 Okay, welcome to theCUBE. We are live here in San Francisco, California, for VMworld for now three and a half days of live coverage. We had three days. Jeff, we added them today because one, we're still here with the setup and we're going to, you know, extra mile and talk to some great guests. We've got the Vanessa Alvarez going to come on shortly but really this is a wrap up of VMworld. Great show. Everyone's kind of winding down. All the booths are gone. It's just the last minute, last keynotes, last sessions. I'm John Furrier, the founder. I'm looking at him. I'm joined by co-host Jeff Frick because Dave Vellante flew back. He's back in Boston and he's been ready for his next trip. Jeff, great to see you again. You too. Yeah, I talked to Dave this morning. We actually had a meeting. So, you know, kudos to you and Dave for going strong for three days. Plus we also had the bonus event with the NetApp coverage Tuesday night at AT&T Park. And I know the official VMworld party was last night at AT&T Park. Part of the thing that goes on at these conferences obviously is the sessions but also there's all the vibe afterwards and there's been a lot of events. So give us a little update on how that went last night at AT&T. Party was great. None of the parties that these shows, you know, EMC, World Oracle, Open World, it involves music, a band of some sort. But, and they usually had some, you know, hall room here at Moscone or, you know, a loud party and drinking. But they held it at AT&T Park where we had the NetApp VIP event with a cube there. And they had the entire field turned into a carnival live stage. And it was just a great event. I mean, probably the best ever for VMworld, no doubt. People were happy. They were smiling, dancing on the field, their shoes off. I felt like I was in Golden Gate Park and, you know, and everyone's like chilling out. It was really a great event. Carl Aschenbach kicked it off with great speech. VMworld's growing, their business is growing. And obviously it's the 10th anniversary so the party was extra special. And I had a chance also to hang with Carl and the former CMO, Rick Jackson and all the senior execs in the private area yesterday got to see them at a personal level and it just reaffirmed some of the things we've already known, which is great culture at VM where great people, and again, their customers and their partners were all happy last night. Really the best party I've been to for VMworld, certainly. And it rivals up there with any of the events I've been into at these conferences. That's great. Yeah, and the guest list we've had has just been phenomenal. So I look forward to going back as the coaches say and looking at the tape. Pat Gelsinger yesterday morning kicked it off at 9 a.m. I think we're going to have that tape up online so you can watch it. But even though the theme here has been a lot about 10 years of VMware and how things have changed so much there's something like 23,000 people running around here in all the Moscone centers and all over the streets of San Francisco hotels. But Pat said really, or not Pat, but Peter said it's really a renaissance today. So it's almost like a new beginning and really the infrastructure and the pieces of virtualization as they move from simple computing to networking and storage is really enabling, I think as Pat said, to let businesses move at the speed of business and not at the speed of infrastructure. Yeah, I mean to me, it's really what highlights some of the key points here that doesn't get reported is the little positionings, the little gestures, the positioning of the vendors and some of the conversations and I took a break from theCUBE yesterday afternoon to go down to an event Intel had near the ballpark, AT&T Park. Jerry Rice was there. They were talking about big data and fantasy football and really what's happening is a new user experience is developing Jeff and I think if you look at what VMware is doing here it's about being positioned to have the engine, the engine of the car, if you will, or the main technology to power, essentially new user experiences. So the Intel event with Jerry Rice was talking about how fans are changing their experience based on data. Fantasy football was kind of like the highlight and it's really, it's about new experiences and I think to me, I've always said in theCUBE is it's about new expectations users have and IT and the technology leaders haven't always thought about that. So we're in a new modern infrastructure, new modern time where a new user expectation is going to evolve and new user experiences. The companies that can enable that and provide that will be winners. Certainly we talked to Sanjay Poonan here who's heading up the end user experience. He came from SAP which spent a lot of time on enterprise collaboration, but also in the iPad hit, SAP rolled out some really elegant and nice mobile solutions. So I think that's a telegraph from Pat Gelsinger and Sanjay's formal role that you're going to see VMware really enabling kick butt mobile experiences, not as a device but as an enabling technology and that's where virtualization will play well. Yet another part of the scene that's going on that not everybody can see overtly is all the analysts presentations that I've been able to sit in on a couple of those, John. And quite a few of them said, and as Pat, another great quote, we're in the age of APIs not UIs and there were a number of companies that we met with in the analyst briefings. I said, you know, a couple of years ago they couldn't do what they're doing today. Leveraging this infrastructure and leveraging the APIs of lots of different applications in new and innovative ways and then bringing the horsepower to provide business insight and enable people to use technology to do things that they could never do before. Yeah, and it's really about, you know, really being on the track with the right technology. And I was just reading an article, I just got a note from Beth Parasu from Tech Target who's a great reporter. She just reported that VMware is splitting vCloud director into vCenter and vCloud automation. And that's really an indication, a small little piece of news, but very relevant because you look at the orchestration and some of the things that make those end user experiences happen is about putting the right technology in the right group. So that's a significant announcement because management software and the management and the automation is the critical differentiator for a lot of these vendors because if infrastructure as a service gets commoditized, if there's a thousands of new servers out there in a new way and you've got open stack evolving, management is the key to success. And we've been hearing that throughout the show that management and moving up the stack has made critical. So again, VMware is doing extremely well. The growth of the conference has been fantastic. The people there are all jazzed up, they're all lined up, they're excited, they have very simple metrics, software defined data center, hybrid cloud and end user computing. So the vibe is very positive, customers are happy, the employees are focused. And I think that is the thing that I walk away with. Yeah. And two, I just want to take a moment, you know, VMware gave us a great setup here. If you're still at the show, come by, we're in Moscone South at the west end of the lobby. But I want to give a quick shout out, John, to some of our sponsors who enable us to come to these type of events and provide the coverage that we can. And obviously VMware for really helping us out, Newtonix, Fusion IO, a long time friend of the cube, Barracuda Networks, SimpliVity, EMC. Obviously we cover EMC's world and I'd love to cover their events. Commvault, IO data centers, a new sponsor for the keep talking a little bit about kind of the next generation, because as you said in your interview with them, there has to be something somewhere at the end of the line, right? There are actually boxes in power. Viridant, Juniper Networks, HP, Service Mesh, and Rackspace, again, without the generous underwriting support of our sponsors, we couldn't take our show out on the road. And again, if you're in the neighborhood, come by, you can see it's a nice production that we tried to put on here at the cube. And I think that's the key to the success of the cube. We want to go out and get that signal from the noise and report. And I don't mind doing 13 hours of straight interviews like we did Tuesday. You know, my eyes are bleeding a little bit today from the party last night and all the coverage. And we've got some more news. Vanessa Alvarez is going to be up next and she's awesome. She's now at a company, but she was a long time analyst. She's one of the early Clouderati analysts. She's been there from day one on the cloud explosion. Knows everyone. So we're going to get her perspective. It's just on a personal level, what she's doing now. So this is just a great show. Without the generous support of our underwriters, we can't bring the cube and bring our perspective here and make people uncomfortable. Even Pat Gelsinger was a little bit uncomfortable when I, you know, I didn't know he's going to react that well to some of my comments, but it shows Pat's got the fight in him and he is believing in his vision. So it's really exciting. Again, Gelsinger etched about all the top executives were here inside the cube, as well as customers, entrepreneurs. And you know what I'm excited about? The entrepreneurs, right? We had Peter Levine, who's a big-time venture capitalist from Andreessen Horowitz. Jerry Chen is a big-time venture capitalist now with great luck. He was at EM's VMware for many, many years. And we had Steve Herodon, who was the CTO of VMware now at VC. So you're seeing the VMware mafia, the V mafia is being called out there. Early employees out making investments, starting new companies. So VMware, I predict, will have an impactful market in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. And if this continues to track the way it is, they're going to be a very, very large growing company. Yeah, and as you said, I think in a couple of interviews, it's all about the ecosystem. So not only are there formal ecosystems with partners and technology partners that they foster in the company, but as people leave the company and go out and do their own ventures with that background and that connection, I think you'll see it, I've seen it before, the other Silicon Valley success stories like PayPal, et cetera. So it is about the people and that's really why we like to cover the tech athletes because there's technology at the end of the wire, but it's people that put it in play. Let me ask you a question. You've obviously been here in theCUBE, you've been watching all the interviews and reading the guests and also going out and scouring, looking for stories and putting your ear to the ground. What's your perspective? What did you learn and what was your observation? Shared the crowd because you were behind the scenes, doing a lot of hands shaking, meeting people, talking to people. What's your perspective? To me, I think it's the juxtaposition between it's been here for 10 years and we started at this really simple way of trying to virtualize things. I remember back the early ASP days, the application service providers where everyone was afraid of the internet and shared infrastructure and this and that and now it's completely morphed and I think it was Levine that talked about going completely the opposite way with these itty bitty pieces of compute power, networking power and some of the briefings we were in talking about, this real move of virtualization from the very simple compute into networking into storage and really it being kind of the start of another chapter. So it's not closed at 10 years. It really feels like this was just an enabling step and now the momentum is really going. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I'd like to share with the folks out there from my observations, again, getting into under the covers a little bit is that a couple points of that I'm excited about. One, VMware is transformed and positioned for the new generation and there's a lot of bets that they're making and VMware is smart. They will make the adjustments if their bets are a little bit off and we might see that with hybrid cloud or however that morphs but I think that's a great track. Two, the talent and the technology guys that VMware has, they maintain that cultural tech mojo. VMware is known to have tech geeks and real guys who care about technology. So it's like having a good mechanic work on your car. You want guys building good technology. So what you're afraid of when you see companies change with either new leadership or market shifts is they lose their soul, right? I mean, and VMware has not lost their soul yet. They have that tech mojo and people complain about some things that they do but at the end of the day, they have that leadership and then at the executive level, they're focused on the business. I mean, for the first time I've seen VMware, really flexing their management muscles saying, hey, you know what, we're serious. We want to grow and build an economic engine. Carl is straight up, straight on his metrics. They have good sales, go to market focus and again, they'll make the adjustments. So that was one point. Two, the technology people that are here understand that virtualization is going to change and enable and that was really exciting and you saw that through a lot of the other interviews. So those are the two things that I say that were really, really highlight. And again, the ecosystem, I think that's going to be a conversation. I mean- What was the biggest surprise, John? You've been coming to these things forever. I mean, what's the thing that, was there anything that just kind of blew your doors that you did not expect at all? I think what I was expecting was more of the same as the VMware, hey, we're tech geeks and I think what I was really blown away by is the growth focus of the management and they always done that before but here it's like, they see specifically a real big prize at the end of this and I think Pat's focus of execution and he knows technology and you got Sanjay Pune and he knows tech, Carl knows tech, I mean these guys are tech guys so Intel had that same concept. If you were in marketing at Intel, you were an engineer. You didn't just get hired out of business school as a marketing degree. You actually had chops and you had to have some tech chops. So again, VMware is, that was the biggest surprise. On the interview side, I was really surprised on the Andreessen Horowitz really aggressively going after Pat on the vision and Mark kind of, you know, needling him a little bit on the whole vision of the compute side and I think that's an open book. The management, the systems management and what the compute will look like. I think it's still an open book and those bets are going to be one or lost. So to me, that's a simple answer. You're done on one side of the street or the other and VMware is not on the right side of the street. It's going to hurt their growth. Yeah, well, and we've talked about many times with a lot of these larger tech companies that are continuing to try to maintain growth rates like a smaller startup or unnecessarily a smarter, but a smaller company. How do you maintain that excitement? How do you maintain the growth on such a big and growing base? And I think the other kind of insightful thing that Pat said was, you know, we still have a long way to go in mobile, right? There's a lot of companies out there now that are mobile first that are developing the mobile applications. You know, I think it's obviously the extension of the, of the bring your own device, but they do, they do have the excitement. They do say, you know, we're tech people that are excited about tech. I think you had a car analogy in one of the interviews talking about if you want mechanics that are excited about cars, right? You want car people building cars and making cars because they like cars and there really seems to be a positive mojo where people are excited about the opportunities that they could do things before that they couldn't do before. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, VMware has a cultural following and there's a cult following that some people call it. They don't really like that. I don't like that word, but they have a very passionate fan base and their customers and their partners. I mean, people, I mean, because they're tech guys and they see virtualizations like magic really has changed the game and technology and it's still going to be that disruptive enabler. And I remember back in the days in the 80s when the standards were evolving, you had proprietary networks, you had TCPIP came out and literally created a new industry and created billions of dollars of wealth creation and that one little element, 3Com, Cisco, you name the companies from that spinoff internet working, that was a huge little little disruptive enable that just created massive wealth. I think that virtualizations is our generation's enabler and I think the wealth creation and the opportunities are going to be fantastic. So I think VMware smells that and they see it and they see cloud as the next data center and I think the hybrid is the right approach. Again, I still think it's still not a done deal. Hence my comment about being a way station or halfway house, I still think IT still needs to get muscled up and every CIO that I talk to always talks privately around yeah, the past 15 years has been consolidation, consolidation, consolidation. I haven't been working out, I have no muscle and now they're asked to essentially move mountains. So they need to have, you know, build up their strength and IT and technology and execute. So it's just not that easy. So that's kind of like what I'm seeing is the big trend. Yeah, but it still seems to be a lot of horses for horses with the hybrid approach and using the different types of flavors of cloud if you will based on the workload and whatever the logic is around the business process. So let's get back to it. We got a few more guests lined up today. We're excited. We're going to go to VMworld 2013. We're going to go finish the last wall, right? Our wall to wall to wall. We'll be right back with our first guest after the short break.