>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (bouncy upbeat music) >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. This is theCube. I am your host, Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined for this special segment. Calling it the independent wrap analysis multi-hybrid focus with Blue Cow. Blue Cow is here. First-time guests on the program and Blue Cow has brought a few of the friends. Friends of mine, people that I got to know through this phenomenal VMware community also guest host on the program here. Been a pleasure working with all three of you. John Troyer from Tech Reckoning Justin Warren from Pivot 9 and Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming here. Now, we're independent when we come to this and I don't think any of us are shy as to kind of sharing our opinions. I think all of us have had "I can't believe what you said on Twitter" at least once. In fact, I remember when John Troyer was working for VMware I did get a call every once in awhile. I've said, if I didn't get a call at least once a year from him saying, "Hey Stu, can you moderate that a little," I'm probably not doing my job. Let's get into it. The first thing I'd say is it's 2017. We blinked and like we're getting towards the end of it. Of course, there's the big party. There's still a whole bunch of sessions going for another day. Reactions on the show, high-level things. Keith, let's start down with you. >> First off, the energy of the show this year was, I have to say it was, I have to say it was up a notch. There was a lot of uncertainty around the acquisition and even Pat's future, whether or not he would be here for the VMworld this year, as the head of VMware he announced, I think it was kind of like with a little bit of pride, that he said "This is my 5th year as CEO of Vmware" and he bought the energy Monday and I think that energy has transferred throughout all of the VMware staff and throughout the show for the past few days. >> Just in that question, of course, and how many selfies has Blue Cow done at the show? >> Not as many as usual, unfortunately, because we've been very, very busy with briefings and meetings, so we haven't had as much selfie time as we've had, but we still make time to take a few photos around the show. And, yeah, I agree with Keith. The energy this year, and I think it had started with the example that Pat set at the first keynote. Which, it's just been lifted this year and I've been saying for, I've been hearing it from a lot of different people and I've been having it in conversations as well that this year, VMware stopped apologizing for existing and it's embraced itself, and I'm sure that having the stock price hit a nice high of a 107, I'm sure that helped with Pat and his idea of, "That makes you happy. Makes it a lot easier for you to keep your job." >> That's great, there was a comment actually The first time most of us remember. The week of Vmworld? The stock actually was going up. John, you know, you've got lots of experience with this community; your take. >> Certainly more energy than last year. I mean, let's look at the micro and the macro. There's always tactical stuff going on. Last year, Vster 6.5 had not been released. Dell acquisition and nobody was sure what was going on exactly. This year, the big VMware cloud on AWS announcement, I think, is an acknowledgement of maybe, that we can talk about. That, wait a minute. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty plumbing infrastructure layer, you still need to partner with somebody like VMware. I think the industry and the analysts, and the market, that's one of the things they like and then look at the macro trends on the economy. If you look at the Expo floor this year? Huge, lots of money being spent, lots of vendors here. There's something macro going on as well with the people here. >> Let's talk about two things I look at. Did VMware meet expectations? Was it what you expect? And, what are we going to be looking back at when we come here? John, I'll start with you, you hit on the big topic from my standpoint, looking at VMware and AWS. What will VMware look like in the future? Are they going to be a SAS provider? How does that transition from an infrastructure software company to a different fit for how they do cloud today versus the whole Vcloud era and everything before it? That was era not error even though, you know... >> Hey, they had a lot to do, of messaging and a lot of product-in announcements and a lot of introductions this week. I don't know, let's give them a B for that because there were a lot of them and they had a lot to do in a short space especially, like, through the lens of say the keynotes which is the lens a lot of people have. I think AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story. I don't know, I predict that in a year or two VMware will probably be the biggest VMware hoster service provider, right? I think a lot of workloads are going to shift into the AWS service through VMware and that will happen to excess capacity. It'll happens through a lot of different things. But, that's my prediction. >> I'm sorry, you say VMware will-- >> VMware will be the largest VMware hoster within a year or two. >> I feel like I'm watching the NFL Network. Bold predictions, here we have it. VMware has got 4500 partners, John. I've have Ajay Patella on a couple of times talking about his tiers of partners and everything like that. But let's let some of the guys weigh in. >> I'll extend on that, I kind of agree. I think that there's a lot of customers who will basically do a lift and shift and use cloud and I think having to choose between which of their children is the most beautiful and which one they love more has been has been really tearing them apart and I think that now they don't have to make that choice. I think they're going to be a lot easier for, particularly CIOs, to just say, "Yep, I'm doing some cloud." The announcement on Tuesday sort of felt a little flat for me because they were talking about Google container services which is running on Pivotal. Pivotal's sort of an unappreciated part of the whole portfolio, I think. There's a lot of companies some really interesting software development work there. But, as we mentioned, the development community? That's not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people. That kind of whole announcement and what they were talking about on Day 2? Just kind of went, it felt a little bit off for me. >> Yeah, I want to echo, I think a couple of statements that you've made. One, that VMware's seemed to embrace... Monday, they seem to embrace being VMware. You know what? We may pick on the concept of VMware VSphere being cloud. That VMware is very proud of calling their SDDC strategy which is an important strategy. It adds a lot of value to, not just legacy IT but current things that people are doing in their data center and they embraced being what they do well on Monday, and then we had cloud pizza on Tuesday which kind of broke that but I think I loved the message for VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, this concept, this reference architecture, this validated design that I can run in my data center. I know that at a Rax pace, at a CNF such as... take your Switch, take your choice between Switch and CenturyLink, etc. I'm going to get that consistent openstack what should have been openstack filling across cloud providers, but John, I agree with you. AWS is AWS at the end of the day and it's a easy checkbox to say VMware Cloud on AWS? Really easy to do and it's easy to consume. I don't have to go and choose between Cloud providers. >> One of the things of this show is that there never enough hours in the day, even Vegas. I actually have to admit I got to bed at a reasonable hour every night. We still have one more night for me here so we'll see on that. Hallway conversations, parties, some of the really cool stuff on on the show floor we talked about a little. I'll start off with kind of, from a customer standpoint, Some customers I talked to; a number of them seemed to be, "I want to move faster. "I'm interested in trying new things "and price isn't necessarily number one on my list. "It's further down the list." Which reminds me: It's not quite there yet but I go to Amazon Reinvent and this will be the fifth year and we are doing the Cube at that show. That's the thing that really excites me. There's cool new things we're trying. I echo and agree with a lot of what you all said about Day 2. Most of the customers here aren't ready for PKS. Sure Pivotal has lots of customers that are using Vmware, but the average attendee's not there. Kind of a wild card, customer insights, cool parties, things there. John, do you want to start down on your end? >> Sure, my channel check and the most surprising thing that I saw this week were talking to SC's from VMware and saying that their customers were coming to them and asking "Help? I now have Kubernetes in the house. "What do I do with it?" That surprised me. I have been a Kubernetes and Container advocate but a skeptic as far as adoption and at least anecdotally the folks that I talk to, it sounds like actually it's now trickling its way and kind of to the mainstream to where the VMware accounts are going to be able to have to deal with it. Now I will say on the flip side, Stu, if you look out at the show floor there are no developer tools, dev ops tools, cloud tools, maybe some cloud tools. That side of, that AWS side of the house, the people that are there, those companies that are there who are not here. If you were a customer, if you were an IT person looking to, this year, finally, educate yourself on how to do that that wasn't here at this show. >> For me, it's been about migration. This is about we have a whole bunch of stuff running on VMware, it's already there and that was one of the reasons VMware was popular in the first place, was that you could take stuff you already doing and you can virtualize it and then you could increase the capacity utilization that you have and you could get some more efficiencies out of that and then people started to layer additional services on top of that and to do interesting an new things on that. It allowed them to do that because it kind of freed up some time. I think we're going to say that again as things start to move to the cloud people start to do them in different ways. the workloads will migrate. It's not just going to happen tomorrow and some of the things that we're seeing, one of the things that impressed me about the show was a company called Densify who had been around previously. They were called Server and they did a rebrand and repossession and nailed it and it's a very, very simple tool that actually sells about the business. It's not about a technology, they don't actually talk about how the thing works or what's going on underneath it. But it allows you to understand the effect of what's happening if you move from VMware here over to that cloud, this cloud or the other cloud and it shows you the pricing. I looked at that and just went I can walk into a CFO and I can sell them on the idea just showing them this. That kind of experience, I think, we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as people moved to the cloud. >> So Monday gave me a new catch phrase for VMworld. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO and, you know what? With hallway conversations I still talk to, John, I don't remember like one-third of the attendees of VMworld are all first-time attendees, I talked to a lot of first-time attendees and it's amazing because VMware has an enormous sales team and they are very aggressive getting to accounts and talking about the overall message. I had people coming up to me and saying "Man you know what, I just found out about this "vRealize Log Insight and it's amazing!" and I'm thinking, Wow, that doesn't get much much more traditional IT than log management with vRealize and you know VMware has preached that for the past 5 or 6 years at the show I think it just shows the Delta in the community from those looking to do the developer, dev ops and cloud-native integration. Us, as analysts, pushing VMware saying, "Hey, what's your digital transformation story? "It's something other than cloud pizza," to all the way, to the keeping the lights on with SAP and Oracle apps that will not change and haven't changed and probably won't change for the next 10 to 15 years. >> Yeah and actually it brings up an interesting point; I had a conversation with Pumela this morning and we were talking about how it used to be, come to the show and it's the virtualization show. Now, It's a pretty broad ecosystem and in some ways it's, I wouldn't say fragmented but I'm grasping for a better word because you walk through the show floor and Dentrify, interesting. We had one of their co-founders on as to that kind of cloud management, and how all those pieces, these big hairy issues that people are solving. We've got people working at analytics and data. You've got all the cloud pieces, security all over the place, networking, we've always had storage at the show. But I'd been a little jaded coming to VMworld. It's now my 8th year and I've kind of re-energized this year. I know that some people have stopped coming. There's a new influx coming in. Let's fast-forward to VMworld 2018. What are you hoping to see from this ecosystem? Any final things you'd want to say? "Hey, this is what we can do better?" Or, "This thing, Do it absolutely again especially!" We've got one more year in Vegas then I think we'll probably go back to San Francisco. You've all been to many of these. Where do we start? >> I'll take two. One, is I like'd to see more basketball players and rappers. We had a lot of them on. >> Did you hang with KD? >> I did not. I was busy. He called my people and I don't know if you want tee that one up, what that one is. >> You could mention that absolutely. >> Sure. I mean Rubrik was here winner of the Best of Show of VMworld. Also spent a lot of marketing dollars on Kevin Durant who was also an investor and also Henson Nischlak >> Did they make cards? I'm on a trading card. How hilarious is that? >> Keith: Trading cards were cool, I have one. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> They came to play and and they bought it this year. Marketing dollar spent, I actually have a second predication which is that next year or the year after we'll be talking about, it seemed like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other so I think next year we might be talking about the Dell technologies Red Hat wars in the cloud. >> Open source comes up but hadn't been discussed much except we did some Red Hat interviews here. Red Hat? Absolutely. Hybrid cloud environment, Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat all players there. John's been thinking about this wrap for a while I know. >> Well I'm going to switch completely differently and into the future what I like to see just to shake it up a little bit. I don't think we should talking about AWS things around containers. I think there will be some of that conversation but what I want to see is that VMware starts hosting a function service. I want to see functions on VMware because I reckon that's where the industry is going to move to in the long time. >> Stu: Serverless, you're saying? >> Yeah, Serverless. >> Like I mentioned on Day two? >> I want to see a functions as a service on VMware on AWS. >> Oh, that will happen. >> There you go product management. That's what you can go build. >> You can tie it into Lambda right now, right? You'll have your... >> yeah but if you're tie it into Lambda that just plays right into AWS's hands. >> Give Chris Wolfe a call and Kit Colbert will make that happen. >> You know what? Full disclosure. I was part of judging for best of VMworld and Rubrik won Best of VMworld. I don't want to see more data protection. I don't want to see more secondary storage. I think one of the driving elements that part of that discussion, pulling back the onion a little bit was about redefining something in the data center that had been forgotten, that API level access Rubrik pushes API level access to the data center. This is something that I've asked from VMware forever which is to basically be the API to my data center. You may not ever, I may never get function as a service. I may never get PaaS, I may never get all these cool things from a developer perspective that I want from VMware but at the very minimum, you're the software defining data center. I want to have APIs into the data center and that data center is not just my physical Data Center but this whole VCF thing that's pushed whether it's in my data center, in Rackspace, or some other VCAMP partner or in AWS. My interface, If infrastructure is going to continue to be VMware's customer then you should enable me from an API perspective to manage my software-defining data center, believe it or not. >> Unfortunately, I love to chat with these gentlemen for hours at a time if I can. We're limited with the queue. We only give you a taste of what's happening at these shows if I've mentioned before, you need to come to these kind of events to talk to these quality people. We also mentioned a few of the sponsors on the show. Sponsorship helps us bring, not only the Cube to the event, but helps me bring high quality, independent analysis from gentlemen like this. Please check out all of our sponsors. Check out all of our content on theCUBE.net. These, all three of them, creating a lot of content. Go to their Twitter handle, @ctoadvisor, @jpwarren, and @jtroyer, I'm @stu. Thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of VMworld 2017. Reach out to all of us. Really, we'll get back to you. 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