 Hi everyone, welcome to the 2016 VMworld preview show here on theCUBE. I'm Sam Cahane with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu, our seventh year at VMworld, going to be a great event. Here's what we're going to cover today. First, what to expect at the event. Then we're going to look into the current state of VMware. And then we're going to take a look at the Dell EMC merger and the implications. So, Stu, can you set the stage for us? Yeah, sure, Sam. As you said, it's our seventh year doing the show. We've been there since 2010. Really exciting show. It's one of the top shows that we do, one of our signature events. Actually, it was one of only like a handful of events that we did the first year. We're back every year bigger than ever. We've got two sets going. I've got lots of hosts, lots of exciting guests. And it's really one of those ecosystem shows. Not only, of course, is it the biggest virtualization event out there. People kind of joke that it's a storage world. Because it's really from a non-storage-owned show. It's the biggest storage show. Of course, there's the EMC relationship there. And now the Dell relationship there, which we'll get into. But a lot going on at the show. Hundreds of exhibitors there. Expecting usually the order of magnitude. 20,000 attendees or so. And it's back in Vegas for the first time since 2011. Since Moscone in San Francisco is under construction. So, back out in the desert, which I'm there a little bit too much. But, you know, happy to... It's such a great community at this show. Really good ecosystem. And, you know, thousands of people I always look forward to seeing every year. Absolutely. And they look forward to having theCUBE. I feel like we've grown together. You know, we started with just one set. Now we're doing two. I'm really excited. I want to just start by talking about big guests. Who are you hoping to have on at the show? Oh, boy. So, you know, first of all, you know, of course there's VMware. And the elephant in the room that we'll talk about some is Dell is buying EMC. And we will see as of, you know, it's the first week of August right now. It hasn't closed yet. We're waiting for China. By the time we get to VMworld, will it be closed? Will it be almost closed? That's going to be sorted out. So, of course, we get the big VMware executives, you know, Pat Gelsinger, Sanjay Poonan, you know, Robin Matlock, you know, the C-suite of executives there. Michael Dell is going to be on the program. Always happy to have Michael on. And then broad ecosystem, you know, companies, you know, EMC, HP, you know, IBM, we always get a lot of storage companies, a lot of startups in the space. We'll also cover, you know, networking, generally virtualization, backups, a hot topic, hyperconvergence, and, you know, kind of the cloud ecosystem, what's happening in the developer space. There's so many angles that we cover, as she said, to have three days, two sets, wall to wall coverage. We do, usually it's in the order of magnitude, 70 interviews, a just a ton of content that helps kick off our second half of the year. We just finished the first half of the year with our spring tour. This kicks off kind of the end of summer fall tour. Lots of shows that we'll be doing and VMware is a great way to kind of, you know, shake off the, okay, we hopefully got a little bit of vacation, you know, got a little bit of a tan for some of us and, you know, join the community. No better way to kick off the second half of the year. So what's changed since last year? So the big thing, of course, is, you know, Dell buying EMC. And that's had a little bit of a ripple. If we look at VMware, there's been a number of executive changes. So from an ecosystem, Carl Leschenbach has really been, you know, the anchorstone for a lot of what's happened in the community. He's been there since, you know, 2010 when we've been there. He's been there long before there. So Carl's gone. He went and joined a VC. We had a lot of former VMware people joined VCs. We had already seen, you know, Steve Herod, who was in the early days who will have him back on theCUBE. You know, is that a VC? Martin Casado, who was the founder of NICERA, which was that billion dollar acquisition. It works at a VC. So a number of kind of key players. So there's been some change as to who the leadership is at VMware. And we're seeing the growth of some of the key products. So Sanjay Poonan's got the Injures of Computing, which was the AirWatch acquisition. NICERA and the Software Defined Networking Space has been growing. VSAN and the storage area has been growing and how they partner with, you know, the ecosystem and where they're just trying to get a bigger piece of the market. So the thing we've all been looking at for a number of years is how is VMware growing outside of its core vSphere marketplace? VMware is still the dominant player in server virtualization. Still have very strong market share, but there's definitely some people threatening the Microsoft of the world and the cloud vendors, you know, Google, Microsoft, Amazon all pros some significant threats long-term to where VMware is going. Yeah, I'd love to take a quick look at, you know, VMware over the past year, you know, a year ago, the stock price was in the 80s. Then around January and February, it dropped all the way down to the 40s, started climbing up 50s in January. Now it's in the 70s. Do you think, you know, it's on the way up? What do you see happening? Well, as we always know, what the market doesn't like is uncertainty and the Dell acquisition and what that means for VMware has left people with a lot of uncertainty. For example, if you look at the cloud marketplace, VMware's vCloud Air and Virtustream, which EMC had acquired for, once again, over a billion dollars, they were going to put those together to make this cloud group. The market reacted rather negatively to that and it fell apart. So Virtustream stays under EMC, vCloud Air. There's vCloud Air and the vCloud Air network. The vCloud Air network is doing okay. They have a number of partners, made a big announcement with IBM. They've had service providers they worked with. But vCloud Air itself as a service hasn't been doing that great. We kind of wonder where it is. There's been a lot of fallout from the infrastructure vendors as to what their cloud strategy is going to be. And that's a big question for VMware. So the market reacted as we get closer to the Dell deal closing. You see stocks almost back to where it was a year ago. So I know the people inside VMware feeling a little bit better. I know those people sitting around their desk watching stock drop into the 50s and the 40s, made everybody a little bit nervous. There's always concern, will there be cuts as things merge here? So where that happens, if we can get uncertainty out, then I think they'll feel a little bit better about it. And once Dell owns it, VMware is still a public company with ownership by Dell rather than from EMC. So there is some change, but a lot of things will be told is stay the course. This is how VMware is going to keep its core business steady. This is how they're going to grow the enterprise licenses and then how are they going to expand beyond that. And they've got a number of good things that are happening in some of the areas we talked about, like the AirWatch and vSAN and the networking pieces. Great. So we're not avoiding the elephant in the room. We're talking about it. Dell buys EMC. EMC is a majority stakeholder in VMware. Anything else you want to touch on on that? So boy, it'd be nice if this was all tied up in an ice bow and done for VMworld. I'm sure they're going to be talking about it. So the other thing, there were some rumors that when the deal closes, Pat Gelsinger will be out. What's your call? So Pat Gelsinger has come out and said, absolutely positively, I'm staying. That being said, we love having Pat on theCUBE. We expect to have him at VMworld. There's been people that have said once the transition is done and everything's set, well maybe in 2017 there will be some transition. So VMworld, expect Pat to be up on stage, giving the main keynote. We'll have him on our program. We'll ask Pat where things are going. Pat is a very well-balanced person. He wrote a book on balancing work, personal life and church. When I watched Pat on Twitter, he was talking a lot about church lately. We can talk about church because all of the Dell EMC, VMworld fallout is waiting to happen so we can't talk publicly about it. So we'll see. VMworld has had some choppy waters to navigate. Pat's been at the helm. Company's still doing well. Still in the leadership position. Great. I want to talk about big announcements. What's going to be the news at this year's event? So it's interesting. The ecosystem really over the next couple of weeks leading up to the show. I expect there's, what, 200 vendors there and you'll probably see 400 press releases go up because everybody lines up announcements around what's happening at VMworld. Usually there's a major release of vSphere that goes out and that has a ripple effect is to everybody saying, hey, we support that and here's the awesome new thing that we do. Always looking out to see, hey, are there any interesting acquisitions happening? Are there any, you know, anybody going public? You know, we've seen now a couple of public companies in the tech marketplace. The one that's relevant to what's going on at VMworld is Nutanix. So Nutanix has filed their S1. We expect sometime in the second half of the year, Nutanix to IPO. Unlikely that it will happen before VMworld, but Nutanix is the market leader in the hyperconverged segment. VMware has their own product. It's the VirtualSan or vSan. They've got a new product with EMC and the VCE Group. ChatSackage leads that up. We'll have chat on the program. We'll hear about that momentum. I know you'll hear a lot from VMware and EMC as to how they're looking to claim leadership in that space. So you've got a number of vendors that are now over $100 million worth of revenue in this space. And, you know, the next mark is like, okay, you know, raised to like a billion dollars. So, you know, hyperconvergence overall. Our market forecasts show that in 2015, it was in the ballpark of about $1.5 billion for that market, which might sound like a decent amount, but when you're talking, you know, that converged infrastructure had, you know, well over, I don't know, $6 to $8 billion. You know, it's hyperconvergent. It's still small, but it's growing fast. So you see all the big players in the storage world, in the server world, you know, quickly moving fast either to have their own products, make acquisitions or partner. So VMware, very important in that space. Got companies like Nutanix, companies like SimpliVity, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Dell, all trying to position themselves in Cisco, all trying to position themselves to be the leader as this new wave kind of takes more and more of the market share. Tagline for the event, the bumper sticker afterwards. What do you think people are going to say? One line. So, you know, it's a question we often ask on the Cube. We're looking forward to, you know, what is the course going forward for VMware as part of Dell Technologies? So, you know, will VMware maintain enough independence and enough partnership with the ecosystem, or will the ties that pull them closer together to Dell and EMC cause people to say, hey, I want alternatives to this. I want to use containers more. We haven't talked about Docker. I want to use OpenStack and use OpenSource, you know, KVM-based solutions rather than using VMware. And Microsoft is a big looming threat both from the cloud and from the infrastructure standpoint, so really a pincer move to try to squash VMware from both angles. I don't have a pithy tagline for you yet. By the time we get to the show, I'm sure John Furrier will have something or I will. Exactly. And that's why people need to tune in. You know, we have, I think the best guest list we've had yet. You know, if Michael, Pat, you know, we have the whole crew on, where can people find theCUBE? Yeah, so of course to watch theCUBE just turn to siliconangle.tv. You'll see the list of when we're broadcasting for VMworlds three days Monday through Wednesday. We do have some limited availability for like end users that want to be on or good people that the community want us to have on. So we always save a couple of slots in our back pocket for those. Feel free to reach out to me. I'm just Stu on Twitter. Also, we're going to do a pre-show crowd chat leading up to the event. If you go to crowdchat.net slash VMworld, you'll see that we're going to have a good, robust discussion as to, you know, what session should you see, any other predictions that we'll have, what's hot, what's interesting. Because every year there tends to be something that kind of bubbles up, you know, around kind of, not just the announcements, but you know, when something is really starting to grow into a part of the market that everybody cares about. So we will see when we get there. And as you said, Sam, oh, I should mention, so we're actually bringing in some guest hosts this year. So we've got so many interviews to do. We're reaching out to the community, friends of both the Cube, the Broad community, and the VMworld ecosystem knows well. So happy, a couple I can mention already. So John Troyer, who's no stranger to the VMworld community. John, of course, ran the communities, started the Vexpert program. Guy, I've been lucky to know for a bunch of years. John will help us out some. Mark Farley, who has done a number of events. He's been part of a number of companies that have been acquired by some of the big companies. He's helped us out on the Cube before. He's been doing the ride cast thing, doing some cool videos riding around in cars. So I expect him to be riding around in Vegas and he'll also be on the Cube some. And also, first time guest host on the Cube, Keith Townsend. So Keith has been part of CrowdChat, part of the community. I'm sure lots of people in the virtualization audience know him well. So we're happy to have Keith on and might have an extra special guest or two. John Furrier and myself will be kind of the main anchors. Sam, I know you're going to be there bouncing all over the show. And we've got a big team there. So we're looking to have tons of meetings, lots of good interviews, lots of good after hours networking opportunities. And it's definitely one of those weeks that make sure you get your sleep here in August because once you get there, there's really not much time to do anything, but you know, go, go, go. Still any last words? So I think we covered a lot of it, Sam. A lot has changed since last year. But the thing that hasn't changed is that VMworld is one of the biggest events of the year. It's one of the things that, you know, everybody, you know, kind of goes, shows up, meets with a lot of people. So take advantage of the opportunities. Make sure to, you know, engage in the community. You know, hop in. Hashtag VMworld is always a hashtag there for those of you still using Twitter, including myself. So, you know, lots of activity there. And look forward to seeing a lot of people at the show. Just so you know, millennials are all over Twitter as well. Stu, great job. Thank you for joining us today. We're really excited to come to the event, one of our favorite events of the year. As Stu said, follow us at siliconangle.tv. We will be in the VM Village. Great location. So again, I'm Sam Cahane. Thank you for watching The Cube. And tune in in a couple weeks for the event.