 Welcome to CUBE Conversations everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman at Wikibon headquarters. And we're going to talk about the move from virtualization to hybrid cloud. Chad Sackich is here. He's joining us from up north. Chad, it's great to see you today. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Dave, it's my pleasure Stu. It's always good to see you guys. So Stu, I want to start with you. For years we've done research on virtualization generally VMware specifically. In particular, the early years of our research focused on integration. Because storage as we know was a problem, right? The first VM world I ever went to I said, wow, storage really is breaking as a result of all this virtualization. So the community, the industry, the ecosystem really stepped up and the focus was on integration. We did a lot of work there, but we've now shifted our emphasis. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of our research scope? Sure Dave, and I think one of the key things we want to talk into is that difference between what virtualization is and cloud. Because I think back, gosh I go back seven, eight years ago when the term private cloud came out, there was the true cloud and the public cloud and then there was this virtualization stuff. And really there's been a lot of work in the industry to say what differentiates virtualization from cloud and a lot of it is what we're talking about in this research which is the management and the orchestration. It's that automation layer that really is going to make your whole operations environment just much simpler. Whereas virtualization alone was really about utilization of your equipment and as you mentioned Dave, really the integration of all the pieces. It was virtualization in many ways broke, storage and networking. We spent the last decade getting those pieces to work and in many ways the industry can claim a lot of victories because now storage works really well with virtualization, networking got much better. So it's that next step to really help the orchestration and help really transform what IT staffs are doing which is rather than managing what Chad would call the cylinders of excellence inside the organization. We're really talking about building cloud architects and allowing the business to focus on the applications and have more agility to deliver for the business itself. And that's what we focused on is really these new orchestration areas and specifically it's for users that have bought into the VMware ecosystem are using that. How do we use the whole v-center and expand beyond that to all of the pieces to make a true hybrid cloud which is going to transform your IT environment? So Chad, I wonder if we could bring you into the conversation here. Yeah, yeah, of course. And thinking about you and I have spoken many, many times about this so-called journey and you've sort of laid it out. I remember years ago, just chalk talking with you and a lot of what you talked about has come true. You know, the whole notion of storage moving toward sort of this invisible resource. But I wonder where are customers on the maturity model? Did they really accept and understand that virtualization is not cloud, it's not hybrid cloud and they've got to do more work? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. So in my experience and you know, it's a joy being here but it's also a joy being on the road with customers all around the world and the biggest of the big and the smallest of the small every single one of them invariably is trying to build a capability which is a robust hybrid cloud model which again, you can drop buzzword bingo and come right down to trying to build a self-service portal, high degree of automation, all the way through the infrastructure part of the stack, all the way up to the PAS and the SaaS services that they offer internally. The reality of it is that the problems of the past that you described largely are cracked. There's still times where people suffer from storage or networking problems but the name of the game now is that inside the enterprise, they want infrastructure as a service, the agility comes from the management and orchestration domain and there's really two dominant ecosystems. So your research was focused on the VMware ecosystem, namely the VRealize suite but there's another ecosystem which is appearing alongside which is the open stack ecosystem. Both of those things are now really the things that are driving the ultimate value of infrastructure which is to be invisible. That hasn't changed Dave from the first time you and I talked about it. The idealized infrastructure is simply invisible, provisioned, automated and consumed by an application and that means you have to break down all of those human silos that exist. That sounds like the beginning of a bad horror movie, breaking down human silos and then we turn them into soylent green. No, but in all seriousness, I mean, literally I was talking with one of our biggest customers in the world, the finance vertical was actually at the briefing center in Hawkington on Friday and they're already 80, 90% virtualized on their x86 workloads. So that's ground that, hey, victory achieved. We saved a lot of CAPEX. Now, how do we get out of the business of provisioning storage? How do we get out of the business of provisioning of VM? How do we defer that all and do it programmatically in a way which is analogous to the public cloud models that exist? Can we do it while retaining control of capital assets on the ground? So that brings up two questions. So when you think about things like VASA, VAI and now soon to be VVOLs, do those things still matter or is the attention just sort of shifting and I wonder if you could address that? They matter. That's like, what's the analogy here? When you go to a great restaurant, when was the last time you went to a restaurant, Dave? Last night, actually. Was it good? It was okay. So presumably if you had severe intestinal flu, it would have been a somewhat less awesome experience. Indeed. But in general, while your body is functioning and functioning properly, the thing that makes your restaurant out in awesome or not has more to do with the meal itself. So VASA, VAI, VVOLs, the core internal plumbing of how the ecosystem integrates with VMware is to some degree like, hey, you better have an autoimmune system that works. Your digestive tract better have a good flora and fauna that allows you to eat and enjoy your meal. But so long as those are true and the vendor ecosystem needs to make sure that they're true, the real challenge is, how do I as a chef make an awesome meal? So it's not just good, but great. And that's frankly about higher up in the stack, the management and orchestration layer, creating the right service catalog, that's the recipe for a good meal. So okay, so those are the things that I don't think about as long as they're working properly. Right. Now the second question that came out of the discussion that you had earlier was this notion of multi-cloud. So it seems like the world, whether it's VMware, whether it's OpenStack and various varieties of OpenStack, whether it's AWS through its API, Google, Azure, et cetera, it looks like we're headed toward a world of multi-clouds. Absolutely. How will EMC play in that world? What are your thoughts there? So it's been a very fascinating last 12 months of customer dialogue because for a little while, and I think that the press is still thinking that it's a VMware versus OpenStack battle, there's some degree that that is true, but it's true only a small amount. For the most part, it's a little overlap and it's kind of an and. Likewise in the public cloud domain, people are starting to realize, you know what Azure is fundamentally different than AWS. And I'm gonna use Salesforce.com and I'm gonna use HR services like success factors and SaaS. That's a form of cloud. And I'm gonna have multiple public clouds that I'm gonna choose, some for infrastructure, some for SaaS. In other words, as a IT consumer, I'm gonna need a M&O cloud layer, like a layer that federates these cloud services at all three layers in the stack across multiple clouds. And in fact, many customers that I'm finding increasing the larger ones are actually building two on-premise private clouds as part of their hybrid cloud strategy. One that's focused on VMware for the domain of pets, of workloads that are built with high expectations of infrastructure resilience. And then literally right beside it, they have a parallel project where they're building one that uses OpenStack as the M&O layer that they're using for new applications that they're building on top of, you know, the applications that are more like cattle using the classic pets and cattle mean, right? So the thing that's interesting is that means then you have at the top layer, the VCloud APIs, and you have the OpenStack APIs just on-prem. Like this is not hypothetical. This is a customer that spoke at the OpenStack Summit in November and that I interact with pretty frequently. So for them, they're very interested in what are you doing in the domain of management and orchestration above infrastructure as a service? There's lots of interesting players in this domain. In this case, that customer was using a company called Scaler, which is, you know, a startup that's focused on multi-Cloud management abstraction layers. The other interesting thing is that there's actually a layer above that, which is the bottom layer of the AppStack. So you can think of Cloud Foundry. Its bottom layer has this thing called Bosch. Bosch will go and it'll provision an OpenStack environment. It'll provision AWS. It'll provision VCloud APIs. It'll also go directly to vCenter if you're not using the vRealize suite. And if you think about it, that is, so long as you're using Cloud Foundry, it is an inter-Cloud abstraction layer, right? So I think that there's a, you asked the question of what are we gonna do about this? We're gonna play at this in multiple ways across the Federation. Number one, Pivotal will continue to expand what Bosch does around deploying paths to multiple Clouds in an OpenCloud fashion. Number one. Number two, VMware will continue to expand the vRealize automation tool set, which already supports AWS to continue to expand out and support other things, including OpenStack. And then number three, EMC will continue to expand the capability, both organically and inorganically, of providing inter-Cloud federated services. That'll appear in a couple of forms, Dave. So the first form that'll show up will be that we're embracing the public Cloud models so that we can say there's backup for Office 365. There's backupforsalesforce.com. Those are things, that's why we acquired Spanning, right? So there's gonna be new forms of backup storage, a persistence of information, and analytics that occur inside these federated models. It's a more complex ecosystem than I think people think at first glance, but there's the delusional value of simple answers, and then there's the true value of actually embracing the fact that the world is multifaceted, right? So that's great background, and sort of sets up my next question, Stu, which is how do you research this stuff? So we used to research the plumbing, you know, the connections underneath, which was what we spent time on VAI, and who has the integration points, and an exhaustive set of research. How have you changed your research, yourself, David Floyer, Nick Allen, to accommodate this changing ecosystem that Chad just described, and how are the horses laying out in the track? Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you're right, there was a lot of work that we needed to do to make sure that we had a contained scope, because Cloud is really complicated, and there's so many factors. Chad went through a whole bunch of them, and if we had tried to boil the ocean and give the landscape of Cloud, forget it, it would have taken us a couple of years, and by the time we finished, we'd be two years out of date. So what we really focused on here was both extending what we had done for the last three or four years on VMware, and extending the first part of that into really the hybrid Cloud management and orchestration, but looking from the storage standpoint, and for customers that are seeing VMware as one of their really strategic partners, and of course there's many ways to skin this cat. If you look at the result of the research, EMC came out with the deepest integrations, which wasn't all that surprising. They obviously are the parent company of VMware, and spent a lot of effort, Chad, his whole team, and all of the Federation working hard on that, but you've got companies like NetApp that are right behind them on that, not far behind them, and everybody else has worked really good on all the VASA and VAI pieces, and are working through the VRealized Suite, and expanding what they're doing there, so it was limited to VMware, starting to talk about some of the other hooks, some little bit of compare and contrast as to what's going on in OpenStack, and it's something we've spent a lot of time looking into, but it's really kind of storage, storage as a service, and some of the APIs from a management standpoint that storage companies can hook into. So you were mentioning the efficacy of those capabilities, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to just interject one thing, guys, my apologies for interrupting, but you're absolutely right that this whole ecosystem view is an impossible problem to tackle. You prioritize, in my opinion, right guys, because again, talking with lots of customers, well, there's lots of interest in OpenStack, in how do Azure packs connect to the Azure domain. The reality amongst the enterprise is the vast majority of them are using VMware as the virtualization strata, and the vast majority of them are using the VRealized Suite, previously the VCloud Suite, as their M&O strata. So in other words, you're doing an assessment of the sweet spot of the mass market. It's very fragmented, by the way. There's lots of other management orchestration tools, UCSD, CIAC, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like an alphabet soup, but where you center the research is the mass, at least the customers that I see. The second thing that I'd say is while I love that your research suggested that we're doing okay by our customers in terms of integration with that management domain, to some degree, that was actually forced on us. So again, I don't want this to come across sounding arrogant in any way, right? But we have an insanely broad portfolio. It is not uncommon for a customer to have data domain, Isilon, VNXs, VMAXs, ExtremeIO, Vplex, RecoverPoint, all sitting underneath VMware, and they're using it for different workloads and with different blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the reality of it is, is that that actually means that, to some degree, our management and orchestration complexity is actually more important to us than it is to ecosystem at large. Now, I think that that problem actually applies to ecosystem at large, but there's a reason why we're so maniacally focused on how do we abstract and how do we automate, not just in the VMware ecosystem, but in all ecosystems. Yeah, Chad, that's a great point, and that's where I know your vision for where Viper's going to bring EMC, because if I look at something like Amazon, they've just got a platform and they've got a ton of services that they can layer on top of that, and that portfolio allows you to reach a broad spectrum of the marketplace, need to be able to make it easier for customers to be able to get all of the services across all of your options. All right, guys, we got to leave it there. I'm sorry we're out of time, Chad. Thanks so much for coming on, and Stu, appreciate you running down the research. You can check out that research on wikibon.org, and thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE Conversations with Stu Miniman and Chad Sackich and Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.