(upbeat music) >> Thanks Adam from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete, from Microsoft Azure. Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete my conversation and we'll come right back. (upbeat music) Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021, we're onsite in-person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in-person for the first time, since the winter of 2019 lots been passed, a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices, platform and services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on. We'll be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, no, that's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year, but like, as you mentioned, I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019. So a lot has happened since then. Right? >> Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let, let's get the content storyline after the number one story at mobile world. Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge, super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler. Okay. And it's also leveraging the assets of, of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic we've had great success, nothing crashed. It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story? What's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area and I think, you know, the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area. In terms of, you know, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and, and 5g now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're, my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5g edge and AI, and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for, for customers and partners. For sure. >> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge, which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI, AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars, and all that good stuff, all the data coming in and then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge. It's a new architecture, unpack that for us. What, where are we in this? So. >> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean, it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and typologies and ways to put things together. Quite often, we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept, which is an end to end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have, you know, on-prem solutions, you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud. You can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way? And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments. And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talked to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite? Because you know, the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid. Right? And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? >> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, you know, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators, you don't hear that in it and say, you don't say that's the operator, the operators writes it department. So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming together, dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady build solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT it collision. And this has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations. Yeah. >> And so it's, you know, we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric, you know, to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network, right. In, in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world. There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science, AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that, you know, you have developers that are enabled to do, you know, AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop it in an environment, whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar with. And, you know, so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert, right. To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores. Right. And so that's, that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. >> Yeah. So what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, you know, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they got, they want to innovate and this year what's your message. Yeah. >> I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is yes. I think we're, we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network and take advantage of 5g and virtualization. And, you know, we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed and hold that whole thing. So that's, that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers and, you know, getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this, you know, big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. >> What solutions do you think Pete are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transformed? >> Well, I think on the NGI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, you know, obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know, where you need a wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know, retail environments when I would have leveraged like low latency 5g. One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know, and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage ciliary networks. So a lot of these verticals are, you know, turning onto the fact that they could get some of their conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. >> Right. You just made me think of a question while I got you. I got to ask this because you know, you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know, and people in the, in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading. Right. So we all know, right. We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point. If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I started poking around and research and there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, we had my west and my east, those are now gone. I'm like, what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple? Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing? >> Well, yeah. One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we're able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment, pretty darn close to where the action is, and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to, to do that. So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements of 5G around virtualization. >> That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point. And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem. That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the, just the, the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think, I think this is going to be an influx point. That's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation, because it used to be the telcos ruled the world, and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say, what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this nutrient? >> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades, and I think it's something like $8, a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device, builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together, to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive. Again, this will be businesses. >> Okay, great. And have you on, I got it. I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story, obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it. You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended, what, but what's, in your opinion, the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talking about, what do you think is something that's being written about, but to talk about, but it's super important that that needs to be true. >> Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones, people talking about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM communications and more, more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And then that enabled me to is going to be a big, big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry. So we kind of know it, but I think on the outside of the industry, when people think 5g, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5g. >> Yeah. And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go open source, openness, interoperability, and security. What, how would you, what's your opinion on those two pillars? >> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end, you know, edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to like with Azure percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud, as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our, you know, stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, you know, we're, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there and you know, you got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, you know, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events. It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, and you can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. >> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related, what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in general. >> For mine. Yeah. So I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic. Whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know, much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know, packaging and, you know, AI acceleration built in as well as all these other, you know, containerized security things. So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock, you know, all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the cloud. That's pretty exciting. >> Peter Love that word unblocked, because I think it's going to unblock them that big, you know, rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be the, an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. >> People in our senior director, silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player, hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area. In my opinion, that's called the accident habits going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices, platform, and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview wide ranging conversation, obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah. Okay. Because that is going to be a power source. You you've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player in cloud, Amazon. Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Microsoft. They didn't really say anything. They have something Amazon has got grab a ton, but big directional signal shift there. >> Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview by the way, and the things that struck me pizza, and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expenses today. And that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right. I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on AWS, a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture. That's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on arm, because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price, performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that, well, Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton and, and, and, you know, gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and telecom and an edge they're going after that because it doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power, high density looks like a consumer, like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out if you squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there, but he said, 5g is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge, that right in the same playbook as AWS, right on the almost right on the number, put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects connectivity. >> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation. That's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale. You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup showcase that we did was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge. >> I got to tell you, we are on this go to the siliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, the cube.net. We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr. Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam, in the studio for more coverage, we'll be back at the desk shortly.

>> Narrator: From New York, it's the CUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. This is the CUBE here in New York City on the ground for Consensus 2018. Part of Blockchain Week New York City. I'm John Furrier your cohost of the CUBE and Enrique Rodriguez is here with me. He's a blockchain guru and he's part of the Crypto Consulting Group. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So love that big coin little thing there. >> Yeah. >> Come on are you holding som bitcoin right now? >> Yeah yeah. >> So tell me about your project says in the hallways here and checking in on what's going on. You're working with Andrew Prell the alumni. >> Yeah. So. >> On a cool project, so explain what that is. >> So the project with Andre or what we do? >> What you guys do first. >> Yeah so essentially you know there's a big problem right now with people trying to get into the space. There's a lot of pitfalls new comers fall victim to and there's not a lot of education out there. It's really fragmented across the internet. So what we're really trying to do is provide you know really great resources to people that are looking to get into the space. We essentially want to be the on ramp for people looking to get into the crypto space. >> Where you located? >> Louisville, Kentucky. Yeah so it's a different location. I think that's why we stand out quite a bit cause we're trying to bring such a new and disruptive technology to a place that's not so on the leading edge of technology sometimes. >> And you know it's cool about it too is I live in Silicon Valley. It's good to be the epicenter, everyone's got to go to Silicon Valley. The blockchain phenomenon and crypto in general is a global thing. >> It is. >> It is not one place. You can be anywhere. >> Absolutely. >> What are you doing, what are you working on with people? What are some of the things that your projects attacking. >> Yeah so right now we're really working on our educational events. We're really putting together just great content for people to come and join us and really just learn about the tech. We're also working with Andrew Prell from Silica Nexus project. He's having ICO soon and one of the things we're doing for them is really auditing the accounts that they have their tokens in. So they have in their tokenomics they have funds set aside for the team, for the advisors. All these different things and they also have ten investment funds that they're going to be using to essentially get more developers to develop on their project. So we'll be auditing those transactions that they send out just to ensure the transparency and that people know the investors that are putting their money into this project. Know where those funds are going. >> So basically it's an audit trail but it's not code review. So when you do smart contracts, there's one aspect which is code review. >> Yeah. >> And the other side of this, the coin so to speak is the transactional efficiency and affectiveness. >> Yeah no absolutely so if out of this wallet they send ten thousand droids to this developer or this project. We are essentially going to be putting together reports for that. So it's all about auditing and the transparency available. >> So you're automating his system end to end so he can manage it. >> Absolutely. >> Cause alternative is what? What's his alternative. Andrew's in particular. >> Yeah I think he went to the big four and they really didn't know. I guess display enough knowledge about the blockchain, the blockchain explorers and all those things and really came at a high price and so instead of do it themselves. It's something that we do on a regular basis. You know blockchain exploring, just looking up transaction. Second nature to us so I mean it's really good fit and it's an industry first. So really could be a break through for ICOs to come so we're hoping it works out well. >> Enrique how did you get here? What's your journey and tell your story. >> It has been awhile so. So I'm 23 years old, around the age of 20 I started hearing about bitcoin and blockchain. I worked at UPS in the international department in Louisville which if you're not familiar. We have the world port, the biggest automated hub in the world but we were having a lot of problems with the supply chain. You know packages going missing, invoices being fraudulent. A lot of manual paperwork. So really just looking into some of these problems and trying to find a solution. Stumbled into blockchain and really went down the rabbit hole and haven't came up since. I started telling people about it, meeting with people. >> So you became an enthusiast, evangelist. >> Yeah and so I mean it's really grown from me meeting people in restaurants, coffee shops and now we have office. We have eight consultants working with us and really trying to make a national network of people that can just educate. You know investors and individuals on the technology. >> Are you happy you made the move? >> Oh so happy, you know I work for myself now. It's really the happiest I've ever been. I'm passionate about something that could potentially change the world. And so I love the space I'm in. Just being here with so many like minded individuals you know from so many different backgrounds. It really is a beautiful thing that CoinDesk was able to put together here. >> And it's also cool, a lot of new people are coming in. Both old and young. I mean old guys like me and so Dan Bates on just before. We're kindred spirits, we're the old dogs. He's doing real business but the young guns are making it happen too. >> Absolutely. >> So it's not about ageism. Lot of us old system guys know this is all one big operating system. >> Even with our clients, we have people as young as 15 coming in like hey how do I figure this out and 85 people that don't even have email set up. You know want to get involved in this space. I mean we have a wide spectrum of people. >> If you got an AOL account we're ignoring you. Although I just try to turn my on that instead have the throwback. >> That's what it is. >> I got to ask you because one of the things I've really been apart of in my whole life in computer science is open source. Even when I was renegade back in the old days now it's tier one. Open source, cloud computing, has really and open source particular. Really built the idea of a community. >> Absolutely. >> The blockchain community is very small still young tight knit and growing. So as people come in, what's your advice to people entering the community. How thy should align, what should they do? >> Yeah this is something that we have to deal with a lot and so whenever because a lot of the headlines that go around. You know the bitcoin bubble all the crazy gains the lambos. People come in with this mindset that it's a get rick quick thing. You know they want to dump money into the newest ICO or the next big bitcoin and well you really have to educate them on is that this is a long term play. We're still very early in this space. Never invest anything that you're not willing to lose and so a lot of these. We call them the commandments actually just in a podcast episode on them. So there's a lot of just base level things that we try and enlighten our newcomers in. It's been a really great because a lot of people whenever they learn about this technology under the surface. It's just enlightening and so it's been great the community grows. >> A lot of businesses are growing into the community. A lot of people are joining the community but also a big trend is that big business and small medium sized businesses are looking at as an opportunity. So I got to ask you the question right which is I see a lot of people out there that are passing themselves off as code gurus because they bought bitcoin in 2013. >> Oh absolutely. >> They don't, but they haven't actually built anything. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people are hiring fraudsters. So I'm not saying, there's nothing wrong with trading bitcoin and being involved in the currency. >> Absolutely. >> But the difference between someone who buys currency and builds the next generation with the community. How does someone vet that person? How does some a business owner how do you figure out the pretenders from the players? >> Yeah I think it's really about getting to know the person that you're talking to about this. Seeing how transparent they are, their ideologies, why they're in this space. Why they bought bitcoin a lot of these fundamental questions that you could tell a lot about a person from their answers. Because we've come across that a lot. Whenever reason I started this company is because you know over the past three years or so it's been a lot of trail and error really trying to figure this stuff out. >> I always ask too, what have you built. >> Yeah no absolutely and so we're currently actually in the beta version of a platform that we want to build that's essentially going to allow us to connect these consultants as well as a portfolio tracker but. >> I got to ask you the question. What's the coolest thing you've done? >> The coolest thing I've done, probably getting my pilots license a month after my drivers license in high school. Just in general you'll be able to leave school and go fly planes. All of my best friends were in a class. You know it was really, it was amazing. >> Surreal, Enrique great chatting with you. >> You as well. >> Awesome voice. So glad to have you on the CUBE and good luck with your venture with Andrew Prell. That's cool project and on the things you work on. Best success to you. Enrique Rodriguez here on the CUBE breaking it down. Lot of new action going on, lot of great voices. Lot of talent coming into the community of course it is a community. It's tight knit, it's early growing super fast and as the crypto action. This is the CUBE bringing it all to you. I'm John Furrier we're watching after this short break. We'll be right back.

(techno music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're having CUBE conversations in the Palo Alto studio. We're getting to the end of the conference season, so it's nice to take a break and do some interviews from the studio instead of from the road. We're excited to have our next guest. He's David Green, he's the CEO of Zero Stack. David, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely, great to have you here. So for folks who aren't familiar with Zero Stack, why don't you give them kind of the quick overview. >> Great, so Zero Stack's focus on building a new generation of private cloud infrastructure where IT can simplify their operations through automation, and at the same time, retain control of the environment. We're really trying to deliver that public cloudlike experience to users while giving IT the type of control they want to have. >> But you, just so I understand, so that, right, a lot of pressure, lot of benefits to public cloud, and everybody wants it in a private cloud, right? There's a lot of issues with public cloud that, you know, there's some data that can't be there, this or that, but there's a lot of attributes of public cloud that people just love, so how are you kind of squaring that circle? >> It's interesting, right? In the last 10 years that I've been working on cloud, this has been one of the recurring themes. It's one of the things that I think is so exciting about Zero Stack, right? You talk to a customer, you talk to an IT customer, and they're like, "I love the convenience of the public cloud idea, it's going to be so simple to operate, right? "But, I need to know where my data is. "I'm accountable for security, I'm accountable for cost. "I need to have control of the environment. "Why can't I have these two things together?" And that's what we've tried to merge together. So from an IT standpoint, it's still going to look and feel like that on-premises IT-managed infrastructure they're comfortable with. From a user perspective though, it's going to have that same sort of self service, on demand that they're used to getting from a public cloud. Think of going to a web application that looks and feels like Amazon, being able to pick the resources you want, but have those resources be coming from resources running within your data center. >> Right, right. >> And then be able to add to those resources the tools that you need to be productive in the environment, really very value added for the developer, again, in that infrastructure that's living in your environment. >> And to be clear, you're not replacing that existing infrastructure that's in my environment, you're really offering, I don't know, kind of a cloud virtualization overlay or ... >> The goal is to-- >> Restructures the UI? >> Yes. You use the servers you've got, the storage ya got, the networking you've got, pull those together into a pooled resource, again, back to the idea of a private cloud, pull those resources into a single set of resources that can be accessed for a variety of use cases to support different applications in the environment. >> So what's the impact, cause obviously, if there wasn't a benefit to doing it that way, people wouldn't be doing shadow IT and whipping out the credit card with Amazon. So, when you do this in an enterprise, what are some of the benefits they see? >> I mean, I think there's a couple. One is the radical simplification of operations. From an IT standpoint, running a private cloud is hard. You know, if you hook up your build of the online environments, which is kind of the most typical frame of reference that we see, it's expensive to set up. It's expensive to operate. It's complicated, it's hard to hire the people. We're trying to get away from the burden. That's the first driver we see for people. From a user standpoint, it's really about that speed. How does IT keep up with the demands of its users and move at that same pace, right? So trying to pull together those two sets of benefits into one is really the package that seems to drive our business. >> And that's really hard, right for IT cause IT's just be keeping their lights on, keeping everything running. Now it's a core piece, if not the really strategic piece, of the business. We talked a little bit before they turned the cameras on-- >> Right, right. >> About banking, right, all banking interfaces these days are electronic. There's nobody goes in to talk to the teller and giving them a check. >> Wait a sec, so go back up here. So, remember that IT today was fundamentally built around the back office. It was fundamentally built around stability. Remember the days when a change request was a physical piece of paper with 20 signatures on it, and you ran around the office, right? >> Every now then, not very often. (laughing) >> You were supposed to right? That was the mindset, right? I think in a traditional back-office set of applications, that worked great. But the problem is today, when the business is presenting itself to customers through software and trying to move at the speed of its customers, those old IT mechanisms built around stability just can't keep up. >> Right. >> So that's the gap that we're really trying to bridge with the Zero Stack solution. Preserve that knowledge set, preserve that control, preserve that data sovereignty that IT can bring, that on-premises infrastructures can bring, but at the same time, still operate at a pace and a speed that more dev ops organization is looking for. >> Right, because the pressure on IT >> It's only getting bigger. >> It's only getting more ... >> It's only getting more. >> If you're not using software to find automation, you're falling behind. So, I would imagine there's some second order impacts that have to come out of using a tool like Zero Stack in terms of utilization and those types of things that are probably some great opportunities. >> Essentially, we really want to be the heart. While the solution looks and feels more like they've got interfaces and management, the heart of the solution, in our mind really, is our machine learning capabilities. It's ability to take a set of information from the application layer, from the operations layer, from the infrastructure and from that start to make educated judgements as to how the infrastructure can best be utilized to support the business and to support the applications. So where should work loads be placed? How are we going to plan for capacity? What needs to happen next in the environment? How should we take corrective action? These are all the sorts of things that we can start to do. And again, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to automate some of the mundane tasks that held back IT and slowed down IT operations, and instead, let them focus on the areas where they can be of more value consulting with the business, helping to move things forward, helping to address higher order questions. >> Right, because really that's another huge opportunity for cost savings or efficiency for the customer, right? Because the traditional methods were not very efficient, and you had, since they weren't efficient, you had to have a lot of overhead, and you had to, you know, pre-order stuff, and you couldn't flex, so you're now, with your automation and machine learning, helping to better utilize those resources on just the pure infrastructure spending, right? >> Exactly, exactly. And that gives you part of the cost benefit that we see with the Zero Stack solution. By getting better utilization of the infrastructure that you have, we'll able to have a more economical solution going forward. We have customers who are getting a 10X return on their investment by using the Zero Stack solution over other cloud solutions they've looked at, just by getting better intelligence and better automation and better operation clarity about what they're doing. >> So then do you partner then with HP and a lot of the infrastructure providers who talk a lot about hybrid cloud cause clearly, they're invested in keeping a big piece of the cloud inside their walls. >> So in our model, we view ourselves as a software company. So we're going to add that Zero Stack software solution on top of your infrastructure of choice. And so, that could be Dell, that could be HP, that could be Lenovo, ya know, all the kind of leading hardware vendors have been certified to work with our product. We're going to add our software on top to create their cloud infrastructure. Then we're going to add our maturing applications, our user self-service applications on top of that, and that's going to give you the top-to-bottom full stack solution. And that full stack's really important because if you want to be able to take automated actions, you want to be able to optimize infrastructure, you've got to be able to not only interface with the users and meet their demands, but also translate those demands down to actions you're taking on the infrastructure. So we're going to be able to do that full stack top to bottom. >> So just a little bit more background on the company. How big are you, how long you been around, how many people, funding? >> Well, we're a start-up here based in Silica Valley, Mountain View, California. We're a Series B company. We're proud to have our first set of customers working with us right now, actively exercising the products, fantastic big enterprise projects. I'm looking forward to coming back and telling you about it as those finish up. But really, all from the theme of people who are unsatisfied with the solutions they've had available to them in the past and trying to figure out how they're going to move forward with a better, more flexible, easier to operate cloud solution. >> All right, well, David, we look forward to watching the progress and getting an update in a few months. >> Look forward to it. >> All right, David, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'm Jeff Frick, he's David Greene. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (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.