 Okay, welcome back to VMworld. This is theCUBE, VMworld 2013, live in San Francisco. Day three of three days of coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. And our next guest is Sean Douglas, who is the CTO of Service Mesh. Very timely conversation to come on theCUBE right after Pat Gelsinger. Dave and I are all jacked up and amped up for a great conversation. You worked at EMC, EMC Ventures, so you know a little bit about what Pat was talking about. Absolutely. And obviously we ratted on a little bit and called me out on my comment, but I kind of didn't really mean that the way I did. We'll explain that in like six blog posts, it'll be fun. Welcome to theCUBE again. Great job. Thank you, have a great day. So, you're a tech athlete. You've been studying the up and downs of what's going on in storage at EMC. You're now at Service Mesh, which is one of the leaders, the leader in orchestration at the high end of the stack. Orchestration and service management, these aren't new concepts, but with infrastructure as a service and what Pat laid out with Software Defined Data Center, it brings up and highlights the importance of it when you want to get to automation and orchestration. Absolutely. And as much as the rhetoric is out there, it's still an open book on orchestration. I mean, every client, every customer has a different process. You can't just throw software at it and say we're done. So explain the nuance in this area of the stack. Absolutely, so it's a tough act to follow your old boss. You know what I mean? So I was working for Pat. We helped define Software Defined Data Center, what that meant, and it's great. In his keynote yesterday, he talked about what are the three things that VMware's doing. One is Software Defined Data Center and virtualization of everything, trying to get the ROI they got traditionally on the server in the hypervisor, now in the network, now in the storage, right? And taking that. And then second thing he said is, we need to rebuild effectively the management platform because nobody has it. Well, we have it actually. We have it today and we were taking down big banks, telcos, people that want to manage a cross hybrid in public cloud. Well, what is service mesh? So let's get into it. Because obviously you work for Pat, was your old boss, and then you were instrumental in the Nassir acquisition that went down between EMC and VMware. And obviously, that was that game change. If you look at pre-Nassir, and Pat Gelser called the shot hurt around the IT world, there really was a game changing moment, it was a shift. That was almost with a tide turning that and everyone's shifted their sales and the wind was blowing in software direction. So I mean, look at me, pre-Nassir, what were we talking about? Post-Nassir, what is it? So I mean, explain service mesh in the software. So service mesh is a hybrid cloud management platform. And what we do is we act as effectively a service broker across VMware's technology, Microsoft's technology, OpenStack, all of the public cloud providers and enable you to do policy-driven provisioning that's application-centric. Now, what does that mean? What that means is you can create one blueprint for your application and then you can click and deploy on top of VMware, on top of Microsoft, on top of OpenStack. So it gives you that vendor contestability and portability across these different software-defined data center infrastructures because VMware's making a big play, you've got Microsoft making a big play, we were just talking about George and IO data, those guys are killing it. They're embracing the whole open compute, open stack. Can you just clarify something before we show it? Absolutely. So a lot of the big guys, VMware, for example, are talking the game, OpenStack, a multi-hypervisor. So they sort of want to do what you just described, is your strategy to just do it better, do it faster, be there earlier, or am I just misunderstanding? Well, we do it today, they're going to build it. They're going to build up your message. Yeah, yeah, that was awesome. He got up here and you know, he's got agility, that's our product. I love it. Have you educated any buyout offers yet? Well, you know, we're popular, but we're going big. I think we're on the ice. So they're trying to get me. That's a non-answer. Okay, so they're trying to buy you, okay, got that. So let's talk about hybrid cloud. I'll see Pat Gelsinger hit a nerd with Pat with my off the cuff haymaker called Halfway House. He called it a way station. There's a big debate. I think what people don't understand about what the conversation with Mark Andriesen and Pat Gelsinger was at the future of IT conference was, there's a fundamental disagreement about what compute is going to look like. And so the reason why I brought up that comment about Halfway House was just kind of needle and I didn't know Pat was going to react that way, but it's kind of good to have a memory like that. Is hybrid just a delivery mechanism or is it actually a product, right? So the question becomes, does compute just sit around in all IT ready to be used by applications? Do applications dictate to the policy of the infrastructure and get services delivered to them? And if that's the case that's going to, that possibly could change the compute paradigm. So that's kind of, I think, Andriesen's perspective is that, hey, compute's just going to be everywhere. It's going to go to zero, infinite resource with virtualization. If that happens, what does it look like? So utilization, server utilization, all those things go away. Software has to be written for that. So that's a different approach than saying, this is a product, this is a data center, extension. That's a pretty loaded question, man. My goodness, how do I parse that? So let me break it apart. Explain that to the audience. So where we sit, we sit across public cloud and private cloud, and we believe that certain workloads, you need to run for compliance reasons today in your data center, and we work in highly regulated Fortune 100 companies, some of the biggest banks in the world, some of the biggest telcos. Those guys have regulations that require, so I'm going to resonate. I'm going to align with Pat here a little bit. Of course, yeah, you see over here. However, with that said, we fundamentally believe that you need to have fungibility across your public cloud and your private cloud and place the right resources at the right time, at the right cost, for where you're at in the life cycle of the application, and doing so in the very, the DevOps-y way, right? And so because we're the architectural control plane across public cloud and private cloud for our big customers that give them this vendor-neutral posture, right? We also agree with what Mark is saying as well, right? You're agnostic how they approach you. Yeah, we think both are going to happen, and we sit in the middle of that and we enable people to do the right thing based on policy at the right time. So it's for us, it's great. We don't have a legacy to lose. You're saying you're not going to sub-optimize some part of the stack in order to drive your revenues or your license. Exactly. You can bridge legacy and bring clean, green field apps to the table. Absolutely, right, right. So we're agnostic there, absolutely. So it's a great place to be. Until you get bought. Let me ask about OpenStack. Let me ask about OpenStack. We're going big. OpenStack as Pat says is a framework, which is obviously an interesting statement from that. And he looks at it as a market expansion opportunity, which is the right way to say it, I mean, I guess. I think OpenStack is the biggest threat to VMware, personally. Look at their software-defined data center strategy, right? So you've got virtualization in the network, virtualization in compute, virtualization in storage. And it's the same thing, right? So they've partnered with Canonical. We're partners with Canonical. I'm a huge fan of Canonical as well. And the reason is Zen is actually the hypervisor of choice for public clouds. They didn't partner with Red Hat, OpenStack, right? Because they're right in their grill, right? So it's kind of an interesting partnering strategy, right? It surely is. I have to be careful, I am at VMworld. No, no, no, first of all, I mean, Pat's right. I mean, you know, this is a geek culture and there are people who do care about what's in the engine. Virtualization is absolutely critical. That's going to continue to be virtualized. So let's go back to our conversation about Nasirah changing the winds. So maybe the waters are still choppy and still there's a lot of work to be done and competition should be battled out in this new battleground. So let's go through that. Nasirah changed the game with Software-Defined Data Center. It becomes a destination, a marketplace, and there's networking, compute, and storage. What is the competitive landscape look like for all the guys? What are the players? What's the ecosystem look like right now? Right, well, I mean, if you look at just Software-Defined networking, right? Since the acquisition of Nasirah, now, you know, big switch, they're starting to really ramp up Plumgrid. We're working with Plumgrid and one of a big telco deal that we just took down doing some integration there. I think in almost every one of our large enterprise customers, we're starting to see some network virtualization as part of our blueprints and as we deploy things. I think it's here, I think it's now, it's real. And then JR with Cumulus, what they're doing is potentially game changing from a routing perspective as well. So I think that that's interesting. So we're going to have JR and Peter Levine from the entries and all what's on today, shortly. So what should we ask them? I don't know, I'm friends with both of them, so I'm not going there, I don't know. All right, so let's get back to the clouds. So what's the competitive landscape? Obviously, it's a growth market, so people are going to win. It's going to be winners. What's the winning profile look like to you? So just generically, without naming names, what's the winners look like? Well, I think it's really interesting, is what is the landscape today? Is you have the incumbents largely have, you know, piles of software that they've acquired in the past that they're trying to glue together and they're selling a vision that's, you know, six to 18 months out and they're saying trust us, Mr. Customer, we'll build it. And actually what we're seeing is that, I mean, first of all, we have a solution today that works today and our customers are saying, well, you know, we're kind of, we want to get away from that vendor lock-in. We want an open, neutral management platform and that's why we're embracing OpenStack as an alternative to, you know, a pure single vendor management strategy, right? So it's, yeah. So let's talk about lock-in. So we asked Pat the question and they said a hardened top. This was like an infrastructure hardened top in Unable like an Intel processor did for a PC. There could be for a cloud, kind of a base foundation as hardened. That could be proprietary, but functionality is strong and versatile. So where is that? Is there a hardened top? Is that a false premise and a false promise? Or is there one? Is infrastructure to service with OpenStack going to be a open but hardened foundation that you can build on, be agile on top of? I think it's going to be. That's the bet I'm making, right? I mean, we're going to support that. We're huge fans of OpenStack. I mean, it's interesting though, is that when, I mean, if you look at applications, how they were developed in the past, you know, IT was always application centric. You would scope your application, just bear with me on this for one second. You would scope your application, you would procure your hardware, you would deploy your hardware into this test dev stage production, et cetera. And then when infrastructure as a service came up, they bifurcated the ability to spin up an empty virtual machine really quickly and to deliver business value and actually bring that to market, right? And now people, you know, cloud foundries coming in and saying, hey, it's past, right? Well, you know, you got to put all these pieces together, right? So there is, you know, it's interesting times there. So Sean, you were talking earlier about the customers that you talked to, you know, want that openness, they don't want that lock-in. Would you agree that you kind of in the early adopter cycle of those guys that the majority of enterprises are willing to risk that lock-in for the safety of whether it's single vendor simplicity or yes, it's going to work. I'm not going to get fired by an IBM that our VMware in this case, et cetera. Is that a fair characterization? Do you feel like it's the majority of the market that's actually, you know? Every customer we're seeing, so, you know, we don't have 4,000 customers, but we've got a lot and we can't keep up. Well, but they're not hard to find, right? They're not hard to find, right? Right, right. In fact, we're talking to a large bank that I can't disclose and they're basically saying, look, if you bring one of the incumbents to the table, you know, that's not what we're looking for. We, you know, that we need to drive, you know, 40 to 70% reduction in cost. And the only way to get to those numbers is, you know, open stack as an alternative in having a, not buying into entire vendor logic. Can you explain why open stack is, well, so Pat, and it's funny, VMware essentially depositioning open stack as a framework. Right. The guys from, you know, we had, we got some rack space on it. They don't agree with that. They see it as a long deal. Yeah, yeah, the rack space guys get it, yeah. Clearly. So, the guy, the customer that you just talked about, why is it, how is it that open stack using that capability will lower cost by that amount versus sort of the conventional approach? Right, well. Even though we're defying convention here. You cut out all of the, you know. License costs. Yeah, license costs, right. Which is, yeah, it's huge. It's huge. License and maintenance. So it's the Oracle factor. You look at the pie, 70% is license cost. Oh, you speak of Oracle, it's actually funny. It's, oh, a lot of the incumbents' marketing today is the Oracle strategy. Come on, freeze the market, ah, we'll build it. You know, and then it's fun for the guys who are actually doing it today, you know. So, you know, we're challenged that, but we'll take anybody on it and bake off. Because we actually can deliver. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. So, ah. Well, right, so it does work for Oracle. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's, I don't know, the big data space is, there's a lot of guys encroaching on, on that. Yeah, but like you said, they'll message it, they'll co-opt it by a company and act like they invented it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Sean Douglas, the CTO of Service Match, thanks for coming out to the queue. I'll give you the last word. What are you most excited about right now? I mean, being a CTO at the EMC, playing with EMC Ventures, where you were working on the Nassir deal, among other deals, you had your hand creatively in a lot of the software-defined data center strategy. What are you getting excited about right now? I should take it down in deals. We heard that. What tech are you getting excited about right now? So, you know, you talked about IO data earlier, right? So I think IO data, they're embracing open compute, open stack, and that just drives down costs and we're partnering aggressively with them. There's some interesting opportunities there. So that could be game-changing, I think for the industry. So you had George Sussman on earlier, and in fact, I used his line from that interview with Pat and said, if software-defined data center is all software, what about the data center, the physical asset? And that's an interesting perspective. You kind of forget about that. Whoa, there's actually a physical plant inside the company. I think honestly, the thing that I'm most excited about when you asked me what I'm excited about is that, you know, you had everybody that's on stage here is talking about software-defined data center, hybrid cloud, and the need for a new management platform. This entirely validates everything that we've been doing and are doing, and we have product today and everybody's talking about road map. So that's what I'm stoked about. So service, match, check them out. I mean, obviously, great, hey, that's good. They have the product. They have the product with everyone's, the coolant everyone's passing out. All right, John Douglas, thanks for coming. CTO, service, match, this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.