 At VMworld 2012, this is SiliconAngle.com's exclusive and continuous coverage of day three at VMworld. We've been here for the first two days, wall-to-wall coverage, and this is day three. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconAngle.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Javier Saltero, who is in the software side, application side. We're going to talk about end user computing from VMware, and first of all Javier, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Pleasure to have you. What an event, first of all. There's a lot going on in here, too. I don't know if people can't see that. There's a lot going on. We haven't described it actually too much. We've got the foosball tables, the shuffleboard. Yeah, the air hockey is the sound that you hear in the background there. And every now and then, it's like in Vegas around the craps tables, you hear, what? Somebody makes a great shot or something. It's a lively show, VMware. So we were talking earlier about the keynote, end user computing keynote. Herod kicked it off. We had Steve Herod on earlier today. Excellent. It's obviously an area that's evolved over the last couple of years. I mean, I remember 2010, we were upstairs across the street, and the term was virtual desktop. So we've evolved the terminology last year, and this year, you're really evolving the technology and the offerings. Talk a little bit about that, and what's new there? Sure. So, you know, VMworld, the topic of end user computing is interesting because for those that remember, right, VMware's original success and first five, six years of existence were dominated by a product that was used mostly by individuals to run multiple virtual machines on development labs and that kind of stuff. So the products like Workstation, Fusion, and all that are really, in some ways, the heart of what made VMware successful. And over time, that idea obviously evolved into this notion of, well, how does that really work at scale? How does the concept of a virtual desktop and VDI really pan out? And, you know, I think it turns out it's just like server virtualization isn't very simple. Neither is desktop virtualization, certainly doing it in a way that is scalable, cost effective, et cetera. So the evolution of that side of the product line has really been driven by the strong desire, I guess, to fulfill that vision, right? To say, you know what? It is practical, cost effective, and good to provide users with virtual machine desktops that contain all of their personal document settings and other sort of customized aspects, but are still centrally managed by IT or are subject to licensed governance, all these other things that are important as you keep master images of desktops. And then kind of complimenting that with a bigger opportunity, which Steve and Vittorio described yesterday around this notion of, well, you know, as we move beyond PCs, what does that really mean for individuals and how they use computing for both their personal and their professional life? So that's what we've really been working hard to fill out. And just one quick follow up, if I may, is when you say good, you mean good from a user experience standpoint, which was always the objection to this whole end of the computing movement. It's really hard. I got to make sacrifices out. I want to make sacrifices. That's right. I thought that the cool thing about yesterday's keynote was that there was, we found a way to tell that story with lots of props to Vittorio for being an extraordinarily good showman and representative of our division. But basically, we found a way to tell that story from the perspective of an end user and highlighting a problem that anybody who's ever worked in an environment where you are dealing with a sort of corporate desktop that's being delivered remotely to whatever device. Encounters, which is this idea of, well, updates mean downtime, updates usually mean that any changes you've made on your image may be overwritten, et cetera. So the Wanova Mirage technology that we recently acquired is really a critical step in sort of enabling what we described as a transformation of all the legacy sort of desktop and PC assets into truly being delivered as a service. My question on VDI is obviously, it's evolved a lot over the past 24 months. And we had Ping Lee on from Excel Partners yesterday. I asked the question at the end of the discussion, what's the big surprises for you just in tech? And I was surprised that he said VDI was a surprise for him in terms of the- He's probably looked at dozens of VDI-related deals and stuff. He's looking at a lot of deals. So a lot of activity now, and it's kind of had a dark cloud over it in terms of confusion, expectation, what does it mean, the market's changing very fast. And I think it's the subject really of the marketplace. So share with us what's happened with VDI relative to that relevance now where literally there are new entrepreneurs out there starting businesses up. And talk about that dynamic of how VDIs move from kind of a cool new feature to actually becoming a category at the top of the stack. I think the prevalence of alternative devices is probably the single biggest force that has changed the definition and the level of interest in VDI. When it was VDI strictly about being able to deliver a managed desktop to a basically a PC or a stripped down PC device on somebody's desk. I mean, there's some benefits to that and those we've realized, but it's when you start talking about users using a variety of personal devices, so mobile devices, tablets, phones, even personal PCs like or Macs. The idea that I want to have a consistent computing experience, especially as it relates to my professional life. And I want to have that across a multitude of devices is really what's opened up the opportunity there. Well, obviously we're here inside the queue, which is our flagship telecast. As we say, Dave goes out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. That being said, one of the things that we're trying to extract out the noise layer is the signal around VDI. So I want you to talk about, and we asked Steve Herrod this one question around dynamic ops, okay? So dynamic ops is an interesting acquisition in the sense that, you know, where does it fit? Does it fit on top or underneath VCloud? And because there's benefits to that, abstracting away complexities, going directly to devices, is an interesting service model. Now, I don't buy the whole Gartner service governor thing, but that's just me. But talk about- We're all those guys, they're in here something. They're kind of slow on their analysis, but the name is kind of a weird name, but really the reality is that the end user computing really is about dynamic and policy baseless, it's some key words. Abstract is a word you guys are using in the messaging abstract pool automate, but talk about dynamic ops, okay? Steve said it sits on top of- Yes. A VCloud, which is cool. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Talk about what that means to the VDI equation when around some of these texts. So I think we're in the process of figuring that out candidly in the spirit of signal to noise. I think the interesting part about dynamic ops is it's VMware's first move into a truly heterogeneous cloud approach. And so what it represents to the company is the notion that yes, our cloud suite which we unveiled yesterday is awesome comprehensive performance, cost effective, et cetera. But the reality is that we live in a heterogeneous world. There are other public and private cloud environments, not all of which are fully built on a VMware stack. So the ability to manage provision and sort of offer services consistently across that environment is the reason why dynamic ops sits where it sits. Now as it relates to VDI, I think it's a little different because the management problems associated with virtual desktop infrastructure are a little more homogenous than heterogeneous. We do have mixes where, for example, we're able to offer some competitive offerings that offer VDI technology but run on vSphere, right? There's a lot of that. But that's still more of a server admin kind of conversation. I don't know that that's a VDI specific thing. I think ultimately as we roll out more end user aspects to the dynamic ops service catalog and all components on that level, they're just going to be exposed the way they are today. So obviously with PASS and SAS, it's a great opportunity for developers and people within the VMware ecosystem to build some cool stuff, right? So I've been on the whole thing of it's enabling technology. This is the year that VMware is kind of going outside of just VMware, it'll ecosystem multi-vendor, rah rah, so on and so forth. So talk about the end user computing equation relative to VMware incubating kind of stuff like social cast and other apps and versus enabling developers and other vendors to build on top of it. What's going on there? I think it's actually not a versus but more of an and and it's an interesting balancing act to be both providing platforms as well as in some cases discrete solutions. So the problem turns out actually very involved in the acquisition of social cast and in some parts of that strategy. And the rationale is this, as you look at the opportunity that is created by the prevalence of new devices and the way that people want to work today where the mobility is a key factor, et cetera, pretty much everything is up for grabs. And so it's up to an ambitious company like VMware to say, well, what parts of this can we truly try and excel at and make a real difference at? When it comes to social cast, for example, the opportunity there is to truly make a big change in the way people communicate and collaborate and do work. So that sort of, you could say the end of the line and end user computing is the place where people are actually using all of these devices, all these different technologies to get work done. And today, for the most part, a lot of that is still sort of rooted in a technology that is ancient history by all accounts, which is email, right? It's not going away, but it doesn't really jive very well with the sort of always on follow me everywhere kind of mode that people are able to work at with the sort of new technologies that exist today. And so you're balancing that. So basically it's a good strategy. Put some apps out there, kind of lead the market, incubate it, build the razor blades and the razors, right? Why not do that, right? I mean, it makes a lot of sense. And if you grow on the ecosystem side, you can even make it a platform feature. So it totally makes sense. Question I want to ask you is, bring in, tie in the device, multiple device angle with filling in the gap on making that layer enabling. So for developers, for example, vet out the story there for us. So in particular, if I may, the limitations of some devices, how do you, you know, abstract those limitations? So I was actually just covering this topic last week at another conference and it came up and it was before we had announced support for iOS. And so I could, I couldn't say it. Sort of awkwardly trying to say, hey, stay tuned. Yeah, stay tuned. Pre-announcing. Our best people working on that. So let me take this kind of in order. So the reality is that a lot of the new development that's taking place is mobile-first development. In a lot of cases, there's still the debate between building HTML5-based sort of, you know, cross-platform apps versus native. I'll sort of skip that and say the right tool for the right job. But in terms of platform capabilities and what that ultimately means for developers, the guys and gals building those mobile applications, they are not interested candidly in the enterprise-ification of their apps. They're just not, right? They're trying to build new experiences or new functionality rooted in existing, you know, enterprise capabilities to deliver something useful, right? The concerns around data security, around access control, around all the things that IT really worries about are a distant concern for them. So the marriage between all the things that we announced yesterday and the concerns of developers is precisely the idea that a developer doesn't have to do anything. They can just build their app and as long as it's being deployed through the Horizon workspace technology that we described yesterday, the necessary wrapping and sort of packaging of the enterprise features will be brought in. In the case of iOS, do we do it one way? In the case of Android, where we have our Horizon mobile product and we have a complete sort of virtual phone technology, it works slightly differently. And bottom line is in the Horizon mobile sort of virtual phone case, the app is unmodified in the iOS technology that we unveiled yesterday. There is wrapping involved. Well, we had app fog on earlier with James Waters who's in the Cloud Foundry side of the business. So it's a clear use cases in web, mobile, pure mobile, pure web, consumer web. Cloud's awesome, right? Okay, so that's, check that box, no real debate there and there's some mix and matches around data, whatever. The issue around enterprises, for example, I mean, just, there's been a massive, massive shift around the fact that they're running their businesses in infrastructures, data centers or whatever, but mainly just their websites. To users want new experiences, they want mobile and they want social and they want cloud. I mean, all at once. So everyone's kind of racing to figure that out. And it's pretty obvious, there's no debate, they've got to migrate over, people don't go to the website all the time, they're on mobile. I just saw some data that said, summer travel season was the highest ever for mobile usage ever, that makes a lot of sense. So, what are the conversations you're having with customers as they, they're not scratching their heads, they're saying mandate, we have to move our content and apps, et cetera, how are we touched the consumer, their consumer, the workers in a cloud, mobile, social environment. What are the conversations you have? Is it technical, is it business? What's the roadmap for that? I think the tendency is to get technical very quickly and sort of, I try, despite being part of the Office of the CTO and having a CTO title, I try to stay back from that. The way I approach it is this. Most of those new experiences that are being considered or that people want to build are actually, the building blocks of those things that are existing capabilities that exist in the enterprise. What's changed is that the view of a web site or a web application, a multifunction, does everything, sort of portal inspired web application is completely the opposite of a focused, likely single purpose mobile app that I pull out my phone, I use for five seconds to check something and sort of get on with it, right? Yeah, be mobile. And so that change in mindset from a user experience perspective is likely the first challenge, right? Is saying, you can't say, let me shrink this giant thing and sort of throw it on a device that's one eighth the size. It's what are the relevant pieces of this that belong on the phone? And more importantly, now that I have this device, it's not just that it's portable, it has a series of capabilities. Cameras, geolocation, I do this because of the compass. Requirement. Right, data, yeah. All of those things, that's what creates new experiences that aren't simply shrinking of existing things. So the more time is focused on trying to figure out what truly makes a mobile app successful, the better. From that point, you get to this idea of, okay, well, so how do I assemble it? And too often we get our wheels spinning on, oh, is it HTML5 or is it native or whatever. The reality is that over time, we will see the cross-platform will likely win the day, but the truth is today, the developers that are building the really valuable and exciting mobile apps, they're sort of completely different. I came to VMware as part of the spring source acquisition. They're very different than the people that we know, than the enterprise Java developers. They think about a completely different set of things. They consider backends and servers mysterious things that lie behind REST APIs. And so, for an enterprise, yeah, what they need to do is they need to create that surface there. They need to offer up those APIs that are going to enable the creation of those new experiences and basically let them have it. So let's circle back to VDI now, because when we were at Citrix Synergy and the original VM World 2010, when we first launched theCUBE, VDI, we talked about the bloated PC, the bloated app. And so basically what you're saying is essentially what the migration happened on the desktop side, which was I got the bloated Windows app now to a thin device. So you're saying, did I hear you correctly, that's the app issue. Don't try to take the bloated app and repurpose it for mobile. Re-architect it, the same specs maybe? Just code it differently. So that's the developer angle. Yep. The really successful mobile apps, and you look at the consumer world for inspiration here, are the ones that do one or two things and do it extraordinarily well. Take the United Airlines mobile app and compare that to the website. The website does a trillion things, right? And it's often really hard to, at this point, now that you're used to using apps that get you there more quickly, you sort of look at these more complex websites and say, look, this is kind of, for me to get from point A to point B, I have to do a lot of stuff. So in order to really capture that and put it in a bottle and replicate it across enterprises, they may not have that skill set. The first order of business is to really create the right platform environment for that. Okay, so the checklist is, to the roadmap is, check the box, application, mindset. Right. Two, what's next? What's the next couple steps? Look at the enterprise as a platform. Basically, don't think of individual, don't talk about it, I need to reach all the way in through my firewall to get to my SAP instance or I need to get all the way into my customized package application that I'm running in here. Think about how you want to expose those capabilities that already exist out to the developers of this new experience. Whether they're your own developers or in some cases potentially third parties, right? That have successfully built applications for companies like Netflix, et cetera. All of that and think of it as one sort of surface layer rather than 16 different apps. I think once you do that, you're gonna see, you're gonna truly be able to reach those developers that today are spending their time building mobile apps for more consumer oriented use cases and say, hey, I now have the environment that is gonna be good for you to build some awesome things here. You don't have to become an expert in SOAP and all these other sort of nasty things. And as a CTO, you spend your time figuring out that platform, how to make that platform available for that development. I mean, we're getting the time clock here on the hook, so, but I want to do a drill down on this at the time. I think this is a really important conversation to go through because there's a massive migration, it's a mandate, it's happening, and we want to kind of drill that down. So it's really early innings in that game. Very much. So final question for you is back in 2010 when Paul Morris laid out the big slide you guys came in that year with Spring, the top of the stack of the end user computing was very light. Yep. I mean, it was pretty obvious. When we weren't being critical, it was pretty obvious. Yeah, it was. I got some work to do at the top. What's changed between 2010 and now? What's the outlook for next year relative to end user computing as a viable dynamic platform? I think the fact that we've now been able to put together the original vision of VDI alongside this idea of identity and brokering access to devices, I'm sorry, to applications along the lines of specific users and not along the lines of individual endpoints, right? And then the third piece is this sort of the ability to reach new devices with technologies like the horizon mobile stuff. To be able to put all of that together, and as we described yesterday, into a comprehensive suite, that gives the customer the ability to say, okay, I'm not just buying an MDM or an app management solution and an identity management solution and a virtual desktop. I'm buying something here that's going to truly transform the way that my employees work, right? And how they access information and likely over time have an impact on how applications are being built to take advantage of that. Well, yeah, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We will certainly be tracking the abstraction of the complexity away with the dynamic options of the feature ability and also what you guys are doing with enabling the edge of the network and the devices. So good work and we'll be following it in your progress as early on. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Likewise. You're right back with our next guest right after this break. Thank you.