 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Walls. And welcome back to Las Vegas here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage of VMworld here at Mandalay Bay along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. Thanks for joining us here for our coverage throughout the next three days. All that's happening in VMworld, almost 25,000 attendees, Stu. Pretty good crowd. Wow, I hadn't heard the number, so that would be the largest VMworld ever if we believed the number, so it's been a thing. No reason not to. We're with John Gil-Martin, who's the Vice President and General Manager of the Integrated Assistance Unit at VMware. And John, thanks for being with us once again. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. You're an old cubet. I am at this point. Get in there. Tell us about the vibe of the show. First off, day one, things underway, a lot of excitement, I would think. Yeah, it's fantastic. I think this is my 11th VMworld in a row. So I've gotten to see a huge evolution in this program. It's amazing to see how much has changed over the year. Going back, it used to be a server virtualization. What is this thing? And where we are today is so different. There's a lot of excitement as people are trying to figure out how to manage and deal with all the change happening in the industry right now. So John, one of the things we're all coming into this week looking at is kind of the cloud management suite, which is right in your area. Can you help us unpack? We looked at kind of, it was the vCloud suite and then there was some SDDC stuff and now it's cloud foundations. How do these things relate? Is it rebranding, renaming, repackaging? What, what, what, what help us understand this? Yeah, absolutely. So with the cloud foundation, that's one of the key announcements we made today. The objective there is really to think about how do we take what we've been talking about with Software to Phi Data Center and just make it easy. How do we make it easy for our customers to deploy, easy for them to architect, easy to even offer as a service from public cloud? That's kind of the key concept here. So we are taking and integrating together the key components of Software to Phi, compute, storage, and network. And then we're wrapping some new capabilities to automate deployment, automate provisioning. And so some ways there's an extension, but also an evolution of what we've been doing previously. Okay, but this is still a software offering, correct? It is a software offering. So what are the components inside of that? Yeah, so there's four key components inside of our foundation. These here, virtual sand, NSX, so that gives you that software to find across all three domains. And then a new component that we call STDC Manager. And so what the STDC Manager does is sort of the glue that brings it all together to bring that integrated experience. It takes all the work that our customers do around, how do I think about design? How do I architect? How do I deploy? How do I manage patches and upgrades over time? And just automates all of that inside of software. So they can go from bare metal systems to deployed cloud infrastructure very, very quickly. So what was the gap? What are you addressing here in terms of improvement, in terms of change? You're talking about doing something a little bit different for customers, use of ease and what have you, but what are you trying to get done? Yeah, so the key thing, there's like the two key new things in this that are really different. One is that just making it really easy on the private cloud side, but then we also take exactly that same set of technologies and also work with our partners to offer it as a service. And that's also the really new thing that we're doing today. So we had an announcement today with IBM as part of their IBM cloud. They're offering cloud foundation as a service, which means customers can go to a portal and provision out capacity based upon 100% consistent infrastructure. That means if I need some more capacity as I have it inside my data center, provision it out inside IBM cloud and now I have same management tools, the same operations, everything I do in my data center, I can now do inside of this cloud environment. And we'll extend that out to other partners in the future. We'll send that out into vCloud Air next quarter. This is really a great way for customers to start extending or migrating into the cloud, but do it based upon without having to rearchitect their applications or fundamentally change how they operate. Yeah, so we've been trying to figure out this hybrid cloud thing for the last few years and there's many companies that are saying, okay, here's the software stack and you can put it in your own data center or you can put it in some kind of public cloud environment. We see IBM does that some. We see Oracle do that. Microsoft of course has Azure and Azure stacks coming sometime in the next year. So is this VMware's answer to say, okay, in the data center where you know and love vSphere, this is a full set and then you can put it in IBM soft layer or a bunch of other service providers? It, yeah, so it is that concept though by a consistent stack, yeah, the same stack inside the data center, exactly the same stack outside the data center. So it is 100% consistent, right? And that's kind of what's really attractive about that. And then as customers think about, well, what are the management tools or the cloud management platforms that run on top of that? That can extend very seamlessly now across multiple environments. Okay, what about the interconnection between different locations? How does that work? So the interconnections, you can take advantage of NSX and what it does around stretching, stretching networking across environments. Like it's a very powerful capability to really think about it, really has a seamless extension of the data center. So that's one of the unique capabilities. And then obviously with IBM as a first partner, they have almost, I think, 50 data centers around the world. So it becomes very easy to co-locate your applications close to your private data center, which is important from a networking perspective. Okay, so IBM is the first partner, how does this fit into the VCloud Air network then where you have thousands of partners already? Yeah, so they are the first VCloud Air network partner to offer a service. And then we expect and are working with other VCloud Air network partners to do the same, to offer a cloud foundation as a service. And kind of underlying that technology is this SCDC manager, which makes it easy for them as well to go provision out these infrastructures very quickly and easily. Yeah, when you talk about customers, what are the pain points that you were hearing from them that you were addressing? Because we think about the sophistication of technology, the ease of use, efficiencies, high performance, all this stuff. It couldn't be any better, but obviously it could have been better. So what were you hearing from them that led you to develop the new product? Well, the big thing is, as customers are trying to think about how do they leverage public cloud as part of their architectures? You know, you can kind of, it's pretty clear the kind of result they want. They want to be able to have an environment where their application owners and their developers sort of don't even know where things are running. They want it to be a little bit transparent, kind of seamless, but at the same time, they want to be able to have the ability to maintain control, maintain security policies, maintain operational control over the environment and have good insight into it. And so that's sort of the challenge that we're walking into. And traditional infrastructure still very much stands in the way of people trying to support their developers. Enterprises spend too much time plugging components together, trying to make things work together. And that's just not value added activity. It's not differentiating. It doesn't help them compete in the marketplace. And so what we saw is, well, how can we help them kind of get out of that business and focus more on the things they want to do above the infrastructure layer? And that's sort of the whole rationale for building Cloud Foundation was, just take everything that they do today that's on value added activity, put that in software, automate it, public and private cloud, and they can focus on what is value added to their business on top. One of the challenges we've been facing in this transformation is kind of the go-to-market. If I think about traditionally vSphere, you know, VMware's got a great channel partnership. You had lots of OEMs in the early days and now I mean just a huge amount of channel partners that know how to sell it, know how to make money. Cloud is a big shift for them. There's only a small percent of the channel that kind of understands this. With IBM kind of as a first partner, how do you see this playing out with kind of traditional panel channel partners, service providers and the whole go-to-market? As you point out, it's clearly an evolving story, right? And different partners are kind of thinking about it in different ways. There's still definitely an on-premise opportunity that they're going after, but clearly having a good cloud strategy is going to be important for every reseller out there and every partner. And some of that is going to be thinking about what are the kind of services that you can offer your customers to help them make that transition? If you think about if I want to extend my data center, I need to migrate workloads or re-architect workloads, those types of services I think are going to be critical to become experts in and to help customers really think about their long-term strategy. The fact is, customers are going to move more and more of the workloads into clouds of some type over the next few years, and they're going to need help and advice and guidance and migration services to get there. So there's real business to be built around those types of opportunities. Okay, can you give us a little bit of what should we be looking for going forward? Are there customers that are running this stack already before it was called this, and how can we benchmark to say whether or not you're successful by the time we come back next year? Yeah, that's a good question, Stu. That's a tough question, too, by the way. Yeah, it's a little challenge for us. Leave it to Stu. So no, it's a great question. So this software is going to be available later this week. So it's actually generally available on September 1st. So it's just coming into the marketplace now. And so we've been working with some early beta customers on this over the last couple of months, getting great feedback and really helped us steer particularly towards this public cloud opportunity. So I would expect as we come back in a few months, we'd be able to talk about our initial Lighthouse customers and how they're doing. But we see just huge interest in this right now. Customers want to move, and companies want to move away from plugging things together. They want to move away from individual components, and they really are looking to buy in more integrated ways. And this is a key enabling technology to help them do that. And we can do that also with our partners as well. Yeah, one of the big challenges we've had is everybody's always like, okay, but my needs are a little bit different. So we understand that if we can eliminate diversity of the environments, homogeneity is good. I can repeat it, I understand it. But everybody, oh, that's the problem with IT is they always want to tweak it. So what do you do when they say, oh, you know, these hands great, but you've got all these ecosystem partners and storage. I kind of want this storage and NSX, I understand some pieces, maybe I want OVS, but I want to deal some other pieces. What do you do for customers that want to kind of go outside of this initial package? What kind of choice and options do they have? Yeah, you know, it's a, so just like vSphere, you know, vSphere is sort of been the universal platform for running virtual machines and has a lot of those connections into different things. So Cloud Foundation fundamentally is based on vSphere. So for, they take storage, for example, you know, vSphere can connect to external storage. So we can connect to external storage and on our roadmap for the automation software inside, we'll look at how we can take advantage of external storage and some of these things as well. So as, you know, as we talk to customers and we, as we learn those areas that are consistent across many, we can start to bring some of those things into the equation as well. You know, this gives us a very powerful starting point and then we can look at what are the right connections out into the ecosystem from there. And do you still have folks who are trying to hang on? You know, say, I understand what you're doing, I understand it's a new service, I have a new opportunity here, but I'm not ready to cut the cord all the way. And how do you bring them along to showing that there are new efficiencies here and there's a better bottom line benefit to you? Well, I think, you know, the history of IT is a history of things remaining, right? So you still have AIX, you still have mainframes. So, you know, this transition will take time. You know, this is not going to be, you know, an overnight type of change as we move to these types of architectures that are fully software defined, but we've made huge amounts of progress thus far. You know, we have over 5,000 customers on virtual sand, you know, NSX is going incredibly fast. Both of these are proof points that these are the architectures that customers are trying to move to. And at the same time though, we have to find the right, you know, the right starting points. What is the right project to start with? This doesn't have to be a wholesale change to the data center. It can be, let's take a virtual desktop project and run that on top of Path Foundation. Let's take a new server application we're going to deploy, run that on Path Foundation. And just like vSphere kind of started with these use cases then expanded over time, same thing with Path Foundation. We can start with the project and then show success and move into other projects. So John, you've been with VMware for quite a few years. You've done two stints of the company. As you hear the outside world talking about, you know, cloud and where things are going, what do you think people don't understand about VMware's position in the cloud marketplace going forward? You know, the one thing, you know, I've talked a lot right now about Cloud Foundation, which was one of our announcements. I think the other thing that is really unique that we talked about this week is something we call a cross-cloud architecture. And instead of cross-cloud services that in addition to foundation and what we're recognizing is just like with server virtualization, we were able to abstract multiple types of servers and provide consistent layer. We're going to do the same thing as we work across multiple clouds, even non-VMware-based clouds, right? Working with Amazon, Azure, Google. And I think that's one thing that is maybe even surprising to folks. And it's very different than kind of the company strategy going back 10 years ago, right? So we are fully embracing that, these will be part of our customer strategy in the future. We do expect to see them. But we see a unique opportunity for us to go help them when it comes to managing applications across the networking security where we have really unique assets we can help with and also data management governance across those areas as well. Well, John, I know you said it takes time, transitions take time. Still gave you a year, so. It gave you a year. So next year at VMworld we'll come back and they update you on the progress that we've made. I look forward to it. Thank you for joining us and best of luck down the road. We'll see you a year from now. Fantastic, thank you very much. You bet. John Gilmartin from VMware and we'll be back with more from VMworld here in Vegas. Right after this, you're watching theCUBE.