 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England winter warmer 2017. Now, your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to Gillette Stadium. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is Silicon Angle Medias of theCUBE with a worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Really happy to be here. This is the 11th year of the VTUG Winter Warmer and joining me for my intro segment here is Chris Harney. Chris, the founder of the VTUG, you bring together all these users, really good ecosystem going between what's happening in virtualization beyond just the VMware stuff and really pulled in some of the cloud activities in the keynotes this morning. I mean, we were talking containers and GitHub and security and virtualization of course and just a wide spectrum of stuff. So thanks so much for having us again and give us the update on VTUG. Thanks Stu, just a pleasure, I'm glad you're here. VTUG is still growing. I mean, we're going to Tampa, upstate New York. We've done events in Chicago, Silicon Valley. And I think there's a big theme that people want much like Silicon Angle. They want an independent view of the state of IT. In virtualization, it's been going around forever, but since 2002, the VMware was the virtualization platform and it still is. But now there are more choices whether you're talking cloud, hybrid cloud, hyper-converged and people need to hear what's out there to make educated decisions. I want to move forward with. Yeah, great point Chris. I mean, when we talk to users, there's still some out there that are trying to figure out what that whole virtualization thing is and how to deploy it. It's not like we've reached full saturation on the market but when you're talking about strategy, it's what we hear people talking about is there's that term thrown around about digital transformation, but you would use it this morning talking about gaming in mobile and how that's fitting in the cloud. Talk about how machine data and sensors are fitting in. There's all these new technologies that are changing very fast. What do you hear from the user community? What are the things that are top of mind for them? What are they struggling with? What are they coming to events like this to try to understand? You know, I think VDI has finally taken hold. It's finally a year of VDI. We've been going to this since 2006 I think. Security, people are struggling with security and automation. I think those are two topics that companies need to do better on. You know, we're trying to figure out how to automate, how to get to realize working. And it's not as easy. You know, all these products that have been stitched together and no one has made a cohesive package to just install and run. So they're just struggling with getting good information on how to really deploy on what works or not. Yeah, so Chris, I remember the first couple of years that we brought theCUBE here. We talked about really just educating on that basic cloud stuff. You've had Microsoft every year. You've got either Amazon or somebody in the Amazon ecosystem giving presentations. Where are we with some of these discussions? I mean, you know, DevOps, you know, containers. When are we getting a serverless track here? You know, how many people are still kind of, you know, bread and butter, virtualization is a major piece of what I do. And you know, where are we in them understanding some of the other pieces? You know, from my experience in talking to users, you're still about 90% on-prem data center. You know, cloud is still a big word. It means different things to different people. Software as a service is a successful deployment, I think, of cloud opportunities. But people, what I think is happening, they'll try the cloud. They don't go all in. And then they realize it's too expensive that way and they bring it back in-house. And I believe if you're going to do it, you have to go all in with the cloud. You have to take that leap of faith and make it work. And many people are struggling to do that. Great, so the event itself, you mentioned Vtug's been expanding. It's, you know, you and I have been looking at, you know, Vmug and how that's happened. There's been kind of some politics, I guess, if you will lately. There's, you know, Vmug people have been fired. Some of the people running the organization, like that they out for some stuff too. They're switching people. You know, I've had the opportunity to interview the CEO of Vmug a couple of times. I think in general we say, you know, Vmug is a good thing, but people are looking for more. And what feedback do you get? You know, what do you hear from users? And maybe talk a little bit more about some of those other organizations that you're working with. Yeah, no, I totally hear it. I mean, Vmug, you know, we started out doing Vmug. And it's a great thing and it's education and it's free to the community. And I think there's, like you said, politics going on. You know, VMware is not happy with Nutanix. So they don't want any Nutanix people in on running their Vmugs. They don't want to have Microsoft speaking out there. But it's relevant. I mean, VMware runs Microsoft workloads. Come on, why not have them there and talk about what they're doing? And I think that's it. It's a closed system. It is a VMware user group. They want to talk about VMware. Well, the tide is changing, folks. I mean, you see Docker out there, OpenStack, Red Hat. And they're everywhere. You know, they're not just in the little small shops that can't afford the product. I mean, you're talking, we heard this morning, Fortune 5 Bank, one of the top five banks runs everything on OpenStack. And they need a place to go and talk to other users about how they're doing it. And I think that's the whole premise of VTUG, is that, you know, let's get smarter together. Chris, what's exciting you out in the marketplace? What technologies are you interested in getting involved in that you're getting to play with? Everyone's here in hyperconverged. You know, I think we heard a good talk this morning that, you know, people don't want to have to manage storage and servers independently. You can put storage on compute nodes, but you can't put compute on a storage node. So, I don't know if that's true or not. You have some intelligence side of storage. So, all flash is exciting. I mean, I look at these data centers that have rows and rows of spinning disks. And they consolidate down to a rack of all flash drives. So, and it's good for the, it's cost less to run an all flash array. So, security, network virtualization is exciting. And I think there needs to be more education around that and what it does. People are still confused with the word micro segmentation. They don't know what that means. So, I think the industry has to do a better job of explaining what they do. And I think, you know, listening to John this morning, you know, when you take your tech specialist and make them marketing people, I think that's a step in the right direction. So, hyperconverged. Of course, there was the big news this week. HPE is buying SimpliVity for $650 million worth of cash. I did a video yesterday talking about it. And actually, I put out there, I said, well, you know, in some ways we're now past hyperconverged. I mean, you know, it's not that it's HPE buying them, but at the valuation that they got bought, which is about two X what they had raised and probably in the three to four X of what revenue is. It's congratulations to SimpliVity, but it's not super exciting from, you know, the valley VC type of folks, you know, investment of infrastructure is kind of interesting. It's some of those broader discussions that you said, you know, security absolutely hot there, how cloud infrastructure fits into that. I think hyperconvergence is a piece of that overall puzzle as it becomes a platform. But I'd love to get your take on SimpliVity specifically. And, you know, does hyperconverged comes up for customers or is that just one of the solutions to help them simplify their environments? So I think it's great for SimpliVity. You know, like you said, it wasn't exciting. You didn't see that 10X multiplier we were seeing years ago, but you have a company like HPE that can really put some investment into the product. And I think that's good for the people that have bought it and the people who are going to buy it. You and I have talked many times about the difference between some of the hyperconverged buyers and they're truly, I think there is use cases for each of them. And I think that gap is narrowing though. I think they're now starting to create products that are overlapping each other. So it's good for the industry. I think we're going to see it. It's much like your wireless was a while ago. Remember we had 15 wireless companies that all got bought up and everyone had to have their own, their own pet wireless that they sold. And I think that's what's happening in the coverage space. Yeah. All right. So Chris, I just want to give you the last word. Why are users coming out to event like this? If you've got any metrics as to kind of rough order of magnitude, how many people are here and what do you hear from the users as to what they're really excited about to learn in today's event? So unfortunately it's been a busy morning and I haven't even looked at registration yet. But the users are excited to hear what's going on in the cloud. They haven't really dabbled in it much. So we'll still keep bringing cloud providers back. And what I'm hearing is that it's interesting. I say their companies aren't affording training but there's so much training out there on the web that's free. So I think people come here to network, find out what's real and what's not. And so it's not architecture. They want to find out from other users what's working for them. And then they're adopting those practices. All right. So Chris, thanks as always for helping me kick this off. I know both of us were here last weekend and we'll be back here again Sunday for the New England Patriots facing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC championship. But we've got a full day of technology here, including special guests from the Patriot alumni at the end of the day. So stay with us. We'll have the full broadcast all day. And thanks for watching theCUBE. Thanks. Since the dawn of the cloud, theCUBE has been there. Connecting with executives, practitioners, entrepreneurs, thought leaders. But you're not a thought leader anymore. You're a futurist. That's the new trend, futurist.