists don't like the venture part of it. They want a predictable story, they want easy money, and they want big valuations. But the venture in the venture, VC capital.. >> John: Wait a minute. The idea of venturing... >> Jaspreet: That's right. >> To go take a chance or a bet. >> Jaspreet: That's right. >> That's called venture capital. >> Jaspreet: Absolutely. >> Not hedge fund or, you know, money market. >> Jaspreet: Absolutely. >> You basically got some pretty weird, kind of like, "Huh" questions. What was the craziest question you got? That was so off-base. >> Crazy questions like, "Where's the box? (Interviewers laugh) "Wait a minute. Where's the storage box?" >> John: "Where do I put it?" >> We had one question where someone asked, "So what's your..." You know, not option, it was... What the word? What's your, the... >> "Engagement?" >> "Engagement on your software?" And we were like, this is your... backup software, or DR software. It's going to perform virtually dutiable. But you don't engage with the software as you would with a salesforce.com. You got to look for... one party or two parties of a strong conviction and sort of go with them. >> John: Great story. Thanks for sharing. >> You mentioned three things: protect, govern, and add intelligence. And that "add intelligence" pieces You don't usually associate that with, certainly not backup, but data protection. So in this world of digital business, we think of digital business is all about how you leverage data assets. And when you think of adding intelligence, that's not something we typically think of in a data protection company. How is Druva different in that regard and how can you help organizations leverage their data assets? >> Yeah. We see this as a customer journey, OK? Data protection is the gateway drug to leveraging an as-a-service model, right? Because it's really obvious. I can protect my data, I can restore it, I can do disaster recovery. Once you get that data into a centralized store, there's incredible things you can do. From the fact that it's centralized. Unlike previous approaches that were dozens or hundreds of silos that you never could report across, Druva gives you that centralization effect. So the first logical step to move up the customer journey is to embrace governance where you can start having a perspective. Making sure that you're legally complying with regulations. Making sure that you're governing for legal requirements within the company. But when you move pass that, you start to actually start to manage for patterns. And that's where intelligence comes in. When you start thinking of data, the associated metadata that surrounds that data, is data within itself. And if you wrap intelligence around that, you could start to get predictive around areas that could affect risk for your organization or even open up opportunity. So a good risk example is ransomware. Through intelligence, you can actually see when data that is distributed starts being encrypted early so you're able to identify and do what we call the anomaly detection. So that's kind of the journey, if you will. You go protection to governance, governance to intelligence. >> So it is kind of the holy grail, right? I mean. >> Jaspreet: Absolutely. >> Companies historically, in your business, haven't been able to achieve-- I mean, EMC tried, they bought Documentum to try to achieve that vision. And, I mean, I guess it failed, but they sold it for a boatload of money. So they're all good. Nobody's crying for EMC, but what's your perspective on this, Jaspreet? >> I think these are mostly elastic workload, highly elastic workload. You want a certain data, you want it right now, and you want it to be a short-lived search. You want AI, DPI, which requires a lot of data, but the DPI machine learning has to have a holistic amount of data for a very short amount of time, can burst compute, get the problem solved and move on. So historically, for lack of architecture, lack of abundant amount of hardware, and also the IT boundaries of not supporting each of the decision was the big limiting factor. Now, with cloud we've delivered a full tech search but to a price point that companies can afford for an investigative search. Searches weren't affordable in the past. They can do searching of parable data in an instant, and go out, right? And likewise, in machine learning. Machine learning is a lot easier proposition in cloud and the to use it pretty easier. So you apply deep learning, you understand parlance to what Matt said, you understand ransomware before most customers can see it, and then alert them, and then sort of move on, right? So, the seeking of IT boundaries and the power of current intelligence is truly helping us build this together. >> One last marketing question, if I may. Or a marketing challenge. You got a choice. You can go after the legacy stovepipe guys, which is relatively straightforward but there is an emerging set of modern data protection folks. How do you pick those two? Do you do both, and how do you differentiate from the latter in particular? >> Well, I'm really grateful that some large companies have gone forward to advocate public cloud. OK, Amazon and Microsoft with Azure, and with even Google with Google Cloud Platform. They have done a phenomenal job selling a disruption and a more effective way to do business when leveraging the public cloud. When you move to that, the data protection conversation must change. There is no option to do things they way you used to do it. It will be called the chain of pain. So from a marketing point of view, I can attach to all of the dynamics of what data protection means in this hybrid reality where some of your stuff will be in the public cloud, some of your stuff will be below the horizon on premises. I also have the opportunity to talk about the centralization of data. So unlike any appliance vendor that's on the market today or in any traditional approach, the idea of stovepiping your data limits you. It limits you both in the immediate term and it limits you over the long term. By centralizing that information together and delivering it as a service to wrap more of your infrastructure with our protection technology. You're going to be able to gain a lot of value. So I need to focus specifically on that centralization, the move to public cloud, and then there's a cost efficiencies conversation that I can add on top of all of that, which is about taking half your costs out. >> Guys, you had the launch of the Druva Cloud Platform. It's your big news here on AWS with the VMware. Since it's VMworld, which is VMware's Ecosystem show, what should they know about your cloud platform? The VMware customers. The people who are running ops and data centers, and obviously the data protection. We talked about what you just said, which is, there's no walls in the cloud. So it's a completely different dynamic. Completely disrupting data protection with cloud. Completely different ballgame, we get that. But VMware customers, what do they do? How do they engage with you guys? Why should they use you and what should they know? >> Absolutely, as Matt said, there are about 90% of customers we surveyed said that looking at AWS for hosting their VMs in that new model and this new shift towards public cloud Druva only adds a service solution they can consume from Amazon Marketplace, from VMware Cross Cloud Services platform, is what they're calling it. Our Druva, our partner channel, right? It's a no-hardware, simple as-a-service solution delivered natively on AWS to consume on-prem and cloud directly onto a >> So you're an ecosystem partner of VMware's. >> Absolutely. >> On that chart that Gelsinger is going to put up. Under data protection, you will have your logo there. In the future. >> In the near future, yes. There were a certain... Yes, absolutely, yes. In the near future, we definitely hope to see our logo... >> John: Well VMware is still owned by Dell Technologies, AKA Dell EMC, hence the top billing. >> Jaspreet: That's true. >> VM was in there. And they've had a little bit of a... >> Jaspreet: It's true. (laughs) >> Early on requirements of... >> John: You got screwed. Look, I'll say it. You should be in there. But you're certified, it's not like it's in development. It's shipping. >> The early on requirements by VM is pretty simple that you have to use native cloud technology, not the classic storage, and you have to have a clean path to talk across AWS. And we qualified very well. So we're in development right now and to be announced pretty soon. >> John: Alright, so bottom line. Can I buy it and use it today? >> Yes, you can buy it and use it today. >> I'm a VMware customer. >> Absolutely yes. >> Guys, thanks so much. Druva, a hot startup. $80 million of funding on top of a bunch of cash you had. How much did you raise total? >> 200. About $200 million. >> John: $200 million. Plenty of cash in the work chest. Check it out, data protection in the cloud, one of the areas being disrupted by this new wave that Pat Gelsinger is going to lay out here at VMworld 2017. We've got more live CUBE coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Work, sorry. >> Okay, we're live here at VMworld 2012. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive continuous coverage of VMworld. Day two, we're here, excited to have the new CEO of VMware, a long time, seven time Cube alumni when he was a lowly president of the EMC, Pat Gelsinger, with my cohost Dave. And welcome back to theCUBE. >> Hey, thank you very much guys, great to be here. >> Pleasure to see you again. >> First time as CEO, so first of all, how do you feel, tell us what it's like. Obviously, just for the folks who haven't watched the EMC World interview, I asked you a pointed question. I said Pat, if you were running VMware, what would you work on? So we'll get to that later, but. >> Okay. >> It turned out to be true. >> Turned out to, yeah once again, theCUBE got it nailed, like always, right? >> Absolutely. >> So just give us some personal color around the transition. So you know Paul, obviously you guys had great rapport, obviously, on stage yesterday. You got a standing ovation, he's being called the King on Twitter, he's got a huge respect. You guys work together, just take us through emotionally, the Pat Gelsinger, inside Pat, what went down there? How did it feel? >> And the way he, said handing over the custodianship of the community, to Pat Gelsinger, that was really, I think a great way to put it. >> Well you know, first thing, Paul and I are just great friends, you know? For 30 years, we've worked together. It's like you know, a great pick and roll team in basketball right, you know he knows when to pick, I know when to roll. You know, we just have really learned how to work together over the years. And just great respect for each other's talents. And Paul embraced me, and really endorsed me to the VMworld, and the community, in that sense, is powerful, right? But it also was intimidating. A bit of a responsibility as well. And you know, I had dinner with Tom Jorgens last night. Right, it's sort of like oh, two weeks ago, we were trying to kill each other. Now, my new best friend, right? So it is this very rapidly shifting role. As well as, we laid out a pretty bold vision this week. >> And you were at Intel too, you understand the whole partnership dynamic, we talk about this in theCUBE, the ecosystem, obviously VMware, the beginning of this massive opportunity of extending beyond the VMware look. I mean you announced, as an example, people who not VMworld, that's always been about VMware, they've been dominant in the enterprise. But yesterday you announced changes to the pricing. I mean you guys are thinking bigger now. Is that part of the plan, to think bigger, beyond VMware, and extend to other vendors? Obviously great love fest on the CEO panel yesterday, and also the demos up on stage. So talk about that mindset, and what you plan to do to take it beyond just VMware. >> Well it is very much a community. And when you think about what we're doing with software defined data center, right we're always touching everything, as Paul said. It's virtualizing the data center. And to do that, you know it's the networking guys, the security guys, the storage guys, the management guys, the new application vendors, right? It really is this ever broadening community. And as part of that is both a great opportunity, as well as a great responsibility too, all of those community players. And how can we innovate together, collectively, to bring about this next layer of fundamental innovation, agility, and speed, for the software defined data center of the future. >> So we want to get to that in a second. I want to ask you about about Paul Maritz again, just to kind of come back to the Paul thing. He has yet to be on theCUBE, so we're trying to get him on theCUBE and say it's a safe place. >> Does he not like you? What'd you do, you offended him? >> We haven't-- >> I don't know, he's... >> People want to know about him, he made some really, kind of cool, tongue in cheek comments yesterday about Facebook's valuation and VMware, everyone had a good chuckle out of it. But talk about Paul Maritz as a person. He's rarely doing public appearances, he's a total tech geek, he's a cool guy. So share with the folks out there, what's he like? >> Well you know, I think of Paul as sort of the Michael Jordan of strategy and technology, right? You know, he is just, you know, I don't think of myself as a bad strategist, this is like, the best strategist operating in the industry today around technology, and it's somebody who's deep in the technology, but also strategically very, very broad. And in that sense, his new role is really to allow him to really go focus on what he truly loves, his longterm strategy, understanding the technology trends and really going deep in that area. >> And the technology right, and he's also a huge technologist. >> Oh yeah right, you know he's sort of like, tops and bottoms, right, he's higher in the stack, I'm lower in the stack and boy, right between us, we sort of cover from sand to solutions. >> Well you said it's somewhat intimidating. And you're a lifelong hardware guy, now taking over a software company, how do you think about that, and how do you think you might change the way you approach your leadership? >> Well I think in some ways, I've always thought of myself as an infrastructure guy, right? And you know, most of silicon is done in software these days, so in that sense, I don't see it as that radical in that regard. But I have had the opportunity to really build the hardware infrastructure that every aspect of cloud is built on, and now to be able to put tops on bottoms, right, to be able to layer that software on top of it, to me is just a great opportunity, to take on this next piece of finishing that overall portfolio. >> How does he fit with Joe Tucci? Because I just love the dynamic was on there yesterday. You know, and we've had a chance to, Joe's been on theCUBE, and we've talked to him in person. Great guy, he's just such a great executive CEO. He's been around the block. Paul's like his sidekick now, and those two guys are going to cause some trouble. What's your prediction on the Joe Tucci, Paul Maritz dynamic, because you've got a strategist that no one's ever seen before in the tech business in Maritz, now with a canvas, painting a new canvas. He's done VMware, he's got that thing kicked off, laid out the roadmap in 2010, it's all filling in nicely. It's all going great, you're going to take it from there and ride that ship, and sail into good waters. But now he's now painting a new canvas. What is Joe and Paul talking about? What's that next canvas? >> Well, if you sort of think about Joe right, he's really become, at this point of his career, I'd say the elder statesman of the industry. Where everybody likes Joe, he makes everybody comfortable with him. And you know, there's just this comfort that Joe really brings to any situation. So here you have the big brains of Paul being combined with the experience, the relationships of Joe, and to me, I expect it to be a really powerful combination. >> You know I was commenting to Dave on a lot of things yesterday, and tying in some kind of trendy stuff, like Apple's market share value, and looking at that percentage of market share. And then also when you guys were up on the panel, one of the observations was, you've got the elder statesman in Tucci, and the senior experience of Joe with Pat, you and Paul, and a lot of the companies like Facebook, are run by people under the age of 35. So there's a generation of kids out there running big companies that have market caps of a billion dollars, so that's now coming on to the scene. How do you see that all playing out? Is there a trend towards business value, some kind of digs around the social media discontent, and the markets changing? You made a comment about that. But is it shifting to business value? Is that kind of what you guys are trying to get there? What do you say to those young leaders out there? And also what's happening in that market? >> Well I do think that there is this aspect of you know, building infrastructure, data centers, right, there's just this piece of okay, it's hard work, right, you have to transition people over time, your customers or CIOs, there is a level of security, confidence, et cetera, that needs to occur on that side. And then you have the dynamism of the consumer trends. And you know, Cook at Apple clearly is the elder statesman of the consumer social side of the world as well, and you know, he's not a teenager anymore, in that sense. But clearly it's this ability to generate extraordinary growth, extraordinary new valuation, as we've seen with Google and with Facebook. And how all of that matures, for social to become a sustained monetization model in the industry, isn't really proven yet. >> You know I was really liking Michael Dell on stage, trying to really make his point, I'm not going away, yeah we did a direct business model, we're the PC guys. And then he's advocating, and it's good to see him back in the game like that-- >> Yeah, me too, I think Michael, over the last two years, you know he has a tough job. HP has a tough job, to really transform those companies. And we have to say okay, Michael, he's really made progress. >> A lot of the CEOs in that PC era, they put a lot of East Coast mini computer companies out of business I think, don't want to see that happen to themselves, are a lot more paranoid to these (chuckling) year olds companies firms, and really more aggressive about staying the course. >> Yep, and Michael I think, has clearly said, I'm up for this challenge, and I'm going to take my namesake company through that challenge. >> So I got to ask you a hardware question. Because you know that business. Now you're going to be moving more into the different kind of this, with virtualization and apps. But HP and Dell are classic PC vendors. They've innovated, they were part of the whole Wintel generational shift. They have huge market shares, still. Margins yeah, are tight, but the market's changing. You guys' point about that, a new way. Apple has huge market value, and they have single digit share and growing, in hardware, yet they're so valuable. So the logic is, if you connect the dots, small, single digit share, yet huge profits. Really great, good products obviously. But they're wrapping services in other business models around the hardware, what's your take on that? I you were at Dell and HP, and saying hey, don't give up that PC business, just move fast, don't become driftwood, but what kind of services are they going to have to wrap around these products? Because the end user computing world, yes it is changing, multiple devices, but Apple has demonstrated that you can have a very strong hardware business and wrap around it. So what's your advice to those guys? >> Well I don't think of Apple as a hardware business, in that sense, I think Apple has been focused on a user experience that happens to be embodied in hardware and services, right? And in that sense, they have owned the user experience. They're maniacal about industrial design, they're maniacal about that whole experience, and have really innovated in how consumers buy, utilize, their products, and I think any aspect of things that touch the user have to have that in mind. It's all about the user experience, and they've done it well, and they've said, it's not hardware, it's not software. It's that integrative platform and experience. And my advice to anybody in that space, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo, RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, you have to really take that very aggressively in mind. >> So you had your put your man on the moon moment up in your keynote, you said let's get to, virtually 100% of applications, versus, I think you said 90%. That's intimidating, I'm reminded of the climber who's climbing to the top of the mountain and it's like this false summit, right? So, my question is, to get there you're going to have to lick the complexity problem. And over the years in IT, we think we've got that problem solved, and then you peel the onion, and and oh boy, there's more complexity there. To get to that 90%, you're going to have to solve that complexity problem, are we, have we solved it, are we on that path? >> Well, I think we're beginning to lay the foundation for it. And I think some of the software defined data center pieces, okay you know, we got to attack management and orchestration, we got to attack the network and security. So clearly those are elements of it. We have to make storage easy and available. But we also have to attack some of the higher level problems as well. Some of the cloud foundry, the PAZ layers as well, because it's not just about modernizing the old, with things like GemFire, and Data Fabric, and rebuilding the database environment, but it's also enabling the new, and enabling those across the multi cloud environments. And you know, so it's a lot of work to go do. But I think we've laid out the core pieces of the vision, and now my job is really to refine, execute and accelerate that endgame. >> Pat, I got to ask you about disruption and change. Joe Tucci made a comment that I thought was pretty Joe Tucci-like, when asked about the trends. And he said the horizontal's getting shorter, and the vertical's getting steeper in terms of the time, the change and the disruption. And he's hyper focused on that. I know you are too, and you tend to move fast and executive in watching your career. So let's take this software defined networking trend. I know we reported that you were in, when you took over EMC Ventures and looked at that, and you guys moved on some of those deals. So that's really key success, and we talk about it on theCUBE, but that's a game changer for VMware, like SpringSource was acquired, acquisition changed the developer landscape, now you got the Nicira deal as a game changing statement, but you have existing stuff going on like VCE, which is pioneering a lot of the vBLock stuff right? So you got VCE out there, and now you got the software defined data center at the merging side. So how do you sort that out? I know you're you know, first week on the job, or first second day on the job, but I mean you know the history. So, VC obviously, is a flagship offering is the vBLock, how does that fit into this change? I mean it's quickly, the disruption's positive. But they got to react, so a lot of the moving parts have to kind of, get tweaked. What do you see there for VCE? >> Well, and clearly you know, we have, on the SDN side, before I answer the VCE piece of it, you know we have two incredible assets. Right, we have the whole vShield, VXLAN capability, which you'd say, inside of the VMware environment was already well down the path of SDN, and now we have the Nicira assets, and NBP, and Open vSwitch, et cetera, so now, job one for us is bring those together as the most complete offering for the SDN space in the industry. You know we got two great teams. Bring those together, and unquestionably, we got the top talent in the world. So we got to make that happen, and then, we have to make that available for our partners to be able to then innovate with us, underneath us, and on top of us. We announced Sisco partnership yesterday, around how we're going to work together on that hardware, software boundary. And then with VCE, it's used them as the world class delivery vehicle for converged infrastructure, but now from the VMware role, it's hey guess what, you know HP just did a great integrated demo of their converged integrated. How are they going to participate with our SDN assets? And how do we enable them, how do we enable Dell, how do we enable the rest of the industry? >> And VCE now, how's that relationship, that's a separate company, but it's well funded and they've knocked down some good deployments. It's pretty solid, is it a high end offering? Is it more of, I mean how do you sort that out product wise? >> Well you know, VCE vBLock has always been a higher end offering, that's where UCS is positioned. It really is the premiere platform in in the industry. And we expect to continue to invest in that and partner with them, and VCE's doing well, hitting a billion dollar run weight, so we're happy with them. But as I'm quickly learning, I've got other great partners as well. >> So ecosystems obviously, are organic, they're ever changing. How do these acquisitions that you make change the balance of the ecosystem? >> Well everyone of them is aimed at, can we do it through partnership, or should we do it as an integrated offering? And that, where that line is, is never the same. Right, and we might make a decision that hey, it's better done in ecosystem today, and two years from now, hm, it's time to integrate into the core operating system of VMware, that's just the nature of how software and operating systems are built over time. Now that said, hey we're going to be an ecosystem friendly company, and even where we choose to integrate will always have OpenAPIs that enable industry innovation around us because there's more bright people outside of VMware than there are inside of VMware. So, and if we don't allow people to innovate with us, well yeah, they're going to go innovate somewhere else. >> Well, they have to move fast. You can't predict every innovation that's going to come down the road, and boom, something like Nicira was started in 2007, I mean-- >> You know, and I did a speech last year. I called it the Golden Triangle of Innovation. And there are are three primary pools of innovation. What we do organically, inside of an enterprise, like VMware, what happens in the university community, and what happens in the startup community. And we believe that we effectively have to participate in all three of those. Yeah we have our roots from Stanford and that community, and Nicira comes from Stanford and Berkeley, so clearly we see the university piece of it. We see the inorganic piece of acquisitions, and obviously organic, cool things we're that doing like VXLAN inside of the company. >> You've done a great job, I mean we can honestly say, we've been tracking you from the original interview, you did those things, and every year we ask you, we'll ask you at the end of this interview, what's your plan for the next 12 months? So congratulations on that. The question I want to ask you is, yesterday we heard abstract, pool, automate, which kind of is like code words for operating system. And you know you got to abstract away complexities, have resource management, and then automate and make all of that link and load together. >> You're pretty smart, that's good. >> (chuckles) I had to look that up this morning on Wikipedia, so that's cool, and you've also talked about your historical experience at Intel, cadence of Moore's law, so the question I want to ask you is, as you take over the helm at VMware, you have a different kind of OS cadence going on that's very rapid, as Joe Tucci pointed out. What's your Moore's Law for applications look like? Because now you have an enabling infrastructure in the VMware products and technologies as well as the ecosystem, and you've got to foster that enabling technology. So what is the cadence of the app market? >> Yeah, and you know first I'll say at the operating system level, with VMware, we say boy, we like this yearly cadence. And it's nice that it sort of matches with tick-tock model at Intel which I helped create. And sort of the major, minor releases of VMware are sort of in lock step with that. And you know, because what sets a cadence? Why shouldn't it be three or four years? What should be the right thing? And hey you know, we sort of set, we built on a firm foundation of SILICA, and we're going to align heavily on that. To me this tick-tock through through the stack, and then if I look to the next level of the stack, clearly you know, agile and sprints and so on, have allowed app development to occur, I'll say in a social, crowd sourced model in an effective way, but I think fundamentally, you got to say what is your foundation? And I'd say boy, you know a yearly major release cycle, I think there's good, solid technical foundations for that. And then making sure that you have an effective ability to continue to do continuous innovation. >> So Pat, for the last five or seven years, this industry obviously, has focused on doing more with less, operational efficiencies, obviously the conversion infrastructure trend. John talked about abstracting, automating, or pooling and automating, all those things really driving efficiencies, and you know the story with IT spending. It's flat, it's been down, but there's a thinking out there, with big data, and with new Flash architectures, that we can have major impacts on productivity. When John asked you at EMC World, what would you do if you were running VMworld, you answered, part of your answer was more tighter storage integration. I want to ask you specifically about a top down storage integration, in other words, bringing Flash, really managed from the server level, doing atomic writes, and driving new levels of productivity for organizations that go beyond just sort of cutting costs and better TCO. Can you talk about just the vision of, is that the right place to do it? In other words, controlling the metadata from fast servers versus slow storage? You know, it's an interesting transition from a storage company to now where you are as the head of VMware. >> Yeah, unquestionably, you know we have to do a better job at VMware of taking advantage of Flash on the server side, the performance capabilities of that, the IO gap that's opened up. In-memory data applications, but at the same time, we're seeing the polar extremes become more polar. The size of big data, will forever drive these larger and larger pools of scale out data on the one end, and now with in-memory and Flash technology on the server side, the things that you can do with extreme performance characteristics, at the server, at the application level, and VMware has to do a better job of making that available. And some of the things that Steve talked about with vFlash is an example of that. And we are going to do a lot better job of enabling those high performance, in-memory characteristic applications on this end, while an agent with larger and larger pools of shared storage on the other end. >> And embracing Hadoop you get one in further, you're going to bring big data analytic applications, and actually potentially feed those transaction applications that you're virtualizing in near real time, is that direction. >> Oh yeah, absolutely, but to me, the phenomenal thing is the extremes that are emerging here, where everything used to be just in a shared storage array, we're now sort of blown apart, right? Now we have high performance and memory on one end, and these massive scale platforms, and multi petabytes on the other end. It's pretty spectacular, and I said I essentially want to operate on both of them in essentially real time. >> What's interesting Pat, when we were at EMC World, I asked you can there be a red hat for Hadoop, and you said, you know, editorialized, you said you don't think it could be. We recently had that debate on SiliconANGLE and pretty much the crowd is weighing in that there is no red hat for Hadoop, mainly because just the market conditions are different. So just, I wanted to share that with you, and that we're going to continue to do that-- >> I'm glad they agree with me, I like that, so. >> You've made some good calls on big data. The question I want to ask you is though, is in the major presentation yesterday, you guys laid out the new experiences, and you talked about old way, new way. Access, it was access, app, and infrastructure, PC users, to mobile users, existing apps to new apps and big data, service to cloud. So I wanted to ask you about converged infrastructure. Because that's the old way, so a lot of the definitions around converged infrastructure has been defined as part of that old side, that side of the street that's old. Yet, in the new operating system future that we talk to everyone about, data's now a key kernel part of the design. So I want to ask you, data infrastructure, define what data infrastructure is as it relates to the new converged, if it's not replacing converged infrastructure, how has converged infrastructure changed from old to modern with data at the center of the value proposition? >> Yeah, you know, my EMC World keynote speech touched on this a little bit, this idea of data gravity. Where data gets bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and as the networks become agile, and VMs become mobile, things sort of move around that gravity well of the data. And I expect that to continue forward. So today, converged infrastructure, you'd say what's at the center of a vBLock? Right, you say well, sort of the UCS servers, because that's where the apps run. And I think increasingly in the future, the center of converged infrastructure's more around the storage infrastructure, because VMs are so mobile and light in comparison. But the idea of collapsing the boundaries between server, network and storage, I think is still a very fundamental concept. And when you go look inside of a Google data center, they don't quite think about it the same way. It's this array of infrastructure that is agilely available for their different applications. And I think that's fundamentally the right model. And a cloud scale version of converged infrastructure makes a lot of sense as well. >> And highly homogeneous, and many have observed, obviously, the advantage that Amazon and Google have. And you're clearly, the software defined data centers moving toward a homogeneous environment. >> Right, one common software layer across a set of services that are embodied in converged infrastructure hardware. >> And historically, homogeneous has meant you don't get best of breed. So how do you achieve best of breed? Is that through the ecosystem? Maybe, if you could elaborate on that a little bit. >> Well I think in this case, the scale operation characteristic swamp, the individual characteristics are best of breed in that sense. And they become enabled through this layer. But that hardware, software boundary is always a point of innovation. When virtualization of VMware first emerged, Mendel had this paranoia, we would rely on no hardware. We'll make it work on anything. And then over time, the hardware got better at doing things like page table mapping, memory breakthroughs, et cetera, for virtualization. All of a sudden, it's sort of like, oh the hardware's enabling better virtualization. You took advantage of it. And the same thing will emerge as you go think about converged infrastructure for networking and storage as well. The hardware will continue to evolve to better enable this virtualization layer of software and automation above it. >> We're starting at the hook, but you know we want to go, you got multi core, high megahertz clock speed right now, with Pat, we have a couple minutes left. I have two questions, one is around the future of virtualization, we're following, on SiliconANGLE.com, some of the new advances around large data centers that have commodity gear. So obviously, the usual suspects are Google, Facebook and whatnot, having a lot of commodity machines. And low level virtual machines is a really big trend now, looking at how to deploy VMwares at a programmatic layer. I don't know if you're following that. So I want you to comment on what you're following relative to some of the new trends around VMs. Obviously down to the low level, low level virtual machines and how they're playing up the stack, and then my final question after that would be, in the next 12 months, what's on your to do list? >> Yeah, well you know, I think you know, part of our task is sort of today, the leader in virtualization, is continue to leading the trends in that sense. Continuing to reduce the overhead of virtual machines, IO stack improvements, the Flash example that we gave before is a big piece of that. And continuing to enable better app affinity. You saw the Hadoop work, you know some of the big VM work around databases as well, and saying now how does, because in many ways, databases, VMs operate on, under provision hardware, and be able to over provision, and databases are over provisioning in memory for an under provisioned resource of the database, it's almost the inverse. So how do we address that? The Serengeti Hadoop work is another example of that. So there's lots of things to continue to innovate at the virtualization layer, both as you look down toward the hardware, as well as as you look up toward the application, and I think in that sense-- >> Is that where the software kind of tie in, that's why you're not seeing software-defining networking, more stuff with defined data centers? You have some ranges there, is that the part? >> Well that's a big piece of it yeah. Right, and you wanted all that to become policy based. Because you want essentially, what Steve likes to call the virtual data center to associate the policy of the application requirements as well as with the policy mechanisms of the underlying infrastructure. So that you know, the virtualization, the networking, the security elements, all of those become embodied in that as a set of services to the VM or this virtual data center. Next 12 months, obviously job one is make the transition smooth. Job two is get plan 13 in place, as the year concludes here. And then some of the key agendas of those we already talked about, operate on the SDN. We just made 1.3 billion, I better make a good use of that. Figure out our storage and security virtualization strategies, our management stack, and some of the horizon things today are really pretty thrilling for that next generation end user experience. >> Pat Gelsinger, always a blast on theCUBE, now as officially the CEO, great to have you on. >> Well actually I'm not official yet, T-minus three days now, September 1st, so I got-- >> Three days, okay September 1st. (chuckles) >> Well congratulations on the-- >> Pat Gelsinger. >> Thank you very much. >> CUBE alumni, great guy and tech athlete for sure. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com's flagship coverage of all the events extracting the signal from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.