 I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with? I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here live at VMworld 2011 and we're here with Jerry Chen who's the VP of application services and cloud services at VMware. Jerry, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So Cloud Foundry announcement was really big. I mean it was taken by storm, by the community who was actively the most converse thing that we're tracking on SiliconANGLE.com and it's been that way for a few weeks. Obviously, platform as a service is hot. So tell us what's the big change in the platform as a service and then we'll jump into Cloud Foundry. Just macro on the marketplace. I think what Cloud Foundry really hit a nerve with developers and our customers out there because it really channeled a need we saw on the market. When VMware took a look around in the past market two years ago, we saw a bunch of new offerings, a bunch of startups and a couple larger companies but most of the past offerings were either a single language like only Ruby or only Java or only Python. They had limited technologies you can use or we're stuck on one cloud. You're like you're only on Amazon, you're only on Google, you're only on Microsoft's cloud. And we really saw a need for some people called like a next generation pass or a modern pass. We call it open pass or open platform or service. We wanted a platform that could be multiple languages because no one's just developing a Java or PHP or Python. They're using multiple languages, multiple frameworks. Number two, you wanted you to plug in your database, your data services, whatever you wanted. And most importantly, we wanted you to run this pass engine in the private cloud or public cloud. So it's your cloud, it's your passenger app. You should run it in the public cloud if you want or run it in your own data center. Or last week we released a micro cloud run on your laptop. So on Cloud Foundry, what's the biggest thing that you've heard from the community about it? I mean, was it people grumbling or like, well VMware, what's their plans? What is the biggest thing that you took away from that announcement? I think the biggest thing we took away from it was this need for symmetry between private and public clouds. So a lot of people love the power of like Amazon or Heroku or Google App Engine, but they wanted to replicate the same development environment in multiple locations. So at VMware we'll be talking about this hybrid cloud strategy for a few years now. Applying that same philosophy at the app layer was I think revolutionary. Just thinking like you can have the same app platform for your cloud apps in multiple locations. So how fast do you expect these to be adopted? I mean, like you mentioned, there's a bevy out there. Developers and users have to make bets. So what's your scenario for how fast this gets adopted, this vision? I think the vision is that you guys have been tracking through the past four months as we announced it. And the vision I think is being adopted. And just thinking about the past four months, everyone's talked about open pass, right? Engine Yard bought orchestra IO for PHP. Other players are adding other languages and frameworks. So we've really changed the name of the game that other players are now doing what Cloud Foundry's doing. I think the next thing you'll see is other players talk about multi-cloud, right? Last week, App Fog, which formerly PHP Fog, announced they're adopting Cloud Foundry as an underlying platform for their own offering. In active state, another company is adopting Cloud Foundry as a platform for their offering. So I can see Cloud Foundry getting adopted by other pass providers, other ISVs. Now, the point you made is developers need to make a bet. And we understand that, which is why we ate open source Cloud Foundry, so you're not logged in. And B, we don't want you to make a bet. If you're a Java guy, use Java. If you're a Ruby guy, use Ruby. You know, if you're a PHP guy, use PHP. We're not going to change the way to develop for our cloud. We're going to build Cloud Foundry to make you productive. What about developers? You mentioned that. So let's talk about that. Rackspace has got a lot of traction with OpenStack. A lot of people are jumping in. It's got a lot of momentum. But the question is, how fast are these things rolling out? And what's the message to developers when they evaluate Cloud Foundry versus other offerings? What do you say to them, those developers? You know, Rackspace and OpenStack is a different type of beast, right? OpenStorage Project really focused on storage, network, and compute. That's more analogous to their version of EC2. And you guys can talk to those OpenStack guys about what's adoption there. There's been a lot, I think, interests around it, but I haven't seen a lot of our customers talk about deploying that production yet. What I think OpenStack- That's the life of saying that no one's adopting, okay? Well, and I think that's consistent with our scenario. It's early days across the board. It feels good. Everyone's jumping in the pool, but nothing's happening. Well, there's stuff happening, but there's not. I mean, as far as commercial deployments, you know, there's a lot of risk there. It's open source, but anyway, sorry. No, no, no. There's a lot of risk because it's new and early. And at that layer, that infrastructure-deserves layer, like Paul Moritz always says, it's got to be rock solid. It's just got to work. And I think we've seen our customers migrate to vSphere and work that virtualization platform. It's a known factor. We've got a lot of history. We've got a lot of VMs running on it. That hardware level is going to work. The innovation that we've seen in my business unit is around how do we create that same kind of elasticity that we built with virtualization at the next layer? The database layer, the server layer, the messaging layer. And in Cloud Foundry, it's all about saying, okay, I've got this nice elastic infrastructure that is vSphere. How do I give elasticity to my applications? One of the things that was talked about yesterday in the keynote is multi-cloud performance. So talk about how Cloud Foundry fits into that, because it's not a coordination involved, obviously policy and a lot of stuff at the bottom of the stack and also software involved. Sure. Multi-cloud's a tricky, tricky answer because it depends on in your application. Let's think about these next generation web apps that you're going to build. The next generation apps are going to be to a browser, maybe to your iPhone or iPad, inherently mobile. They're using tons of more data. So you want to scale your application dynamically from one cloud to another cloud. So one, you want to scale elastically. And we've got products within Cloud Foundry and within our VMware family like GemFire that lets you scale your data. It's like an in-memory database. Then Cloud Foundry, if you look underneath the hoods, it scales linearly. You just add more instances of our runtimes and you just scale up your application so we can kind of go bigger or go small. And then in terms of multi-cloud, it's real easy. Because if you're running Cloud Foundry on your laptop or in your private cloud, you're running Cloud Foundry in your public cloud, it's really easy for you as a developer to just push your app to one cloud and then redeploy that same app to another cloud. So we really give you this multi-cloud portability. What are the biggest goals you have this year for Cloud Foundry? I see a lot of splash out there. So a big splash in the pool. But I'm on a tactical basis. What are you guys looking to do? What's your key goals? Yes, I think our goals are two things. One, developer awareness and adoption. Number two, ecosystem. So on cloudfoundry.com and cloudfoundry.org, the open source project, we aggressively track and monitor the number of open source check-ins and improvements. We've had, I would think, over 100 open source contributions to the project. People added Erlang as a language. We've added JRuby, Gauze adding PHP, Python. So we track that as the health of open source. Number two goal for the year was ecosystem. Getting Cloud Foundry as a platform for developers and ISVs. And last week with AppBog and ActiveState adopting Cloud Foundry, plus the week before that with Canonical, OpsCode, Dell, and Stratus and RightScale all using Cloud Foundry as a past container as well. We feel pretty good that we're on a good trajectory to get adopted. What are you about to demand? The demand of the marketplace from customers. So it really seems to be really high, right? So what's the speed of change that you're seeing in our development around the past market and Cloud Foundry? What's the pace like? Pace is always interesting to kind of judge. From our perspective, these were starting from zero four months ago, it's been a solid ramp. I think on cloudfoundry.com, just to give you an indication, we've been doubling the users every two months and tripling the applications every two months. Which means that apps are growing faster than users, meaning developers like it, they come back and deploy more apps. So we continue on that growth pace of, I think a year from now, you and I can have this conversation and we'll be really surprised, really happy about the number of apps being powered by Cloud Foundry. But only time will tell. Well, one more question is that CSC was on yesterday talking about Cloud, their customer base. And she said, Siky Gunther said, people are talking about the future too much and not about today. And the CEO of Puppet Labs said, they focus on problems that are in the market today. What are the biggest problems that are opportunities that are in the market today? Biggest problems are opportunity marketing. Yeah, I mean, fix the market today. So what the message was is that, you can talk about the future, this stuff in the market that needs to get done today in customer environment, problems that need to get solved. What are they? I think for us, what we're seeing at VMware and the Cloud Foundry team is speed and agility for this next generation applications. You're going to have your existing apps or legacy apps, you know, you can manage those, make them better by running them on vSphere, wrapping them in a VM, security availability. Now, every CIO out there saying, I got a next generation apps to build for my iPad, iPhone, I got to throw a mobile client on a legacy app, right? How do I get my CRM application on my ERP app to an iPad? How can I do that quickly and as fast as possible without any disruption? So I think the biggest problem for us is, customers are saving a ton of money virtualizing their infrastructure at that low level. They now need to spend that money to build new apps, to actually add value to the business. To the end of the day, the application supports a business need or a business process. And if they can spend more money to develop apps faster, they can be more competitive in the marketplace. How early is the past market right now? Is it still in the bottom of the first inning, second inning and talk about that and standards? Where are we in the industry in this particular area? Yeah, I think we're early. And when you think about the past marketplace and standards, we're early, I think two, three years with the market cloud, I mean, being where we started this project two years ago, just launched a project four months ago. So I think we're very early. In terms of standards, there's two areas to look at. Number one is we support open frameworks and open languages, Ruby on Rails, Java for Spring. So those are well-established standards, well-established open source communities. We're just embracing them. Above and beyond that, standards around deploying to different clouds like Amazon or VMware. I think that's evolving. VMware definitely works aggressively with the DMTF around standards bodies, around what a VM is or what a container is. What we've seen at our team is working with these open source projects like public labs, if you mentioned, or ops code. We heard from the venture capitalist, Ping Li from Excel Partners and Insuk Ray, co-founder of Loud Cloud. And I asked them what the biggest challenges were and they said finding talent. So as you attract people to your project, what are you seeing in terms of talent acquisition and engineers, et cetera? What are the key skills and is it tough to find good people? I think it's always tough to find good people. A productive engineer is great and there's 10 times productive as a social engineer. So I think Ping and our team at VMware, we're always looking for a top engineering talent. At VMware, we're really lucky that we have a great team. The engineering team that built the vSphere platform, the team that built the Cloud Foundry platform is probably top 5%, top 2% of engineers I work with. What's the biggest change you've seen in say the last five years in the developer mentality and project forward as to what you see with things like Cloud Foundry. How is that going to change the development environment and going forward? I think the past five years, you've seen developers really take control of their environment tools. 10 years ago, for May 15, IT was really centralized, right? The CIO said we're a Java shop, we're a .NET shop, we're an Oracle shop. The past five years, we've seen developers say, you know what, I'm going to pick the tools to make me productive. I'm going to use Tomcat, I'm going to use Ruby, I'm going to use PHP. All these kind of new SQL technologies like MongoDB or Cassandra or HBase, were saying, hey, I'm going to use these new technologies to be super productive. And I think the past five years, we've seen that shift of power between centralized IT, move to the developers so the developers can pick the languages and technologies to make them super productive. I think you project that forward, that's only going to continue. The cloud services like VMware and Cloud Foundry are just going to make it easier and easier for developers to grab the technologies they want to write their apps faster. So I see the next generation of app platforms all about making developers productive and making them as efficient as possible. And an app explosion. An app explosion. And it's true, a bunch of mini apps. Look at the Apple App Store, there's a thousand, thousand small apps. And I think you're going to see a world where you have your legacy apps and then for everything else, there's an app for that. What is the biggest thing you've learned over this project, past two years and four months, that you can share with folks out there? I think the learning has come largely in two perspectives. One is working with this next generation of developer communities, right? What they care about. They very much care about working in the open source community, using new technology frameworks. And they're very, very lightweight. I mean, if there's a language or framework that doesn't meet their needs, they'll create their own framework, right? And they'll create their own tools. So working with a really dynamic developer population, number one. And number two, it's trying to marry that speed with a system that scales. I mean, developers will figure out building their individual apps. What we're trying to do is give them that productivity, but in the behind the scenes, give them a cloud scale platform that's not going to fall over when their app takes off. Okay, we're here with Jerry Chen, inside theCUBE at silkenangle.tv, theCUBE, our flagship telecast, we go out, get the smartest guys to tell us what's going on, and share that with you, Jerry. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.