 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And this is theCUBE, our flagship program. When we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. My voice is getting hoarse. This is our fourth day of live coverage. My eyes are bleeding. The party last night. And my co-host is Jeff Frick for the segment. And our first guest on day four, kind of wrapping up. Everything's winding down. It's Vanessa Alvarez, who's a longtime Clouderati, you know, on Twitter early on as an analyst, now head of marketing for Scale Computing. Vanessa, welcome back to theCUBE alumni. Thank you. So what do you think? Last day of the show, what's just your take? You need the analysis. You know, I think for 10 years for VMworld, it's been quite interesting. They obviously pioneered virtualization. And it's interesting to see them now shift from doing just server virtualization to bringing in both networking, right? What we saw with NSX and storage, which we saw with VSAN. I think that today it's really about how do you bring those three pieces together, right? I've always been a fan of converged infrastructure. Obviously, Scale Computing today is hyperconvergence and we have a converged infrastructure of server storage and virtualization. So I think, you know, the fact that VMware's finally bringing those pieces together is just testament to the fact that converged infrastructure really is the future of IT. And kind of going back a little bit to what you were talking about earlier in terms of user experience. Today, IT has to be simplified, right? Nobody wants to deal with managing separate servers, separate networking, separate storage. IT wants simplified infrastructure so that they can deliver a better user experience to their end constituents. And I think that's really the core of bringing these three components together. We were talking about virtualization on the intro segment as a disruptive enabler. You've seen this evolve from, you know, downloads from software to a full-blown, you know, companies tracking to be billions and billions of dollars in revenue. What's your view on virtualization and its acceptance and its positioning as it's evolving? Virtualization today is mainstream, right? I mean, we see it in the market. Companies have gone through the whole phase of server consolidation. And I think it's a given that, you know, the benefits of virtualization are real today. I think what we're starting to see, really, is that shift and we see it in our customer base as well at scale computing that people want to go beyond server consolidation today, right? They want to be able to really leverage virtualization to achieve a higher level of management and orchestration within their environments. And that's really where you start to see private cloud coming into its own and really starting to see the fact that companies have to start to build out their private clouds in order to be able to fully achieve the benefits of virtualization and the efficiencies, right? So... So Vanessa, we often love sports analogies here on theCUBE, right? And we're talking about, you know, where are we in the game? So on a base, you know, we're at AT&T Park, a lot of events, nine innings in a game. So you've got a real great perspective because you come from the analyst side. So you've covered a lot of stuff, you've seen a lot of change. Where are we in the game? The early days, are we at the late days? And that begs the question, how do you define, how do we move down the game? What are the things that we're kind of crossing as we go, ending by ending? So I think the first step was really in virtualization, right? So a consolidation. And companies took a while for that to happen. I mean, how long have we been virtualizing environments now for? Too long, in my opinion. But the reality is that it's happening and that's great. And so I think in order to start to move sort of the next inning, it's really key to start to bring together the network and storage components. Obviously, scale computing, that's what we do. We're an integrated architecture. We've seen VMware do the same thing, right? So starting to bring NSX, starting to bring VSAN together and really tie together those three pieces with intelligence, right? Software intelligence. And that's the next step, right? Bringing those three pieces together, make sure that they're interconnected and really efficiently being utilized within the environment. And then the next level and the next inning, and I think it's still an open field in terms of who makes it, is really bringing in the application, the end user experience, and tying that all together, right? Vanessa, one of the things we talked about just in the intro and throughout the day when we went, Pat was on here, we kind of had to needle pat a little bit, but Mark Andreessen and Pat talked about the future of IT on a big panel with luminaries from the tech industry like Pat, and there's a philosophy difference. People think that the world's going to be different. And so that being said is different debates, but I want to talk about hyperskips. One of the things that everyone talks to this year, whether it's EMC world is, you could be the next Facebook. You could be, especially DevOps, right? So what's happening is applications are now at the center of the innovation conversation because they're driving infrastructure change. Our history and for our generation, they wasn't like that. The infrastructure did their stuff and enabled it. And then you dealt with what you were, cards you were dealt on the table with infrastructure. Now it's completely the other way around. And they use Facebook as an example and they say that's hyperscale. So hyperscale is a use case that a handful of companies are playing in, obviously building there on Google, Facebook, but not all IT's like that. So there's a huge mid-range market opportunity for enterprise hyperscale. What's your take on that? Because you guys in scale, obviously scale computing, you're in that market and you're swimming around with the other fish there. How big is the pond? Is it an opportunity? Fusion's trying to go there as well. Is it available? I mean, how gettable is it? Is it adopting? Is it in market right now? Absolutely. So hyperconvergence, hyperscale, all these trends are really driving the market to a different level, right? So when you think about what Facebook's open compute project has done, right, our friends at Netflix, open sourcing all their tools and really showing the industry that this can be done, that you can scale your infrastructure environment far beyond what we ever thought we could possibly do, is just, and it's just a testament as to where the infrastructure is going today. We leverage like 66 servers and wrap our software intelligence around it so it goes to patent technology to really deliver the efficiencies of X86 servers, right? White commodity hardware at the end of the day and we're able to deliver the same performance, same scalability, same efficiencies as our friends at Amazon and Netflix and so on and so forth. When I think about Facebook, and I know this has been sort of the controversy around how Facebook does it versus how enterprises do it. Certainly different workloads, different kinds of performance requirements so on and so forth, as opposed to just uploading pictures on Facebook, right? One of the funniest comments we had on theCUBE was, Amazon is trying to be like the enterprise and the enterprise is trying to be like Amazon. How does that balance itself? It's a collision, you know? Well, it's interesting that you say that because I actually see Amazon going to be like maybe the next IBM or something along those lines, right, in terms of building out the enterprise business. But the reality is that, you know, obviously scale computing, we leverage the same concepts that Netflix and Amazon do and deliver that in a tailored manner to, you know, the mid-market enterprise. An example of a customer or you have the name names, we can name names, it'd be great, but how they're using it? So today, it's all about simplified infrastructure, right? Being a highly automated solution that you just really rack it, stack it and power it, right, and it runs itself, it runs its applications. Our customers today don't want to invest in managing infrastructure, right? They probably have, you know, a handful of IT guys, they don't want to invest anymore, you know, obviously the business wants to invest in growth, not in managing infrastructure. What we deliver is really simplified IT, right? Simple, available, scalable. You don't have to manage a separate server, you don't have to manage a separate stand, you know, everything is integrated into one single platform. Another good quote we had from a customer that was on, he asked, hey, what does cloud style mean to you? And there was a quote, a tweet, I forget the guy's name, I tweeted it earlier, he says, you know, cloud style, it's like a form of doing business, a mindset, you know, cloud style, or DevOps style, the cloud style. Like what does cloud style mean to you, doing it cloud style, you know, in the enterprise? And he goes, horizontally scaling at will. I'm like, that was money, I mean, but that's what they want, right? They want horizontal scalability, and that really was Amazon, what brought to the table. That mindset that I don't have to go, you know, just scale up, I can go scale out and go horizontal at will. Exactly, and you don't have to pay up front, right? You don't have to over provision, you don't have to, you know, buy another system in order to be able to just add, you know, a little bit of capacity. With our architecture, you can actually just buy single nodes as you grow, right? So you don't need to make the necessary upfront CapEx investment. And then not only expand, but then turn it off when you don't need it anymore, right? For all these kind of one time projects or events, whatever. Exactly, yeah. I just feel like we need to get Gordon more on here, because we just keep talking about X86 and the inevitable mark to more of law. So we're going to have to work on getting Gordon on the queue. But what I'm curious about, but that's, again, leveraging your, you know, you've been looking at this space a long time. You've got a great perspective. VMworld, not to say three years from now, not one or two, what are we going to be talking about? Convergence, right? Hyperconvergence, really that integrated nature of infrastructure. Today you cannot look at silos anymore, right? You cannot look just at servers or networking or storage. I think we're going to start to see not individual vendors, right? But vendors really starting to come together and build that integrated architecture, right? Whether they do it, however they do it, it remains to be seen. Obviously when we're doing it already, but, you know, it's inevitable that we have to move towards that route, right? Because at the end of the day, you want to look at infrastructure. You want to look at how you deliver your applications, not necessarily how you virtualize your server, how you virtualize your network, or how you virtualize storage. And ultimately, I think, you know, the partner ecosystem definitely changes, right? I think, you know, VMware has brought in how its ecosystem, certain moves that they've made, you know, probably don't necessarily fit with that ecosystem model anymore. I think that changes a little bit. But that being said, there's so much innovation in technology today that, you know, what happens today, what happens in two years, it's going to be even more exciting, right? I just realized I treated wrong. Thanks to Robert Novak for pointing out that when I tweeted Vanessa Alvarez one, I missed the letter. And he's like, just, I love the internet. It's open, open to everyone. You know what? It's all the spell checkers are out there, all the fact checkers, it's crowdsourcing. Thank you, Robert Novak, appreciate it. You know, the hyperscale thing's a big deal. Let's talk about that for a second, because the Wall Street Journal just posted an article this morning about the server share. I usually put out some numbers and it's all gloom and doom. But I want folks to go to wikibon.org and search for hyperscale. David Floyer has some of the best research out there on hyperscale. We've been following IO, Centric Infrastructure, Fusion IO, since they've been a private company, and that whole flash market. So we have our hand right in there. So go to the Wikibon for data. But the Wall Street Journal points out, HP's earnings are down, they've talked about their shipments, and then market share numbers came up, Dell's up, Cisco's up a bit, I mean, well, Cisco's up from a smaller base, so the numbers mean anything to me. But Peter Levine yesterday at Andreessen Horowitz, he was at one of the early employees at Veritas, sold Zen source to Citrix. He's a player. He has a good vision. And he said, quote, there could be thousands of servers in a building. Because I asked him the question, software defined data center is great. Software defined is software. But the data center still is a physical asset, right? So what is that going to look like in the future? He said a building could have thousands and thousands of servers. That's a challenge. I mean, it could be a sense, isn't it? How do you find a server? He actually said the building becomes the server. I got the quote. The building becomes the server. So to me, it's like, okay, data center's optimized, but then everything else turns into an addressable device, Internet of Things, obviously is what we talk about on industrial internet, things like that. So that brings up back to our horizontally scalable question. That's not a unique Facebook problem. That's everyone's problem. So take us through the mindset of the current IT guys that are challenged with this. Because again, they've been past decade, consolidated, consolidated. Now do something different and grow. I mean, how do you guys talk to those customers? Are they ready for your box? Is it plug and play? Talk about the mindset of that IT guy. Absolutely. And I think when you take a look at some businesses today, the building data centers is what they're going to do. Some companies, just because for regulatory and compliance reasons, or for whatever it may be, and Mia has certain challenges where they have to keep their data within country. So I think there's certainly going to be certain niches where we see that data centers are going to still exist and they're going to have to have at least thousands of servers, but the reality is that from our customer perspective, they want to be able to eliminate a lot of that footprint. And the integrated architecture approach is really what it does, right? And it eliminates the footprint. It integrates everything into a single platform. They don't need to have five people managing this infrastructure environment. And they can continue to run their applications highly available, always running. We deliver the SLAs, obviously. But that being said, there's certainly customers who are trying to figure out how they get to this sort of hyposcale concept, right? They see Facebook, they see Amazon. They want Facebook. They do. I mean, there's an envy there. There's an IT envy because not everyone can do their own. And even in a DevOps space, we were talking earlier in this week and we've been, we love DevOps, but an IT guy, I've been running a storage for years, EMC storage, all this stuff. I'm like, DevOps, is there a book do I read? I mean, I'm not a DevOps. So it's like, they want DevOps. It's like, how do I study up on DevOps when it's like, it's really hard to do? It is. I mean, being a DevOps guy in the modern era, in the early pioneers, they were eating glass, you know, spitting out nails, like hard stuff. You're right. And I think it's still a big shift from an organizational perspective, right? DevOps is an organizational movement, much more so than the actual technology. I think the technology is there already. You know, the IT people just aren't quite there yet. And so that certainly has a long way to go. But infrastructure like ours, you know, integrated architectures really simplify the technology part, right? We deliver that same concept, you know, of like the Facebooks of the world and simplify that for our customers. And that's what they want, right? They want to be able to scale like Facebook or Amazon, right? They want to be able to have, you know, that cost efficiency that they do in their own environment, right? And so we can deliver that today. You know, it's funny about theCUBE as we get a lot of text messages and people do respond to our Twitter handle, but I get mostly text messages, indirect messages. I don't know if people don't want to ask it, but they had a lot of response to your boys' club comment earlier. Not theCUBE saying, yeah. I'm sorry. But I want to talk about that. This is important. theCUBE is, we don't discriminate against anything that anyone who has signal from the noise. And we've had Kim Stevenson on. We love anyone who's a tech athlete and you're a tech athlete. So theCUBE, TechRecord, speak for yourself. The videotape's on YouTube, go look at it. But the women in tech question is good because there are more women in tech that people think about, in my opinion. My observation is a lot more women in tech. Certainly the new generation, you're seeing huge numbers of people because tech now is broader. It's not just the boys' club anymore. Yeah, at the top, anyone, you know, over 40, maybe that generation has had less women, but there are a lot of women. What's your take on the women in tech conversation? Is it overblown? Is it legit? What's your take on that? You know, I think that there's a number of very successful women in tech, right, today. I know you've had a number of them on theCUBE, Padma, Sony. And thank you for having me as well. And a number of other women. And certainly we're starting to see them come out of the woodworks and really start to identify the successes that they've been doing in technology for a long time. And I apologize for the boys' club. It was the sports comment. No, no, of course, whatever. Kip Stevenson, by the way, is a huge college football fan. She always texts me, you know. We had Cynthia Stoddard on at AT&T Park. She's the CEO of NetApp. But I think we just need to really start to highlight a number of women who are out there already in the engineering field, right, in tech marketing, and really start to showcase what it is that they're doing, right. And I think that's really key. Well, you know, I think today it's not really about saying I'm a woman and I'm in tech and I'm doing all these great things. It's just really about highlighting that person, right, and making sure that their successes are also being showcased in the public and making sure that we realize that there is certainly a number of women out there today who are contributing to the industry. Yeah, Dave's got daughters. John's got daughters. I've got daughters. So, you know, we're big fans and I think what people don't always appreciate too are the number of types of professions in a way that you can get involved in this industry. It's not just being a coder. It's not just being a coder. Everyone has connected devices now. So everyone has phones and connected. So I think tech is exposed. And one of the interesting things about big data, and we talked about this earlier on the first days, that core IT has been a very specific function. But the role of IT is expanding out to the business units and the business managers. And you're seeing big data and BI and data warehousing, enabling new types of tech analysis. So that's opening up IT. The concept of IT is touching everyone now. So you're seeing new roles emerging. So I think that's going to be a tsunami of opportunity. I agree. And I think, you know, obviously we saw with the data scientists, right? If you ask someone 10 years ago that we were going to have data scientists, I don't think that we would have ever thought that, right? DevOps, you know, DevOps engineers is something that I've seen as well emerging in the last few years. Didn't see that 10 years ago, right? And what is that? I think that's just a testament to the fact that IT skills are changing. They need to change, obviously. We see the convergence and hyperconvergence architectures coming out and bringing together service origin networking, for example, and also moving up stack, right? Whether you're in IT or whether you're in the applications team, you have to have an understanding of both those areas, right? And so I think that that's really, you know, a testament to the fact that IT skills are changing and they have to, right? IT's not going away. It's just evolving, right, today. And it's evolving because technology is forcing us to evolve. And that's really interesting for me. So talk about what's going on scale in your new role. I mean, you're now, you know, digging in to a company, usually an analyst where you were seeing everything. Now, you're kind of, you're on a team. You've got a jersey on, scale computing. What's happening with the company? And what are you working on? What are your projects? And what are some of your customers doing? So earlier this month, we announced a momentum around the company. We launched HC3, our virtualization platform a year ago. Since then, 65% quarter of a quarter new customer business growth, right? Certainly a testament to the integrated architecture approach. It is hyperconvergence. It's starting to really resonate with customers. And for all intents purposes, whether you want to call it a buzzword or not, the concept is real. And our customers are loving it, right? Simplified IT, simple, available, scalable. That's what they're looking for in their infrastructure, right? And the demand's pretty high. Yeah, absolutely. 700 customers in a year. That's, you know, certainly something that we, we expected. But, you know, when it comes down to it, it's been quite a year. And when you're in that year and you're in it, and I haven't been in it the whole year, but the team has. And, you know, I think they realize that, okay, this is, you know, this is definitely something that is needed in the market. There's certainly demand for it, you know, and we launched a couple of different configurations throughout the year to meet the demand of more performance and more scalability. We announced on Monday that in order to move our customers from server consolidation to private cloud and eventually to, you know, the vision of software-defined environments and software-defined data centers, we had to really take a step back and look at our storage architecture. At the end of the day, storage is the foundation of IT, right? There's some, and it's the hardest part. Somewhere. Right, exactly. Data's growing, right? And storage really needed to change. So we announced an object-based store, which is going to be integrated into our architecture, right, and be the foundation for the platform. Again, something that for our customers doesn't really matter. We abstract all of that complexity for them and give them one single platform, right? But for us, it's really about being able to move our customers from A to Z, right? Whether you want to go from server consolidation to private cloud or you're a little bit more advanced in moving from private cloud to now, you know, trying to realize a software-defined environment. At the end of the day, customers are already kind of in a software-defined environment, right? I mean, they already play with software and server consolidation, right? Private cloud is all software, right? At the end of the day, we're a software with commodity hardware, right? So they already understand the concepts. It's just about being able to give them the full vision. Right, give us the facts on some of the factoids of the company, funding, employees, and revenue. Revenue under school, so we'll get that out of the way. But about 75 employees, funding was about 40 million, benchmark capital, scale ventures, and Bill Gurley is a good friend of the company. He's a good investor, he's aggressive. Benchmark's aggressive, they do some great investments. Totally kicking butt right now. Absolutely, and I think they have the same vision that we do, right? And it's about simplified IT. Simplified infrastructure, hyperconvergence, delivering the same, the similar concepts of Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, in a tailored manner to businesses, right? So you can bring that hyperscale mindset in a box for customers. That's basically what you have. Yes, absolutely. And wrapped with software intelligence, right? And our software is really our IP today, right? That's really what gives our customers the benefits and efficiencies of hyperscale and hyperconvergence. I just got a note from Stu Miniman that the Wikibon link is wikibon.org slash SLI for the hyperscale data. If you're interested, go to that report. A lot of great research, thanks Stu for that. wikibon.org slash SLI, which stands for software-led infrastructure, because it's certainly not defined, it's being defined by the players. And we talked to Martin Casada at the VMware, founder of Ms. Sierra, software network virtualization, really amazing. This is happening, convergence is happening, but not the way it was defined five years ago. Exactly, you know, I often hear comparisons, oh, this was done 20 years ago, right? So what's changed? That flash virtualization, yeah, cloud, DevOps. Like you were saying earlier, you know startups today move fast, right? Before, when you least expect it, we're going to be able to maybe have that, you know. Rick Jackson's now at Rackspace and this is completely other side of the coin for him. It's a service provider, they're doing cloud, he goes, John, it's like a hectic pace that's shipping code every day, this is like. The beauty of software, right? The next house, thank you for coming on theCUBE, always a great interview, a CUBE alumni, now head of marketing, it's scale, computing, again, Facebook in a box, Netflix in a box, this is the kind of convergent infrastructure. Data center in a box. Data center in a box, wait. And a woman tech athlete, which we like. Thank you. Thank you, come on in. We'll be right back. Day four of our live extended coverage, this is a special extended day coverage of theCUBE, our flagship program. We're wrapping up VM, we're all just getting all these great interviews we can and expecting to see them from the noise. We'll be right back after this short break. CUBE is a live mobile studio, we bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise. What we do is we get the app.