 Hi everybody, this is theCUBE and I'm Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and we're here live at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. This is the eighth annual VTUG, the Virtualization Technology Users Group. It is a big community of diverse customers, not only just VMware customers, but it's a multi-hypervisor environment. We heard this morning from the likes of Rackspace and Amazon and Microsoft is here. Obviously, many customers of the VMware community and we're here with Chris Harney, who's the founder of VTUG and the president of that organization. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks Dave, I appreciate you guys being here. It's really great to be at this awesome venue. We've got this tremendous background. It's Stu, we went from the Boston skyline to Gillette Stadium. It doesn't get any better than this, does it? Nice kicking off the new year here in the Northeast. So Chris, help us understand the evolution of VTUG. I've been at this event many times. Stu has as well. It's sort of evolved from more of a VMware focus into sort of a broader participation and multi-hypervisor, as the market has, but why don't you take us back and sort of describe what this event is all about? Sure, so I've been a lover of community and user groups for decades. I mean, that's how I got my start in IT. People would share information and would all get smarter because of it. So when VMug, when we started this as a VMware user group 10 years ago, people were just getting excited about this information and they were sharing ideas and we were all getting really, really smart. But this is a community. You know, this is a community-driven organization. And so the one question we ask at every event is what can we do better? And we were hearing loud and clear. People said, you know, my manager is asking me, what's next? Do you know VMware really well? What is Microsoft doing? What's Citrix doing? What's Red Hat doing? So we started inviting these people to talk at these events. You know, it wasn't really, it wasn't politically acceptable at the time but it's what our users wanted. And because of that, we're just getting bigger. I mean, we have 1,500 people signed up here today. Well, I mean, you know, you're right on them. I remember last time we had, you know, Ed Walsh, former CEO of Avamar and StoreWise and he was at IBM for a number of years. He said at one point, hey, I give talks all the time. I asked the audience to raise your hand. Who's got VMware? Every hand in the room goes up and then I asked who's got only VMware and all the hands go down. And so that sort of underscores. And Stu, we've done some work in this area. You launched that big survey last year in the multi-hypervisor environment. What are you seeing in terms of trends there? Sure, Dave. So especially the bigger customers are trying out some, want a second source some, you know, there's some pushback in the community as anytime we have a company that builds up their licensing base, you know, they look for alternatives. And, you know, Microsoft and open-source solutions like KVM are giving the customers options out there as well as, you know, there's that kind of journey from just using virtualization to the broader cloud discussion, whether that be public hybrid or private cloud. So there's a lot of options out there and I love that this community is broadening much beyond, you know, what VMware is doing and talking to, you know, the real challenges facing, you know, the IT staff today. So Chris, I mean, from a practitioner's perspective that accommodates their needs and it's reflective of the market, but it brings challenges, right? It brings complexity. You're seeing, you know, this permeation of multi-hypervisors, they have to be managed. You're seeing the same thing now in cloud. Right. You know, the clouds aren't all working together. Wouldn't it just be easier if everybody just did one thing? You know, I think it may be easier but competition breeds better prices. It breeds better features. So if you don't have competition breathing at your door, why is there a reason to innovate? So having all these multi-hypervisors, I think it's much better for the community. It's much better for the industry, not only financially, but all the options you have available now. I don't know if VMware would have bought Nacera if there wasn't competition breathing down the door. They got to be ready for the next big thing. And now look what that's done in the whole software defined networking space, right? And Cisco's on its toes. Absolutely. You know? A room of 10 years ago when VMware started, there was one hypervisor out there and then no one really took them seriously. Well, once we heard this word software defined networking, everyone jumped in with both feet. When you've got Cisco, you've got HP, VMware, Microsoft, BroCon, BroadCon, everyone is trying to do something around software defined networking. Well, you mentioned, you talked to the cloud service providers. They have a lot of needs that they want to customize. They seem to be going in a particular direction and it's not necessarily always VMware. So the diversity really accommodates the market needs, is what you're saying, and it creates competition and innovation. Absolutely. Okay, so what do you see as next in virtualization? You and Tony Asaro gave a great talk this morning in one of the three keynotes and that was one of your topics. What was the conclusion of that discussion? You know, we're not really seeing a virtualization 2.0 out there. You know, people are doing the same thing just a little different, you know, we're still virtualizing servers on top of hardware. We're still right clicking, deploying. We're waiting to find out what the transformation is going to be. Software defined networking is interesting, but it's still the same thing. You know, we're still doing networking on top of, on top of switches. It's going to be great because, you know, when the software defined networking happens, we're just going to put servers in. So instead of just a bunch of disks, we'll have just a bunch of servers. You know, they'll have local storage. They'll be talking faster. They'll be on the same back lane. Maybe we'll be talking with a PCI eBus, but there is, we haven't seen something transformation-wise, like maybe an OS across, one OS across all your servers. So I wanted to follow up on one of the things that you guys proposed in your session was like the mainframe logical partitioning, maybe a VPAR. Right. And so more granularity into the stack. Now, my question to you again, as from a practitioner perspective, what does that, what are the advantages of that? And how would that change, for example, things like security that you need to think about? So the advantages to me are, now you've got one agent on the CPU. You don't have to have backup and antivirus and all this other stuff in every OS. Now you maybe you're doing that at the lower level. The other advantage is, you know, our all VMs are all processes created equal. We have some control within the hypervisors where you can give things shares and say, you're more valuable than something else. Well, when you add another machine, those values change and they get skewed. Whereas if you can really divide it up down at the CPU level, this is my most important app. You're going to be guaranteed 50% of my processor. QOS at the processor level. Exactly. And then does that or how would that change the security model? Would that have to change to accommodate that greater level of granularity? I don't know that it would. I mean, we're still going to have CPU, we're still going to have application security, which is really all we're doing for security right now. I think there's a bigger need for security out there. People need to take a more serious look at it because you can copy off VMs right now and take the keys to the kingdom with you. And there is nothing stopping you or tracking who's doing that. So you guys are excited about this software defined trend. Obviously, Stu, you've written a lot about it. It was interesting to note when you guys were querying the audience, they weren't adopting it yet. They were looking at it. They also, I think, you know, some of the folks, the practitioners in the audience were excited about it, but they tend to be dealing with, you know, sort of everyday nitty-gritty problems. And we talk about all these trends, we read about them in the trade rags and in the blogs, but the adoption takes longer. What are you guys seeing in software defined and what's your outlook for that? So what I'm seeing in software defined is your service providers, Amazon, Microsoft, they're adopting software defined networking very highly. And that's the first step. Now, all of your IT companies would like to see themselves as service providers, so I see them adopting software defined networking two or three years down the road, but they're waiting for a true leader. They're, you know, VMware claims to be a software defined networking company. Cisco claims to, but there is no one clear leader, so no one's betting on a horse yet. Yeah, so Dave, absolutely. I wrote an article at the end of the year. Today, you know, VMware and Cisco kind of have some of the share of voice out in the marketplace on SDN, but we could argue Cisco is really a hardware play. If you look at the offering that they put forward with ACI, it's got a good vision to tie into applications, but it's yet another platform that I have to do. It doesn't work directly with Catalyst, it's not a current Cisco Nexus 3000 or 5000, it's the new Nexus 9000, and it's not even shipping until next quarter. VMware, it's got a nice vision with NSX and at VMworld, a lot of customers were interested in it, but we interviewed Martín Casado and said it's really early days. These are really big companies that are deploying it today. It's service providers or companies like GE and the e-bays of the world that are looking at SDN today. There's plenty of innovation to go forth on both SDN and on the storage side that we look forward to. Well, it's interesting, Chris, in your session one of the practitioners asked a question, you know, the vendors are always pushing automation at me, but I'm not so sure what the benefits are. Now, when you look at the hyperscale guys, the Amazons and the Googles are highly automated. I mean, you could, I think you can call what they're doing software defined. So my question is, are they a harbinger of what we're going to see in the data center, the traditional sort of IT application space or is there going to be sort of a bifurcation there where you've got sort of the gold standard in the cloud service providers because they're in the IT for profit business and the traditional IT maybe sort of bumps along lags, does more with less and just looks at IT as a cost center. What do you, what do you see there? Do you ever see those worlds coming together? No, I don't think they'll ever totally come together. I think you hit it now right on the head. There's going to be, you know, just like now we have about 10% of the companies that have automated their virtual infrastructure. They'll be the ones adopting software defined networking. They'll be the ones adopting automation and private cloud and hybrid cloud. You've got the 40% of the market that has adopted virtualization and some of them may adopt some software defined networking. We still have half the environments out there that haven't even touched virtualization. So I think you'll see the same scale, you know, it's the same story. Some people did networking and then it's just probably about the same percentage as 10 years ago. So I think we're just going to see the more of the same. Yeah, so the stuff you see in the labs and the stuff we read in the paper, it takes, you know, decade to get adopted and by the time it's adopted, we're on to the sort of the next thing. And that's why people are talking about it already. They want people to adopt it maybe a little earlier so we're getting all this hype and promotion about the software defined data centers. Do you think there's a backlash in the customer community because of all the talk? And of course theCUBE, we perpetuate some of that, right? We're always talking about the next greatest thing. Do you think there's a backlash or do you feel as though because of the innovations that you're seeing from the Amazons and the Googles and the software as a service people that IT practitioners are more receptive to that these days? I think there's a problem that there is no one clear leader, no visionary telling us where they're going to take us to. You know, they're telling us little stories in pockets but they aren't showing us some real innovation of where they're going to take us down the road. So that's why I think people are kind of slowing down a little bit. They want to wait and see how this story unfolds a little bit and then they'll start moving towards some visionary voice. So VMware's trying to be that leader, would you agree? And the practitioner base we saw the hands today say, well, we're really not implementing cloud the VMware way, we're doing it a different way. So it's not pure VMware. Microsoft clearly would like to be that leader but there's a little bit of, some of the glow of their halo has dissipated, much of it, okay? So they don't appear to be the next one. Open source as a concept maybe has potential but that's just this big amorphous thing. So, and then you got IBM and HP who are doing their IBM and HP thing. And of course Dell, a big place. They have all these big chunks of leadership but it doesn't feel like anyone that can actually move the market forward as you're proposing, except perhaps the open source but that's going to take a long time. So do we have that right that there really is no clear leader on the horizon and the community is going to have to be that leader or do you see sort of a dark horse coming forward? Maybe an Amazon or a Google. You know, and maybe someone even different than them. You know, we didn't think that the VMware, we didn't take VMware seriously 10 years ago. You know, there could be another provider that comes in and comes up with the transformation. And like I said, maybe it's an OS that just spans across all of your hardware be it Unix x86 or P but we don't know. So I think there are a lot of people trying and until they get the community's trust it's going to be the same way for a little while. And all with all the trends in cloud and mobile it's very unpredictable and again, open source makes things even more unpredictable. All right, Chris, we're up against the clock. Well, thanks very much for stopping by theCUBE. It was a pleasure finally meeting you face to face. And keep it right there. Everybody will be right back. We're live from Gillette Stadium. This is the VTUG and this is theCUBE.