 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, John Furrier. Day two at VMworld 2015 is Jim McHugh, who's the Vice President of Marketing at UCS, among other things, at Cisco. Welcome back, good to see you. We're in the director's seat, you looking good. I know, I'm pretty happy to be in the director's seat. We love chatting with you, Jim, for a couple of reasons. One, you're an industry veteran. You're a sports guy like us. You're a Raiders season ticket holder. Getting, having a lot of fun. But more importantly, you manage probably one of the most dynamic parts of Cisco with UCS. You got a lot under your wheelhouse. Got big data, you got the data center. What's going on right now? You heard Pat Gelsing talking about this unified hybrid cloud. That means data centers will take much more of an important role in the public-private kind of integration, so what's the bottom line? Yeah, I mean, so actually, I'm actually a big fan of the word unified, because I've been calling it unified data center for years and as we keep going on. But reality, I think what people are really coming together and figuring out is it is compute, network, and storage together. And there's different approaches to that. There's software to find. There's all these different ways of looking at it, but it is the convergence of those three technologies that are important. And a lot of people are talking about compute resources, network resources, and storage resources. So whatever, how you look at it, those have to come together to solve the problem more and more for customers. So one of the things in Pat Gelsing's keynote was talking about asymmetric environments. You have unified as big word he had. Obviously, you guys have UCS unified as a part of your DNA. Also, talk about connected devices. Five billion people are going to be connected by 2025. The average devices per person this year is 2.9. Technically, it's round up to three. I got my watch here. It's a notification economy. It could be powered by something. What's going on in the software side of your business that's going to power that? And we're seeing things like Android, iOS, taking over Hollywood. You guys just announced a big deal with Apple, Fastlane. I mean, this is crazy world. What's going on? Well, I think what people are really actually getting to is that solutions now aren't just in the data center. So I'm a data center guy, but it is edge to data center, to cloud, and more and more a solution or an application doesn't live in just one of those locations. So you're actually having a lot of things that go on your mobile phone and everybody thinks that's the solution, but it's powered by stuff that's either in the cloud or the data center as well. So we have to design infrastructure to support all these needs going forward. And I think the really cool thing is, all that's going on is the amount of data that's being created off these devices and amount of activity people are doing with them that it's just going to really explode. And we think we're there. We think we're at this place where it's changed the world now, but we haven't even seen anything yet. It's just coming so fast and furious that, you know, I Ubered here or Lyft, you know, all the amount of activity that's going on. Oh, just when you're so cell phone, it's like crazy. So forever you guys have been a huge partner to CIOs from a network perspective. Five or six years ago, people thought you were crazy to get in the server business. It's low margin, it's commodity. Obviously taking market share number one in blade servers. Like how much has your conversation changed with CIOs now that you're touching the applications, you're part of their compute infrastructure, you're part of that data infrastructure? Well, I think you hit a head on. I mean, the reason why I think we got into the compute businesses, it touches the applications and everyone really knows the application is where the business outcomes are. So we can talk about everything we do in data center, we can talk about all the things we do, you know, from the server to the hypervisor, but it's when you get to the application that it's hitting the business outcomes that people need. So it's really essential that you make sure those are there, the uptime, the performance and that actually you can handle all the different form factors that are required for that. And by the way, we are number one now in Americas. We've actually left those other guys behind quite a bit. Well, let's take in those numbers a little bit later, but I want to get your take on Cisco historically for 10, 15 years ago. You know, there's a big debate within Cisco. You know, do we move up the stack? Do we go after adjacent markets? Well, chambers announced we go after adjacent markets. Hence the server leadership and then some of this integrated stuff you guys are doing, but moving up the stack is a very interesting proposition. We're a routing company, but now you guys are diversified. You went into adjacent markets, but big data is the hottest market on the planet right now. That is fundamental in all applications. You're running that piece of the business and what does that mean for you? You're doing a keynote at Strata and the big data NYC event that's going on in New York with Wikibon and SiliconANGLE in next month. So tie that together. Big data into the application into UCS. Well, the crazy thing is it's, if you think about Cisco and the world's data, I think we touch 85% of the world's data. It hits a Cisco device. And so what does that mean? Well, there's a whole side of big data that it's just about operation technologies. So how do you make your infrastructure more efficient? How do you collect the machine data? How do you do the machine to machine learning that actually can inform how you do your business decisions? That's a huge part of big data. And I personally spent all my other time on consumer-facing, outbound-facing sports, as you know. I'm obsessed with big data in sports and how the Tour de France had sensors on all the bikes and how baseball doesn't put sensors on anything, but actually we're using radar and video technology to analyze how fast that outfielder goes after the ball. To me, that's so cool. But the reality is we're saving companies a lot of money by taking what was infrastructure and turning it into a sensor, right? I mean, look, Wi-Fi, we're all here at Wi-Fi. We don't realize it, but they know where we all are collected. Our MAC addresses are saying, hey, we got a big crowd of people here and this place is actually more convenient. So we're constantly feeding information through the network and through these sensors that are going to perform great things for us. Okay, so I got to ask the consumerization of IT question because that's been kicked around for many, many years. We had one guest on startup yesterday doing wide area network stuff, Viptel, I think it's called, and essentially the company's infrastructure is still the old stodgy, and I want to say Cisco because you're in all the accounts so you kind of fall in that incumbent position. I want to have a user experience that's going to look like Netflix, it's going to look like Comcast, but I want SLAs, right? So I want the best of both worlds. I want the agileness of robust, diverse access and speed, but I want the SLAs. How are you guys delivering that and not locking the customers into the old stodgy networking paradigm? I mean, you're hearing it more and more. The companies are living in a bimodal world. I mean, you got your standard ERP, a cut my cost, make me more efficient, and then giving my cutting edge apps, giving my apps that are actually customer facing, giving my apps that are even driving what a lot of our employees expect today. They have to be more robust. They have to be changing. I mean, we're changing our entire internal website and external because things are moving so quickly, right? So you got to actually be fast there and drive it. So if you think about, I mean, even what we heard yesterday, VMware is talking about doing really cool things in the area of Photon because new apps are coming on and they require new infrastructure. So everybody in the industry is right now saying, okay, from form factors to the software that's running the infrastructure software to how the applications are being developed, it's all changing. So we're all sitting here all calm, but we all know this world is changing fast and furious. Yeah, so obviously a big change at Cisco going on. John Chambers is no longer there. Chuck Robbins is there. First couple acquisitions he makes, software companies, he's talking to the Wall Street about deferred revenues in terms of software. Is Cisco, is the culture of Cisco becoming a software company? Is that the change that's happening? The world's becoming software. I mean, and yes, so definitely. I mean, where everybody looks at infrastructure, all the value in our infrastructure is the software. Let's just be honest, I mean, come on. From our networking and ACI and the value you get there, from UCS, which is honestly industry standard components and it's our service profiles and our ability to actually take these things, which are the equivalent, like I always say, it's the SIM card of your mobile phone, all the personality, but we do that in software. And that's why we were able to take over and actually dominate the blade market because of the software component. Yeah, we had a great crowd chat here yesterday at VMworld, the flash mob with the Cisco ACI team. And it's interesting, policy-based fill in the blank is everything now, so that's software-driven. We got a wrap, but I want to get your take on one topic that's near and dear to my heart, competing in this new era. You guys got great leadership with UCS, congratulations. You're out there marketing, leading the business efforts there. What's the secret in today's market? You've been extremely successful in marketing to solutions to customers in a dynamic environment. You're a pioneer, obviously in the social side, you've done some great things. What's your secret? So the secret is how you reach your customers is not the same. You don't just actually come out with your product, pull out your solution brief and put it out there. It's more about influencers today and it's reaching people that you can't reach through normal components. It is partnering with likes of SAP, VMware, NetApp, EMC and going into our big data partners, Cloudera, Platforms, Splunk and working with them to go to your customer because the customer doesn't want to hear just one side anymore. The customer wants to know that you actually understand why you're partnering with these people, what the solutions are you're doing together and what are the business outcomes you're going to deliver upon that. Social business, it's now collaboration is the new normal. Jim McHugh, Vice President of Cisco, UCS and other things, big data as well. This is theCUBE director set here live on the floor of the lobby of Moscone North in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Go.