 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE TVs, live, wall-to-wall coverage of VMworld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com, here with my co-host on the director's set this week, Brian Gracely. So, Brian, you've been a guest many times on theCUBE, but now you're in, back to back to back sessions, context switching, we're talking cloud, we're talking hyperconvergence, we're talking containers, we're talking all sorts of stuff. What's your first impressions here from day one at VMworld? So, we came into the week, we weren't sure, there wasn't a lot of sort of pre-noise. People are excited, people are excited for, in some cases, the ecosystem, they're excited because VMworld's talking about hybrid cloud and things, they're talking about containers, they're talking about hyperconverge like crazy. That's when the big takeaway for me is, people are excited that VMworld is validating a lot of these markets that maybe a year ago were sort of buzzy. Yeah, so, it's interesting, one of the critiques we came in is there wasn't an overriding theme. I mean, last year, the kind of, Marvin Evo Rail was dominating the year before, I mean, everybody in networking was like, oh my God, I see your acquisition, NSX is coming to play, you're before that even, it was Paul's stepping down, Pat's coming in, there wasn't an overriding theme, it's ready for any. It was like, okay, any apps and any workload, I'm not sure, but I think you're right, there's a lot of different pieces going on and sometimes we miss out that, when we're looking for kind of a big bang. Right, right, well, when you're looking at it from your perspective, today was a little unusual, Pat typically goes first in the keynote, today was a lot of other things, but hyperconverged, VSan, the new Evo, what used to be Evo Rack is now Evo STDC, what's your take on both hyperconverge and hyperconverge and what's going on with STDC? Yeah, I think it's a great point because I tell you, VMware's been looking to expand into some areas, we're not just talking about 100% virtualized and what apps can or I can't do or what the competitive landscape is for the hypervisors, so let's start with VSan, actually I had a good conversation on Twitter that a lot of people have been hating on VSan and they said, oh, you know, Evo Rails is expensive and there's lots of solutions that are undifferentiated, I don't know how the community makes money, but first of all, the foundation of that technology is VSan and the storage group inside VMware has a lot of things they're doing, what's going on with V-Volls, what's happening with VSan, and that go-to-market for a converge or hyperconverged solution isn't easy, I mean, Brian, you and I lived through the early days of what was Acadia, then VCE and it took them almost 18 months to kind of get things copacetic with the channel and even though VSan might be a software piece, how do I bundle it, how do I package it, so we had Evo Rail last year and VSan now 6.0, 6.1 got announced, what was originally going to be called Evo Rack is now called Evo SDDC and a big piece of that is what they also call the Evo SDDC Manager, so really how do I pull together all the components of compute, storage, and networking, how things like NSX fit into it, pulled all together because if I'm really going to make that simplicity, it's not just software but the management of all of those pieces and boy, I mean hyperconvergence was buzzy last year and we did a bunch of interviews, big guys like Nutanix are here of course, SimpliVity, Big Booth giving away another car, I talked to Scott Lowe and David Davis, wrote a book actually sponsored by SimpliVity, and a bunch of startups, so it's only grown and lots of customers trying this stuff out. Any comments from you on the hyperconverge piece? For me it was, we're continuing to see startups want to get into this space which tells me that the VC community still sees there's value in there, as we talk to them, they've got customers, they're sort of working through the challenges of this, so that part is encouraging, because I know a lot of people had some concerns about if it's an all VMware stack, what do I do? And the fact that there's room for not only VMware and the things they're doing, but all these other companies is encouraging, it means that there's big market opportunities, it means there can be big market change. Yeah, absolutely, and you talk about, okay, the VMware stack, what about the hybrid cloud? The big message was one cloud, any apps, any device, and we were kind of going back and forth, it's like well, does it just mean I have VMware here and there? But when you kind of unpack the messaging that Karol and Ragu went through is that unified hybrid cloud, so they're not just saying it's only their environment, there is ties to AWS and Azure, even though they don't want to mention them. It was like, we can't give them validation if I say AWS three times, maybe they'll appear, but what's your take on that cloud messaging? Well, a couple things, to me, when I heard the unified hybrid cloud, what I really heard was them tying together the VMware cloud on both ends, but really making the network piece an important part of it, which is important. We know it's difficult to networking together, all that security and everything, but to me, I still think it misses this idea of calling it one cloud. We had Rodney Rogers on who's CEO of Virtustream. Rodney sort of said, look, the reality is most customers are gonna, they're really managing multiple clouds as resources, and so I think VMware still sort of, I mean, they're committed to this, it's the same everywhere. I think the reality based on our research is customers are saying, there's a lot of other clouds out there and a lot of them are doing really well, so yeah, if they're not gonna mention them by name, trust me, customers are mentioning them to them. Yeah, I mean, the recent revenue data that we put out there, if we look at what we expect the public cloud portion of what AWS sells and the cloud solutions that Microsoft sells, which includes Office in the SaaS space and Azure, both of those revenues are likely to be bigger than what VMware does in revenue this year, so it's big numbers, and boy, the growth rates are, you know, you're talking 60 to 80% typically, which is much bigger than the traditional infrastructure guys dwarfs what's happening in the virtualization space. All right, so we talked about kind of some of the infrastructure piece talked about cloud. Brian, there's some DevOps hackathon going on, there's vSphere integrated containers, what about, kind of the emerging cloud native and developer focused stuff, what's your take on what VMware's announced and doing this week? Yeah, so I want to get down there, they're having a whole track on DevOps, I want to get down and go see some of that, we've been swamped doing shows. Really excited though about all the things that were announced today about VMware integrated containers or vSphere integrated containers, Project Photon, that maturing, we had Patrick Chazan from Docker on here, he was excited about the Docker and VMware partnership. That's an area that I'm really excited about, because I think what I see is, you've got the people that are pure containers and a lot of those platforms are cool and we've seen them at DockerCon and other things, but the enterprise wants to know how to do it and VMware's got such a hold in terms of how to virtualize resources, it's good to see them making a big deal, it's on stage, they're showcasing it, it's open source, so to me that's one of the real highlights of what's going on and I'm excited to see what the marketplace thinks of DevOps Day and Developer Day here at VMworld, definitely different markets for them. Yeah, absolutely, even one of the interviews I did today talking to a practitioner that was doing hyperconverge, he was talking about how it helps him with DevOps it simplifies my environment, it can allow me to do some of those changes that I need organizationally and allow me the freedom to change my architecture of my organization to be able to move faster and to change the way that I'm doing things. The other thing that we said when we were coming into this was the big white elephant in the room is gonna be what's going on with VMware and their role in the Federation. Didn't, I mean, obviously they're not gonna say anything until what comes out, but a lot of people as we're talking in the hallway going, what will VMworld look like next year? Is it gonna still be VMworld? Is it gonna be something else? Did you get a feel from anybody in terms of like how much that concerns them or is that still just, it's just rumors? Yeah, we wonder how much of it is, those of us in the Twittersphere and the Clouderati just banding back and forth. When you talk about some of those fights or disagreements going on in the industry, a lot of times the customers aren't thinking about it. I haven't heard, I've talked to some companies sometimes when they're going through massive changes. When you've been acquired or there's threats of what's going on and you kind of get that fear. I haven't had that buzz yet. I've talked to a number of people that work for VMware and I'm not getting anything behind the scenes because we know that whatever happens with the Federation, VMware is an important piece of what's going on. I mean, that's why even there's discussion that says, hey, maybe VMware is the brand and the leader of what's there because that's going forward. What have you heard so far? I mean, we obviously heard from Rodney, Rodney was excited about what his role's going to be in terms of Clouderati. To me what I heard and you just reiterated it, the thing that's exciting out of all this is whether you're talking to the hyperconverged guys, you're talking to the cloud guys, it's about software and so software becomes that really important thing. So whatever ends up happening with the Federation, whether it's nothing or whatever, I think we're going to see more and more push towards what does software do, what do the software economics look like and quite honestly, if they're going to compete with an Amazon or Google or Azure, you better figure those out because at those growth rates, they're dealing with pure software. So. It's interesting, if you look at the initial partnered for the Evo SDDC, which isn't going to ship until 2016, but it's VCE, which you expect, but by the way, the underlying hardware on that, pretty sure that's some kind of ODM type thing. They're not sure how much they're sharing what goes in there. There's Dell. And the third one is Quanta. I mean, partnership with Quanta. We talked to Randy Baez, cloud scaling before he was bought with EMC. They were partnering with Quanta. It's been that discussion of how the software is going to change the underlying hardware and that's moving. See, Cumulus has a bigger booth here and is getting more involved on the networking side. Definitely some seismic shifts happening on the hardware space. Yep, absolutely. So a lot of things got announced today. Some of them were exciting, some of them incremental as you would expect. Tomorrow's going to be another big day. Pat's going to run the keynote. What are you looking forward to as we think about what we saw today versus what's coming? Anything, either trends you saw today or what might be coming tomorrow that you're looking forward to? Yeah, so there's always that, there's a couple of things here. First of all, what is the average VMware customer thinking? How much are they just coming in here to get certified and where are they with this mindset? So in the last few years we went through the, hey, that flash sounds interesting. Why am I doing it to, oh my God, of course I'm using flash. And a lot of storage here at the show. Hyper-converged is moving fastly along, I guess if you talk the traditional hype cycle. Cloud and how customers are thinking about cloud. We talk about this community. A lot of the people that did virtualization, they were the early adopters. They were the ones that got involved and they got excited to help make their infrastructure better and where are those people, are they digging in and saying, that DevOps stuff is all crap still and I'm not going to make change and where are they moving forward for new environments? So that's what I'm always kind of excited to see as to how open are we to the change and what is that environment going to look like going forward? How about yourself? So for me I look at it as, there's really four big shows that do infrastructure, right? There's this one, there's DockerCon is growing, OpenStack Summit's growing and then obviously Amazon or AWS re-invent. Those are the four big infrastructure sort of cloud shows. At the end of the day, VMware is still driving a lot of the momentum and they're still part of huge markets and so forth. So as much as people may have opinions on where they're at, how fast they're growing, they're still in the center of this stuff and in some cases they're driving the train. I'm excited tomorrow, we're gonna dive into NSX in a couple of different ways. We're gonna dive in with some of the partners working around OpenStack and we're doing a few different things so we're gonna figure out what the fringes of that SDDC look like that aren't just talking about the hypervisor. That part I think is gonna be pretty exciting to see how you unpack that. Yeah and actually I've been pretty happy. We've got a double set here. We're doing things a little bit different. Get to show off some socks sitting on the director's set and we've had room for some audience. So in the keynote area there were a ton of people packed in here. We definitely welcome people to come. We're gonna have panels on Tuesday and Wednesday, a bunch of them so they can come, they can ask questions. As always, hit us up through Twitter, send us notes. Always on the screen here to be able to find what we're doing. Brian, I'll give you last word, day one and going forward. Last word, so first off, had a great time today. Glad you guys are allowing me to be part of this thing. It's fun, you get to know the community. They wanna come talk to us. So good first day, lots of great energy. I think people are excited to hear what Pat's gonna talk about tomorrow and I think the guests we're gonna have are gonna help unpack that. So that part looks like it's gonna be fun and looking forward to tomorrow. All right, as always, find all the research on wikibon.com, the live videos as well as all the replays show up on siliconangle.tv. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you Brian Gracely for being here on this program. We are a wrap on the director's set for day one here, VMworld 2015 and this is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.