>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE here live in Las Vegas where Amazon Web Services, AWS re:Invent 2018. Our sixth year covering it, presented by Intel and AWS. Our next guest is Paul Savill, Senior Vice President of core network and technology for CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, really glad to be here. >> So one of the things we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE is that the holy trinity of infrastructure is storage, network, and compute, never going away but it's evolving as the market evolves. You guys have been providing connectivity and core network. >> Right. >> Really high availability bandwidth and connectivity for many, many years. Now you guys are in the middle of a seat change, what's your story? What are you guys doing at re:Invent? You guys are partners, your logo is everywhere, What's your story? Why are you here? What are you talking about at re:Invent this year? >> Sure, yeah. You know I really do believe it is a seat change. We've actually been working with AWS for many years and when AWS first started, we were one of the major internet service providers for AWS and access into AWS cloud services, but a few years ago we really started seeing this seat change start to happen because Enterprise customers started asking for weird things from us. They actually wanted to order dedicated 10 gigabit optical waves from their Enterprise location into the AWS platform, and we were thinking everything should come through the public internet, why are people doing this? And really, what was driving it, was issues around performance, concerns around security, and so we're starting to see the network really start to play a major role in how cloud services and how performance of cloud-based applications are delivered. >> We're here in day two of re:Invent, we've got two more days to go. Andy Jackson's got his big keynote, he's the CEO he's got his big keynote tomorrow morning. We're expecting to hear latency to be a big part of his keynote. Specifically as Amazon evolves their strategy from being public cloud, where all the action is, to having a cloud version on premise. >> Right >> Because of latency and heritage or legacy workloads on premise aren't going away certainly. Maybe their footprint might be smaller, I'd buy that, but it's not going away. But connectivity and latency is now at the front of the conversation again because data and compute have that relationship. I don't want to be moving date around, if I do it better be low latency, but I want to run compute over the network, I want to send some compute to the edge. So latency is important. Talk about this, because you gave a talk here around milliseconds matter, I love that line, because they do matter now. >> They do, yeah. >> Talk about that concept. >> Sure, yeah. We're absolutely seeing it and the reason we kind of came up with that tag line is because more and more as we've been working with enterprises on networking solutions, we've found that this is really true in how well their applications perform in the cloud, and I really do applaud Jausi and AWS for working on that solution to deliver, to the prim, some of the AWS capabilities. But really we see the market evolving, where in the future it's a trade off between latency and the amount of bandwidth and how the performance needs to be applied across the field. Because we believe that some things will make a lot of sense to be hosted out of the cloud core, where there's major iron, major storage and compute, some things can be distributed on the prim, but then other things make more sense to be hosted out of somewhere on the far edge where it can serve multiple locations. It may be more efficient that way, because maybe you don't want to haul all the bandwidth, or huge amounts of data very long distances, that becomes expensive. >> Well bandwidths cost, it's a cost to you. >> It's still a cost, yeah. >> Latency, one, is a performance overhead cost on that that could hurt the application, but there's also a cost, there's actual financial cost. >> Yes, there is. >> Talk about this concept of latency in context to the new kinds of applications, because what's going on is that as compute, and as you mentioned, storage, start to get more functionality, specifically compute, >> Yes >> Things happen differently. I've been studying AI, I've been a computer science major since the 80's, and AI's been around since the 80's and earlier, but all those concepts just didn't have the compute capability and now they do, now machine learning is on fire, that's a renaissance. Compute can help connectivity, you just mentioned a huge case there, so this is powering new software applications that no one has ever seen before. >> That's right. >> How are these new networks workloads and applications changing connectivity? Give some examples, what are some of the things you guys are seeing as use cases running over the connectivity? >> Sure. So we're seeing a lot of different use cases, and you're right, it really is transforming. An example of this is retail robotics for instance. We're seeing very real applications where large retail customers want to drive robotics in their many retail store locations but it's just not affordable to put that whole hardware software stack in every single store to run those robotics, but then if you try to run those robotics from an application that hosted in a cloud somewhere a thousand miles away then it doesn't have the latency performance that it needs to accurately run those robotics in the store. So we believe that what we're starting to see is this transformation where applications are going to be broken up into these microservices where parts of it's going to run in the cloud core, part of it's going to run in the prim, and part of it's going to run on the near edge where things are more efficient to run for certain types of applications. >> It's kind of like a human. You got your brains and you got your arms and legs to move around. So the brains can be in the cloud, and then whatever is going on at the edge can have more compute. Give some other examples. You and I were talking before we came on camera about video retail analytics. >> Righ, uh huh. >> Pretty obvious when you think about it, but not obvious when you don't have cloud. So talk about video analytics. >> Yeah, that's another important driver is with all of the AI tools that are being developed and as AI advances and as other things, technology like machine learning, advances, then we want to apply AI to a whole new range of applications. So retail, like video analytics for instance, what we're starting to see is the art of the possible. You may have a retail store that has 30 different video cameras spread up around its store and it's constantly monitoring people's expressions, people's moods as they come in, there's an AI sitting somewhere that's analyzing how people feel when they walk in the store versus how they feel when they walk out. Are they happier when they walk out than when they walk in? Are they really mad when they're in the waiting line someplace, or is there a corner of the store where, real time, there's an AI that's detecting that, hey there's a problem in the corner of the store because people seem like they look upset. That type of analysis, you don't want to feed all of that video, all of those simultaneous video feeds to some AI that's sitting a thousand miles away. That's just too much of a lift in terms of bandwidth and in terms of cost. So the answer is there's this distributed model where portions of the application in the AI is acting at different locations in the network and the network is tying it all together. >> Microservice is going to create a whole new level of capabilities and change how they're implemented and deployed. >> Yes. >> And connectivity still feeds the beast called the application. Also the other thing we're seeing, as we're expected to hear Amazon announce, new kinds of connectivity, whether it be satellite and/or bandwidth to edges. IOT, or the network edge as it's called, where the edge network kind of ends with power and connectivity. Because without power and connectivity it's not on the network, it's not an edge. >> That's right. >> There's a trend to push the boundary of edge. Battery power is lasting longer, so now you need connectivity. How do you guys at Century look at this? So do you guys want to push the boundaries, how are you guys just pushing the boundaries? >> Sure. >> Yeah, IOT is another area that's really changing the business. It's opening up so many new opportunities. When you talk about the edge, it's really funny because people define the edge in so many different ways, and the truth is the edge can vary depending on what the application is. An IOT, if you have a bunch of remote devices that are battery powered that are signaling back to some central application, well then that IOT, those physical devices, are the new edge and they could be very deep into some kind of a market. But there's a lot of different communications technology that can access those. There's 5G wireless that's emerging, or regular wireless. There are applications like LauraNet, which is a very low bandwidth but very cost effective way for small IOT devices to communicate small amounts of data back to a central application. And then there's actual fiber that can be used to serve locations where IOT devices can be feeding very heavy amounts of bandwidth back to applications. >> So it's good for your business? >> It's great for our business. We really see it opening up so many other new avenues for us to serve our customers. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here. If I asked you a question, what has cloudification done for CenturyLink? How has it changed your business? How would you respond to that question? >> I think that it's made what we do even more critical to the future of how enterprises operate. The reason for that is just the point that you made when we started, which is storage and compute and networking, it's all really coming back together in terms of how it boils down to those things. But networking is becoming a much more important factor in all of this because of the latency issues that are there and the bandwidth amount that is possible to generate. We believe that it's creating an opportunity for us to play a more pivotal role in the whole evolving cloud ecosystem. >> I still think this is such an awesome new area because, again, it's so early. And as storage, network, and compute continues to morph, all of us networking geeks and infrastructure geeks, software geeks are going to actually have an opportunity to reimagine how to use those parts. >> It is, yeah. >> And with microservices and custom silicon, you see what Amazon's done with amapertna. You can have data processing units, connectivity processing units, you can have all kinds of new capabilities. It's a whole new world. >> It is and, you know, interestingly enough organizations are going to have to change. One of the things we see with enterprises is that many enterprises are organized so that those three areas are still completely managed in separate departments. But in this new world of how cloud is crushing all of those things together, those departments are going to have to start working much more closely aligned. I had a customer visit me after our session yesterday and was saying I get the whole thing of how now when you deploy an application in the cloud, you can't just think about the application. You got to think about the network that ties it all togeher. But he says I don't know how to get my organization to do that. They're still so segmented and separated. It's a tough challenge. >> And silos are critical. I just saw a presentation with the FBI director, deputy director of counter terrorism, and they can't put the puzzle pieces together fast enough to evaluate threats because of the databases. She gave an example around the Las Vegas shooting here. Just to go through the video tape of the hotel took 12 people for 20 hours a day for a week to go through that video. They did it in twenty minutes with facial recognition. And they have all this data, so putting those puzzle pieces together is critical. I think connectivity truly is going to be a new kind of backbone. >> Yes, uh huh. >> You guys are doing some good work. Okay, lets get a plug in for you guys real quick. By the way, thanks for the insight. Great stuff here at re:Invent. One year anniversary CenturyLink with level three coming together. Synergies, what are you guys doing? Give the update on the coming one year anniversary of the Synergies. >> Sure. Uh huh. >> What are the Synergies? >> Yeah, we're getting tremendous synergies. In fact, I think if you listen to our analyst reports and our quarterly earnings calls, we're really ahead of plan in that area. We've actually raised our earnings guidance for the year as a result of what was originally expected of us. We're doing really well on that front. I'll tell you the thing that excites me more than synergies is the combined opportunity that we have because of these two companies coming together. Ways that, bringing the companies together, surprised me that we found new opportunities. For instance when you take level three, which is a globally distributed network covering Europe, and Latin America, and North America, and parts of the Pack Rim with fiber and sub sea systems, and combine it with CenturyLink's dense coverage of fiber in North America, then it really creates a stronger ability for this company to reach enterprises with very high performing network solutions. One of the main things that surprised me actually relates to this conference, and that is that CenturyLink was really focused around building out cloud services, working closely with companies like AWS on creating managed services around cloud, building performance tools around managing cloud based applications. Level three was really focused on building out network connectivity in a dynamic way to use the new software defined networking technologies to be the preferred provider of high performance networking to cloud service providers. >> The timing was pretty impeccable on the combination because you were kind of cloudifying before cloud native was called cloud native. You were thinking about it in kind of a dev ops mindset and they were kind of thinking of it from a software agility perspective out of infrastructure. Kind of bring those together. Did I get that right? >> That's exactly right. Level three was thinking about how to make the network consumable on a dynamic basis and on demand basis the same way cloud is. When you combine CenturyLink's capabilities with that then it's just opening up so many new things for us to do, so many new ways that we can deliver value to our enterprise customers. >> Well I'm always hungry for more bandwidth, so come on. You guys lighting up all that fiber? How's all the fiber? >> Yeah, we're expanding dramatically. We're investing heavily in that fiber network. We have around 160,000 enterprise buildings on our network today and we're growing that just as fast as we can. >> So Paul Sevill, you're the guy to call if I want to get some cord network action huh? >> That's right. >> Alright. Thanks for the insight, great to have you. Good luck at the show here at re:Invent. CenturyLink here inside theCUBE powering connectivity. Big part of the theme here at re:Invent this year is powering the edge, getting connectivity to places that need low latency for those workloads. That's the key theme. You guys are right on the trend line here. CenturyLink on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more wall to wall coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno 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.