 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2011 here at Dave Vellante. Dave, what's the story today? So John, we've been going all day, day two, just an unbelievable lineup of guests. I mean, we had Gelsinger on, we had Georgians on, we had Rick Jackson on, we're doing these spotlights, and we've got a spotlight now on hybrid cloud solutions. As you know, John, we're doing these spotlights, we're going deep, they're hour-long segments designed to help our audience better understand a particular technology. Hybrid cloud is a key issue. These are sponsored segments. This one's sponsored by EMC. We love the fact that our sponsors are stepping up to theCUBE to support this in-depth content. We've done a lot of research around this, done a lot of survey work. We're going to bring that to bear. So we really appreciate that. Hybrid cloud solutions. So we're going to talk about what we mean by hybrid cloud, how fast is adoption going on? What is the customer-based need? And then we're going to have a series of subject matter experts on to help take us through what customers are doing, what they're asking for, what the adoption is. Dave, hybrid cloud has been the hottest thing since private cloud started, because private cloud never really got some adoption and was very hyped up. But hybrid cloud seems to be the safe middle ground between public cloud and private cloud. So there's no doubt that private cloud has a value proposition. The reality is that hybrid seems to be filling the void there. Yeah, so let me share some data, which actually is quite interesting. We went out to the Wikibon community in June and we did a survey. We did a technique, it's called conditioned response. You have to put your answer into a bucket. And we asked them, which of the following best describes your cloud computing plans? And you can see here on this slide the responses. But what was interesting to me is it was very clear, well, first of all, 15% said cloud is a meaningless buzzword. Still, 15%, wow. And then 22% said, 22% said we have no clear cloud computing plans. And then another 22% said we're cautious about outsourcing to the public cloud, but we are building private clouds. So that seems to be where a lot of the action is. And then only 9% said we will use a hybrid of public and private clouds. So it says it's very early in the hybrid cloud game. People are trying to understand their data, where to place the data, what it means to move data around, how they can ensure consistent policy. So basically 63%, really not what I would consider heavily on the cloud curve yet. Okay, so a lot of upside here. Hence that's the focus we've heard from people using test and dev, DevOps, mostly developer, low risk deployments of the cloud. So then on this next slide, you can see we asked that same audience, which suppliers are best positioned for cloud? When we got out of the 400, 185 answered this question, look at VMware, it popped up nearly 50%. Of course, multiple answers were allowed, nearly 50% said VMware. We're here at VMworld, I think that's pretty relevant. Interestingly, look who's number two. Yeah, Google. Google, right? What do you make of that? You got enterprise whale and consumer, search giant. Yeah, search engine. So they search and obviously they have an enterprise group and people view Google as a viable cloud possibility. And so it's natural. They got a good brand, great brand equity. VMware, I'm not surprised by it, but we actually heard from Rick Jackson early in the day who said that when they did studies, VMware's name didn't come up. It's one of those silent number ones. They're like, it's almost a sumptive that they're in there. So I think that's a clear proof point for VMware. Well, I think you see IBM's here, Microsoft's here, Cisco, EMC, HP, Oracle, Amazon, cloud service providers, Dell, NetApp and Salesforce. What's interesting is if you take the combination of VMware and its ecosystem, VMware, put in Cisco, EMC, NetApp and the convergence side, you could even combine those. That's a cloud force. Now you combine that with HP and its relationship with VMware. IBM's got a relationship with VMware. So this whole ecosystem around VMware, to compete with, let's say Microsoft for example, very, very big force here in cloud. I'm surprised how low in the order Amazon is and look who's dead last, salesforce.com. Yeah, now that's a really good observation. Now these are IT practitioners. So we're in the heart of IT, that's what they see in IT. They must not value salesforce because salesforce has a lot of deployments. So to them it's just a rolodex or some sort of non-critical infrastructure which is not true, salesforce is very robust. And I think that it talks to who's buying salesforce. It's not the IT people. So that's kind of interesting. So here's the market angle. The market needs proof of hybrid cloud. They're trying to understand all these other issues that I talked about, whether it's security, privacy, policies, data, where my data sits, what it means to move data around. There's other issues around compatibility with legacy data centers. A lot of disruptions in the channel. So we've listed a bunch here on this slide. Some of the themes we're hearing are cloud onboarding, cloud bursting. That's why people want to use the hybrid cloud. Yeah, I mean they can manage their workloads in a very variable way and the other thing I noticed on this list here is big data. And that's really, really relevant. Because I'm Rahwa Dalla from CloudEra talked about how big data and cloud really fit hand in hand. So that's really a good list there, Dave. Okay, and then the business angle that we're looking here, the competitive issues, there's not a vendor who can do it alone, right? You're seeing ecosystems built, even the biggest whales have to partner up. Interesting VMware, obviously big partner strategy. You're seeing them partner with virtually everybody. Anybody who wants to partner, they'll do it. And so a lot of ecosystem emphasis, it's highly competitive. This is going to strain hardware and software margins because new pricing models are coming out. People want to buy by the drink. Wouldn't you want to pay for stuff you don't use? Yeah, and that's the change in the economics and also the consumption models. We heard also the theme from Paul Morant on Keynote and Steve Herrod about consumption, how they're consuming the services in the cloud. And we're seeing that more and more, we're seeing suppliers emerge with new business models. CIOs, whether you call it private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, IT as a service, they want to pay only for what they're consuming. So there's lots of uncertainty in the market right now with hybrid clouds. We need services, we need proven solutions, we need proof points. That's what people are looking for. So customers are... To me it's all economics, Dave. Economics drive everything on that one. So obviously I love the economics and the economics goes two ways, OPEX reduction on the business side and also revenue generation. Right, John, so that's a quick thumbnail of what we're seeing in cloud and hybrid cloud sharing some data. We're going to go deeper in this spotlight. So stay with us. We're going to talk about hybrid cloud solutions. We're going to talk to Prasad Rampali who runs the solutions business at EMC. We're going to go deep with him and we've got a Mark Lesher's coming on with him and then we've got the New York Stock Exchange coming on. They built a cloud. The New York Stock Exchange basically built a cloud environment for themselves from the ground up with all that sensitive financial data. I'm interested to hear that. And then we've got a panel, our friend Doug Gorle is coming on, Alex Williams will be here and some others. So stay tuned for that folks. We'll be right back with Silicon Angles with continuous coverage of VMworld Live 2011.