>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest David Arnette, who's a technical marketing engineer with NetApp. He's living in the heart of the show, which of course is The Knock. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu, it's good to be here. >> All right, so Dave, first before we get into it, give us a little bit about your background, where were you based and what your role is. >> Well, I'm based in Research Triangle Park, which is NetApp's East Coast headquarters, were basically right across from Cisco's East Coast headquarters. >> So we all know the RTP, those of us that work in tech. >> Right, so my role, I'm a technical marketing engineer on the FlexPod solutions team, so I build systems in the lab and then validate them, and then document them, and publish them for our customers to use to build similar systems for themselves. >> Okay, if we go with all the TLAs, or the TME from RTP or any in the NOC. (laughs) >> That's correct. >> All right, so you are not responsible for the network here, so we're not >> That's correct. >> gonna ask you why the network went down for a few minutes, (laughs) and people are troubleshooting everything with that. >> Thanks, I appreciate that. >> Why don't you explain NetApp and your role at The Knock. >> Well, NetApp is a big sponsor of this conference and one of the ways we do that is that we supply storage systems for the Network Operations Data Center. There's a lot of systems that have to run in addition to the actual network in order to make everything run, and those systems require data center resources, so we bring servers and storage to run all of the services necessary. >> Okay, and luckily I'm sure, everything's running really smoothly, there's never any challenges, and that's why it's just this great glass thing that we look at as we walk by. >> It just magically appears like that, right? >> All right, so give us a little bit of insight. You've done this at a few shows. What kind of things do you run in? What are the stresses and strains? And how does the architecture hold up? >> Well, we started Wednesday of last week putting The Knock together, and of course the room here was completely empty. There's nothing here, the rigging is laying all over the floor, and we end up with delays just because things are in the way. We can't put our equipment where it needs to be, then the power gets pulled in. We had the racks in place and then waited an hour or two for power to come in, and then another couple hours for the network drop to arrive before we could get connected to the outside world. So, it's always kind of a challenging, there's a lot of moving parts in order to get this thing off the ground. >> It reminds me so much of you talk about customer environments. All right, how does day zero go? Well, things like we interviewed one of your colleagues talking about FlexPod, FlexPod conversion, hyper-converged infrastructures help simplify that initial rollout, and then it should also help once you're up and running. So once you've got The Knock up and running, what's your team working on? Are there knobs you've gotta adjust? Are there outside stresses that need to concern you? >> Well, I'm happy to say that the storage and the data center infrastructure is one of the most reliable parts of The Knock, right? Once we get it up and running, it's more about monitoring and management than anything else. I'm personally monitoring to make sure that we're not running out of storage capacity, to make sure that everything is still online, and make sure that basically everything is running as smoothly as it can be. >> Okay, are you doing any analytics on this? Do you have hero numbers that come out after the show? >> We do, we participate in the session on Thursday, The Knock round table session, and so we're collecting all of the, all of the numbers, how much capacity we're actually using, kinda what the performance envelope of the system is and so on. >> It's interesting, when we talk about customers and their deployment one of the biggest challenges is "Okay, I'm gonna deploy this. "How long am I gonna have it, "and when am I gonna run out of storage? "When am I gonna need to grow?" It's kind of a unique beast when we're here at a show like this cause you've got some ideas, but what if something's really popular or stresses and strains? How do you plan for that, and has anything ever come up that you have to worry about? >> Well, we've never actually hit the wall yet. We try to be very careful. We've actually provisioned a considerable amount more capacity than we need, and the system that we've deployed is an all-flash FAS, so it's got performance to spare. So we really try and avoid any of those problems up front. We have seen in the past issues where the cameras and recording and such generated more data than we expected, but it was not more than we could handle. We had planned ahead and made sure we have plenty of extra capacity. >> Oh trust me, this is our ninth year doing theCUBE. In some of the early days we were scrambling. Luckily we actually work with a lot of storage companies, (laughs) so sometimes there's spare drives or things that we can grab because, yeah, it's more and more data, the devices get larger megapixels, higher resolution. It's challenging to deal with things like video. >> Yeah, it is pretty challenging and of course every time we do this, there are and more cameras, not just the data they produce, but the actual items that are producing it, so things really can grow very quickly. >> Yeah Dave, there any interest, are they playing with IoT here that brings data back? >> Not so much, I mean the video recording is more just for general monitoring and security purposes. There is, there's not a whole lot of deeper level analysis going on like on the video or anything like that. As far as the rest of the systems, everything is constantly being monitored, and for pretty much every system that we run, at the end of the week we'll kinda produce some metrics around what we saw and where the challenges were. >> Okay, you said at the end of the show there's a round table to talk about it. What are the users looking for? What kind of things do they learn going to a session like that? >> Well, they're really interested in how it's possible to bring such a huge scale network into existence, especially in such a short period of time, right? So we talk a lot about the deployment, and how the wireless access points get spread all over, and how all the applications come up and come online, and then take advantage of the networks that we put in place. They're really interested in the deployment details, because they're doing the same things in their own shops, and they're looking for guidance on how the experts do it. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I remember I read a book once, they're like you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a conference, but there are some interesting lessons (laughs) that we learn going through some of these deployments. Any interesting points over your time working with The Knock? >> Well, we built this system to be really highly reliable. That's key for the operation of the show, right? We just can't take any chances that it goes down. We've had some incidents where the wrong circuit breaker gets switched, and so we're left with a failed over situation, but because the system was designed to withstand those kind of failures, it's really nothing but a thing. We flip the power back on and make sure the other half comes back alive, and we're back in action. >> All right, yeah, definitely I'm sure people's running around a little bit trying to fix those-- >> Oh yeah, as soon as lights go dark, man, there's chickens in the hen house. >> All right, and it's something we people can walk by, and is there tours of it? Is it a big plexiglass thing? (mumbles) >> Yeah, there's a, The Knock is actually all of our data center equipment is out on the floor for everybody to see. Rotalis supplied an enclosure and the cooling equipment, so we can run it right there in the middle of the floor and still keep it at proper data center temperatures. It's there all the time for everybody to come look at, but then there are tours daily, starting at noon I think, every hour on the hour. There's a tour related to more specific technologies like the wireless, and the routing and switching, and then of course the data center. >> And the stuff you're not using, you're doing Bitcoin mining on that now? >> That's correct. (laughs) No actually, we do run some, we do run some, oh, I can't even think of the name of the application now. It's one of, it's like not SETI, but something similar, folding at home or something like that to really just kind of drive the systems a little harder, and run them at an operational pace, more like what a customer would see. We actually, in terms of the entire infrastructure, we are way over-provisioned in terms of compute capacity and stuff. So we have some room to do that, and that's always an interesting number at the end to produce how many projects we closed in a folding at home scenario. >> Okay, so you've got half a week to set it up. How much time do they give you to tear the whole thing down? >> About 24 hours. (laughs) Yeah, it goes down really quickly, it's remarkable. >> Yeah, it is something. If you've ever, people, if you've been involved in these events, it takes such a long time to set things up, but they usually are designed to break it down and get out of town, on to the next thing. >> Yeah, all of the, all the equipment is in racks, pre-racked. It arrives in the rack and we just connect up the patch panels between the racks, and when the time comes to go, we just power everything off and pull the cables and roll it back into the crate. >> Do you do similar things at other events? >> We don't do similar things at other events. Cisco Live is actually the only show I know of that actually runs the operations as a centerpiece of the show. It's really a remarkable thing. >> It is, the network is obviously pretty critical here. >> Yeah, the attendees expect a world-class experience right? And so, our job is really to make sure that happens. >> All right, Dave, wanna give you the final word. Key takeaways you have coming to events like this? >> Well, it's really kind of an honor and a privilege, right? NetApp is really proud to be a part of what Cisco has going on here. We've got a lot of synergies with our FlexPod program, and so it's really great to be here and be a part of this show, and really specifically to work on The Knock team where I can say I had a hand in making it a success. >> Dave Arnette, really appreciate you joining, giving us some insight into some of the inner workings that help everything going on here at the show. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here at Cisco Live Orlando 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman and this is the inaugural Dell Technologies World and Pat Gelsinger's here, he's the- >> Hey, great to be with you today, >> Dave: the CEO of VMware, awesome to see you, >> Oh, thank you. >> Our number one guest of all time, this is our ninth Dell/EMC World and your 900th CUBE interview, But it never gets old Pat. It's really a pleasure to see you. >> Oh it's always fun to be with you guys. Thank you for the chance to spend some time on theCUBE, you've come a long way. >> So, thank you for noticing! So, you were the first, and people are recognizing this, to really sort of call the boom in the data center. We certainly have seen it with cloud, and we saw a little bit with data and big data, and now digital transformation, but well over a year ago, you said, we have tailwinds, it just feels right, so good call. >> Yeah, hey thank you, and you know clearly like the IDCs, Gartners, you know, they began last year, 2% to 3% growth, I said no, I think it's at least 2x that, and we ended of the year almost 6% growth in IT, and everybody's raised their forecast, and I think they're still a little bit conservative, and I think in this period, where technology is becoming more pervasive in everything, every business is becoming a tech business, every area of every business is becoming influenced by tech, and as a result, hey I think we're going to see a long run of tech strength and every company in tech is going to benefit and those that are well-positioned are going to benefit in a big way. >> Yeah, you see, you called it, "tech is breaking out of tech" >> Yep, yep absolutely, right, you know, we're no longer that little IT thing stuck in the back corner making sure your mail runs, it's now everything. You know, back office has become front office, right. You know, every aspect of data becomes mission-critical for the business. As some have called it, you know, data is the new oil, right, in the future. And it really is thrilling to see some of our customers, and Michael had a few on stage this morning doing really pretty cool things. >> Well VMware is on fire. I mean, it's only 10% of Dell's revenue, but it's half, it generates half of its operating cash flow. Obviously we love the software business, of course. Talk about your business, the core is doing really well, you got NSX crankin', vSAN cranking, the cloud now, there's Clarity in cloud, give us the overview of your business and give us the update. >> Sure, and as I say, you know, there's three reasons we're doing well. You know, one is our strategy is resonating with customers, and you know, when you got strategic resonance with customers, you're not in the purchasing department, you're in the business units, the CIO's office. So strategy is resonating well, across what we do for private cloud, what we're doing for public cloud, what we're doing for end user and workforce transformation, our security strategy, every aspect is resonating. You know, second, we're executing well. And I'll say, you know, your good strategy, you're executing it well, and you know, clearly the Dell momentum has helped us. We're ahead of schedules on the synergies that we've laid out, and that's been a powerful accelerant. It was like we're doing well, you know, and you put some turbochargers on, whoa, you know this is going, and then finally as we said, it's a good market, right. And well-positioned tech companies are benefiting from that. So across our product families, you know, NSX, vSAN, and HCI, you know, our cloud management is really performing, the end user computing, you know, all of these seeing, you know 30, 50, 100 percent growth rates. You know, my overall cloud business, you know, VMware is growing in the teens you know, my cloud business is growing in the 30s, and way ahead of the growth rate of the business, so pretty much everything that we've laid out is firing on all cylinders. >> Pat, I think most people understand some of the products of VMware. I think it's, you know, 20 years now, since server virtualization laws You've, you know great momentum with NSX with vSAN, wonder if you could talk a little bit about the digital platform though, you know how does VMware look, you know, for the next five to 10 years, fit into the Vision 2030 like Michael was talking about. >> Yeah, yeah, you know very much, you know, as I say, you know, our objective is to be the essential, ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, right. Where you know, this idea, you know, essential. You know we run this mission critical stuff and increasingly we're seeing businesses put their crown jewels running on VMware. You know, 'cause we ran a lot of the stuff of the past, we'd run your SharePoints, your Outlooks, and so on, but now, they're putting core banking on us, you know, core transactional platform. They just say, you are essential, ubiquitous, our strategy is to move all the way to the edge, and the IOT use cases, into the core networks of our service provider partners, You know, to as I say, build these four clouds, the private cloud, the public cloud, the telco cloud, and the NF or the IOT cloud. All of those on a common infrastructure, that enables applications to build on and leverage all of the above. So you know, we're increasingly ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, meaning that they can build their applications from the past as well as in the future on us. And as we're partnering with Pivotal with our PKS strategy, reaching more to the developer, right, and delivering that infrastructure for the next-generation apps, and of course the dirty secret is, is that almost all of the cool new apps are some ugly combination of new and old. And if we can give a common operational security management and automation environment that transcends their cool new container, and function as a service, but combine it, in a consistent operational and security environment with today's infrastructure, oh, that's like the big easy button for IT. Got it, we could take you to the future, without giving up the past. >> We hear from our, you know, CXOs, in our community, in our audience, they really, they want to get digital right. So my question to you is, what kind of conversations are you having with executives around getting digital right? >> Uh-huh, yeah, and lots of those things are, you know, like just with a big media company, was with a huge Bank, on the phone with a big consumer goods product last week. You know these interactions occurring, you know like you say they want to get it right. And with it we're seeing the conversation shift, because a lot of it used to be, you know best of breed. Oh that looks good, and I'll stitch it together with this, and maybe I'll put it that, and a lot of their bandwidth was being put to putting the pieces together, and we're saying no, right. What you going to do is have robust infrastructure. Increasingly rely on fewer, more strategic vendors. It's my job to put it together, so you can take your investments and put them into the applications and services that really differentiate your business. And this is becoming a sea change in how we work with customers and say, okay, yeah I can't stitch all these pieces together, I can't have a hundred security vendors, I must rely on fewer vendors, in much more strategic ways. And in that, obviously we're benefiting from that enormously and they're expecting us to step up like never before, to be a partner with them, and it really is a thrilling time for us. >> So that simplifies all the complexity on there, and at least in concept. Who's leading this charge? Do you discern any patterns of the guys that are getting it right, versus the guys that are maybe struggling, or maybe complacent, specifically in terms of leadership? >> Yeah, and it's super, super interesting, because I find leaders in every industry, right? You know, you find leaders and laggards in those, I had one customer not a lot, long say, "Hey is that virtualization stuff, can I really rely on it?" It's like, ding dong, you know, you're now the trailing edge of technology, but for every one of those trailers, we're seeing those front end customers, and you saw some of them on stage this morning. Where they're just really going and saying, boy we are now ready to ante in, in a big way. We're seeing that in car companies. We're seeing that in financial services companies. We're seeing that in supply chain companies. And some of those are now really seeing these startups now putting pressure on their business for the first time, and they say no, we got to innovate in a very aggressive way. And for that, you know, the Dell Technologies family, you know all of us coming together, you know with our, each skills and focus areas, but together being able to present that holistic solution that says, that's right, we can lead you on digital transformation, we could change your infrastructure, we can build-in security, we could transform your workplace, we could take you to the multi-cloud future, we got it. >> Pat, there was one of the things that caught my ear, Allison Dew, when she was talking about the Dell Technology Institute, said that, together you're going to become a force for good. I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart, >> Pat: Yeah. >> So, maybe, you talked about the tech, and the security and everything, what about the Dell families as a force for good out there? >> Yeah, and I've described this era, and I've said there's four superpowers. You know, technology superpowers that are bigger than any of us, right. And the four I described, you know, mobile. The ability to reach anyone, over half the planet is now connected. Cloud, the ability to scale as never before. AI, the ability to bring intelligence to everything, and IOT, the ability to bridge to the physical world everywhere. And those four are really reinforcing each other, right? They're accelerating each other, as Michael said, you know, "Today, the fastest day of your life. "Today, the slowest day of the rest of your life, "for tech evolution." And we see them just causing and accelerating each to go, as I mentioned in my talk this week at the Grow Awards in Silicon Valley, in 1986 I was making the 486, a great AI chip, right. It's like, what? 31 years ago? And now it's a success because the superpowers are coming together. The compute is now big enough, the data is now volumous enough, that we can do things never possible before. But with that, technology is neutral. The Gutenberg printing press did the Bible, you know, Luther's Bible, it also prints Playboy. It sort of doesn't care. Technology is neutral. And it's our job as a tech industry to shape technology for good. You know that's our obligation, and increasingly we need to be involved in, and shaping, legislations, policies, laws, to enable tech to be that force for good. >> Pat, you mentioned kind of the speed of change in the industry. You're a public company with you know, a lot of employees, how does, internally, how do you keep up with the pace of change, keep inspiring people, get them working on the next thing? You know, Michael talked about going private was one of the things that would help him restructure and get ready for that, so maybe discuss that dynamic. >> Well, you know and for us, you know, as a software company living in Silicon Valley, we feel it every day, right. I'll tell ya' you know, we see these startups, that are hovering around our people, and our buildings, and they got ideas, you know, so we're synthesizing those ideas. We have our own research effort, our advanced product efforts, we're engaging, you know, and thousands of customer interactions per day. And ultimately, it's my job to create a culture that enables my 8,000 software engineers to go for it every single day, right. Where they are just, you know, they love what we do as a company, they love who we are as a company, our values. And then find ways that we enable our teams to, what I say, innovate in everything. Not just in R and D, but how we sell our products, how we support our customers, you know, how we enable these new use cases. We have to innovate in everything, if we're going to keep pace with this industry, and to some degree, I think it's almost in the water in Silicon Valley, right. You know yeah, you got some crazy master's student coming out of Stanford, and he thinks he's going to start up a company to displace me. It's like, what are you talking about? But we feel that every day, and as we bring those people into our environment, creating that culture that allows everybody to innovate in everything, >> So it's hard to argue that things aren't getting faster, that speed, but speed is an interesting question. When you think about blockchains, and AI, and natural language processing, just digital in general, there's a lot of complexity in terms of adopting those things. So speed versus adoption. What do you see in terms of adoption? >> Yeah, you know in a lot of these things like, you know, you look at a technology like NSX, cool, breakthrough, you know we're five years old now, almost on NSX, right? Since we did the Nicira acquisition as a starting point, 4 1/2 years on NSX, and some of these things need to be sedimented, as I describe it, into the infrastructure. Hardened, you know when you've really proven all of the edge cases. You know, those things don't move every day. >> Dave: Right right, fossilized, Furrier word, >> Yeah, you know there is, you know similarly with vSAN. Boy, these edge use cases, data recovery, pounding on the periphery of failure cases, disk drives, failure modes on flash drives, some of those things need to be sedimented, but as you think about those layers, always it's you know, how do you sediment? How do you standardize? And then expose them as APIs and services to the next layer. And every layer as you go up the stack gets faster and faster right, so as somebody would consume the software-defined data center, they need to be able to do that pretty fast. You know, how can I make, you know VM, we just released 6.7. Which reduced by an order of magnitude the time to launch a VM. You know, increase the, by 20x the amount of V-Center bandwidth, just so I can go faster. Not that I needed to go faster for VMs, I needed to go faster that I can put containers in VMs, and they need much higher speed of operation. So to me, it's this constant standardization, sedimenting, integrating, and then building more and more agile surfaces, as you go higher in the stack, that allows people to build applications where literally they're pushing updates, and seeing their CICD pipeline allow new code releases every day. I'm not changing NSX every day, but I am changing my container environment for that new app literally every day, and the whole stack needs to support that. >> Cloud partnerships, we talked last year at Vmworld, about the clarity that the AWS deal brought, of course you have an arrangement with IBM, you're doing stuff with Kubernetes, so, just talk about your posture with the big cloud players, and how that has affected your business, and where you see it going. >> Yeah, you know, clearly the cloud strategy, the AWS partnership, as I said, more than anything else, when we announced that, people moved their views of VMware. Oh, I get it, VMware isn't part of my private cloud, or part of my past, they're the bridge to the future. And that has been sort of a game-changing perspective where we can truly enable this hybrid cloud experience. Where I could take you and take your existing data centers, I can move them into a range of public cloud partners, AWS, IBM, you know, and be able to operate seamlessly in a truly hybrid way. Oh your data center's getting a little hot, let's move a few workloads out. Oh, it's getting a little bit cool, let's move some workloads back. We can truly do that now, in a seamless, hybrid multi-cloud way, and customers, as they see that, it's not only the most cost-efficient, right, it also allows them to deal with unique business requirements, geo-requirements that they might have, oh, in Europe I have to be on a GDPR cloud in Germany. Okay, we support, we have a right, you know here's our portfolio. Other cases, it's like, oh, I really want to do take advantage of those proprietary services that some of the cloud vendors are doing, you know. You know, maybe in fact that new AI service is something that I could differentiate my business on, but the bulk of my workload, I want to have it on this hybrid platform that truly does give them more freedom and choice over time, while still meeting unique compliance, legal, security, issues, as they've come to know and love from VMware over time. >> So to clarify, is it, are you seeing it as use-case-specific, or is it people wanting to bring that cloud experience on-prem, or is it both? >> It is truly both, because what you've seen, is many people, and if we were talking four years ago, you would've been asking me questions, "oh, you know I just talked to Fred, "and he says everything is going to the cloud" right. And people tried that student body right to the cloud of their existing apps, and it was like, oh crap, right? You know, it's hard to re-platform, to refactor those applications, and when I got there, I got the same app, right. You know, it's like, wow that was a lot of investment to not get much return, right. Now, they look at it and they say, "Oh boy, you know, "I can build some new apps in cool new ways" right, with these cloud native services. I can now have this agile private hybrid cloud environment, and I truly can operationalize across that in a flexible way. And sometimes we have customers that are bringing workloads out of native cloud, and saying, oh that's become too big in my operation role. You know I have different governance requirements. I'm going to bring that one back. Other cases are saying, "Oh, I didn't want to move it to the VMware cloud on Amazon", or you know, IBM, the migration service is really powerful. I want to get out of the data center. Other cases, they look at their cost of capital, and the size and scale they're operating, and says, "Hey, I'm going to keep 80% on-premise forever, "but I never want to be locked in, "that I can't take advantage of that, "should there be a new service." It really is all of the above. And VMware, and our Dell relationship, and our key cloud partners, now 4,100 cloud partners strong, it's really stepping into that, in a pretty unique and powerful way. >> And the key is that operational impact, as Pat is saying. >> So Pat, just one of the challenges we've heard from users we talked to is, if this was supposed to get simpler, virtualizing it, you know, I kept all my old applications. Going the cloud, there's more SKUs of compute in the public cloud than there are, if I was to buy from Dell.com. You know, in management, you know we're making steps, but you know it's heterogeneous, it's always add, nothing ever dies, how do we help customers through this? >> Yeah, and I do think they're, you know we're definitely hearing that from customers. And they're looking to us to make these things simpler. And I think we've now, you know, laid the templates for a truly simpler world. Right, in the security domain, intrinsic security. Build many of the base security capabilities into the platform. Automation, automate across these multiple cloud environments, so you don't care about it, we're taking care of it against your policies. Being able to do that, you know, and have an increasingly autonomous infrastructure that truly is responding and operationalizing those environments, without you having to put personnel and specific investments, right at that fundamental operations level, because it's too big, it's too fast, you can't respond at the pace the business requires. So I feel really good, we have some key innovations, you'll see us announcing. Now, we're going to talk at VMworld right? >> Dave: Oh absolutely. >> Okay, >> I will 100% be there, >> I have some cool announcements in this area, by VMworld as well, specifically, in some of these management automation, we see some of that applying, some new AIML techniques, to be able to help with some of those workload management and policy management areas. So, some really cool things going on to help these problems specifically. >> We've seen, oh we saw blog recently, about you guys working on some blockchain stuff. I know it's early days there, but it's exciting new technology. >> Yeah, and the blockchain stuff is what I'm really, really pretty excited about. We have some algorithmic breakthroughs that right now, you know, blockchain on a log scale basically scales at you know log or super log, right. Which meaning, it's problematic right. Is you get lots of nodes, right, you know the time to resolve those, gets to be exponentially expensive, to be able to resolve. We've come up with some algorithmic breakthroughs that drop that to near linear. And when people look at that, they sort of say, wow, I can make my blockchain environments much larger, much more distributed as a result, so as a result of some of that work we'll be increasingly making blockchain as a primitive. We're not trying to deal with the application level, you know for insurance, for financial, but we can increasingly deliver a primitive infrastructure along with vSphere in the VMware environment, that says yeah, we've taken care of that base issue. We've guaranteed it from a vendor you trusted, and you might remember there was a couple of breaches, of some of the blockchain implementations, so yeah, we hope to take care of some of those hard problems for customers and bring some, a good breakthrough engineering, from VMware to that problem. >> Well, it's great to see companies like VMware and you know enterprise plays, IBM obviously involved, into bringing some credibility to that space, which everybody says "Crypto, oh", they don't walk they run, but there's real potential in the technology. I want to ask you about a Silicon Valley question. >> Pat: Okay. >> Any chance I get, so if I broadly define Silicon Valley, Let's include, you know, Seattle. And we generally don't do that, but that's okay, but I'm going to. >> We'll take this, we'll take 'em in okay. >> it's technology industry, but technology industry seems to have this dual disruption agenda. We've always sort of seen, tech companies own this horizontal stack, you know, and go attack, and cloud, and big data, and disruption, but it seems like, with digital, you're seeing them attack new industries. Whether it's healthcare, or groceries, or media. What do you make of that? Can Silicon Valley, broadly defined, pull off this dual disruption agenda? >> You know I really believe it can, right. In that, I'm, you know, being part of it. I'm a huge optimist on it. I don't think it will be exclusive to Silicon Valley, right. You know, there's a tech community in Boston, that's a bit more focused on healthcare, right. Obviously, the cloud guys coming out of Seattle. You know, Austin, and you know, Texas has increasing, Research Triangle, when you go around the world, you see more places because, you know, in that sense, one of my favorite, you know, cartoons, is a picture of a dog at a terminal. I'm sure it was a Dell terminal, but you know, and the caption reads right, "On the internet, "they don't know you're a dog." Right, you know the point being, hey, when you're on the net, it doesn't matter where you are, right. And it enables innovation, whether that's Afghanistan, whether that's Bangladesh, whether that's Myanmar, you know any of those places, become equal on the net, and it does open up that domain of innovation. So I view it much more as tech is disrupting everything. And that's my theme of, "tech is breaking out of tech". Clearly the hub of that, is Silicon Valley. Right you know, that's the center where you know, every third door is a new startup, as you walk down the street. It really is an incredible experience. But increasingly, you know, that innovative disruptive spirit is breaking out of Silicon Valley, to you know, literally across the world. The Chinese think they might be the number one. You know, Europeans, oh sort of a renaissance in France, you know that we haven't seen for many years, and so on. And I do believe that it will continue to be technology, in this horizontal way you know, but increasingly, and I think you know, Amazon has led the way on this. We're seeing boy, we can disrupt entire industries you know, leveraging that. You know, Tesla in automotive, and Airbnbs. All of these are changing industries in fundamental ways, and I do not see that slowing down at all. You know, I'm thrilled to see like, you know, health care, right. Boy, I have not seen this amount of disruptive technology startups in healthcare, healthcare one of the lowest percentage of spend on IT. Can you imagine that? Right, you know at that level, and boy, we're starting to see that pick up. So industry by industry I think we're just getting started. >> And that's an industry that is really ripe for disruption. >> Pat: Oh my gosh. >> So Pat, we're going to hear about some of this, this afternoon at your keynote, I presume? Maybe show us a little leg there, and we'll wrap. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dave: Alright, take it home. >> Hey, you know we're, today's keynote, obviously going to talk about the better together aspects, we'll update on vSAN and HCI and our strategy there, some of the cool things we're doing with Dell, and AirWatch Workspace ONE, and the client space. Yeah, we're going to talk about networking. I'm going to lay out our networking strategy, and we're going to give a teaser this afternoon of a broad set of networking announcements that we're doing this week. And hope to really lay out, what we think of, as the virtual cloud network of the future, and how the network is essential to that future. So, we're going to have a little bit of fun there, and you'll see me don the VR headset, right, and hey we're going to go into the virtual, virtual data center today, >> Virtualization inception. >> There we go. >> Well Pat, on a personal note, you've been a great friend of theCUBE, and we really appreciate that, and you've been an awesome guest, we saw you come from Intel with an amazing career, and we just see it going from there. So congratulations on all your personal success, your team success and continued. >> Love you guys, it's always great to be on theCUBE. You guys do a fabulous job, >> Dave: Thank you. >> For live tech coverage, and it really has been a lot of fun, and next year we're going to go party for your 10 year anniversary on theCUBE. >> Dave: That's right. Love it. >> Okay, cool, very good. >> Alright. >> Thank you, thanks so much. >> Good. Thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany. It's theCube, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Jean English. She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp, thanks so much for comin' on the show. >> Thank you for having me, we're glad you're here with us to join us at Insight Berlin. >> We're always excited to do anything with NetApp. So, talk a little bit about NetApp's digital transformation. You're now at a year's long transformation from storage, your legacy, to data. Talk a little bit about your positioning in the market. >> Sure, so I think people have previously thought of NetApp as storage, and what we're so focused on now is data. And why data? Because that's what we hear from our customers, our partners, the analysts, is what is really topping their needs right now. If we think about how companies are transforming, they're having to think about digital transformation is topping the list. It's topping the most strategic agendas of most CEOs. But what happens is they have to think about the data. It has become a life blood of their business, and as it seamlessly flows through that business, and what does it mean to either optimize their operations, if they've gotta increase their customer touch points, do they have to create new product services, and even businesses. So we feel like right now that is where our focus is on data, and it's so much a part of our heritage that we look to the future as well. >> One of the things that you're working on now is helping customers use data in new, exciting, innovative, creative ways, can you talk broadly about your approach to that, and how you're drawing inspiration on customers and then empowering them? >> Absolutely, so we really try to think about, what is our purpose? And our purpose could be true to our heritage from 25 years ago, we just celebrated our 25 year anniversary this past spring, and it is to empower our customers to change the world with data. Just a few of those, we've seen now, especially in hybrid cloud environments, customers have to think about how are they gonna simplify to integrate data across on-prem, cloud environments, to accelerate digital transformation. One example of that is EidosMedia. We love their story, because their talking about how to get news stories, real time, through a cloud platform, into the hands of journalists that can publish real time live insights. Real time journalism, and so when you think about the speed that has to happen with creating stories, getting 'em published, getting 'em out to news networks, that's data. And it's a good data story. >> When you think about the data story though, a lot of people talk about how data is a fuel, or data is. And we tend to think, at least at SiliconANGLE Wikibon, that that's probably not the best analogy, because data's different from other resources. Most resources share the economics of scarcity, you can do this, or you can do that, but data's different because data could be copied, data can be shared. But data also can be appropriated inappropriately. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship or the direction that NetApp's taking to on the one hand, facilitate the sharing of data strategically while at the same time, ensuring that proper security and IP controls are placed on it. >> So I think people are looking to make sure that they can share freely data, and seamlessly integrate data across multiple sources. Right now what we find is that whether it's because you've had data that's been on-prem, and maybe that's more structured. Now we're startin' to see more unstructured data. So data's becoming a lot more diverse. People are constantly looking for the latest source of truth of data, so dynamic, and because it's so distributed across environments, people are trying to figure out, how do you integrate data, how do you share data, but it's all about simplicity, 'cause they need it to be efficient. They need to make sure that it's protected, so security is top of minds, so data protection is the upmost of importance. They're looking for ways to embrace future technologies. And whether that's thinking about different cloud environments, SAS applications, and then how do they create the most open opportunities. A lot of people aren't just putting their data in one cloud, what we're finding is, is it's a multi-cloud world, and they're looking for a holistic solution to more easily and seamlessly manage their data through those environments. >> But the infrastructure has to move from as you said, a storage orientation towards something that's going to facilitate the appropriate sharing and integration of data. Like a fabric. >> Yes. >> Can you talk a little bit about that. >> So we started the conversation around data fabric, it was one of the first people to really talk about data fabric in the market back in 2013. And this vision was about how do you seamlessly be able to share and integrate data across cloud and on-prem environments. That has become so true in how we've been building out that data fabric today. We just launched a few weeks ago that we are the first industry leading storage data service in the Microsoft Azure console, so that people can easily be able to, can do complete storage capabilities in cloud storage, in Microsoft, we've also been developing solutions to make sure that, maybe if you're not wanting to do everything in Office365 and Azure, you wanna back it up to AWS, so how do you have better backup capabilities? Sharing of data across clouds. We're also seeing that you may wanna sync data, so maybe once you put data into the cloud, and you run analytics or even machine learning, how do you then get data back? Because you wanna make sure that you're constantly being able to look holistically at your customers. This notion of one cloud, to back to on-prem, multi-cloud environments, has been critical as we think about customers and where they're going. >> One of the things we're also hearing about at this conference is, this is the day of the data visionary, and this is where people who are thinking about how to store data, use data, extract data, find value in the data. The demands on them, the pressures on them, are so intense. How is NetApp helping those people, sort of understanding where they are, not only in their businesses, but also in their trajectories of their careers, and then helping them move forward. >> We've been really thinking about who is really using data to disrupt, and are this disruptive use of data to really drive business results. It's not just about having the data, it's about how are you gonna have an impact on the business. So we start to think about this notion of who is a data thriver? Who's thriving with data versus who's just surviving and in fact, some are even resisting. So we actually partner with IDC to launch a study on data thrivers to look at who is truly looking at driving new revenue streams, attracting new customers, how are they able to use data as correlistic part of their business. Not some one off or side project to help do the digital transformation, but what was gonna drive really good business results. Data as an asset. Data across business and IT. And we see new roles are emerging from this. We're seeing that, Chief Data Officers, there's Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Scientists, Chief Transformation Officers. All new roles that have been emerging in the last couple of years, but these data thrivers are seeing tremendous business impact. >> So, what is it that separates those people, I mean I think that, those really, those companies and those business models, and what are sort of the worst case scenarios for those companies that are just surviving and not necessarily thriving, in this new environment. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, we're seeing that companies that actually put data at the center of what they do. So we think of it as a data-centric organization, are seeing 6x in what they're seeing in terms of being able to drive real customer acquisition. When we think about what it means to drive operational efficiency, when we think about 2x times in terms of profitability, real bottom line results, compared to people that are simply just surviving with data. What's interesting is that when we start to think about what are the attributes of these people, so business and IT working together in unison. These roles in fact that are emerging are starting to become those catalysts and change agents that are bringing IT and the business more together. We're also seeing that when you think of data as an asset, even to the bottom line, how does data become more critical in terms of what they see in terms of being a differentiated advantage for the company. Also, thinking through quality, quality, quality. You've gotta make sure that the data is of highest quality and it's constantly being cleansed. Then in terms of how do we think of it being used across the business, it's not just about holding data and locking it away behind a firewall. Data more today is so dynamic, distributed and diverse, that you have to let it be utilized and activated across the business. And then to think through, it's starts not just in terms of what customers are using and seeing from data, what they can actually see in terms of customer touch points and having a better customer experience, but then how do you make sure it even comes back to the development to create new products, create new services, maybe even eliminate waste. Stop doing product lines based on what they're seeing from actual usage. So it's a pretty fascinating space right now, but the data thriver is the new thought we're thinking in terms of getting that out in the market and really sharing more so with our clients, so that they can benchmark themselves as well. >> So, you're a CMO. >> Yes. >> You're telling a story, but you also have operational responsibilities. How would you tell your peers to use data differently? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. I mean, for me data's the life blood of how we think about how we actually create a better customer experience. We're using data constantly to better understand what are our customer's needs, and those customers are evolving. Before, in the loyalist that we love was storage architects and admins, we're starting to see that people are thinking about how to use more hybrid cloud data services with CIOs. How are they gonna look at a cloud strategy? With DevOps, how are they gonna create, deploy, and, applications at speed? How are they gonna be able to help to really think through, what are they gonna do to drive more analytics and better workload usage, and efficiencies? Our clients are evolving, and when we think about how do you reach those clients differently, we have to know who they are. We have to use data to understand them. We have to be more personalized. We just relaunched our entire digital experience, so that when we try to look at how do you bring people into something that's more customized, more personalized, what does it mean to be a cloud architect that's thinking about a data backup and protection plan. What does it mean for someone in DevOps who's thinking about how do I actually create and deploy an application at speed? How do you think about someone that's gonna look at the needs from a CIO, so much differently than before. But, using data, using customization, thinking about an engaging experience, bringing 'em through that experience so that we solve their business challenges. We use data and analytics every day. I think of us as being the new data scientists. People say, is it art or is it science and marketing? I'm like, it's a little bit of the storytelling, absolutely, we have to lead with stories, but the data and the analytics is where we really understand our customers best. So using analytic models, using predictive models, using more ways in which we can actually reach customers in new ways we never have before through social. But bring them into a new conversation. Analytics, analytics, storytelling, and understanding, getting closer to new clients like we never have before, and then thinking through how do we use that full-circle loop of learning to get better and better in how we engage our customers in ways they want to engage with us. >> I wanna switch gears just a second, and I know that you've just been nominated as an International Board Member. You were a Board Member before, of Athena of the Triangle, which is about supporting and inspiring women in the technology industry. As we know that this is the dearth of women, technologists, is a big problem in the US and globally. Can you tell us a little more about the organization and what you're doing? >> So, Athena International is really about, how do you promote women's leadership? It's across the world, in fact we just launched some very exciting initiatives in China where I lived for a year, and the President of Athena International is a friend of mine, and she was really looking at how do you foster growth, especially in emerging markets and countries where women's leadership can be so profound in terms of how do you impact the business, government, and market, and really overall global success. Athena is focused on, is technology, but it's also with women in many industries. But really, how do you gain the powerful mentorships, how do you gain powerful access to programs, to having more access to expertise that can help them to think through business models, business cases. How do they grow their business, it might be from financial to career counseling, to mentoring on marketing, but it's really thinking through women's leadership as a whole. >> And is NetApp also working on behalf of those, of that cause too? >> We're really focused on, today in fact we're gonna be hosting the, the annual Women in Technology Summit. So we're so focused on how do we think about developing women in technology, how to think about that across not only our employees, but our partners and our customers, and it's not just about women, this is men and women working together to determine how do we stop the fact that we've got to get more access to women in mentorships and sponsorships, and really really driving how we have leadership as we grow, really grow into our careers, and can drive more business impact. >> Great. Well Jean, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> It was really fun talking to you. >> Absolutely, thank you both. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight, here in Berlin, Germany in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany. It's The Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Peter Burris. We are joined by Jean English. She is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're glad you're here with us to join us at Insight Berlin. We're always excited to do anything with NetApp. So talk a little bit about NetApp's digital transformation. You're now at a years long transformation from storage, your legacy, to data. Talk a little bit about your positioning in the market. >> Sure. I think people have previously thought of NetApp as storage. And what we are so focused on now is data. And why data? Because that's what we hear from our customers, our partners' analysts, is what is really topping their needs right now. And when we think about how companies are transforming, they're having to think about digital transformation is topping the list, is topping the most strategic agendas of most CEOs. But what happens is they have to think about the data and how does it become a lifeblood of their business? How does it seamlessly flow through that business? And what does it mean to either optimize their operations, if they've got to increase their customer in touch points, if they have to create new products, services, and even businesses. So we feel like right now that is why our focus is on data. And it's so much a part of our heritage that we look to the future as well. >> So, one of the thing's that you're working on now is helping customers use data in new, exciting, innovative, creative ways. Can you talk broadly about your approach to that and how you're drawing inspiration from customers and then empowering them? >> Absolutely. We really try to think about what is our purpose. And our purpose could be true to our heritage from 25 years ago, we've just celebrated our 25 year anniversary this past spring. And it is to empower our customers to change the world with data. And just a few of those we see now, especially is hybrid cloud environments, customers have to think about how are they going to simplify and integrate data across on-prem, cloud environments, to accelerate digital transformation. One example of that is EidosMedia. We love their story, because they're talking about how to get new stories, real time, through a cloud platform into the hands of journalists that can publish real-time live insights, real-time journalism. And so, when you think about the speed that has to happen with creating stories, getting them published, getting them out to news networks... That's data, and it's a good data story. >> When you think about the data story, though, a lot of people talk about how data is a fuel or data is... And we tend to think, at least it's looking like a Wikibon, but that's probably not the best analogy. Because data's different from other resources. Most resources share the economics of scarcity. You can do this or you can do that. But data's different, because data could be copied, data could be shared, but data also could be appropriated inappropriately. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship, or the direction that NetApp's taking to, on the one hand, facilitate the sharing of data strategically while at the same time ensuring that proper security and IP controls are placed on it? >> Absolutely. I think people are looking to make sure they can share freely, data, and seamlessly integrate data across multiple sources. Right now what we find, whether it's because you've had data that's been on-prem, and maybe that's more structured. Now we're starting to see more unstructured data. So data's becoming a lot more diverse. People are constantly looking for the latest source of truth of data. It's so dynamic, and because it's so distributive across environments, people are trying to figure out how do you integrate data, how do you share data. But it's all about simplicity because they need it to be efficient. They need to make sure that it's protected. So security is top of minds, data protection is utmost of importance. They're looking different ways to embrace future technologies. And whether that's thinking about different cloud environments, Sass applications, and then how do they create the most open opportunities. A lot of people aren't just putting their data in one cloud. What we're finding is it's a multi-cloud world and they're looking for a wholistic solution to more easily and seamlessly manage their data through those environments. >> The infrastructure has to move from a storage orientation towards something that's going to facilitate the appropriate sharing and integration of data. Like a fabric. You could talk a little bit about that. >> Yes. We started the conversation around data fabric. Was one of the first people to really talk about data fabric in the market back in 2013. And this vision was about how do you seamlessly be able to share and integrate data across cloud and on-prem environments. That has become so true in how we've been building out that data fabric today. We just launched a few weeks ago that we are the first industry leading storage data service in the Microsoft Azure console. So that people can easily be able to do complete storage capabilities in cloud storage in Microsoft. We've also been developing solutions to make sure that maybe if you're not wanting to do everything in Office 365 and Azure, you want to back it up to AWS. So how do you have better backup capabilities? Sharing of data across clouds. We're also seeing that you my want to sync data. So maybe once you put data into the cloud and you run analytics or even machine learning, how do you get data back? Because you want to make sure that you're constantly being able to look wholistically at your customers. So this notion of one cloud to back to on-prem, multi-cloud environments has been critical as we've been thinking about customers and where they're going. >> One of the things we're also hearing about at this conference is that this is the day of the data visionary, and this is where people who are thinking about how to store data, use data, extract data, find value in the data... The demands on them, the pressures on them are so intense. How is NetApp helping those people? Understanding where they are, not only in their businesses, but also in their trajectories of their careers. And then helping them move forward. >> Absolutely. We've been really thinking about who is really using data to disrupt. And are this disruptive use of data to really drive business results. It's not just about having the data. It's about how are you going to have it impact on the business. So we started to think about this notion of who is a data thriver. And who's thriving with data versus who's just surviving. And in fact, some are even resisting. So we actually partner with IDC to launch a study on data thrivers. To look at who is truly looking at driving new revenue streams, attracting new customers. How are they able to use data as a corlistic part of their business? Not some one off or side project to help through the digital transformation, but what was going to drive really good business results, data as an asset, data across business and IT. And we see new roles are emerging from this. So we're seeing chief data officers, chief digital officers, chief data scientists, chief transformation officers. All new roles that have been emerging in the last couple of years. But these data thrivers are seeing tremendous business impact. >> So what is it that separates those people? I think of those companies and those business models. And what are some of the worst case scenarios for those companies that are just surviving and not necessarily thriving in this new environment? >> It's interesting. We're seeing that companies that actually put data at the center of what they do, so we think of it as a data-centered organization, are seeing 6x in what they're seeing in terms of being able to drive real customer acquisition. And we think about what it means to drive operational efficiency. When think about 2x times in terms of profitability, real bottom line results, compared to people that are simply just surviving with data. What's interesting is that when we started to think about what are the attributes of these people. So, business and IT working together in unison. These roles, in fact, that are emerging are starting to become those catalyst and change agents that are bringing IT and the business more together. We're also seeing that, when you think of data as an asset, even to the bottom line, how does data become more critical in terms of what they see, in terms of being a difference and an advantage for the company. Also, thinking through quality, quality, quality. So you've got to make sure that the data is of highest quality and it's constantly being cleansed. Then, in terms of how do we think of it being used across the business. It's not just about holding data and locking it away behind a firewall. Data, more today, is so dynamic, distributed, and diverse that you have to let it be utilized and activated across the business. And then to think through, it starts not just in terms of what customers are using and seeing from data, but they can actually see, in terms of customer touch points and having a better customer experience. But then how do you make sure it even comes back to development to create new products, great new services, maybe even eliminate waste? Stop doing product lines based on what they're seeing from actual usage. So it's a pretty fascinating space right now. But the data thriver is the new thought we're thinking in terms of getting that out in the market and really sharing that more so with our clients. So that they can benchmark themselves as well. >> Peter Burris: So, you're a CMO? Yes. You're telling a story, but you also have operational responsibilities. How would you tell your peers to use data differently? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. For me, data is the lifeblood of how we think about how we actually create a better customer experience. We're using data constantly to better understand what are our customers' needs? And those customers are evolving. Before, and the royalists that we love with storage architects and admins. We're starting to see that people are thinking about how to use more hybrid cloud data services. With CIOs, how are they going to look at a cloud strategy? With DevOps, how are they going to create deploying and applications at speed? How are they going to be able to help to really think through? What are they going to do to drive more analytics and better workload usage and efficiencies? So our clients are evolving. And when we think about how do you reach those clients differently? We have to know who they are. We have to use data to understand them. We have to be more personalized. We just relaunched our entire digital experience so that when we try to look at how do you bring people into something that's more customized, more personalized? What does it mean to be a cloud architect that's thinking about a data backup and protection plan? What does it mean to someone at DevOps that's thinking about how do I actually create and deploy an application at speed? How do you think about someone that's going to look at the needs from a CIO so much differently than before? But using data, using customization, thinking about an engaging experience, bringing them through that experience so that we solve their business challenges. We use data in analytics everyday. I think of us as being the new data scientists. People say, is it art or is it science and marketing? And I'm like, well it's a little bit of story telling. Absolutely we have to leave the stories. But the data, the analytics is where we really understand our customers best. And so using analytic models, using predictive models. Using more ways in which we can actually reach customers in new ways we never have before through social. But bring them into a new conversation. So, analytics, analytics, story telling and understanding, getting closer to new clients like we never have before, and then thinking through how do we use that full circle loop of learning to get better and better at how we engage our customers in ways they want to engage with us. >> I want to switch gears just a second. And I know that you've just been nominated as an international board member. You were a board member before of Athena of the Triangle, which is about supporting and inspiring women in the technology industry. As we know, the dearth of women technologists is a big problem in the U.S. and globally. Can you tell us a little bit more about the organization and what you're doing? >> Sure. So, Athena International is really about how do you promote women's leadership? And it's across the world. In fact, we just launched some very exciting initiatives in China, where I lived for a year. And the president of Athena International is a friend of mine and she was really looking at how do you foster growth, especially in emerging markets in countries where women's leadership can be so profound in terms of how do impact a business, government, and market and really overall global success. Athena is focused on its technology. But it's also women in many industries. But really, how do you gain the powerful mentorships? How do you gain powerful access to programs? To having more access to expertise that can help them to think through business models, business cases. How do they grow their business? It might be from financial, to career counseling, to mentoring on marketing, but it's really thinking through women's leadership as a whole. >> And is NetApp also working on behalf of that cause too? >> Today, in fact, we're going to be hosting the annual women in technology summit. And so we're so focused on how do we think about developing women in technology. How to think about that across not only our employees, but our partners and our customers. And it's not just about women. This is men and women working together to determine how do we stop the fact that we've got to get more access to women in mentorships and sponsorships. And really really driving how we have leadership as we grow into our careers and can drive more business impact. >> Great. Well Jean, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. It was really fun talking to you. Absolutely. Thank you both. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight here in Berlin, Germany in just a little bit.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

(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.