 Okay, we are back live at day two of VMworld 2013. We're live in San Francisco, California, in Moscone, South Lobby. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We brought up the Advanced Distracted Signal from the Noise. That's our goal. I'm joined, as always, with my co-host, Dave Vellante at wikibond.org. Hi, everybody. Chuck Hollis is here. Chuck's with VMware now. So Chuck, long time friend of theCUBE. Really great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see both of you. We get together on a regular basis. The topics are always different, but it's always a lot of fun. Yeah, so you are a trend spotter, and you've made the move to VMware. Let's start there. What was the attraction? Personal motivation. I really believe in software-defined everything. Software-defined data centers, software-defined storage, and as an article of faith, I think the whole industry is going to transition to this model. So if you believe in a transition, what do you do? You want to go where the action is. So fought and clawed my way into VMware. Sometimes I think it's kind of a disadvantage coming from EMC, because it's just so fiercely independent. But found a way to get associated with a new business unit there, and it's going to be fun. Yeah, so you didn't waste any time. You got blogging about the move and the software-defined everything. You unpacked software-defined storage, which you want to do. But you're a great communicator, so a lot of times this stuff gets kind of complicated for people. So take us through. What do you mean by software-defined everything? What does that mean to the customer? Well, I'll just start with software-defined storage as an example. Three things we're looking for. One is a control plane that is as programmable from whatever control stack we want, be it VMware, OpenStack, et cetera, et cetera. So by control plane, I mean, just again, for the late people, you mean the ability to... Management, operations. Do stuff. Right, do stuff. Move stuff around. And be able to do it in a way that doesn't require getting on a storage array console and typing a lot of complex commands, but just as a natural part of provisioning or natural part of provisioning. Because that's how it's done in the old days and a lot of today, right? You're in a command line, you're in a phase, you've got a little... You take out your hex code calculator and off you go, right? So that's kind of thing number one. And everybody's looking for not only that ease of management, but to have it converged with other things they're doing. Network, server, et cetera, et cetera. Second thing is the ability to provision data services. Replication, encryption, all that sort of stuff, and do it hopefully in software rather than binding it to a piece of hardware. I see the same thing in software-defined networking. And the third big idea is a data plane. Being able to use a mix of not only our traditional friendly storage arrays that we know and love, but some of these new software-based storage arrays, VSAs, so I can mix and match kind of the technologies I store data on. I think storage is ripe for a change. It's probably going to be the last discipline of the big three to kind of transition to the software-defined model, but it's started. So why break apart the embeddedness of the hardware and the software, and why now? What's the advantage for the customer? Doesn't it run faster in hardware? These are a lot of the questions that people are asking. Well, I think there's a couple of forcing functions. First of all, commodity hardware has gotten really good. I mean, I remember when you can get in a TUU, you had to go out and buy a big rack of sun servers. So this is getting very powerful stuff. It's now water-cooled. Yeah, it's now water-cooled. But I think the bigger forcing function is people need the efficiency of the operational model. You know, I don't think we have the luxury anymore of having our server silos and our network silos and our storage silos and whatever traditional job roles. And with the customers I talk to, they are hell-bent on not only getting to converge infrastructure, but a converge operational model. I think you heard some of that from the last guest. Yeah. That says, you know, the problem is the people in the process, and they're looking for supporting technologies and supporting models that supports this new converged way of doing things. And I think that more than anything else will force people into this software-defined model. Chuck, your blog obviously well read by all these storage insiders and people following EMC. You've been great. My mom reads it too. You've had some great hits. I think you're awesome. The iPad blog. Yeah, the iPad blog. The iPad post went supernova. Yeah, yeah. You wrote that, drinking beers in the backyard one day. Yeah. I know them. I should do more of that. VMware needs you now. So, but VMware, the signal is, you know, very storage, Pat goes over a year over there. A lot of people like connecting the dots. Okay, Chuck's over there. It's the new EMC. But in a way, VMware has to be IT. And I was early in the intro said, VMware is the next Oracle in terms of the trajectory. If you look at the pace of where this is going, you see, I don't know if we want to be everything Oracle is. In terms of size and penetration, taking over Moscone here in San Francisco. 23,000 people, that's what I heard. Yeah, 23,000 people. So, you know, it can continue to grow, right? So, there's growth ahead. But what does VMware have to do? I mean, what are the key holes to be filled? End user computing, been misfired a few times. Top of the stacks waiting for that enablement underneath. What do you see? I'm coming to the storage. It's a very central point as well. I think you're starting to see it. You know, when Pat went over, he was very clear that VMware should be multiple businesses, kind of a BU strategy. Prior to that, it was one main product, vSphere, everything plugged into vSphere. So, part of what I kind of feel good about is Pat, from a business strategy perspective, seems to have a good view about how to create the swim lanes for different businesses. The second thing is, they're bringing in talent. They're bringing talent from other disciplines and making it work. John Jay, put one in. Yes, great executive hire. And there's more, good CIO. I don't know how I got in there, but, you know, they're bringing in, they're bringing in. It's not good before they had required credentials. Yeah, it's in the closed door, they're on hire. I'm all joking aside, they're very well positioned. I mean, you look at it. Great technology, great footprint in the enterprise. Passionate people who are willing to apply the technology. We see a lot of them here at the show. You know, they basically have the license to go innovate in these areas. And I think you both know it all gets down to execution, even though you may have the license to go do these things. So I think the next year will be, you know, can NSX get the market adoption it needs? Can VMware start to be taken seriously in the storage world? Some of these other areas being addressed. I wrote on the crowd chat the question of, does IT reward disruptors or sustainers? And we're in a disruptive marketplace. How does VMware morph its ecosystem, trying to be a disruptor and innovator? I mean, obviously not sustaining. Laggards will sustain and hold on to the old model. Like Oracle, for instance, we always criticize Oracle, but people are holding on to that install base. Good question. Microsoft is a victim of that. Good question. So if you think about what VMware did with ESX and vSphere is probably the least disruptive disruption of all time. I mean, the proposition is, hey, you can adopt this whole new way of doing things. By the way, keep your operating systems, keep your applications, go at your own pace. And what I like about VMware's model of disruption, it's preserve the best of the old, but still move through the through. Now, that being said, there's some people out there who are getting very aggressive with the technology, burn the boats, this is what we're doing. But the vast majority of the people I work with is they're kind of doing a mix. They're preserving some things that aren't ready to change yet, but still introducing the new ways of doing things. And it's my hope, and I think I'm seeing this in the product strategy, they can do that same style of non-disruptive disruption for both networking and storage and availability in some of the other disciplines. In your opinion, can that, IT guys want to get from point A to point B without that disruption? You make a great point, it's the part of why VMware's- Can't start over again. We'd love to, but it's just not going to happen. So can VMware replicate that dynamic in storage and networking? In networking in particular, what's different? What's the same? How long is it going to take? Well, I'm not a networking guy, so I get to be a kind of- Well, you are now. I am now, officially. Yeah, I guess I have to learn how to be one. But what I'm observing is the networking community was ready for a change. They were ready to start doing things differently. They had gotten so deep in the minutiae of setting up networks and controlling provisioning networks. I don't know if you're following the social feeds, the reaction to NSX. It was huge. And people are just going to take this stuff and give it a thorough workout. And I saw the partner community that they were announcing up there pretty big. One name was missing, but everybody else together was pretty good. We talked about that yesterday. Yeah, we talked about that yesterday. I would have talked about it too. But all positioning aside, people are ready for a change. My belief is that the storage guys are ready for a change as well. Anybody who's lived in the world of storage administration, storage architecture, yeah, it's great, technology, et cetera, et cetera, but you start yearning for a simpler way of doing things. And without that appetite, I don't think the technology really matters. So there's the people in process imperative. Uh-huh. You're saying. Right. So the guys who direct the careers of these disciplines, you know, they are interested in looking at new ways of doing things. So I'll give you an example. Yesterday, VMware announced VSAN, which is a non-array storage array. And if you're a storage traditionalist, you might be tempted to say, oh my God, where are the LUNs? Where are the fiber channel ports? You know, how can you call? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? But I've been involved in a lot of the early customer interactions around this. And they're intrigued. There's some important new ideas in there and they're going to give it a shot. Now, I think, you know, the over and under is, you know, will it actually catch and will this become a major new style of storage in the industry? But there's certainly an appetite out there for people to take a look at this stuff and give it a shot. Yeah, one of the things we're seeing, the trends we're seeing here, the cube that's kind of been coming into the event and also here, the discussion is, there's no one hammer and nail model anymore. It's multiple hammers. No answer. There's multiple answers. And we just heard the customer, I was just on earlier saying, hey, my process and automation is different because I automate my process, not someone else's automation manages my unknown process. And I would go farther. He would probably see over time, that's his secret sauce. I've got a better way of figuring out business problems and automating and improving them. Monolithic solutions aren't flying, right? So if you want an appliance, great, you can have an appliance. If you want an appliance with some more software, you can buy that. So people want specific broken down menu of services. Give me a manifest, have it your way, if you will. Forget this gold, silver, bronze thing. Let me tell you what I want. I want nine copies of my data. I want compliance and switch to Latina. Just going down the meta test. I want process compliance. I want to do some cloud, boom, boom, boom, done. Give me, right? Give me. Publish. And we're also in an era, I think, that's differently. Now the IT landscape is like changing. So like titles are changing. The mindsets are changing. We just talked about cloud scaling, right? Horizontal scale, cloud style, right? I mean, what's the new mindset of the users? I think we've got a generation of business users who aren't scared about having a technology discussion. Now, I'm a little older here. At the time, you know, go back 20 years, well, IT technology, I don't know any of that stuff. We have raised a whole generation of business leaders now, I believe, that are comfortable with not only talking about technology, but consuming it. Hey, let me tell you what I can do with Google. Let me tell you what I can do with Amazon. Let me tell you what I can do with these things. And I think it's a lot of change. Analytics drive that too. People don't mind pulling their iPad out saying what's the performance like. Look what I can do, I created a model of what you're doing. These intelligent business consumers, I think are probably the biggest driver of all of forcing some of these transformations we're talking about, because I got to tell you, if you're a business person and you can't get what you want from your IT guy, you have a credit card, you know how to use it to your earlier point. Okay, so here's a question for you. So what are the biggest areas of change from a title perspective, the personnel inside an IT? That's really easy. First of all, and there's some good survey data to back this up. One is, let's see if I can remember, I can't even remember the survey that came out about three months ago. But you know, what are CIOs looking for in their organizations that they think they're deficient? Number one on the list was business-facing and people-facing skills. The ability to engage with other parts of the business. Now, I don't think you would have found that four or five years ago, but that's kind of the biggest thing, they realize they have a service to sell and it's all about engaging with folks. Second, process people. People who can look across very vast domains and figure out how to continually re-engineer the processes. Not a typical... What are they calling these people? DBAs? System admins? These are traditional titles. People have jobs going, hey, am I going to be displaced? Process engineers. Data scientists? No, customer engagement managers. It's starting to look a lot like a business where you find a lot of the same things you'd find in a manufacturing organization or a retail organization showing up on IT. Program managers. Yeah, here's the joke. For years, I've heard people in IT rant, gee, we ought to be running IT like a business. Congratulations. You now have marketing, you now have sales. You have process engineers, you have quality control. You're starting to look a lot like a business. So I want to get one more question. I guess we could go all day with Chuck and our good friend, Rick Jackson, who originally got us here, is waiting. But I want to go back to the software defined. So for a number of years, companies like, let me use Microsoft and Oracle and Table, but I could use Amazon and Google too, but software companies grabbing certain storage function, putting it into their stack. Now the challenge was always for them is it only worked on their applications and it always seemed to run better in hardware. And EMC made a great business out of this. Now you have what you pointed out, you got Zillion cores and all this processing power. It's really inexpensive and you got VMware, who's not, who's kind of application agnostic in a position to own the protocols throughout the stack. You take things like vSAN, integrate flash. Why doesn't VMware become the dominant player in the storage business over time? I think a lot of the reason you can see on the show is this wonderful ecosystem. If you think about it, the very best storage technology today shows up on the VMware platform. You got software defined, a physical array. I mean, if you want to do some of the wildest, craziest things with storage today, it's in the VMware ecosystem. And I think the opportunity going ahead on both the networking and the storage front is to do a little bit of both. Let's have the best ecosystem with some of the best solutions, but also, you know, some unique differentiators that we can offer because we're part of the stack. I think everybody's familiar with kind of the Microsoft and the Oracle story, and no one wants to see repeated that. So the allure of monopoly will not suck you in. I haven't seen a whiff of that in my time at VMware. Very partner centric, creating opportunities for partners, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think customers win when you have the best choices available to you and they all work well together. So are we going to, final question, because we're going to get Rick Jackson, the CMO of Rackspace, former CMO of VMware on, but Chuck, I got to ask everyone really wants to know one burning question around Chuck Hollis. Are we going to see a nicer, gentler Chuck Hollis now that you're in the ecosystem and you got to be bare hugging all your new best friends like Pat Gessinger. Partner centric, yeah. Partner centric. We all know you as a lovable, kind individual. Kind individual. But you can find a couple of posts back there where I kind of snark at a few people pretty hard. But the answer is yeah, it's very partner centric company and it's easier. I also like to point out that, you know, at EMC had a lot of partners like Microsoft that VMware didn't particularly like very much either. So, you know, every company partners, but it's certainly a different partner set of VMware. So, same old Chuck, you get what you get. That's what it is. You're too old to change. Kind of like a VM change. They do something different, I'm sorry, but we're looking forward to it. Yeah, congratulations. I think it's a great move, honestly, so I'm going to find data centers happening. Disruptions there, we just talked about yesterday. HP had some disappointing changes in earnings. Microsoft is going to have a new CDO. Certainly, there's things going on. Cloud style is the focus, and that's the buzz here at VMworld. So, again, VMware's positioning themselves for a small, medium-sized business enough. So, good luck with that. This is theCUBE at VMworld 2013. We'll be right back with Rick Jackson, the CMO of Rackspace, right after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.