 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE VMworld 2013. We're live in San Francisco. We are on the ground at VMworld 2013. Day three of three days of coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced extracted system of the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, John McCose, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. Hi everybody, Ramin Sayers here. He's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware's cloud management business. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. So obviously, VMware, big show for you guys. Management is a big conversation here. Moving up the stack has been the theme. So just give folks a sense of what your group does at VMware and then we'll go into some specific questions. Sure, well I mean this has been a multi-year journey for us as we've helped build the customer's foundation around server virtualization, expanding that to the rest of the data center around beyond compute to network and storage. Automation and management become that much more critical to deliver on the promise and premise of the private cloud. So fortunately, we've had the opportunity over the last three and a half, four years to incrementally build out the portfolio of offerings that most of our customers and partners saw debuted here. What are some of the key things right now that updates for the news for you guys that you're announcing at the show here? Sure, well I mean if you looked at some of the things we showed the other day, it's all around how do you enable flexibility and choice but you have the policy governance control. So what we showed the other day with Carl on main stage was how our vCloud automation center as part of the new vCloud 5.5 suite really enables a separation of duties between administrators on the infrastructure side versus developers who are requesting virtual machines with operating systems and improved developer productivity. But beyond that we also announced some new capabilities in core vSphere that take advantage of some of the management capabilities like vSOM which is vSphere with operations manager. Yeah, so talk about the uptake there a little bit. I mean it's relatively new. Your executives talk about it on their earnings call. There's always a lot of discussion about going beyond core vSphere. So talk about the customer reaction and the uptake of it. Sure. So it's fast growing product line in the company right now. Awesome. And fortunately that's primarily because customers need to be able to automate more and more of not just the inside bowels of what's going on in vSphere but also all the peripherals with respect to network and storage. And so the uptake for us has been on two fronts. One has been adoption of the vCloud suite holistically and customers looking to not only build a homogenous based private cloud but a heterogeneous based hybrid cloud. So as we look at the vCloud suite the starting point for a lot of customers is let me get granular control of the vSphere based environment and then I want to be able to bridge out what we call expand out to the hybrid whether it be public or even vCloud hybrid services that we announced. Okay, so when you say holistically you're talking about the whole enchilada of the suite to get all the capabilities. Right? So in addition, I mean you guys have credible renewal rates. I mean your customers are very loyal. Customers oftentimes are doing multi-year renewal engagements, right? So can you talk about that a little bit? You're seeing more and more of that from sort of bespoke little buying patterns to much more of holistic and broader whether it's ELAs or more pieces of the pie. You got rising average ASPs. Talk about that a little bit in terms of customer adoption. Sure, I'll talk more specifically around the management business and then more broadly around VMware. From a management point of view our attach rate to the VCR install base has dramatically grown over the last year and a half. And the first half of this year particularly we've seen a substantial growth as we announced and a lot of our earnings calls. And what's driving that at the end of the day? Well one is more customers are continuing to move from the phase one to two and even three of the kind of maturity life cycle. And so that means they're moving past the 40% adoption. So great example that is VCOps that's really helping manage a vSphere deployment. So our attach rate and penetration rates around that are growing. And in particular you're seeing not only VMware direct reps but also the channel pick that up. So earlier this year we announced solution rewards for our channel partners which they get 30 points rebates. We've done a lot to certify and train them. So both our direct selling and our partners are actually going and helping customers evolve their maturity to go beyond 40% to 60% and ultimately get to the private cloud or the cloud suite. A few years ago John and I were talking and we called management a jump ball. You had a lot of traditional players and sort of a lot of entrenched management of suites, offerings, solutions, whatever you want to call them. You guys have begun to really change that market. Can you talk about sort of in that context where you are today and what your vision is going forward as a player in that marketplace? Yeah, I mean if you look at IDC for example and they just put out a report, it says VMware is the fastest growing management vendor in the space. And part of that is due to the fact that we have such a big loyal install base and they want to do more with respect to what they're doing already with the server virtualization products, right? And so as they expand out to integrate networking and storage they need manageability, they need consistent way but they need a new way. Not a traditional framework play that takes a long time to get into this dynamic environment, right? So one of the great things is the feedback of the customers whether it be Vmugs or part of the design process, we really intently listen to a lot of our customers and partners and we give them access to a lot of our products and betas and we innovate with them so it's not just VMware building these for them. You got to ask you obviously the landscape question and you have a lot of history in the enterprise software business, I mean probably different companies as well. VMware's got a great brand, we talked to Sanjay Poonan earlier, he came from SAP, he was excited about the opportunity. We didn't really talk much about what it was like before he got there but he's got his running shoes on but you've been around the block on enterprise software management. We all know the history, HP OpenView, systems management, EMC. What's changed now? What is the big thing that you look at from product management to go to market that is a critical difference from the old way to new way? Still a lot of legacy, you've got to bridge the legacy. What's the new open markets that you see and technology that's underneath? Right, great question actually. I think something from a technology perspective was changed is that the dynamic environment simply cannot be managed by those older frameworks. I worked on a lot of them, I built a lot of them and in this new world, the cloud era, you need different types of techniques around machine learning and analytics to understand what's going on deep within the bowels of all the abstraction layers that we're creating. So that starts to separate the pack right there, right? But I think what else is going on is there's a very aggressive and progressive move towards open source, right? Whether that be an open stack or whether it be other open source technologies, we see quite a bit around Puppet or Chef or Assault in the development community as well, right? So what's the biggest change there is open source is enabling developers to be a lot more productive but also it's also enabling them to be more demanding as to what they expect from infrastructure. So therefore the traditional tools and the way delivery models of infrastructure as a service, fun amount needs to be turned upside down, right? And so no longer does IT have that monopoly control when developers are going outside? I've always asked myself that question and I remember when monitoring started hitting the scene in the late 80s with client servers, oh, we had all these networks now from one coax string to hubs and then you got all kinds of great stuff. It's always the infrastructure that drives management. Now we have management paradigms in an ever changing architecture of the operating systems or the networks. So now you got massive architectural changes. People are trying to shoehorn old management techniques into a moving train on the architecture side. So this is not even a done deal. How can you manage something that's not known? So that's kind of like the mindset that we're looking at. So one, do you agree with that? And then what's your commentary around that? What do you do? How do you manage that dilemma? Because you've got clients looking for systems management and monitoring. Yeah, so first of all, I do agree with that. That's part of the reason why I'm here at VMware. I got the opportunity several years ago to come in and ground up, build this technology and business out. And if I didn't believe that, I probably wouldn't be here, right? But more specifically, I think the challenge for customers is that if they try to go about the private cloud or hybrid cloud from a brown field perspective, meaning that they're trying to leverage their old and new, it's very difficult and cumbersome because people in process is just as important as technology. And what we've seen the customers be most successful is where they actually instantiate a new green field private cloud and start to look at new paradigms of networking and storage and management to deliver upon the requirements of development and lines of business. And usually those customers are a lot more successful than the brown field environments where they try to leverage the existing tools and frameworks and processes. And you're an example, you can share with folks that have done that, the name names, but just describe the environment of the green field where they had challenges and kind of stuck in the middle on one hand, you've got the brown field, all stuck in the middle, half pregnant, whatever you want to call it, too. Okay, clean sheet of paper. Yeah, so there's one big bank in the media and central part, they tried for nine months to, in essence, this is exactly similar to a service provider there. Take the network team, the storage team, the compute team, bring them together and create a virtual shared services group, right? It was like the UN, right? And you had to go sell and solicit everyone for nine months, they made no progress. And the reason they made no progress was one group and Sila didn't understand the challenges of the other and there was no single person that was the authority to break decisions. So they ended up parking that and they ended up going with a converge stack and they rolled that in and they brought in a new team. They picked the best and brightest from the compute team, the network team, the storage team, that became the cloud organization, right? And that was a green field cloud in a three and a half month time they were able to consider- So Silo Busters basically, basically get guys who don't even care about the politics of the silos and saying, go. Yeah, go eat class as we say, right? The Silo Busting is very critical as we're busting down the technology silos. We're also very cognizant of the fact that the process and organizational barriers are often the issues that customers need to address, too. I want to come back to something that I said earlier about analytics. A lot of people believe that the sort of traditional policy-based management is dead. That it's too complicated, you need machines to actually make decisions. Humans can't make them fast enough. So that's kind of, it sounds like bromide, but still, this makes some sense. What are your thoughts on that and what are you guys doing in that regard? So we applied that principle quite a bit. If you look at our VC Ops portfolio products and our log insight, it's all about machine learning, behavior analysis technology that starts to understand normal and abnormal behavior of workloads, right? And the reason is because in the traditional infrastructure and data center, a user had to define what they thought a high and low threshold amount would be. But this infrastructure is so dynamic and applications are so dynamic, it's impossible for a user to know the variability and what a workload or infrastructure should act like. So when you have characterization of an application or workload that learns a behavior through different cycles, that can be very informative as to where you provision, deprovision, as well as where operationally you need insight to what's going on in the underlying infrastructure. So I have a heavy investment in machine learning, PhD, analytics folks, constantly building analytics and algorithms into the VC Ops product and also other parts of our ITBM portfolio to help with better improved decision making, whether that's done by human or by providing that insight or automatically, as we say, by the machines and the system itself. Now is that a predominantly organic investment or are there some acquisitions as well involved in that capability, it's both. So we acquired one technology company, it's called Integrion several years ago, right? And we've built upon that. We have a lot of machine learning PhDs. We acquired a set of folks last year with our acquisition of our log insight product as a company that we brought in. But we also added more than quadrupled those teams over the last couple of years. Awesome. We love machine learning. I mean, Dave and I are data junkies and we have our own little analytics system and unsupervised machine learning. And it's interesting as you get more data, it gets smarter, right? So you need the data, right? You can't manage the data. It's Jeff Jonas' puzzle, right, John? Jeff Jonas, guy from IBM, real brilliant scientist, chief scientist, and says piece of the puzzle here or there, you can't really see it, but as the puzzle starts to get bigger and put together you can get more data. So what's interesting is how you make use of the data. Because more data's not necessarily great, right? And as you- How do you act on it, right? Yeah, how do you act on it? And as you heard during the various presentations, the amount of telemetry that's going in and even non-out, outside of IT is just enormous, right? But inside IT, from the hardware platforms all the way up, you're getting inundated with more and more metrics, right, events. The visualization challenge alone is mind boggling. So how do you provide the right insight to the specific metrics or KPIs, you know, at that point in time, is a difficult balance for us? And what sort of UIs do you provide that visibility? We spent several years and we're still fine-tuning it. Right? I mean, expectation maximization like protocols to go in there, figure out, hey, we've seen this pattern before. Yeah. So we're actually starting to use some social principles now. So because machine learning, you know, is good to understand what's good and normal and not normal, but then the user needs to start to vote whether they kind of like it or dislike it, right? Now which users? The end users of the system, of the tool, right? So how, so for example, one of the things we're doing in our release right now is we're asking the user to rate something. Was this helpful or not? So then we can start to better fine-tune the algorithms for that particular use case and scenario that they're managing, right? Crowds or techniques to feed the... Well, using the human intelligence, it's really bouncing humans and machines. You're spot on, that's exactly where we're doing. Yeah, and that's new data too, that's new data. Yeah, so we've actually expanded from the structured data that we've talked about before log in with VC ops to now unstructured data as we saw during the main stage with log insight. So now we can, the beautiful thing is we bring the both together and so with time series structured data with unstructured log data, now we can provide powerful insight to what's going on. What does dynamic ops fit into all of this? It's a very critical control point for us and for customers. Ask more... And what does that sit on the stack? Above or beyond, I mean what does that piece sit on the stack? So logically it sits on top of the VC-VCD stack for it within a homogeneous vSphere environment but also sits on top of any converged stack, sits on top of any roll your own kind of infrastructure and it bridges the release automation process from applications upstream with a component called AppDirector and downstream to provision on a single virtual machine or a set of virtual machines or a virtual data center. Yeah, I mean we like Leslie, we've had him last year in the queue, he's one smart guy so that was a nice acquisition too. So the final question for you, we're going to break on the segment is I want to just tell folks what's your goals for the year? Obviously you're in a hot area, dynamic networks are changing the game on management, you guys get that, it's a clear vision, no debate there, check the box, now execute, get the hiring and the PhDs, that's smart, get in the big day, use big data for you, little crowdsourcing, little new gesture-based data coming in to complement some of the machine learning. On the business side, what should you do, what's your goal list for the next year, so half a year or so? So obviously we have very ambitious and aggressive vision around software-defined data center and we've debuted some of the announcements here, we logically have another event coming up in Barcelona, we'll be making some more announcements there so for us, my engineering organization, we're heads down, we're pumping out products, right? We have a bunch coming out in the second half and a lot coming out in the first half, so one is just keep innovating at the pace that we're innovating, right? The second is make it simple, right? Management and automation needs to be much simpler in this new world. And so we're rapidly innovating, prototyping new stuff, some of it comes to market, some of it doesn't, and so we're looking at continued integration development with our partners and our customers to help influence that. I do have one more question just popped in my head and as you were saying that, a personal question, you know, you grew up in Silicon Valley, you know innovation, you've seen it right in front of your eyes from the Apple orchards to now the crowded valley that it now is. You know what I'm talking about there, if you grew up here, no, not from the East Coast, so I wasn't there then. It was A4 caught for me. And I should have bought a house when I stood up here. My biggest mistake in five houses. But all seriousness, I mean, you had a great run in your career, you were at Netscape, you've been at the startups, you've been at HP, now VMware, talk about the culture of VMware. We were talking this morning with Pat and the team and Sanjay, it's a technical culture. It is. And they say the word cult, I mean I like that word, but it kind of makes, I don't really like that word too much, but it's techniques, innovation is key. And what are some of the, some things you can share about the culture? You know, on a personal note, I must say that in your career, you only have a few opportunities like this that I have here at VMware where you get a ride like this, right? And if you surf, you surf, you understand when you get those, right? And this is just an unbelievable opportunity culture for me to be in. And a lot of the folks are here at VMware. With Pat coming on board, he wholeheartedly believes in this SDC vision. He's doubled down on the management business for me in particular in the group. So we're accelerating a lot of the innovation IP creation. But at the end of the day, you got to live and breathe and die by the technology. And if you're not passionate about it, you don't thrive here. Passionate. We love big fans of VMware obviously in Palo Alto, great company and great ride. You know, there's tenses up and you know, the one year since Pat's been there, changed and Pivotal's out doing their thing. Nice separation. That's still the stack that Merit still showed in 2010, still just two companies now attacking it in an ecosystem that's doing great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We'll be right back. Stay with us. Day three, wall-to-wall covers to theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.