 here today why don't you guys introduce yourselves tell us who you are what you're doing here today I'm George Reese I'm CTO of in Stratus and author of cloud application architectures I'm Gary Ornstein I'm the host of the cloud computing show I do some guest blogging for giga ohm and then during the day we're going to come in called Fusion IO I'm Derek Harris I cover cloud computing and general infrastructure for giga ohm okay guys so we're all bloggers here tell me what are the stories that you're seeing develop here VMworld and how do you see it in the context of the rest of the market Derek why don't we start with you well so I think just from my cursory glance at the news this morning right I think I think we start with one big theme we're starting to see developers thank you is um is you know kind of the global expansion of a VMware if you will right I mean we're seeing you know there's new clouds popping up built on VM where we're seeing globally managed VMware clouds right I think you know VMware is making its entree into the database database business with its beef what I forget the name beef fabric controller so I mean there's I think you know it's a continual every year VMware expands bigger and bigger trend is definitely the tentacles are far and wide definitely one of the most interesting things I've seen is VMware's expansion into the storage arena so about a month or so maybe a little bit more they announced vSphere 5 with a slew of storage features in fact the vSphere blog is on in the midst of some 11 or 12 part series on all of the storage features and I think that we're gonna see a lot more there and if you remember how VMware so adeptly wedge themselves in between the CPU and the operating system to where the hypervisor is now a primary choice in architecting for the data center I think we're going to see the same thing with storage where they've got so many features and so many capabilities that are fitting right in between a CPU and the IO subsystems that eventually what IO subsystem you have isn't going to matter because VMware is going to have such a pervasive and expansive control layer there that that's all you're going to need I'd say the the most interesting thing going on is the coming of age of cloud foundry you know up until now it's been a lot of talk but I think with recent announcements you're seeing people actually doing real stuff with cloud foundry and it represents the culmination of all these acquisitions that VMware have been doing over the last couple of years moving away from virtualization as a product to the whole what I call the whole cloud in my blog owning all aspects of cloud. So Gary the themes that we see here at VMworld what you're talking about and you know and storage you know as one how do those contrast to you what you're seeing in the rest of the market for instance from players like Amazon web services you know and others in the space such as you know Citrix for that matter. Well I think Amazon is a whole different category because there's no option to run Amazon locally you can't own your Amazon cloud and I think if I'm looking around some of the signage at VMworld one of the taglines is your cloud own it so I think VMware is making a very clear distinction that that is not an option in most cases you can't own it even if you wanted to. Now Citrix of course is a different case because they give you options with the cloud.com offering an acquisition that happened recently and then this morning we saw that they expanded the open source arrangement around that. So you know I think we have to break that distinction into companies that do offer end users the ability to actually own the the infrastructure and the software to build the cloud from those that don't like like Amazon web services and and that distinction is going to grow over time I think there'll be people say you know it's important to me to own it and if we think about classic enterprise companies that is likely to remain the same for the foreseeable future but then there's plenty of people who don't care about owning it or controlling it to that level of degree and for those folks public cloud offerings like AWS are probably going to be just fine. Derek is that a challenge for VMworld for VMware in context of what we're talking about here the Amazon web services approach versus what VMware is doing? I don't think so I mean I think if you look at Dell this morning for example launching a VMware based cloud you know VMware has the number I think it claims hundreds of service provider partners I mean it's been a pretty smart play that says hey here's our vCloud here's vSphere here's vCloud here's our set of tools build your own cloud we'll run it and then it's you know starts you know have rolling out technology today we're on by the way now you can manage these all from this from a single interface I mean it's you know it's really trying to you know to use overuse cliche at this point you know become the cloud operating system right and you know so it has you in the data center it has you in the public cloud if you're larger enterprise which is what most VMware clouds target so I think it's but like there's I think it's a different play I don't think you're gonna see a lot of VMware based clouds trying to compete with Amazon it's not the business model and frankly I don't think they can compete you know for developers especially. Right George I'm curious from your perspective you know with VMware what you know what Derek's talking about are we in a time of disruption or are we in a time of just in another evolution of IT or is it or is it kind of both? Well it's kind of both and I actually disagree with his assessment a little bit because where VMware does well with its infrastructure offerings is with the legacy applications and you know doing stuff around taking what you've got and making it a little bit cloudy and and that's obviously important we saw that in the cloud switch acquisition by Verizon that people care about taking those applications and leveraging them in a cloudy environment but where VMware has a challenge and you know where they don't do so well at the infrastructure layer is the new kinds of applications built for cloud stuff that can auto scale rapidly can you know and scale back down can where where you know the design for failure stuff. George you didn't know that I mean all the cloud foundry stuff that's exactly what that is for so but what do you say? That's at the platform level and and and certainly that helps a lot in terms of for people who want to leverage that kind of stuff at the platform layer but if you want to build applications at the infrastructure layer that you know have these self-healing characteristics and auto-scaling characteristics the the vCloud infrastructure isn't there. Yeah I can't comment I don't know a lot of it. My question is though it does seem like the trend is to abstract away from the infrastructure where possible particularly when the case of you're either refactoring existing applications or developing new applications are you seeing something different? Well that's the essence of design for failure I mean is that you abstract away from infrastructure and that the availability of your application becomes the responsibility the application itself and there are two ways you can do it one is to go to the platform as a service layer and deploy your applications in a platform as a service container like cloud foundry or you could use an orchestration layer to you know to take care of the underlying infrastructure and there are times when you want to do one and there are times when you want to do the other. I have a question if I could for the for the my fellow panelists you know last year at VMworld we were still coming out of a lot of the infrastructure as a service layer I think it was just a few months after the spring acquisition to be announced this year I think we're seeing a lot and hearing a lot about the platform as a service layer what what are we going to be talking about next year? I think we'll see you know from my view it'll still be about data you know that I think that the big data story will probably be much more pronounced next year and I think you'll see that as more platforms emerge and more apps become developed you know Tim O'Reilly said in an interview that we did with him that he said you know what was Apple's killer app and he said it was the App Store and because what are you know what's the app what are those apps made of they're made of data and so that data story is just going to continue and it's going to continue into other realms you know beyond just our mobile devices as we all well know I mean it's going to continue into all aspects of our life and that that'll have that that's going to be a story for sure speaking of the App Store I think you know I mean so we forget when VM world rolls around and and it's all v-sphere and v-fabric and all these things we forget that VM were bought up you know how many software application startups in the past year I mean yeah that's what I was indicating right and so they bought Zimbra and they bought a live rocket and social cast and so I think you know so we're talking about cloud phones you were talking with the platform we're talking about applications right and those are all very very new things you know the cloud foundry launched in what April I think next year we're going to see that stuff all culminating right yes VM where be the new salesforce.com no no why not George first off I don't see that I see they have ambitions more towards the Google stuff than the salesforce.com stuff and I think their salesforce.com is too much of a juggernaut for them to go after that I mean you know like I said I mentioned this concept of the whole cloud they're obviously going out after owning SAS pass and infrastructure as a service but at this point they're there if they have any level of humility they would not go after the king of SAS is their first target but they are but they are competing more do you think this databases of service announcement today is a competitor database.com at all I mean they said to me at VMware they said well we are consider ourselves the private version of databases of service and database.com as the public version. I personally think that the reach into some of these higher level collaborative applications the slide rocket the Zimbra stuff is indicative of I think they're keeping their fingers there for a potential big push I think there's so much on the plate right now with the infrastructure activity with the platform activity of clown fatter is probably enough to keep everybody busy for the foreseeable future but I think that when you look at the the whole pie you know how long are we going to want to talk about these infrastructure components or even these platform components as an industry before we just talk about the applications that help us get the work done. I don't know when that happens but I just get a sense that it's coming. I think the focus on the application is here today I mean you look at even at the infrastructure layer you know my company has spent this year focusing on automating the deployment of custom build applications so it's not a question of the application meaning not worrying about infrastructure software or past it's more of a you know SAS is it's it's analogies so SAS is your you know as your shrink wrap application traditional shrink wrap software passes more like your traditional ASP stuff and then what goes in infrastructure is more like your your traditional custom build applications and the need for those three kinds of applications doesn't go away because we moved to cloud it's just the deployment models changed yeah yeah I think VMware and Paul meant you know spoke when they launched vSphere 5 a couple months ago that you know I pretty much said you know we want to get to a place where the infrastructure is down here and you know the few people I guess have to worry about it as possible we just want to deliver the applications I think that's coming I think that looks a lot more like Salesforce than it does like some infrastructure provider even if it's a software infrastructure. Well is it is are they looking at Salesforce they look at it Microsoft. Well Microsoft too I did a blog post on that at VMware is the new Microsoft but when you look at the executive leadership there's something like a combined 47 years of Microsoft experience in the executive suite at VMware so it's not hard and also if you read the bio for for Paul Maritz it's not hard to see the areas he was involved with and the areas that he's made help shepherd the company towards particularly the developer focus the collaboration focus so I definitely believe that's the case. You know we talk about applications being here it seems to me at least that they're here but we are like in such a time where it's so early in the game I mean you have the fact that people are carrying around two devices often one for work one for personal you know that kind of thing you know where so there's really you know they're trying to like talk about efficiencies in the enterprise but I think people are still trying to figure out those efficiencies in their lifestyle and how those two axes cross. Well that's one of the interesting things about the new development platforms things like CloudFroundy from my understanding is when you start building applications if you started today building an enterprise application one of your primary requirements is make sure I can use it on the phone or the iPad or some mobile device. I spoke to someone from IBM and he said from their from their social media group and he said with no uncertain terms the the phone is the number one form factor when designing especially collaboration software you know you can we can work it back to the PC said but you start with the phone. You start with the phone I mean even in you know day-to-day work when we put things together I insist with the team makes whatever you're putting together in terms of the document shareable easily on a phone right so we're reverting a lot of times to ASCII formatting just because folks are busy they don't want to open attachments they don't want to look at all this you know file format stuff just give me what I need in a simple format right now the universal way to do that that's totally in our control is to do a text-based email communication but I think what's coming is a whole suite of collaboration applications that are targeted to be mobile device first and everything else later yeah and I would point I mean so VMware owns a handful of those now right right and actually I mean to plug our upcoming mobilize conference Steve Herrod is is you know doing a chat about VMware's role in the mobile space so I mean there's there's a connection there right there's a there's definitely a maybe that will be the leapfrog for for VMware to get into the collaboration space that they come in with this thing of it mobile first yeah I mean I think the thing that glues it all together though is that once you get away from the having two devices and it becomes a true bring your own device world then suddenly all corporate resources with their public cloud private cloud or whatever have to be accessible anywhere any time and that means the firewall has to start coming down and and tools like cloud foundry and stuff get into play to make the ubiquity of availability of reality that yeah I think that's that's all that's all very true one of the other questions that I do have for you guys is you know the the technology progression that we're seeing across the marketplace you know we're seeing just incredible amounts of data but there's also there's some serious bottlenecks inside the enterprise right now and virtualization is creating major storage issues you know for companies the performance becomes a problem and and performance is always a way to you know to just is a way just to kill any adoption because you know who wants to use a phone that takes five minutes for the email to come up right so are there any themes that you guys are seeing along those lines that are in the back of your mind as as you go through an event like this so I mean Gary probably knows this better than anyone but I'll let you go first a solid state I mean we say you there are I think you're seeing I mean I honestly in the past month I think we've covered like five you know almost pure if not almost pure play SSD storage plays yeah one of them targeted specifically toward virtualization yeah it seems to be like everybody and their brother and grandmother now has a way to optimize storage for virtual machines which often includes some kind of solid state or flash media so historically when you know when you've operated in a in a non-virtualized environment you had relatively good control over that path between the application and the data but as you virtualize everything it gets far more complex and many people say that they don't feel comfortable virtualizing certain IO intensive applications like databases because they get worried about performance or that they can only virtualize a limited amount of things because they get worried about performance so flash memory and a variety of flash memory based solutions are a great way to do that without putting you know too much of a plug in I invite folks to visit the Fusion IO booth at the show to get a closer look at exactly what some ways to solve that problem are George you have any thoughts well there seem to be sort of two parts to your question was more of a enterprise barriers piece to right and then there was a storage piece and I think one of the interesting things on the enterprise barriers piece is just that you know you still have companies who you know they went to virtualization they bought into VMware because it was going to enable them to reduce procurement time down from three months to three days or whatever and what did it do they came in and they implemented a whole bunch of procurement processes around getting virtual machines and some we have a reality today in which the process for getting a virtual machine is the same as the process for getting a physical machine both in terms of time and it's I know of organizations that the chargeback model for VM is the same cost as a physical machine and then and then organizations that have learned that once they get a VM that even if they don't need it anymore they don't dare give it up because they don't you know so so as we take it a step further in the cloud how do we get it hands off of that right well well I want to thank you guys very much for joining us today taking some time out of your day we look forward to seeing you guys around and reading your reading your posts thank you thanks for having us