(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back to VMWorld 2013. This is theCUBE, flagship program. We go out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with David Vilante, my co-host from Wikibon.org and we're kicking off today with an awesome interview. CEO of VMWare, Pat Gelsinger, CUBE Alumni. Been on the theCUBE with Dave and I multiple times. So many times. You are in like the leaderboards. So in terms of overall guest frequency, you've been up there, but also you're also the top dog at VMWare and great to see you again. How are you feeling? >> Thank you, thank you. Good morning, guys. >> Pleasure. >> Good to see you. >> So what's new? I mean obviously you're running the show here. You're running around. Last night you were at the NetApp event. You ran through CIO, R&D. You got to go out and touch all the bases out here. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What does that look like? What have you done and obviously, you did, the key note was awesome. What else is going on? >> You know, everything, you know, VMWorld is just, it's just overwhelming, right? I mean 23,000 people almost. I mean you know the amount of activities around that and it really has become the infrastructure event for the industry and you know, if you're anything related to infrastructure, right, what's going on, right in the enterprise side of IT, you got to be here, right? And there's parties everywhere. Every vendor has their events. Every you know, different particular technology area, a bunch of the things that we're doing, and of course to me, it's just delightful that I can go touch as many people and you know, they get excited to see the CEO. I have no idea why, but hey I get to show up. It's good. >> You've been in the industry for a long time. Obviously you've seen all the movies before and we've talked about the seas of change in the EMC world when you were there, but we had two guests on yesterday that were notable. Steve Herrod who's now a venture capitalist at Generalcatalyst and Jerry Chen who's a VC at Graylock, and we have a 10-year run here at VMWare which is esteemed by convention, but the first five years were a lot different than the last five years, and certainly, the last year you were at the helm. So what's changed in the past 24 months? A lot of stuff has certainly evolved, right? So the Nicira acquisition certainly changed up, changed everything, right? You saw software-defined data center now come into focus this year, but really, just about less than 24 months, a massive kind of change. What, how do you view all that? How do you talk to your employees and the customers about that change? >> Well you know, as we think about the software-defined data center vision, right, it is a broad comprehensive powerful vision for rearchitecting how the data center is operated, how customers take advantage of it. You know and the results and the agility and efficiency that comes from that. And obviously the Nicira acquisition is sort of the shot heard 'round the world as the really, "Okay, these guys are really serious "about making that happen." And it changes every aspect of the data center in that regard. You know and this year's VMWorld is really, I'll say, putting the beef on the bones, right? We talked about the vision, we talked about each of the four legs of it: compute, networking, storage and management of automation. So this year it's really putting the beef on the bones and the NSX announcement, putting substance behind it. The vSAN announcement, putting substance behind it. The continuing progress of management and automation. And I think everything that we've seen here in the customer conversations, the ecosystem of partner conversations are SDDC is real. Now get started. >> Can you, I think you've had some fundamental assumptions in that scenario, particularly around x86 in the service business. Essentially if I understand it, you've said that x86 will dominate that space. You're expecting status quo in the sense that it will continue to go in the cadence of you know, cores and Moore's Law curve even though we know that's changing. But that essentially will stay as is and it's the other parts, the networking and the storage piece that you're really, where you define conventions. Is that right? >> Yeah certainly we expect a continuing momentum by the x86 by Intel in that space, but as you go think about software-defined everything in the data center really is taking the power of that same core engine and applying it to these other areas because when we say software-defined networking, right, you need a very high packet flow capability and that's running a software on x86. We need to talk about data services running in software, right? You need high performance. It's snapshots, file systems, etc. running on software, no longer bound to you know physical array. So it really is taking that same power, that same formula right, and applying it to the rest of the elements of the data center and yeah, we're betting big right, that that engine will continue and that we'll be successful in being able to deliver that value in this software layer running on that core powerful Silicon engine. >> So Pat, so obviously when you came on board, the first thing you did was say, "Hey, the pricing. "I want to change some things." Hyper-Visor's always been kind of this debate. Everyone always debates about what to do with Hyper-Visor. But still, virtualization's still the enabling technology so you know, you kind of had this point where the ball's moving down the field and all of a sudden, in 2012, it changed significantly, and that was a lot in part with your vision with infrastructure. As infrastructure gets commoditized, what is going to change in the IT infrastructure and for service providers, and the value chains that's going to be disrupted? Obviously economics are changing. What specifically is virtualization going to do next with software defined that's going to be enabling that technology? >> Yeah, you know and I, you know, we're not out to commoditize. We're out to enable innovation. We're out to enable agility, right, and then the course of that, it changes what you expect and what the underlying hardware does. But you know, it's enabling that ecosystem of innovation is what we're about and customers to get value from that and as you go look at these new areas, "Hey, you know, we're changing how you do networking." Right, all of a sudden, we're going to create a virtual network overlay that has all of these services associated with it that are proficient just like VMs in seconds. We're creating a new layer of how storage is going to be enabled. You know, this policy-driven capability. Taking those capabilities that before were tightly bound to hardware, delivering it through the software layer, enabling this new magnificent level of automation and yesterday's demo with Carl. I mean Carl does a great CTO impersonation, doesn't he? And he's getting some celebrity action. He's like, "I got the bottle." >> Oh yeah. >> Steve Herrod gave him a thumbs up too. >> Yes, yeah Steve gave him a good job. But you know, so all of those pieces coming together, right, is you know, really, and you know, just the customer and the ecosystem response here at the show has been, "Oh, you know, right, "SDDC, it's not some crazy thing out there in the future. "This is something I can start realizing value for now." >> Well it's coming into focus. It's not 100% clear for a lot of the customers because they're still getting into the cloud and the hybrid cloud, I call it the halfway house to kind of a fully evolved IT environment, but you know. How do you define? >> No it is the endgame. Hyper cloud is not a halfway house. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? >> To to full all-utility computing. That is ultimately what we're saying. >> Halfway house? >> I don't mean it that way. (group laughs) >> Help me. >> Okay next question. >> (chuckles) When you're in a hole, stop digging, buddy. >> So how do you define the total adjusted mark at 50 billion that Carl talked about? >> Yeah you know, as we looked at that, we said across the three things, right that we said, software-defined data center, 28 billion dollars; hyper cloud, 14 billion; eight billion for the end-user computing; that's just 50 billion opportunity. But even there, I think that dramatically understates the market opportunity. IT overall is $1.7 trillion, right? The communications, the services, outsourcing, etc. And actually the piece that we're talking about is really the underpinnings for a much larger set of impact in the part of what applications are going to be developed, how services are delivered, how consumers and businesses are able to take advantage of IT. So yes, that's the $50 billion. We'll give you the math, we'll show you all the details of Gartner's and IDC's to support it. But to us, the vision and the impact that we're out for is far more dramatic than that would even imply. >> Well that's good news because we said to Carl, "It's good that your market cap is bigger than--" (Pat laughs) >> Oh yeah your TAM is bigger than your market cap. Well okay now we-- >> Yeah, that's nice, yeah. Yeah, we're out to fix the market cap. >> Yeah he said, "Now we got to get the 50 billion. So I'm glad to hear there's upside to the TAM. But I wanted to ask you about the ecosystem conversation. When you talk about getting things like you know, software defined network and software defined source, what's the discourse like in ecosystem? For guys like, let's take the storage side. EMC, NetApp last night, they say, "Hey you know, software defined storage. "We really like that, but we want to be in that business." so what, talk about that discussion. >> Yeah, clearly every piece of software defined, whether it's software defined storage, software defined data services, software defined security services or networking, every piece of that has ecosystem implications along the way. But if you go talk to a NetApp or a EMC, they'd say, "You're an appliance vendor." And they would quickly respond and say, "No, our value's in software, "and we happen to deliver it as an appliance." And we'd say, "Great, let's start delivering "the software value as a software appliance "through virtualization and through the software delivery "mechanisms that we're talking about for this new platform." Now each one of them has to adjust their product strategies, their, you know, business strategies to enable those software components, right, independent of their hardware elements for full execution and embodiment into the software-defined data center feature. But for the most part, every one of them is saying, "Yes, now how do we figure out how to get there, "and how do we decompose our value, embody it it in new ways "and how can we enable that in "this new software-defined data center vision?" >> And they've always done that with software companies. I mean certainly Microsoft and Oracle have always grabbed a piece of the storage stack and put it into their own, but it's been very narrow, within their own spaces, and of course, VMWare is running any application anywhere. So it's more of a general purpose platform. >> Absolutely. >> Is it a tricker fit for the ecosystem to figure out where that white space is? >> Absolutely. Every one of them has to figure out their strategy. If you're F5, you know, I was with John McAdam this morning. "Okay, how do I take my value?" And you would very quickly say, "Hey, our value's in software. "We deliver it as mostly as appliances, "but how do we shift, you know, your checkpoint?" Okay, you know, they're already, right, you know, our largest software value or Riverbed, you know, the various software vendors and security as well. Each one of them are having to rethink their strategies and the context of software define. Our customers are saying, "Wow, this is powerful. "The agility and the benefits that I get from it, "they're driving them to go there." >> So what's the key to giving them confidence? Is it transparency? You're sharing roadmaps during integration? >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Anything else? Am I missing anything there? >> You know, also how we work with them and go to market as well. You know, they're expecting from us that, okay, "you know, if this is one of our accounts, "come in and work with us on those accounts as well." So we do have to be transparent. We have to the APIs and enable them to do integration. We have to work with them in terms of enabling their innovation and the context of this platform that we're building. But as we work along the way, we're getting good responses to that. >> Pat, how do you look at the application market? Now with end-user computing, you guys are picking that up. You got Sanjay Poonen coming in and obviously mobile and cloud, we talked about this before on theCUBE, but core IT has always been enabling kind of the infrastructure and then you get what you get from what you have in IT. Now the shift is, application is coming from outside IT. Business units and outside from partners, whether they're resellers. How do you view that tsunami of apps coming in that need infrastructure on demand or horizontally scalable at will? >> Yeah so first point is, yes, right, we do see that, you know, as infrastructure becomes more agile and more self provisioned, right, more aligned to the requirements of applications, we do see that it becomes a tsunami of new applications. We're also working very hard to enable IT to be the friend of the line of business. No longer seen as a barrier, but really seen as a friend, partner enabler of what they're trying to do because many of the, you know, line of businesses have been finding way. You know, how do I get around the slow-moving IT? Well we want to make IT fast-moving and enabling to meet their security, governance, SLA requirements while they're also enabling these powerful new applications to emerge and that to us is what infrastructure is all about for the future is enabling, you know, businesses to move at the speed of business and not have infrastructure being a limiter and as we're doing things, you know, like the big data announcements that we did, enabling infrastructure that's more agility, you see us do more things in the AppDev area over time, and enabling the management tools to integrate more effectively to those environments. Self-service portals that are enabling that and obviously with guys like Sanjay in our mobile initiative, yeah that's a big step up. Don't you like Sanjay? He's a great addition to the team. >> Yeah Sanjay's awesome. He's been great and he has done a lot on the mobile side. Obviously that is something that the end users want. >> That's an interesting way that I put him into that business group first. (group chuckles) >> Well on the Flash side, so under the hood, right? So we look under the hood. You got big data on the dashboard. Everyone's driving this car to the new future of IT. Under the hood, you got Flash. That's changing storage a bit and certainly reconfiguring what a DaaS is and NaaS and SaaS and obviously you talked about vSAN in your key note. What is happening, in your vision, with compute? I mean obviously as you have more and more apps hitting IT, coming in outside core IT but having to be managed by core IT, does that change the computing paradigm? Does it make it more distributed, more software? I mean how do you look at that 'cause that's changing the configuration of say the compute architecture. >> Sure and I mean a couple of things, if you think about the show here that we've done, two of them in particular in this space, one is vSAN, right? A vSAN is creating converged infrastructure that includes storage. Why do you do that? Well now you have storage, you know, apps are about data, right? Apps need data to operate on so now we've created an integrated storage tier that essentially presents an integrated application environment in converged infrastructure. That changes the game. We talked about the Hadoop extension. It changes how you think about these big data applications. Also the Cloud Foundry announcement. Right on/off premise of PaaS layer to uniquely enable applications and as they've done that on the PaaS layer, boy, you don't have to think about the infrastructure requirements to deploy that on or off premise or increasingly as I forecast for the future, hybrid applications, born in the hybrid, not born in the cloud, but born in the hybrid cloud applications that truly put the stuff that belongs on premise on premise, puts the stuff that belongs on the cloud in the cloud, right and enables them to fundamentally work together in a secure operational manner. >> So the apps are dictating through the infrastructure basically on demand resources, and essentially combine all that. >> Absolutely. Right. The infrastructure says, "Here's the services "that I have already, right, in catalogs "that you can immediately take advantage of, "and if this, you fit inside "of these catalogs, you're done." It's self-provisions from that point on and we've automated the operations and everything to go against that. >> So that concept of "born in the hybrid" is a good one. So obviously that's your sweet spot. You're going from a position. >> Yeah and this stupid halfway house hybrid comment. I mean I've never heard something so idiotic before. >> One person, yeah. (group chuckles) >> I don't know, it was probably an Andreessen comment or something, I don't know. (group chuckles) >> He's done good for himself, Marc Andreessen. >> Google and Amazon are obviously going to have a harder time with that, you know, born in the hybrid. What about Microsoft? They got a good shot at born in the hybrid, don't they? >> Yeah, you know and I think I've said the four companies that I think have a real shot to be you know, very large significant players for public cloud infrastructure services. You know, clearly Amazon, you know Google, they have a large, substantive very creative company. Yeah Microsoft, they have a large position. Azure, what they've done with Hyper-V and ourselves, and I think that those, you know the two that sort of have the natural assets to participate in the hybrid space are us and Microsoft at that level, and obviously you know we think we have lots of advantages versus Microsoft. We think we're miles ahead of them and SDDC, right, we think the seamlessness and the compatibility that we're building with one software stack, not two. It's not Azure and Hyper-V. It is SDDC in the cloud and on premise that that gives us significant advantages and then we're going to build these value rate of services on top of it, you know, as we announced with Desktop as a Service, Cloud Foundry as a Service, DR as a service. We're going to quickly build that stack of capabilities. That just gives substantial value to enterprise customers. >> So I got to ask you, talk about hybrid since you brought it up again. So software defined data center software. So what happens to the data center, the actual physical data center? You mentioned about the museum. I mean what is it going to look like? I mean right now there's still power and cooling. You're going to have utility competing with cloud resources on demand. People are still going to run data centers. >> You're talking about the facility? >> Yeah, the actual facility. I'm still going to have servers. This will be an on premise. Do you see that, how do you see that phasing out to hybrid? What does that look like physically for someone to manage? Just to get power, facility management, all that stuff. >> Yeah and in many ways, I think here, the you know, the cloud guys, Googles and Amazons and Yahoos and Facebooks have actually led the way in doing some pretty creative work. These things become you know, highly standardized, highly modularized, highly scalable, you know, very few number of admins per server ratio. As we go forward, these become very automated factories, right, of cloud execution. Some of those will be on premise. Some of those will be off premise. But for the most part, they'll look the same, right, in how they operate and our vision for software defined data center is that software layer is taking away the complexity, right, of what operates underneath it. You know, they'll be standardized, they'll be modularized. You plug in power, you plug in cooling, you plug in network, right, and these things will operate. >> Basically efficient down to the bone. >> Yeah. >> Fully operated software. >> Yeah and you know, people will decide what they put in their private cloud, you know, based on business requirements. SLAs, you know, privacy requirements, data governance requirements, right? I mean in Europe, got to be on premise in these locations and then they'll say, "Put stuff in the public cloud "that allows me to burst effectively. "Maybe a DR because I don't do that real well. Or these applications that belongs in the cloud, right because it's distributive in nature, but keep the data on premise. You know, and really treat it as a menu of options to optimize the business requirements between capex to opex, regulatory requirements, scale requirements, expertise, mission critical and all of those things then are delivered by a sustainable position. Not some stupid hybrid halfway house. A sustainable position that optimizes against the business requirements that they have. >> Let me take one of those points, SLA. Everybody likes to attack Amazon and its SLAs, but in many regards. >> Yeah, I'm glad I got your attention. >> Yeah, that's good, we're going to come back to that John. (group chuckles) >> In my head right now. >> I don't think we're done with that talk track. (laughs) So it's easy to attack Amazon and SLAs, but in essence, the SLA is, to the degree of risk that you're willing to take and put on paper at scale. So how transparent will you be with your SLAs with the hybrid cloud and you know, will they exceed what Amazon and Google have been willing and HP for that matter have been willing to promise at scale? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean we're going to be transparent. The SLAs will have real teeth associated with them, you know, real business consequences for lack of execution against them. You know, they will be highly transparent. You know, we're going to have true, we're going to measure these things and you know, provide uptime commitments, etc. against them. That's what an enterprise service is expected, right? At the end of the day, that's what enterprises demand, right? When you pick up the phone and need support, you get it, right. And in our, the VMWare support is legendary. I'm just delighted by the support services that we offer and the customer response to those is, "Hey you fixed my problem even when "it wasn't your problem and make it work." And that's what enterprise customers want because that's what they have to turn around and commit back to their businesses against all of the other things as well. You know, regulatory requirements, audit requirements, all of those types of things. That's what being an enterprise provider is all about. >> John wants to get that. Talk about public cloud. (Pat laughs) >> I want to talk about OpenStack because you guys are big behind OpenStack. You talk about it as a market expansion. Internally what are some of the development conversations and sales conversations with customers around OpenStack instead of status, what's it doing, how you guys are looking at that and getting involved? >> Yeah, you know, we've clearly said you know, that you have to think about OpenStack in the proper way. OpenStack is a framework for building clouds, and you know, for people who are wanting to build their own cloud as opposed to get the free package cloud, right, you know, this is our strategy to enable those APIs, to give our components to those customers to help them go build it, right and those customers, largely are service providers, internet providers who have unique scale, integration and other requirements and we're finding that it's a good market expansion opportunity for us to put our components in those areas, contribute to the open source projects where we truly have IP and can differentiate for it like at the Hyper-Visor level, like at the right networking layer and it's actually going pretty well. You know, in our Q2 earnings call, you might recall, you know, I talked about that our business with the public OpenStack customers was growing faster than the rest of our business. That's pretty significant, right, to say, "Wow, if it's growing faster, "that says the strategy is working." Right, and we are seeing a good response there and clearly we want to communicate. We're going to continue that strategy going forward. >> And the installed base of virtualization is obviously impressive and the question I want to ask you is how do you see the evolution of the IT worker? I mean they have the old model, DBA, system admins, and then now you have data science on the big data side so with software defined data center, the virtualization team seems to be the center point for that. What roles do you see changing with hybrid cloud and software defined data center and user computing? >> Well I think sort of the theme of our conference is defy convention. Right and why do we do that? Because we really see that the, you know, the virtual admin and the virtual infrastructure that they have really become the center of IT. Now we need the competence of networking, the security guys, the database guys, but that now has to happen in the context, right, of a virtualized environment. DBA doesn't get to control his unique infrastructure. The Hadoop guy doesn't get his own unique infrastructure. They're all just workloads that run on this virtualized infrastructure that is increasingly adept and adaptable, right, to these different workload areas and that's what we see going forward as we reach into these new areas and the virtual admin, he has to go make best buddies with the networking guy and say, "Let me talk to you about virtual networking "and how we're going to cross between the virtual overlay "domain and the physical domain and how these things "are going to stitch together for making your job better "right, and delivering a better solution "for our line of business and for our customers." >> One thing you did to defy convention is get on stage with Marc Andreessen. So I want to talk about that a little bit. You guys had I would call it, you know, slight disagreements and, into the future. >> Just a little. >> But I thought you were kind to him. And he said, you know, "No startup that I work with "is going to buy any servers." And I thought you were going to add, no never mind. I won't even go there. (group laughs) I won't even go there, I want to be friends. No so talk about that a little bit, that discussion that you had. Your view of the world and Marc's. How do you respond to that statement? Do they grow up into VMWare customers? Is that the obvious answer? >> I mean I have a lot of regard. You know, Marc and I have known each other for probably close to two decades now and you know, we partnered and sparred together for a long time and he's a smart, successful guy and I appreciate his opinions. You know, but he takes a very narrow view, right, of a venture seed fund, right, who is optimizing cashflow, and why would they spend capital on cashflow when they can go get it as a service? That's exactly the right thing for a very early stage startup company to do in most cases, right? Marc driving his customers to do that makes a lot of sense, but at the end of the day, right, if you want to reach into enterprise customers, you got to deliver enterprise services, right? You got to be able to scale these things. You got to be cost-effective at these things and then all the other aspects of governance, SLAs, etc. that we already talked about. So in that view, I think Marc's view is very perspective. >> Also Zynga and those guys, when they grew up on Amazon, they went right to bare metals as soon as they started scale. >> They had to bring it back in right 'cause they needed the SLAs, they needed the cost structures. They wanted to have the controls of some of those applications. >> And rental is more expensive at the end of the day. >> There you go. Somebody's got to pay the margins, right, you know, on top of that, to the providers so you know, I appreciate the perspective, but to me it is very narrow and periconchal to that point of view and I think the industry is much broader and things like policy and regulation are going to take decades, right? Not years, you know, multiple decades for these things to change and roll out to enable us a mostly public cloud world ever, right, and that's why I say I think the hybrid is not a waystation, right? It is the right balance point that gives customers flexibility to meet their business demands across the range of things and Marc and I obviously, we're quite in disagreement over that particular point. >> And John once again, Nick Carr missed the mark. We made a lot of money. >> I think Marc Andreessen wants to put a lot of money into that book. Everyone could be the next Facebook where you you know, you build your own and I think that's not a reality in enterprise. They kind of want to be like Facebook-like applications, but I wanted to ask you about automation. So we talked to a lot of customers here in theCUBE and we all asked them a question. Automation orchestration's at the top of the stack. They all want it, but they all say they have different processes and you really can't have a general purpose software approach. So Dave and I were commenting last night when we got back after the NetApp event was you know, you and Paul Murray were talking in 2010 around this hardened top when you introduced that stack and with infrastructure as a service, is there a hardened top where functionality is more important than which hardware you buy so you can enable some of those service catalogs, some of those agility features in automation because every customer will have a different process to be automated. >> Yeah. >> And how do you do that without human intervention? So where is that hardened top now? I mean is it platform as a service or is it still at the infrastructure as a service model? >> Yeah, I think clearly the line between infrastructure as a service and platform as a service will blur, right, and you know, it's not really clear where you can quite draw that line. Also as we make infrastructure more application aware, right, and have more application development services associated with it, that line will blur even more. So I think it's going to be hard to call, you know, "Here's that simple line associated with it." We'd also argue that in this world that customers, they have heterogeneous tools that they need to work with. Some will have bought in a big way into some of the legacy tools and as much as we're going to try help them move past some of those brittle environments, well that takes a long time as well. I'd also say that you know, it's the age of APIS, not UIs, and for us it's very much to expose our value through programmatic interfaces so customers truly can have the flexibility to integrate those and give them more choice even as we're trying to build a more deeply integrated and automated stack that meets a general set of needs for customers. >> So that begs the question, at the top of the stack where end user computing's going to sit and you're going to advance that piece, what's, what's the to do item for you? What needs to happen there? Is it, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being fully baked out, where is it, what are the white spaces that need to be tweaked either by partners or by VMWare? >> Yeah and I think we're pretty quickly finishing the stack with regard to the traditional PC environments and I think the amount of work to do for the mobile environment is still quite enormous as we go forward and in that, you know, we're excited about Horizon getting some good uptake, a number of partner announcements this week, but there's a lot to be done in that space because people want to be able to secure apps, provision apps, deprovision apps, have secure work spaces, social experiences, a rich range of integrations to the authentication devices associated with it to be able to have applications that are developed in that environment that access this hybrid infrastructure effectively over time, be able to self-compose those applications, put them into enterprise, right, stores and operations, be able to access this big data infrastructure. There's a whole lot of work to be done in that space and I think that'll keep us busy for quite a number of years. >> This is great. We're here with Pat Gelsinger inside theCUBE. We could keep rolling until we get to the hook, but a couple more final questions is the analogy of cloud has always been like the grid, electricity. You kind of hinted to this earlier. I mean is that a fair comparison? The electricity's kind of clean and stable. We have an actual national grid. It doesn't have bad data and hackers coming through it so is that a fair view of cloud to kind of look, talk about plugging electricity in the wall for IT. >> I think that is so trite, right? It came up in the panel we had with Andreessen, Bechtolsheim, Graeme, and myself because you know, it's so standardized. 120 volts AC right and hey you know, maybe it gets distributed as four, 440, three phase, but you know, it is so standardized. It hasn't moved. Sockets standards, right, you're done. Think how fast this cloud world is evolving. Right the line between IA as in PaaS as we just touched upon, the services that are being offered on top of it. >> Security, security. >> Yeah, yeah, all these different things. To me, it is such a trite, simple analogy that has become so used and abused in the process that I think it leads people to such wrong conclusions right, about what we're doing and the innovation that's going on here and the potential that we're going to offer. So I hope that every one of our competitors takes that and says, "That's the right model." Because I think it leads them to exactly the wrong conclusion. >> I couldn't agree more. The big switch is a big myth. I wanted to get tactical for a minute. I listened to your conference calls. I can't wait to read the transcript. I just go, I got to listen to the calls, but just observing those and the conversations around here, I just wanted to ask you. I always ask CEOs, "What keeps you up at night?" They always say execution so let's focus on execution in the next 12 to 18 months. I came up with the following. "To maintain dominance in vSphere, "get revenue beyond vSphere, "broaden end user license agreements, "increase end user computing adoption "and proof points around hybrid cloud." Are those the big ones? Did I miss anything? >> That's a good list. >> Yeah? >> That's a good list. >> So those are the things an observer should watch in let's say 12 to 18 months of indicators of success and of what you're doing and what you're driving. >> Yeah and you know, clearly inside of that, with SDDC, obviously we think this environment for networking, right, and what we've really, I'll say delivered that. That would be one in particular inside of that category that we would call out you know, with regard to our hybrid cloud strategy. It's clearly globalizing that platform. Right, we announced Savvis here, but we need to make this available on a global basis. You go to an enterprise customer and they're going to say, "I need services in Japan, I need services in Singapore. "I need to be able to operate in a global basis." So clearly having a platform, building out the services on top of it is another key aspect of building those hybrid user cases and more of the value on top of it and then in the EUC space, we touched a bit on the mobile thing already. >> So we'll have Martin on later, but his PowerPoint demonstration. >> What a rockstar, what a rockstar. >> He is a rockstar and we've had him on before. He's fantastic, but his PowerPoint demonstration is very simple, made it seem so simple. It's not going to be that easy to virtualize the network. Can you talk about the headwinds there and the challenges that you have and the things that you have to do to actually make progress there and really move the needle? >> Yeah it really sort of boils down in two aspects. One is we are suggesting that there will be a software layer for networking that is far more scalable, agile and robust than you can do in a physical networking layer. That's a pretty tall order, right? I need to be able to scale to tens, hundreds, millions of VMs, right? I need to be able to scale to terabytes of cross-sectional packet flow through this. I need to be able to deliver services on top of this, right, that truly allow firewalls, load balancers, right, IDSes, all of those things to be agile, scale. Yeah, it is ambitious. >> Ambitious. >> This is, right, the most radical, architectural statements in networking in the last 20 or 30 years and that's what gets Martin passionate. So there's a lot of technical scale and we really feel good about what we've done, right, but being able to prove that with robust scalability, right, for which like the Hyper-Visor, it is more reliable than hardware today, in being able to make that same statement about NSX that just like ESX, it is better than hardware, right, in terms of its reliability, its resilience. That's an important thing for us to accomplish technically in that space, but then the other pieces, showing customer value, right? Getting those early customers and what a powerful picture. GE, Citigroup and eBay, right? It's like wow, right? These are massive customers, right, and being able to prove the value and the use cases in the customer settings, right, and if we do those two things, you know, we think that truly we all have accomplished something very very special in the networking domain. >> Pat, talk about the innovation strategy. You've been now a year under your belt at VMWare and you were obviously with EMC and Intel and we mentioned on theCUBE many times, cadence of Moore's Law was kind of the culture of Intel. Why don't you tell us about the innovation strategy of VMWare going forward, your vision, but also talk about the culture and talk about the one thing that VMWare has from a culture that makes it unique and what is that unique feature of the VMWare culture? >> We spent time as a team talking about what is it that drives our innovation, that drives our passion, and clearly as we've talked about our values as a team, it is very much about this passion for technology and passion for customers and how those two coming together, right, with fundamental disruptive "wow" kind of technologies where people just say, like they did when they first used ESX and they say, "Wow, I just didn't ever envision "that you could possibly do that." And that's the experience that we want to deliver over and over again, right, so you know, hugely disruptive powerful software driven virtualization technologies for these domains, but doing it in a way that customers just fall in love with our technologies and you know as, I got a note from Sanjay and I just asked him, "You know, what do you think of VMWorld?" And he said, right, "It is like a cult geek fest." Right, because there's just this deep passion around what people do with our technology, right, and they're not even at that point, they're not customers, they're not partners. They are deeply aligned passionate zealots around what we are doing to make their lives so much more powerful, so much more enabled, right, and ultimately, a lot more fun. >> People say it's like being a car buff. You know, you got to know the engine, you want to know the speeds and feeds. It is a tech culture. >> Yeah, it is absolutely great. >> Pat, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We scan spend a lot of time with you. I know we went a little over. I appreciate your time. Always great to see you. >> Great to see you too. >> Looking good. >> Thank you for that. >> Tech Athlete Pat Gelsinger touching all the bases here. We saw him last night at AT&T Park. Great event here, VMWare World 2013. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Pat Gelsinger, CEO on theCUBE.