>> From the Silicon Angle media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's Boston area studio, where we're talking about storage, and SDI essentials. And of course, storage, and infrastructure, really are there for the data in the application. To help me dig into this, Rob Coventry, and Steve Kenniston, thank you so much, gentlemen. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Alright, so, yeah, when we talk about one of the only constant in the industry, Steve, you said in one of our other interviews, is change. The role of all of this infrastructure stuff is to run your applications, and of course the application's, you know, the really critical piece of everything we're doing, is the data. So, Rob, maybe talk to us a little bit about your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, help set up this conversation. >> Well, one of the biggest changes that's going on these days, is the move towards cloud. And I often kinda want to reset the definition of what we mean with, when we say cloud, 'cause it means so many different things to so many different people. To me, cloud is all about, not a place, not somewhere where you're running computing. While it may have started out that way, when Amazon launched AWS back in, what was it, '02 or '03? Or salesforce.com, and when they were running everything in the cloud. But, it's really evolved more to a style of computing, distinct and different from your traditional computing. It has certain attributes, those attributes are what distinguish cloud computing from traditional computing, more than anything. And so, basically now, storage has gotta evolve, and support that, just as like we did with virtualization. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we did it, in the industry, we spent so much time arguing over definitions, and we went, "Hybrid, public, multi, composable, "composite, everything like that." Well, you know, when I talk to customers, most of them do have a cloud strategy, but, number one is, the ink's still drying on what that strategy is, and the pieces that make up that strategy are definitely changing over time, as they grow and mature. But, they absolutely know that no matter where it is, their data is one of the biggest assets that they have, outside of people, and therefore how can they leverage, how can they get more out of data? The whole wave of big data that we were well into, and the next wave of AI, is all data at the center of it. >> Yeah, I think, I like the way Rob kind of positioned this. We've, we talked about, you hear a lot of folks talk about cloud. You know, a big part of what we're trying to do is have our sellers, as well as the community, understand that cloud isn't a place, right, it's a thing. And you've kind of alluded to what I want to do, specific types of either development, or programming, or provide assets to the world, whether it'd be data, or whether it'd be things like websites, or that sort of thing. It's got to live somewhere. And where that lives is becoming more cloudy. Now, whether that place is on-prem, or it's in a cloud, or it's in a remote data center someplace, at the end of the day the functions that you want to be able to deliver on, behave in a cloud-like behavior, and I think that's becoming more the trend of what people want. And really, it's the consumption model of where it lives, and how you pay for it, is really the bigger part of how things evolve. >> Yeah, applications are changing a lot. You used to say, the era of shrink-wrapped software is mostly over now. It's, talk a lot about microservices now, and when I'm building things, you mention functions, which catch into functions, and services, and serverless. You know, a whole new area that's changing. What's needed for this world, you look at it, you've got, you know, most customers have hundreds if not thousands of applications. Most of those aren't ready for that brave new world of cloud-native. There's usually some stuff, so, maybe Rob give us a little bit on that spectrum, and where your customers... >> So, look, I think we recognize that people have the vast majority of their infrastructures running, or applications are running, on traditional infrastructure, right? And so, they've got a couple different choices. They've either got to modernize what they've got, and the modernization is, you know, it, I was sharing with Steve last week, you know, we're modernizing our house, because we built the house back in '01, it was golden oak, it was gold handles everywhere, and so now we're getting rid of all the gold, we're painting all the golden oak, and repainting the whole house, right? So, that's a modernization. It's not a complete refurbish, remodel, that's what we would refer as refactoring, right. That's a much bigger, heavy-duty thing. And so, businesses are going to have to look at those traditional applications, and decide which of them should be just simply modernized, and then adapted, or modernized to work, and orchestrated, with that bigger cloud-like environment, and which of them need to be refactored to operate with the underlying cloud infrastructure. Which, by the way, expectation is that it's completely virtualized, it's automated, it's policy-driven, it's orchestrated, it's got all those types of cloudy-like, you know, pay on demand types of characteristics, that people learned and love from AWS, and from Google, but now they're getting on-prem as well. >> Yeah, and let me poke at one thing, because you said, you know, virtualized, and I think you don't mean just a hyper-visor, but we have things like containerization, you know, bare metal's back, you know, it's so funny, what's old is new again. Remember, it was like, "Oh, we're gonna go 100% virtual," except for containers and everything else, now, so now we've got lots of flexibility into how it's deployed. And there's that modernizing the platform, and modernizing the applications, and sometimes you do one before the other, depending on how you're doing it. >> Great point. I mean, not everybody understands the distinction, right, between containers and VMs, right. But the way I look at it, containers, one of the first things that they were really trying to attack is, a more efficient way to do virtualization than what we had with VMs in the past, right? And one of the things that they learned, is if they break those applications into smaller functional microservices, then they get another benefit, and that is continuous development. That's critical to the flexibility and agility that the business needs, to be able to constantly evolve those applications. And the third factor is, what I call asynchronous scale. So, each little function can consume however much memory, storage, and compute that it needs, independent of all the other functions in there, whereas when it was operating as a monolithic application, the traditional approach, well you were kinda stuck with however much the largest footprint was required. Now, you get a lot more efficiency out of it, you get a lot more availability, and you get continuous development. That's what you get out of containerization. >> And if you bring that up even one more step now, right, and I like to use this analogy when I'm presenting to clients, and maybe this is helpful, is, if you look at our, just take two of our product. We'd take Spectrum Protect if you take Spectrum Protect Plus, right. Spectrum Protect, you know, 25 years in the industry, number two in the world, everything, right, millions of lines of code, might even be tens of millions of lines of code. Any time you have to do anything to that code, like I want it to support X, all ten million lines of code need to kinda make sure it's adaptable to that thing, and it needs to be able to lift and shift. And we were talking about agile development, which we do now, but you were also talking about the release trains, and all that stuff, right, and what ends up going in and out. Versus, look at Spectrum Protect Plus, built on an agile development, built on microservices. I want to put in a service, I can just grab that service and plug it in pretty easily. I don't have to kind of drag all that code kicking and screaming, so to speak, along with it. But, um, now I want to ask you a question, Stu. Because I tend to think the analysts, as well as kinda the thought leaders in any company that are trying to think about helping sellers sell, and that sort of thing, we're about 12 to 18 months ahead of the customer. We have to be, because we gotta kinda see what's out there. What are you hearing around this containerization, refactoring? I think we have an opinion, it'd be interesting to hear an outside view of what you think is happening. >> Sure, Steve. And in the last few years, I spent a lot of time going to the cloud shows, I go to CubeCon, going to my second year of doing serverless comps, so, look, yeah, serverless functions, as a service, we're still in the early adopter phase. Some cool startups out there, I'm excited to talk to real customers that are doing some cool things. But even I asked Andy Jassy if, you know, the CEO of AWS, he had made some comment, you know, if we had said a couple years ago, "If Amazon was built today, it would be built on AWS." And he had made this, "If Amazon was built today, "it would be built on Lambda Serverless." And I was like, come on, really? He's like, "Well, no, I mean, what I mean is, "that's the direction we're going, "but no, we're not there yet, because we can't run one "of the biggest global companies on this yet." So, look, we understand, what could be done today, and what can't, when we talk servers? Containers, containers are doing phenomenal, we're now, containers have been around over a decade, you know, Google's been talking for many years of how many billions of containers they spin up and down. But, I've talked to much smaller companies than, you know, the Googles and Yahoos of the world, that like containers, are moving in that environment. I'm not sure we've completely crossed the chasm to the majority, but most people have heard of Docker, they're starting to play with these things. You know, companies like IBM and everyone else have lots of offerings that leverage and use containers, because a lot of these things, it just gets baked in under the hood. When you talked to, you brought up virtualization, it's like, oh. It's, you know, we watched this wave from the last 15 years of virtualization, it's just for basic, we don't even think about, sure there's environments that aren't virtualized for a certain reason, if it's containers. But, you know, when you've seen Microsoft get up on stage, and talk about how they've embraced Linux. And a lot of the reason that they've embraced Linux is to do more with containers, that's there. So, containerization is going strong, but, when you're talking of the spectrum of applications, yeah, we're still early because, the long pole in the tent, at least customers like to, it's those applications. If I've been running a company for 20 years, and I have my database that keeps everything running, making a change is really hard. If I'm a brand new application, oh, I'm doing some cool, you know, no sequel, my sequel, you know, cool applications. So, it's a spectrum as we've been talking about, Steve, but, um, yeah, the progress is definitely happening faster than it ever has, but, you take those applications, there's a lot of them that I need to either start with a lift-and-shift and then talk about refactoring things, because making change in the application's tough. APIs, we haven't talked about yet, though, is a critical piece into this. As worry about, okay, we're just gonna have API sprawl just like we have with every other thing in IT. >> I definitely want to get to API, but one more, just one more piece of color. When you're at these conferences, and the users are there, listening to the folks, but one more piece of color is, do they have, applications run the business. But it has to sit on top of something, so there's the infrastructure piece. What are the questions around refactoring, and containerization, that happen around infrastructure? I'm trying to to think about how to get from A to B, what do I think about the underlying infrastructure, or is that even a conversation, because a lot of the stuff is cloud-native, right, I mean, or can be cloud-native. >> Yeah, and the nice thing about containers is, it just lives on top of Linux, so, you know, if I've got the skillset, and I understand that, it's relatively easy to move up that way. Yeah, for a lot of the developers, when they say, "The nice thing, if I do containers, if I do Kubernetes." I really don't care, the answer is yes. Am I gonna have stuff in my data center, yeah, of course. Am I gonna do stuff in the public cloud? Yes, and that's if I can have the same Linux image. We've been talking for years about, how much of the stack do I need to make sure is the same both places to make it work, because that was always the last mile of, "Okay, it's tested, my vendor said it's good, "but I get an okay, what about my application, "my configuration, and what I did?" When I use Salesforce, I don't need to worry about it. I can pull up on any device, well, the mobile is a little bit different than the browser, but for the most part, I'm anywhere in the world, or I work for any company, it's relatively the same look and feel. So, a little bit long answer on this, but when it comes to containers, what we've been trying to do, and what I found really interesting, is, the Nirvana's always been, "I don't want to worry about what's underneath the stack." And when I said, I mentioned the cool new thing, serverless-- >> The reason for that, is the business, with containers, gets that continuous development, and continuous availability, and scalability, all in that infrastructure. The infrastructure enables that, right? So, in my mind, the reason people want to do it is, they know, the speed of change in their business is never gonna get any slower. And this platform enables that speed of change. >> So, the one thing, those of us that live through the virtualization wave, virtualization, great, I don't need to worry about what server, or how many servers, or anything. Yeah, but, the storage and networking stuff, oh wait, that kind of all broke. And we spent a decade fixing that, and trust me, when containerization first went, I had, like three years ago, went into a conference, someone is like, "It's so much faster than virtualization, "it's this and this and this." And I got off, I'm like, "Hey, uh, "we've all got the wounds, and, y'know. "You know, less hair, now that we've gone through a decade "fixing all of these issues, what about this?" Docker did a great service to the industry, helped make containers available broadly, and have done a lot. I'd say networking is a little bit further along than storages, most of the the things, you know we talk serverless, it's mostly stateless today. When we talk containers, okay, where's my repository on the side, that I do things, so, state is still something we need to worry about. >> That said, you know we've made a big investment in our ability for a block storage, and by the way, all of our file storage offerings, to be able to work with both Kubernetes and OpenShift, so, those are two of the predominant, prevalent container-based systems out there. So, I think that, at least it gives that ability to attach anything that needs persistence to our storage. >> So, what I'd love to get your perspective on, because we talk about, boy these changes that are happening on the infrastructure side. For a while it used to be, okay, business needs a new application, let's go build a temple for it. So, the business people says app, and then the infrastructure comes, team's set in, okay, I've got the building specs, give me a million bucks and 18 months, and now I'll build it. Well, today, you don't have as much money, you don't have as much time, but that relationship between infrastructure and application, they've gotta be working so much closer, so, how do they, you know, when I'm building this, who is that that builds it, and how do they work even closer? >> Well, that's this, we can talk about the infrastructure developer, I guess, too. Because really, this is the role that kind of is an evolution from what maybe was in the past a storage administrator, right? It's somebody who is setting up a set of policies, and templates, and classes of storage, that abstracts the physical from the logical, so that the application developer, who is going into Kubernetes, or into OpenShifts, says, I need a class B usage for storage, that has backed-up, and maybe replicated. Or, I need a class C, that is backup, replicated, and highly available. And the storage administrator, in that case, is setting up those templates, and just simply making sure that he's monitoring all this, so that when the additional demand comes, he just plugs it in and starts to continue to add more. >> Okay, so, I've talked a lot to developers, I haven't run across an infrastructure developer, before, as a term, so, where do they come from, what's their skill-set, maybe help flesh that out a little bit for me. >> I was gonna say, I think in a number of customer presentations I've given over the course of this last year, it's come up a number of times. So, I think, and granted in a larger companies. And it typically comes across in a chart that shows, not the number of people are changing, but the skillset in the different organizations I have are changing. So, today where I spend a lot of time doing administration, five years from now I'm not gonna be doing that much administration. So, what I want are capabilities, well, first of all I need to program the infrastructure, so that it is programmatic, to either the application, connect through API so maybe I have a chef or puppet doing dev-ops, but when I make that call, as a developer in the company, to chef or puppet because I want this, to Rob's point, everything underneath that-- >> It's orchestrated underneath there. There's a set of policies that are set, that says, this is how much compute, how much network, what kind of storage you're gonna get. That's the infrastructure developer, who sent, using APIs that are in the infrastructure, and at the higher-level platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift, that basically allow that developer that just says, "I need some of that, I need some of that." The experience is not a lot different than what they get with Amazon Web Services, or Google App Server. It's a similar kind of experience, but you can do this on premises now. >> Yeah, and, it's very similar, as you said, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Because, for sure, chef puppet, been hearing lots of people talk, that's the people, it's like, you're not configuring luns anymore, I don't need to do all the old masking, and all the configurations. The network people, it's like, no, you've got a different job, and it's shifted, that whole vision of infrastructure as code is starting to come to fruition. >> And we talk a lot, or at least I do, right around, IT, and technology, and infrastructure's made up of three things. People, process, and technology. And the people are evolving just as fast as the infrastructure needs to evolve. So, tomorrow, I want to be building a programmatic infrastructure today, so that my people can be focused on, like you said, where is the future, I don't know, but I constantly need to be thinking like the analysts think. I need to be 12 to 18 months ahead of the company, so that I can continuously evolve that infrastructure, and help them get there, but I don't disrupt the flow of the people that need access to the data, or the applications, or that sort of thing. It's gotta be constant, and that's how that skillset is changing. >> Okay, so, is that, what's that infrastructure developer's role in helping with the app modernization? How do I figure out, you know, what do I just build new, what do I move over, how do I start pulling things apart? >> Yeah, I think it definitely starts by looking at the different applications that they have, I think you made a good example where, okay so now I want to modernize as much as I can, and now I want to start drilling into by taking a break, gaining some knowledge and some insights about containerization, and APIs, and that of sort of thing, and figuring out which applications in my stack today, I can refactor, which makes sense to build out of microservices, you know, refactor into microservices and that sort of thing. Start doing that, get that done, and then start looking at, ahead of that, what's next? So, getting that infrastructure programmed and plumbed ready, so that anyone who needs to access it can, so it's more hands-off. Think of the younger generation coming into technology today, right? I want to use my iPhone, I want to do this, I want that piece of storage, I want it to be a click of a button. I, as an infrastructure developer, need to help set that up and make that happen, so that as we move forward, I'm doing other new things. Would you agree? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, at the end of the day, those guys are basically taking advantage of those large pool of services, whether it be storage, networking, or computing, creating APIs, or leveraging APIs, in that infrastructure, and wiring it up so that the end-user developers can go and access them at will, without waiting. >> Yeah. Last thing I want to ask in this segment, is, you know, change is tough. And when I look at my application portfolio, it can be a little bit daunting, so what sort of things should they be doing, to make sure that they're ready for the modernization, the transformation, to get along that journey a little bit faster? >> Well, the first thing is, is that you've gotta have a software to find infrastructure to be able to do any of this. And basically what that software to find infrastructure has, is has a number of attributes. The first of which is, an actual separation between the physical and the software. It has policies, it has the ability to, APIs that allow you to control that, that are either through command-line interfaces or rust interfaces, such that it can be orchestrated, and then you take advantage of all those all policies, such that you can automate it, monitor it, and manage it centrally. That is the base definition of software-defined infrastructure, and we've had it with CPUs for a long time, we've had it with networking, people have been doing network separation of software and hardware, and it's really IBM that is unique in this business, that has a set of software-defining capabilities that I think is different than the rest of the marketplace. >> Yeah, I mentioned it earlier, but I think I'll close on it too, is, you know, lots of customers, gotta modernize the platform, and that really sets you up to be able to modernize the application. Alright, Rob and Steve, thanks so much for joining us, helping us walk through the data, and the applications. Alright, thank you so much, I'm Stu Miniman, and, appreciate you watching theCUBE.

>> Why don't I spend just a couple minutes talking about what we mean by digital enactment, turning data in models and models into action. And then we'll jump directly into, I'll introduce the panelists after that, and we'll jump directly into the questions. So Wikibon SiliconAngle has been on a mission for quite sometime now to really understand what is the nature of digital transformation, or digital disruption. And historically, when we've talked about digital, people talk about a variety of different characteristics of it, so we'll talk about new types of channels and activity on the web, and a many number of other things. But to really make sense of this, we kind of felt that we had to go to a set of basic principles, and utilize those basic principles to build our observations up. And so what we started with is a simple observation that, if it's not digital, or if it's not data, it ain't digital. By that we mean fundamentally the idea of digital business is how are we going to use data as an asset to differentially drive our business forward? And if we borrowed from Drucker, Drucker used to like to talk about the idea that business exists to create sustained customers, and so we would say that digital business is about applying data assets to differentially create sustained customers. Now to do that successfully, we have to be able to, as businesses, be able to establish a set of strategic business capabilities that will allow us to differentially use data assets. And we think that there are a couple of core strategic business capabilities required. One is human beings and most businesses operate in the analog world, so it's how do we take that analog data and turn it into digital data that we can then process. So that's the first one, the notion of an IOT as a transducer of information so that we can generate these very rich data streams. Secondly we have to be able to do something with those data streams, and that's the basis of big data. So we utilize big data to create models, to create insights, and increasingly through a more declarative style, actually create new types of software systems that will be crucial to driving the business forward. That's the second capability. The third capability is one that we're still coming to understand, and that is we have to take the output of those models, the output of those insights, and then turn them back into some event that has a consequential moment in the real world, or what we call systems of an action. And so the three core business capabilities that have to be built are this capture data through IOT, big data to process it, systems of an action also through IOT, through actuators, to actually that have a consequential action in the real world. So that's the basis of what we're talking about. We're going to take Flavio's vision that he just laid out, and then we, in this panel, are going to talk about some of the business capabilities necessary to make that happen, and then after this, David Foyer will lead a panel on specifically some of the lower level technologies that are going to make it work. Make sense guys? >> Sounds good (mumbles). >> Okay, so let me introduce the panelists. Over, down there on the end, Ted Connell. Ted is from Intel, I don't know if we can get the slide up that has their names and their titles. Ted, why don't you very quickly introduce yourself. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I run Solution Architecture for the manufacturing and industrial vertical, where we put together end to end ecosystem solutions that solve our clients business problems. So we're not selling silicone or semiconductors, we're solving our clients problems, which as Flavio said, requires ecosystem solutions of software, system integrators, and other partners to come together to put together end solutions. >> Excellent, next to Ted is Steve Madden of Equinix. >> Yeah, Steve Madden. Equinix is the largest interconnection, global interconnection company and a lot of the ecosystems that you'll be hearing about, come together inside our locations. And one of the things I do in there is work with our big customers on industry vertical level solutions, IOT being one of them. >> Phu Hoang, from Data Torrent. >> Hi, my name's Phu Hoang, I'm co-founder and chief strategy of a company called Data Torrent, and at Data Torrent, our mission is really to build out solutions to allow enterprises to process big data in a streaming fashion. So that whole theme around ingestion, transformation, analytics, and taking action in sub second on massive data is what we're focusing on. >> And you're familiar with Flavio. Flavio, will you take a second to introduce yourself. >> Yes, thank you, I am leading a company that is trying to manifest the vision highlighted here, building a platform. Not so much the applications, we are hosting the applications (mumbles) the data management and so forth. And trying to apply the industrial vertical first. Big enough to keep us busy for quite a while. >> So in case you didn't know this, we have an interesting panel, we have use case, application, technol infrastructure, and platform. So what' we'll try to do is over the next, say, 10 minutes or so, we're going to spend a little bit of time, again, talking about some of these business capabilities. Let me start off by asking each of you a question, and I will take, if anybody is really burning to ask a question, raise your hand, I'll do my best to see you and I'll share the microphone for just long enough for you to ask it. Okay, so first question, digital business is data. That means we have to think about data differently. Ted, at Intel, what is Intel doing when they think about data as an asset? >> So, Intel has been working on what is now being called Fog, and big data analytics for over a generation. The modern xeon server we're selling, the wire in the electronics if you will, is 10 silicon atoms wide. So to control that process, we've had to do what is called Industry 4.0 20 years ago. So all of our production equipment has been connected for 20 years, we're running... One of our factories will produce a petabyte of data a day, and we're running big data analytics, including machine learning on the stuff currently. If you look at an Intel factory, we have 2,000 fit clients on the factory floor supported by 600 servers in our data center at the factory, just to control the process and run predictive yield analytics. >> Peter: So that's your itch? >> Our competitive advantage at Intel is the factory. We are a manufacturer, we're a world class manufacturer. Our front end factories have zero people in it, not that we don't like people, but we had to fully automate the factory because as I speak, tens of thousands of water molecules are leaving my mouth, and if one of those water molecules lands on a silicon, it ain't going to work. So we had to get people physically out of the factory, and so we were forced by Moore's Law, and the product we build, to build out what became Fog, when they came up with the term seven years ago, we just came to that conclusion because of cost, latency, and security, it made sense to, you know, look, you got data, you got compute, there's a network between. It doesn't matter where you do the compute, bring the compute to the data, the data to the compute. You're doing a compute function, it doesn't matter where you do it. So Fog is not complicated, it's just a distributed data center. >> So when you think about some of the technologies necessary to make this work, it's not just batch, we're going to be doing a lot of stuff in real time, continuously. So Phu, talk a little bit about the system software, the infrastructure software that has to be put in place to ensure that this works for them. >> I think that's great. A little bit about our background, the company was founded by a bunch of ex-Yahoos that had been out for 12, 15 years from the early days. So we sort of grew up in that period where we had to learn about big data, learn about making all the mistakes of big data, and really seeing that nowadays, it's not good enough to get insight, you have to get insight in a timely fashion enough to actually do something about it. And for a lot of enterprise, especially with human being carrying around mobile phones and moving around all over the place, and sensors sending thousands, if not millions of events per second, the need for the business to understand what's going on and react, have insight and react sub second, is crucial. And what that means is the stuff that used to be batch, offline, you know, can kind of go down, now has to be continuous, 24 by seven. You can't lose data, you got to be able to recover and come back to where you were as if nothing has happened with no human intervention. There's a lot of theme around no human intervention, because this stuff is so fast, you can't involve human beings in it, then you're not reacting fast enough. >> Can I real quickly add one thing first? >> Peter: Sure. >> We think of data at Intel in half life terms. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. >> The data has valuable right now. If you wait a second, literally a second, the data has a little bit of value. You wait two second, it's historical data you can run regressions, and tell you why you screwed up, but you ain't going to fix anything. >> Exactly. >> If you want to do anything with your data, you got to do it now. >> So that, ultimately, we need to develop experience, a creed experience about what we're doing. And the stuff we're doing in applications will eventually find itself into platforms. So Flavio, talk to us a little bit about the types of things that are going to end up in the platform to ensure that these use cases are made available to, certainly, businesses that perhaps aren't as sophisticated as Intel. >> Yes, so in many ways, we are learning from what is going on in the Cloud, and has to come through this continuum, all the way into the machines. This break between what's going inside the machine, and old 1980 microprocessor and the server, and the Cloud server with virtualization on the other side cannot leave. So it has to be a continuum of computing so you can move the same function, the same container, all the way through first. Second, you really have to take the real time very, very seriously, particularly at the edge, but even in the back so that when you have these end to end continuum, you can decide where you do what. And I think that one of the models that was in that picture with a concentric circle is really telling what we need to learn first. Bring the data back and learn, and that can take time. But then you can have models that are lightweight, that can be brought down to the front, and impact the reaction to the data there. And we heard from a car company, a big car company, how powerful this was when they learned that the angle of a screwdriver, and a few other parameters, can determine the success of screwing something into a body of a car, that could go well, or could go very, very bad and be very costly. So all the learning, massive data, can come down to a simple model that can save a lot of money and improve efficiency. But that has to be hosted along this continuum. >> So from a continuum, it means we still have to have machines somewhere to do something. >> Touching the ground, touching the physical world requires machines, actuators. >> Peter: Absolutely, so Steve, what is Equinix doing to simplify the thinking through of some of these infrastructure issues? >> Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that people find when they start looking at millions of devices, millions of data capture points, transferring those data real time and streaming it, is one thing hasn't changed and that's physics. So where those things are, where they need to go, where the data needs to move to and how fast, starts with having to figure out your own topology of how you're moving that data. As much as it's easy to say we're just going to buy a platform and choose a device, and we'll clink them together, there's still a lot of other things that need to be solved, physics being the first one. The second one, primarily, is volumes. So how much bandwidth and (mumbles) you're going to require. How much of that data are you going to back haul to centralized data center before you send it up to a Cloud? How much of it are you going to leave at the edge? Where do you place that becomes a bigger deal. And the third one is pretty much every industry has to deal with regulations. Regulations control what you can and can't do in terms of IT delivery, where you can place stuff, where you cannot place stuff, data that can leave the country, data that can't. So all these things mean that you need to have a thought through process of where you're placing certain functions, and what you're defining as your itch between the digital and physical world. And Equinix is an interconnection company that's sitting there as a neutral party across all the networks, all the clouds, all the enterprises, all the providers to help people figure that out. >> So before I ask the audience a question, now that I'm down here so I can see you so be prepared, I'm going to ask some of you a question. When you think about the strategic business capabilities necessary to succeed, what is the first thing that the business has to do? So why don't I just take Ted, and just go right on down the line. >> Yeah, so I think this is really, really important. I work with many, many clients around the world who are doing five, 10, 15 POCs, pilots, and the internet things, and they haven't thought through a codified strategy. So they're doing five things that will never fit together, that you will never scale, and the learnings you're using, you really can't do that much with. So coming up with what is my architecture, what is my stack going to look like, how am I going to push data, what is my data... You know, because when you connect to these things, I can't tell you how much data you're going to get. You're going to be overwhelmed by the data, and that's why we all go to the edge, and I got to process this data real time. And oh, by the way, if I only have one source of data, like I'm connecting to production equipment, you're not going to learn anything. 98% of that data's useless, you got to contextualize the data with either an inspection step, or some kind of contextualization that tells you if this then that. You need the then that, without that, your data is basically worthless. So now you're pulling multiple sources of data together in real time to make an understanding. And so understanding what that architecture looks like, spend the time upfront. Look, most of us are engineers, you know five percent additional work upfront saves you 95% on the backend, that's true here. So think through the architecture, talk to some of us who have been working in this area for a long time. We'll share our architecture, we have reference architecture that we're working with companies. How do you go from industry 2.0 or industry 3.0, to industry 4.0? And there is a logical path to do it, but ultimately, where we're going to end up is a software defined universe. I mean, what's a cloud? It's a software defined data center. Now we're doing software defined networks, software defined storages, ultimately we're going to be doing software defined systems because it's cheaper. You get better capital utilization, better asset utilization, so we will go there, so what does that mean for you infrastructure, and what are you going to do from an architectural perspective, and then take all of your POCs and pilots, and force them to do that specifically around security. People are doing POCs with security that they don't even have any protocols, they're violating all their industry standards doing POCs, and that's going to get thrown out. It's wasted time, wasted effort, don't do it. >> Steve, a couple sentences? >> Yeah, essentially it's not going to be any prizes for me saying think interconnection first. A lot of our customers, if we look at what they've done with us, everyone from GE to real time facial recognition at the edge, it all comes down to how are you wired, topology wise, first. You can't use the internet for risk reasons, you can't necessarily pay for multiple (mumbles) bandwidth costs, et cetera. So low latency, 80% lower latency, seven times of bandwidth at half the cost is a scalable infrastructure to move (mumbles) around the planet. If you don't have that, the rest of the stuff (mumbles) breakdown. >> Peter: Phu? >> Well I would say that analytics is hard, analytics in real time is even harder. And I think with us talking to our customers, I feel for them, they're confused. There's like a million solutions out there, everybody's trying to claim to do the same thing. I think it's both sides, consumers have to get more educated, they have to be more intelligent about their POCs, but as an industry, we also have to get better at thinking about how do we help our customer succeed. It's not about let me give you some open source, and then let me spend the next 10 months charging you professional services to help you. We ought to think about software tools and enterprise tools to really help the customer be able to think about their total cost (mumbles) and time to value to handle this thing, because it's not easy. >> Peter: Flavio. >> Yeah, we're facing an interesting situation where the customers are ready, the needs are there, the marketing is going to be huge, but the plot, the solution, is not trivial. It is maturing and we are all trying to understand how to do it. And this is the confusion that you see in many of these half baked solution (mumbles). Everything is coming together, and you have to go up the stalk and down the stalk with full confidence, that's not easy. So we all have to really work together. Give ourselves time, be feeling that we are in a competitive world, preparing for addressing together a huge market. And trying to mature these solutions that then will be replicated more and more, but we have to be patient with each other, and with the technologies that are maturing and they're not fully there and understood. But the market is amazing. >> Peter: So we have a Twitter question. >> Man: It's being live streamed, the audience is really engaged online as well, digital. So we have a question from Twitter from Lauren Cooney saying, "Would like to know what industries would "be most impacted with digitization "over the next five years." >> Which one won't be? (men laughing) All of them, what we've seen, the business model is the data. I mean, our CEOs calling data the new gold. I mean, it's the new oil. So I don't know of anything, unless you're doing something that is just physical therapy, but that even data, you can do data on that. So yeah, everything, yeah, I don't know of anything that won't be. >> I think the real question is how is it going to move through industries. Obviously it's going to start with some of the digital native, it's all ready deep into that, deep into media, we're moving through the media right now. Intel's clearly a digital company, and you've been working, you've been on this path for quite some time. >> Let me give you a stat. Intel has a 105,000 people, and 144,000 servers. So we're about 1.5 server to people, that's what kind of computation we're (mumbles). >> Peter: We can help you work on that. >> If you do like the networking started by (mumbles) the internet, then content delivery, and media, hard media, et cetera, is gone. Financial services and trading exchanges pretty much show what digital market's going to be in the future. Cloud showed up, and now, I think he's right, it's effecting every industry. Manufacturing, industrial, health professional services are the top three right now. But people who shop to ask for help went from every industry on every country, for that matter. >> Our customers are, you know, the top players in almost every vertical. You start out as a small company thinking that you're going to attack one vertical, but as you start to talk about the capability, everybody (mumbles) wait, you're solving my problem. >> Peter: (mumbles) are followers, is what you mean. >> Yeah, because what business would say, hey, I don't want to know what's going on with my business, and I don't want to take any action. >> Add to that it's an ecosystem of ecosystems. No one, by themselves, is going to solve anything. They have to partner and connect with other people to solve the solution. >> So I'll close the panel by making these kind of summary comments, the business capabilities that we think are going to be most important are, first off, when we talk about the internet of things, we like to talk about the internet of things and people. That the people equation doesn't go away. So we're building on mobile, we're building on other things, but if there's a strategic capability that's going to be required, it's going to be how is this going to impact folks who actually create value in the business. The second one, I'll turn it around, is that IT organizations have gone through a number of different range wars, if you will, over the past 20 years. I lived through IT versus telecom, for example. The IT, OT conflict, or potential conflict, is non trivial. There's going to be some serious work that has to be done, so I would add to the conversation that we've heard thus far, the answers that we've heard thus far, is the degree to which people are going to be essential to making this work, and how we diffuse this knowledge into our employees, and into our IT and professional communities is going to be crucial, especially with developers because Flavio, if we are, right now, trying to figure stuff out, it really matures when we think about the developer world. Okay, so I want to close the first panel and get ready for the second panel. So thank you very much, and thank you very much to our panelists. (audience applauding) And if we could bring David Foyer and the second panel up, we'll get going on panel two. Oh, we're going to get together for a picture. (exciting rhythmic music)

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