 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Now, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live video production. Go out to all the big enterprise IT shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm really excited for the wrap up to have a longtime friend of theCUBE, a friend of mine, actually one of the first people I knew that was involved with Wikibon before I was involved. John MacArthur, president of Walton Technology Partners, thank you, John, for helping me do kind of an analyst wrap up segment to talk about the VTUG. Thank you, Stu, I appreciate being on. Yeah, so if you don't know John, you probably should. And you probably know people that know John because here in, definitely in New England, in the storage industry or tech in general, John's one of my go-to people. He's just really knows a lot of the people. He advises a bunch of businesses out there and just one of the nicest guys too, because I appreciate you can help me out here. We're here at Gillette Stadium. You've got your Patriot colors on. I do, yeah. I can see a tie. All right, John, so Chris Harney this morning, when I was like, it's the ninth year you've been doing this VTUG. He's like, wow, where did the time go? It's like, we're here in 2015. Can't believe that it was a year ago that we were here. You and I get to talk at a lot of industry events and off at other times. You got to see a lot more of the show than I did. I did, yeah. What's your impression? The good, the bad, or the team might maybe a few less people than I'm used to. I know Chris said there's over a thousand here, but it's a good show. I'm never in, I'm not counting heads as I'm walking around. What I am looking for is are the users here and are the vendors there and are they getting good traffic at the booths and are they learning new things? Actually, one of your previous guests was talking about a company that I hadn't seen before. They're a fairly large company, it sounds like, but PrinterLogic that eliminates the need for print servers. So that's a really well-defined kind of market and it was good talking and catching up with them and I think he'll take that back to his people. So I think this is a show where people can come and see new technology or see technology they haven't seen before and maybe take something back to the home office. Yeah, it's also just one of the best community events here in the Northeast. We get everybody from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, a little bit of Connecticut and of course here in Massachusetts. Good location here at Gillette. Teddy's been watching us all day. We're hoping that they bring home another championship. Yeah, I'm hoping he doesn't give me the elbow there. All right, so John, you wrote a really interesting blog post that we've been talking about called The Theory of One. Can you give our audience a little bit about what is The Theory of One and what have you been seeing today at the show when you've been poking around? So The Theory of One came out of a little bit of self-reflection and actually some conversations. I mentioned a friend of mine, Ian Barrett, who's over at Media Boss TV. And we were reflecting back on the fact that I'm coming, knowing the VTUGS now in its ninth year. I'm finishing up my eighth year since founding Walden Technology Partners and I was looking back at the things where I've had the biggest impact on companies and it's really in helping companies define the one thing that they are better at than anyone else in a segment. And I started thinking about that and recognizing that it's a real differentiator with companies if they can focus on doing one thing better. I did a follow-up post this week talking a little bit about Component because I knew the Component team early on and they really focused on capturing, believe it or not, Minneapolis. They wanted to capture the mid-market for lawyers and mid-sized companies in Minneapolis and once they had that established, they'd grow from there. So as I went around today, I was talking to a bunch of companies. I was like, how well-defined is their message and do they have a one thing where they can be the best? Yeah, I mean, the challenge we have, we talk about on this program extracting the signal from the noise, there's so much going on out there that I might not understand the terminology or they all sound kind of the same. It's virtualization, cloud, software-defined, buzzword, bingo, hello. So how did the vendor community do when you poked at it? It was a mixed bag. There were some that were excellent and I won't out them. You won't out the excellent ones? No, no, sorry. I won't out the ones that were a little less crisp but among ones that were really good is actually was data core vendor agnostic, HA, was how the person who was at their booth was talking about their technology and I have some familiarity with them because I'm on the board of store magic because I think you know, and we sometimes see them in accounts and so that was a very crisp message. SimpliVity had a good crisp message, optimize your data, more efficient, backup, restore, clone, access to data. I especially liked grid store hyper-v erasure code with 50% less infrastructure. Yeah, and that was one that was in the panel that I moderated that they gave that answer. That was a good one. John, I mean, you're being a great point, especially in the startup world. I mean, I think we've all seen a couple of startups that they do some really good stuff and then they failed and you're like, why did they fail? It's like, well, they deployed to 100 customers and 10 of them did the stuff that they really wanted but the other 90 wanted to do 90 other things and boy, it pulled us in seven million directions and I went under. It reminds me of, you go to this really good restaurant and they open up a second location and then they go under in both. And we've seen this time and time again, it's like, oh, all the reasons why companies can fail at that and so a singular focus and being clear about it is going to help get the right people to you. That's right. And it doesn't mean that that single focus is what your focus always is because things change. Once you get a dominant position in a market, you change your definition of one. So when I was a customer of EMC in the very early days, I replaced all of my IBM mainframe storage with EMC storage in one fell swoop. And their definition was at that time was we just want your mainframe storage. But then they added open system storage to that and the definition was I only want your enterprise storage. I'm not looking for your branch office or remote office and then they changed it. Yeah, I really want all your storage. I'm going to be the best at all your storage. So they progressed their own theory of one as they expanded on but while they were in a particular niche, even if that niche was large, it's a niche still and they stayed focused on that. So I think that was a big difference. It's a great point, John. I mean, I think back, I did sales back in the 90s. And what I really felt is if there's something that's working, hit it as fast and as hard as you can because you never know when something's going to change. It might not be, I was working with a large financial company and they were like, oh, we're going to replace all of what we're doing. And the sales guy that I was working with was like, great, we'll do this over the next six months. And I was like, no, no, no, we need to start moving. And after a month and a half where we'd gotten about 75% of the branches updated, they got acquired and everything froze. And you're like, oh, you never know what's going to change. So you're right, it's a certain focus is such an important thing. But for the bigger companies, as you said, it's tough. One of the things as an analyst we always get is vendor comes and we're going to do the biggest event ever. And here's 27 bullet points that you come through. And it's like, if I'm a user, I'm not going to read 27 bullet points. I'm not going to read three. It's what's the big takeaway for me when I go to version X of what's going on? Right, I met with Storyant while I was walking around. I don't know if you've had to talk to Storyant. No, I'm not going to cross that, what do they do? This is really simple. 18-9's availability, how we doing? 18-9's availability and SEC compliance. So it's basically... Fault tolerance based then I'm guessing? Yeah, right, so this is, that's pretty clear. Okay, you must really care about this data. It's got to be around for a long time. 18-9's of availability, that's good. So I don't know what all fits that, I don't know who needs that kind of availability, but if you need that, they're probably the only one that can make that current. There have been companies in the fault tolerance base for a long time and there's a lot that needs to be done to harden it. Come on, I was looking at all the cloud for 2014 and it's funny because if you look for years worth of data and if a cloud didn't go down it had 100% SLA, which I kind of laugh because 18-9's kind of makes me laugh a little bit, but 100% we know it's never, never that. So of course, when you're walking around, I'm just curious, what are the hot buttons for user? Is cloud, convergence, the software defined, storage or networking, what are the things that they are really paying attention to now we're looking at more about? So I just came back, I think I told you I was down at National Retail Federation, the big show, I think they call it, down in New York City on Tuesday and it's clearly security and privacy and all of that were big, hot issues. But then the other big issues were really around what are the kinds of tools that give me personalization and ability to market, to targeted marketing, do near real-time marketing, actually real-time marketing based upon information that I capture about you as I'm walking, as you're walking around the score. The impact of mobile on retail and, wait, are those coupons going to be buzzing on all our phones as we walk around? So they already are, if you're paying attention and they could already be buzzing on your phones. There are other things like, I mean, I looked at one application which was basically, you don't have to try on the clothes, you just have to stand in front of, you have to stand in this one spot and they put the clothes on you and you can change them, change the outfits and you can see what the back of your outfit looks like without turning around because the cameras are there and it just turns around. So there's some cool slick stuff. The question that I always come back to is, okay, so what are the availability requirements for those kinds of applications? You know, is it, does your whole customer experience, now that it's dependent on these applications, does your whole customer experience change when the network goes down or the server goes down? I was talking to Bill Exidius. He's with integration partners so he's one of many, there are so many, there are a lot of resellers, system integrators here. They're always curious about how they differentiate, right? So I said, so what's your one thing? What's the one thing that you're better at? And he says, understanding the upstream and downstream impact of changes in the network, right? And so if anybody here is a network person, you know, you may get the data there faster but if you can't deal with it when it gets there faster, you may just end up with a clogged receiver, right? So I think that was a nice, crisp story. Yeah, so let's come back to a little bit at the show. What's always interesting to me in the VTUG is being a virtualization show, you know, try to get a good honest opinion of what's happening with VMware as well as what's happening with Microsoft, Amazon and everything, really enjoyed the interview today with Dan Stoltz from Microsoft because you know, they're one thing, it's really Azure, but Azure is public cloud and private cloud because Hyper-V kind of rolls into that and it is a really crisp, clear, understandable hybrid cloud message that if I have my own infrastructure, I know how to get there. As opposed to hybrid, to most people is a disjointed message. I got some here and I've got some there and I've got some other things and I've got pieces. Microsoft at least has a crisp message on it and as we dug into a bunch of pieces because I mean, you know, Xbox and Office 365 and boy, Dan talked really fast but if we slow it down, boy, there was really good metadata and VMware, I don't think it's been following the, you know, kind of theory of one lately because VMware's got a lot of different solutions. I think their messaging has pulled it back together. At a show like this, most of the people are happy with VMware. They're not, you know, throwing it out or saying they hate them. Yeah, there's a little bit of the undercurrent where we have, you know, Microsoft users which most VMware customers are choosing Hyper-V and are looking at Azure and, you know, Amazon plays into things and everything else but, you know, what do you see in that space? Well, yeah, so I think VMware's getting better at recognizing places where they work well and places where they can't take their technology as much so, you know, you, you know, they launch VCN and that's had some really, really, really good buzz, you know, but I think the notion of taking VCN way down market is sort of not going to happen. They tried the low end product with the VSA, they killed it, you know, so you got those kinds of things. I'm certainly hearing a lot about Microsoft Hyper-V. I heard a lot about Hyper-V when I was down at the retail show as well, retailers are very much focused on, a lot of them are focused on Hyper-V. So I'm seeing that and I'm seeing more focus on a desire for, you know, highly available applications. The question that I see most CIOs not being able to answer is how do I deliver high availability and they would like to get rid of all of the infrastructure in and pull everything back to a private cloud or a public, or not so much a public cloud but a private cloud, but when you start looking at the performance implications of doing that for certain applications, it just becomes really hard. So I would say most of the application vendors that I talk to would say their first route to market is as a cloud offering, you know, some software as a service and when you press them on how many of your customers are actually doing it that way, it's much less. So I'm certainly seeing some mixed messages around cloud. I don't know what you're seeing. Yeah, so the march to cloud is happening. It's not going away anytime soon. No, it's not, it's real. But, you know, absolutely. It's really kind of an application by application discussion. It is. There was, you know, how many applications do I have and how often do I refresh them? Right. That's exactly right. One of the biggest challenges I saw and, you know, look, I've been involved in virtualization for, you know, since like 2002 is when I started working with VMware and it had huge wonderful things that it did for IT. But the one thing that it did really well that actually has hurt us in the long run is it allowed me to keep things running the way that they'd run for a long time. So in 2002, number one use case was Windows NT was going to go end of service. Let me just stick it in a VM and leave it there for another 10 years. And you're sitting there saying, this is already old and really time to update it. Let's go to the new ones, you know. So I should go to more, you know, applications that are built for mobile, applications that are built for scalability and work my environment. If I'm custom building my stuff, there's probably somebody else doing it better. I worked, I worked with it. Maybe, maybe yes, maybe no. So I, you know, one of my clients has, you know, the development team, there's driving real differentiation for them based upon the applications that they, based on the applications that they write. You know, I came out of banking. I was at State Street Bank and we had a plan to rewrite an application to go to a more modern database. When I left there 20 years ago, that they planned to be off that database in five years. Took them 20 years to do it. Because rewriting code takes a long time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, John, one of the key things I have is when I put something in place, how long am I stuck with it? If I build a data center, it's 25 to 35 years. If I buy a storage array, five years, seven years, if I build a database, I mean, you're with that forever. So, you know, and when I deploy it, two years from now, has it gone anywhere? Or is it static? Banking environments love the banks. What do they do? Gold image, I make a gold image and I replicate it a thousand times. And, you know, every, you know, what, 24 months or so, I might look at changing that gold image, but that was a, you know, do it in the sandbox and then roll it out as opposed to, look, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it's all, you know, you know, unicorns, John, that, you know, we should have everything on the latest version, like, you know, the core West message is like what Chrome is, is when I deploy something today, when, you know, there's a major security issue and there's a patch tomorrow, I've got it. When I go deploy on Microsoft Azure or AWS, I don't worry about being on the latest patch because I'm there. If I go deploy hyper-converged, I can add those patches much in and roll it out. So, the non-disruptive upgrade needs to just go to non-disruptive IT, you know. Yeah, and I do think, you know, we talked a little bit about security and I do think that the security issues associated with staying on legacy platforms, legacy operating systems, legacy apps with holes that, you know, I think that that's probably one of the things that will have some impact on driving customers. Certainly, it's caused an enormous refresh, tech refresh at some of the retailers. I had one retailer say to me recently, I kind of wish we had a target-like attack because I would then get a budget. Yeah, let me ask you, you were at the retail show and everything else. I mean, security is always a top concern, but when it comes down to budgeting, it's always underfunded. So, you know, are things changing? You know, are they really going to move? I mean, there's some really exciting startups, you know, not only VMware's doing some cool things. I've seen a number of startups like, you know, Elumio and what was that, there's a couple others that are doing, you know, it's no longer about the perimeter, it's about doing things inside and microservices and it sounds interesting. The short answer is I don't know, but the short answer is I don't know from the security applications perspective, what I do know is that it is driving customers to look at tech refreshes faster. They see the vulnerability of failing to do tech refreshes. Well, they're not, it's going to drive new security apps. They're looking for more from just getting newer operating systems and applications, you know, packaged apps that are more current. All right, so, John, you've had a chance to look around and you've been in this community, the VTUG for a long time. What's the theory of one for the VTUG? Oh, for the VTUG, that's a great question. So, you know, one of the things, for me, it is the best vendor neutral, right now, the best vendor neutral forum to show the end user customers in New England the latest technology. Pardon, I don't think anybody else does it as in such a vendor neutral way. And I'm going to refine that to in New England, right? So the question, I think they've captured the market here for it. The question then becomes, how do they, should they then expand and how do they expand and in which way? Yeah, really interesting challenge because the industry trade shows have just fallen off, you know, the last few years. The cross-industry. The cross-industry. Yeah, like, the old- The old networking world. The old networking world. Even my own conference when I was at IDC, which was sort of a cross-industry. I was at Gartner Data Center Conference on behalf of Store Magic. And I will say that was a large conference with lots of interested, excited users. So I hadn't been to a Gartner conference in 20 years since I was at State Street Bank. So, you know, that was an interesting experience. But they were engaged people. And that was a vendor neutral forum, but not an analyst neutral forum. Yeah, absolutely, John. I mean, we do some of our own events. We've got Big Data Silicon Valley coming up where we bring together lots of users. We're going to have a great VC panel. We had done a capital markets event down in New York City. So, you know, but it's a small event. I mean, you know, we're looking to get, you know, a couple hundred people in there and, you know, share information and do videos and things like that. It's, you know, it's tough. The event business is a lot of work behind the scenes. As you know, though, because you're at what, 60 events a year now? Yeah, the queue's been at 60. Thankfully, I don't need to travel that much. You don't have to go all 60. But, you know, when you go around, I mean, I'll ask you, but, yeah, if you go to the EMC world, or you go to VM world, or you go to Oracle Open World, or you go to, you were at Salesforce, Dreamforce, right? The number of attendees at those vendor non-routral events was enormous. And I think the industry-specific events, like National Retail Federation, whether I was at Tuesday, there were 45,000 people there. Yeah, right, so there are industry-specific events. Hymns is in the healthcare, it's phenomenal. NAB for the media is still great. CES for the consumer is still huge, but in the enterprise tech world, the vendor shows have replaced the independent shows. I mean, top cloud show of the year is Amazon, without a doubt. Top application shows, probably Oracle Open World. Yeah, and in the big day of space, in the big day of space, what's the biggest conference? It's usually, it's the Hadoop World and Hadoop Summit, which O'Reilly, but then Hortonworks really kind of drives it. A little bit more independence in big data, because it's early-ish, but it's driving there. All right, so John, I want to give you just a kind of final word. Discussions you're having with users, what's the most important thing to them, and what should they be looking for out there? What's the most important thing for a user today? Yeah. Yeah, I think finding suppliers who are very clear on what they do, I'm going to quote a VP of the data center at a retail chain, at a restaurant chain that I spoke to recently, who she said, if any vendor comes in and says that their technology integrates seamlessly with what I have, I throw them out. Okay, so honesty, what customers are looking for is vendors who will listen, who will be honest, who will be direct, and whether they're a fit or they're not a fit. All right, sounds like they're tied to the old platitudes too, so we're going to wrap on that. John, thanks so much as always for coming on the program and helping out here during the day. It's been a real great day here at the VTUG. Of course, if you go actually bit.ly slash VTUG all capitalization, VTUG 2015 has the links to all of these videos, lots of articles, lots of videos. The Cube's going to be at a ton of shows this year. Reach out to us if you don't see us listing the event that you think we should be at. Always reach out to us, on Matt's stew on Twitter. It's at the Cube is what's going on. We've got Wikibon, Silicon Angle, The Cube, CrowdChat's given the social conversation throughout many of the shows. Thanks for joining us from the stadium and go Patriots.