 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2011. I'm John Furrier, under siliconangle.com. We're back with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, and we are very pleased to have Rick Jackson, CMO of VMWare on with us. Rick, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So Rick, run us through the numbers, big successful show. Second year, we've been here doing theCUBE, which has been a great success, but thank you very much for allowing us to come and do our independent broadcast with the great guests that you guys helped us out with. But give us the numbers. It's a packed house here. What is the official count register? Just walk us through the inside the numbers. Yeah, so great turnout this year. Of course we had an uninvited guest called Irene, which had a little bit of an impact, but we've got over 19,000 attendees, which is fantastic. So we're very pleased with that. Over 250 partners are here sponsoring and showing off their wares at the event. Over 350 unique learning sessions for the attendees themselves. So it's coming together nicely, and I think there's a real positive energy around the event that I've noticed over the last couple of years. What was last year? 14,000? Is that right? Last year was 17,500. 17,000. Okay. So a little, definitely an increase this year. Nice. And I think without Irene, we would have probably hit 20,000. Pat Gelsinger calls it the new tech IT show. So, yeah, obviously the vibe is good. Demographics are fantastic. I'm talking about the theme, because we've been commenting on the show. Some people are talking about, is all the banners up here? People are got their arms crossed, standing up tall, chest out. Is that like, don't mess with me? Or is that like more of confidence? What's the theme for the banners? I got it. Is that the image of IT? Don't mess with me? Well, yeah. Depends what neighborhood you grew up in. But yeah. I think the theme itself, it's your cloud, own it. And really the point that we're trying to get across is that it really is IT's decision on how the cloud should operate. Is it internals and externals? Is it hybrid? What should the controls be? And we really wanted a theme of empowerment. So kind of the cross-arm thing is, is a confidence pose really of, you know what? It's my cloud, I own it. And we want to really show that confidence coming. Okay, so in that theme, do you feel that's where the industry is right now? Hey, we've got VMware behind us. Is that, and you mentioned in your keynote that it's not multiple cloud environment, hybrid, public, and you guys are running this show on a specific infrastructure. Could you share with the audience what that is, that demo you gave with the keynote about the infrastructure? You're running a cloud here? Yeah, so we're actually, this year we're actually doing a full public cloud implementation for all of our labs. Last year we used a hybrid environment, so we actually had a private cloud onsite when we were in San Francisco and then used public cloud infrastructure to extend that. This year we're completely public. This will be the largest labs, lab session that we've ever done. Each year it keeps going up and up and up. We're expecting approximately 200,000 VMs will be provisioned over the course of this week. And it's across three different data centers. One here, one in Texas, and one over in Europe. Was there any surprises that caught you by surprise in a good way or bad way in the show? Anything that stuck out that you didn't see coming? The crowd, the demos, the technology you saw, anything, any particular surprises? Well, you know, there's always things that happen behind the scenes, but we keep them behind the scenes, right? So it's a lot of work to put on an event of this scale. There's a lot of technology that goes on behind the scenes. So a lot of people working very hard to make it all happen. And our job is to make sure that there's no surprises visible. How about like in terms of technology, like demos, or anything that you see that say, hey, wow, I didn't think that would be that big of a hit. Or we thought it would be big, but it's not as big. Any demos or particular products jump out at you? Well, I think, you know, I haven't had the chance to go through solutions exchange yet. That's my afternoon today. I think a lot of people have been very excited about what we were able to show this morning, especially in in-user computing, really putting together that whole vision of what does it look like in that post-PC, post-Windows world, and how is IT able to orchestrate that, manage it, secure it, but in a way that gives end users all the freedom that they need. So I think we got a lot of really good, positive comments and feedback on Steve Herrod's keynote, especially around that in-user computing vision and how it all works together. Because that's kind of what we're missing today, is today the industry is really filled with a lot of point solutions and almost like a hodgepodge of products that, you know, IT has left holding the bag, trying to integrate everything together. We really feel that, you know, the role that VMware will play is to bring all this together into a very common, centralized, secured, managed environment. Makes it easy for IT to be able to do that and move to this post-PC world. At what point did you guys come to the realization that this whole notion of virtual desktop, desktop, virtualization, desktop was not the right nomenclature that it had to move toward, you know, more mobile and end user oriented environment. When did that occur, you know, in your sort of marketing mindset and take us through that a little bit? Yeah, I think the goals of desktop virtualization and our entire strategy are very similar of, you got to be able to pull things into a centrally managed, secured environment. We really can't depend on the end device to be our management and security endpoint. And so, the notion of desktop virtualization makes sense, but to me, you know, when you start looking at things like, you know, we've got a couple of iPads up here, do I want a Windows experience on my iPad? And I think, you know, one of our theories is that mobility isn't about devices. It's about an experience. And so, just because I have a device that's portable doesn't mean I want the same desktop experience on it. I bought this for the experience, not just because it's lightweight and portable. So, when you start thinking through that way, it really comes down to, hey, there's two things that matter. Applications and data. And you got to get those completely separated from the host operating system, from the device, get the applications and data up into that centralized service and deliver those to the experience that the user chooses. Not what you're trying to force on them. So, we've really had this philosophy for a while, but it's just taken a while to get it all together into a comprehensive product solution to be able to deliver that. And what you saw today with both ThinApp Factory, which extracts the Windows applications, wrappers them up and publishes them to the Horizon Application Manager. And then Project Applast, which is taking any application and delivering it to an HTML5 client. That to me is just the real breakthrough. Finally, we're free to actually choose our device, our experience, but get access to what I care about applications and data. The Herod keynote this morning, laid it out, the big vision is the CMO, you must love that, gives you a lot of material to work with. Talk about that a little bit. Well, I always say that I have the best marketing job in the industry because the things that VMware does are there's so much innovation behind it, and then the products are just such high quality, they work. And so it's a pleasure for me to go out and be able to market these products because we have just such a happy customer base, a loyal customer base, as you can see. And so I'd like to say that I work really hard at it. Truth of the matter is it's pretty easy to do marketing for VMware. Well, you're forging new ground. I mean, VMware, we were talking earlier, Emerging Company, you guys are a leader. But you're going into a space and you got an ecosystem. So you got a lot of brand messages, or a lot of messaging, and you got a brand. Can you just take us through your vision of the VMware brand and all the different messages that are key to you, the ecosystem, product? I'll see you got Maritz, who's riveting it on stage, very smart. So how do you piece that all together? I mean, what's your strategy of piecing it all together? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, what's really interesting right now, and we touched on this in both Paul's keynote yesterday and Steve's keynote this morning, is when we think about cloud, we're not just talking about a change to infrastructure or how we deliver things. Really in the industry right now is a whole new perspective going on. We use the very simple diagram and Steve's keynote this morning. We used to think about servers talking to desktops. Now it's about cloud services and how people consume them. And that's such a simple statement, but it really represents a very different perspective on how to even think about IT. And we VMware, we're not doing that alone, right? We're just a part of this. And it really does take the entire ecosystem to make that perspective change, both real, actionable, and consumable. And so that's why you've got so many big brand partners here. And I love the fact that you see a spectrum of types of partners here. The small service guys, the cloud providers, the big hardware guys, and even now you've got the device people, the handset people, LG's a big sponsor here. To me that's like, we've made it. We've got, even the consumer brands are here showing off their technology wear. So this is fantastic. But that's the power of this transformation that's happening in the industry. It is the whole ecosystem is getting around this big change. And so it takes an ecosystem to make that happen. So that's very important to our message to get out. When we go out and we talk about it, sure, we're trying to innovate in the software layer. We're going to constantly be pushing the envelope there. But we need all these partners in this ecosystem to make this vision a reality for our customers. And that's a very important part of the overall message. You know, you had this metric. I think it was Todd Nielsen shared with us last year, is every dollar spent in VMware licenses that's 11, 12, $13 spent in the ecosystem. Is that something that you actually measure? Yeah. And how is that evolving? Yeah, it's actually, the figure is now $17 for every dollar of software, $17 in the ecosystem. That's between services, hardware, partner solutions, other software solutions, et cetera. And that's why, in many ways, virtualization is not just a market, it's an economy. Because of the amount of money that's being spent on this whole move through virtualization and now to cloud. And the fact that really all aspects of IT are now being touched by this transformation. And those services, you mentioned services, being consumed, also the services business, consulting services, as a rising tide floats all boats. I think that's where there's a tremendous amount of opportunity because as we make this transformation, we also are not only implementing the technology, but we have to think about new ways of managing it, new ways of operating. And so a lot of companies are looking for help on that transformation. You know, do I have the right skill sets? Do I need to change my processes? You know, how do I get the most out of this environment and what do I need to do differently? That is a services play. And so we actually have a system integrator, system outsourcer summit here that's going on this week as well with over 150 executives from system integrators around the world on site here. What day? What day? It actually started on Sunday and I think finished up yesterday. Do you have other summits going on? Is that the main one? We've got a lot of different activities going on. In fact, I was just told there's 70 ancillary events going on during VMworld. So executive summits, partner summits, different types of partner summits. So we have a summit for our cloud providers that are here, it's a lot of different types of events like they're going on. And if you could think of one, it's probably happening somewhere. You know, your alliance, successful with your alliance have been strong too. Any update on your overall plans for next year? VMworld 2012. I saw some signs, San Francisco. Yeah, it's going to be in San Francisco next year. We have the great problem that we're outgrowing Las Vegas. This is as big as they can hold. And we absolutely anticipate growing again next year in attendance, so we're back in San Francisco. Well, they have the convention center, like CES, right? Soon. That's the next move again. After you outgrow Moscone then we'll come back. Until then, let's hang in San Francisco. So what's your goals for next year? So last year, you told us your goals was to kind of expand and keep the ecosystem one to 15 was the number last year. Now it's up to 17 on the ecosystem. What's your goals for next year for the brand and for VMware? For VMware and VMworld? VMware and your brand and the products of the brand, your vision. Well, I think that a lot of what we're trying to do is really demonstrate the cohesiveness of all three layers of our strategy. Now, we talk about our strategy in terms of the three layers of cloud infrastructure and management, a cloud application platform, and then end user computing. But really the value is when you start to enable these things to really get value from each other. So it's the one plus one equals three. So a lot of what we're trying to do now is make sure that our solutions work well and work well together across the entire stack. And that's kind of a big message that we want to get out there. A lot of the things that we're doing, for example, around the cloud application platform, we're doing them in such a way that you maintain full freedom of choice of where you want to run that application, where you want to run the application platform. But if you're doing it on a VMware virtualized infrastructure, there's things we could take advantage of it in the intelligent infrastructure layer that simplifies the management, creates automatic scaling, memory management, et cetera. So you really do get a more powerful combination. That I think is a lot of the story that we need to start getting out there, because we're so well known for just the infrastructure obviously. We have a very good reputation in market share and end user computing. Cloud application platform is our newest area, really just about 18 months that we've been doing that. But what we really want to do is start talking about how it all works together, because that's what supports that transformation of viewing IT from a different perspective. It's when you bring it all together. So that's what we really got to focus on over the next year. You know, you're saying before you had the best job in marketing, you didn't say the easiest job, you said the best job. What is the hardest part about what you do? Is it juggling all the priorities with this huge ecosystem? Is it prioritizing? What is the hardest challenge that you have from a marketing standpoint? Well, I think the hardest thing is that in our industry, let's face it, marketing has a tendency to over proclaim capabilities and smoosh a lot of words together that sound a lot alike. So really the challenge that we have in marketing these days is how do you stand out from the crowd? Because the one thing I know is that when we're able to meet with customers directly and brief them on what we really have, what we're doing, how it works, et cetera, I have never seen a customer walk away from a briefing without being just floored with what we're able to do for that particular, for their environment. We've got real solutions, tested, tried, intrude out there. We've really brought together a lot of great technology and experience, but when you're marketing that, everybody makes that claim. Everybody says the same thing. You know, as I always tell my team, marketing is cheap. It's easy to copy, you know, if we're doing something successfully, then within three months, all of our competitors will be doing the exact same thing out in the market when they're going to market. So that's to me as the challenge is how do you really break out? And I think the best thing we have going for us and the thing that I'm probably the proudest of is our community. And our community does a lot of the talking. Now, for me, I think our job is to make sure that our community has all the right information, all the up-to-date information and really let the community do your marketing and they do a great job of that. You were thanking the V-Mug heads and your keynote for good reason. I mean, those guys put a lot of effort in and with great passion. How have you evolved the targets, if you will, of your marketing? I mean, it's started with that sort of V-Mug community, you know, that the tech guys were actually using the products, but it's really up-leveled in the last several years, hasn't it? Yes, it has. And as we broaden out our solution portfolio, there's clearly new decision-makers that are involved and that's something that we have to do as well. So that's probably another one of my biggest challenges is we have such strong support from the core base, but now we need to be talking to the application side of the house. We need to be talking to the developers. We need to be talking to security and management people. And then, of course, to be honest, we also need to be elevating what we do in the value proposition so that the executive level is more aware of what VMware can be doing for them as well. So we really, as a company, really grew kind of grass fruits from the bottom in IT up, where people were just taking the stuff off the shelf, trying it out and stalling us that this works great, using it more and more. And we didn't even have executive-level attention in many accounts for quite a long period. It wasn't until the IT admins were saving so much money and getting so much good results out of their virtualization efforts, somebody upstairs finally took notice and said, well, what are you doing down there? We're cooking the books. What's going on? What is that technology? So it's amazing to me is when we do our brand awareness studies that, amongst the executive levels in IT, VMware is not a common brand. Yet every single one of them have VMware in their shop. Actually, I wonder if I have it here, and I'm going to show this later. We did a study in Wikibon. I don't actually have it handy. I'll have to bring it up and maybe show you off camera. But we said, who are the vendors that are in best position to provide cloud computing? And VMware was number one. Now, I guess that's not surprising when you think about it, but it is kind of surprising that they would pop up number one. This is a random sample of about 400 Wikibon end users. And that was impressed. I mean, obviously you saw IBM was up there and Microsoft was in there, but VMware was decidedly eliminated. Yeah, we've seen similar results to that. And for example, at some of the Gardner data center conferences, they do some questions like that as well. And we've popped that at the top of that. That surveys are consistent with what you guys are seeing. Well, Rick, I just want to personally thank you for being a great supporter of theCUBE. Last year was our first event. Eric Nielsen, Tony Dunn backstage helping us out here. I really want to say thank you. We really appreciate it. It's been such a big success. And I know you supported it coming back. I think it's great. I love having you guys here. And I think broadcasting right from the floor where it's all happening. I mean, it's in what a perfect spot to be. So thank you guys for participating. Yeah, you're welcome. We appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. Okay, we'll be right back. Rick Jackson, CMO of VMware. Thanks so much, visionary. Explain the banners. He's got a great program here, multi-media. The social media is great. The community is strong. VMware number one in corporate IT shops. But no one knows it yet, but soon they will with this initiative. So Rick, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.