 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of wall-to-wall coverage here at VMworld live in Las Vegas, the SiliconANGLE Meetings theCUBE. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier. My co-student Miniman runs the set one of two sets here in the broadcast center and the hang space at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for VMworld. Stu, day two, we're kicking off of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I mean, we got so many interviews going on. I don't know, what's that, we got two sets. We have the director's set with the director's chairs and obviously here are the anchor desk. Just amazing amount of interviews yesterday. I kind of felt like I ran a marathon last night and I still crash, I'm like, got to get up and do it again today. Yeah, come on John, you know, the cube, it's not a marathon anymore, it's the Iron Man, it's three days, we're biking, we're swimming, we're running, going through this, there's so many interviews. I know you and Dave so many times, it's like, hey, what do you think, you know, Bill, the interviewed and they're like, who's Bill? Oh, you interviewed him three hours ago, I can't remember. It's like, you know, the old structure, you know what you had for breakfast, I mean, that's the thing, that the pace of the interviews is fun. I got to say, I love doing the cubes, Stu, you're awesome, you had a great day yesterday. I just feel full of data. I mean, we're like in an ingestion system. We ingest all the content, then we go to the events after and hear the hallway conversations and I think to me, that's the best part is we get to sit down, have great conversations, share that with the audience out there and get a live perspective, but then go out and talk to the other analysts, the other press guys, the executives at VMware and the partners and then we get to scuttle butt in the hallways. Oh yeah, John, nothing like, you know, you're having a couple of drinks, listen to some music and you know, hearing all the dirt of what's going on in the industry, what's happened at the show, what do they like, what don't they like and then we're back into it with a big keynote this morning and another full day of all the coverage that we have to do. We'll get down to what's happening, day two here, obviously the keynote, Sanjay Poonan on stage. Really, again, we mentioned it yesterday, it was Salesforce on stage. Sanjay Poonan, basically the number two guy now at VMware, he's right there, growing his business, doing really, really well. Really talking about the end user computing and he made a joke yesterday to end user computing. So Stu, what's your take on that? Because now you're looking at a standardization, a unification, so if you have a unification of the end user side and you got containers and you got cloud native, it's almost all snapping together, your thoughts. Yeah, John, so I mean, we've been talking to Sanjay about this back when he was at SAP, it's that wave of mobility and digitization. It's not about like, oh, desktop virtualization. It's the other, there's reasons I might want to do VDI, but for years here in the VMware community, it was kind of, that was it. Sanjay's really broadened that, they had the AirWatch acquisition, they've really moved that ball forward, it said they had Salesforce out there, good software partnership and I hear good progress as to what VMware's doing, real revenue, real growth. So it's pretty exciting. It's a nice line of sight too on the solutions, pretty obvious, it's almost laughable when you think about it. People have their mobile phones, they want to log in, they want to access the apps, they don't want to have different methods of getting in and they got to build security around it. So to me, I was interested in the security aspect of it, Stu, because now you're talking about, okay, you can unify stuff, great, eliminate those point solutions, but the security is a tough nut to crack. What's your thoughts on their approach there? What's your thinking about the NSX component of that? Yeah, so we really highlighted last year, the tip of the spear for NSX has been security, VMware's digging into a lot, we've got a couple interviews we're going to be doing today and tomorrow to look at that, but NSX has gone beyond it. I got to talk to a customer that was using VMware NSX to help scaling of their storage environment and it actually wasn't VMware VSAM, this one happened to be a Dell Nutanix customer and even he was a little bit worried about doing Dell plus Nutanix, I got a personal call from Michael Dell, which, John, we know how that can happen, Michael called him up today, what can I do for you? How can I assure you that you should buy from Dell and that Nutanix solution from us is a good one, it really helps scale their environment because that networking and storage needs to go hand in hand as we build out these environments. Yeah, and the NSX, obviously center stage of the multiple keynote sessions, so that was key. The other thing that I liked in the keynotes this morning was the VSAN, Stu, this is close to your heart because I think you, I think you were the one that originally did the original premise work around VSAN in the early days and people were scratching their head, kind of throwing some rocks at you, saying Stu, what are you thinking? But turns out VSAN is looking good, big time. So first of all, right, we called it ServerSan and we were like, it's the combination of what's happening in the hyperscale, what's happening with Swatford to find storage, how Flash is changing everybody, and yeah, we took a lot of stones getting thrown at us and we showed growth rates in our 10 year forecast that everybody was like, you guys are crazy, well, we put out our third year of the report and people look at where we were in 2015 and it's over five companies with over $100 million with revenue, VMware is now number two in the space and we are seeing the growth, people are understanding, like VMware itself, this whole hyper-converged infrastructure has expanded to a lot more use cases and really most virtual environments can live on that kind of infrastructure, so we've had a bunch of interviews, we're digging in not only with VMware but all of the ecosystem partners and a number of customers that are using it, so it is exciting growth, something is near and dear to my heart having watched kind of converged and now hyper-converged growing and that trend of simplification is what we need in IT, more homogeneity and more simplicity to be able to get people out of that drudgery of the undifferentiated heavy lifting like we see in the cloud. And obviously, VSAN with Kid Colbert is talking about a lot of the integrated storage IO, control component, also the issue that's coming up, I'm looking at Twitter, some of the Twitter feeds here, next VSAN version bringing more advanced data security features opens up a lot of doors and that was by Brandon Wardlaw. So this is important, data is going to be the value proposition and open data. How does this fit into the cross-cloud architecture? Yeah, so storage is, we've called it off and it's been that boat anchor that's held IT down for so long, so we need to free storage services and therefore if it's more software-driven, more distributed, that's going to help people to be able to build new architectures, leverage it as we build modern applications, need to take care of advantage of that. That doesn't mean we change the laws of physics, John. Moving data is still very difficult. David Fleury, if you talk to him about cross-cloud, VMotion is everything, it's like, well, is that just the application and the compute and the resources, are we spinning up and spinning down VMs or containers or are we actually moving data because then we've got kind of speeds and feeds issues we need to discuss and storage is still hard. We talk about layers of abstraction that doesn't mean that it gets rid of the challenges we have. As a networking guy, one of my favorite lines is there's no such thing as eliminating a bottleneck, you've just moved it somewhere else. So, big challenges here, but we are making progress. Just to day two keynote, it's basically a lot of meat on the bone, as we say. Day one was pretty much the big cross-cloud architecture, Pat kind of doing his thing, laying it out. Some were saying it was a really boring keynote, but he really wanted to lay down essentially that premise. Today, there was very much substance. Nissan J Laydown, a lot of good stuff there. Obviously Salesforce on stage, for the first time at VMworld, VMware and Salesforce on stage. Yesterday, IBM, Salesforce, this is a rebirth of their ecosystem. So I got to ask you, because you and I were talking about this last night about what will the future of cloud architecture look like vis-a-vis the competition? If there's multi-cloud architectures being in play for customers, what's Microsoft going to do? Some are saying they're going to come out with a proprietary stack to lock in customers. So, Stu, that's not going to work for VMware. So, really interesting point, John, because if you ask me, who is more open today? Microsoft or VMware? I'm saying Microsoft. Microsoft's really embraced open source. They've open sourced a lot of their applications. Their cloud allows me to plug in Linux here. That being said, Kit Colbert was on stage today, did a real nice job update for VMware Integrated Container, the Vic and Photon, both pre-revenue products. And John, I want to dig into this a little bit, because when we look at this community, you were at DockerCon. I've been there before, this community, it's complicated and people want choice. So it was great that VMware said, hey, we've got a container registry called Harbor and it's up on GitHub and it's open source and you could choose Docker containers if you want, but building that whole package, feedback I got from the community is, you can't shrink-wrap that. There's no way to be able to take that whole experience. I need to be able to really take the different pieces, code on it myself. VMware's got 500,000 customers and most of those people are operators. They're admins, they don't speak as well to the developers, it's just not their audience. Even when their first thing, they talk about enterprise container infrastructure, to me, that says operator. That says trusted and that's what VMware knows to do, but it reminds me of the early days of Amazon Reinvent, who talked only to the developers and not to enterprise. VMware's got the opposite problem. And specifically, you mean the operators? Yeah. And what does Microsoft have there? So Microsoft does have a mix, John. I mean, you know better than me, some of the developers that are working in the Microsoft space. It's not for everyone, and sure Microsoft has their challenges there, but does Microsoft have a good play? Of course. They've got their operators in the data center of that. So they have database, they have software, they have server software, so all that stuff's going on in Microsoft. But to me that I'm looking at is, still you mentioned open source and who's more open. Being open and using open source are two different things. I mean, so the lock in spec is not so much proprietary, it's a lock in spec of stickiness. So to me, what I'm looking at Microsoft in particular and why I'm scratching my head thinking they might be a more of a lock in for customers is that they're using open source very aggressively, but creating a sticky stack where it's really not so much be open per se. Yeah, absolutely. If you don't think you're getting, you're going to get locked in no matter what you do, it's just how much and how sticky it is. That's a great point, John. VMware is real sticky, even when there are alternatives to be able to go to other hypervisors, but cloud I think is still a big threat. I'm looking forward to talking to Pat today about kind of the latest swing that they're taking at kind of that cloud management and orchestration suite because VMware has been beaten on this for a few years, but I'm not sure if VMware has the right to be the choice when customers say I'm doing Azure, I'm doing AWS, and I'm doing VMware, is VMware going to be in the center of that M&O stack? So what are you going to ask Pat Gelsing? What's your main questions for? Let's go talk about Pat Gelsing here. Three o'clock Pat Gelsing will be on theCUBE, again for his annual sit down with us, which he loves to come on theCUBE, which we love having him. He's very candid, he's very open. I'm predicting he'll be banging on the cross-cloud architecture. I'm going to ask him a little bit more about the foundation component of that, but other than that, I mean, what do you expect to hear from Pat? Yeah, well, John, what we look at for any company of the size of VMware is how are they continue to grow what they've had and how are they going to really drive forward? In many ways we know, you can't just go to everybody that's been running VMware for the longest time and say, okay, change everything, retrain all your people and do something a new way. How are you managing that transition? How are you going forward? How is VMware going to work on that next generation of applications? Pivotal came out of mostly out of VMware, John, and they're driving some of that application modernization. When I think back to the early days when I worked with VMware, what they enabled was customers to take their old applications on old hardware and hold onto them even longer. So how does VMware go from a company that helped customers hold onto the past as long as possible to a company that can drive the new innovation and that digital transformation that Pat opened up the show with? So Pat's been working at this for four years and even longer at his previous companies. He's always got some well thought out ideas on it and definitely looking forward to digging into it with him and lots of our guests. So Stu, you get a lot of popular questions coming on Twitter here. Stu, what has Sanjay Poonan brought to VMware? That's a question to you from the Twitter sphere. Yeah, Sanjay Poonan is great leadership. He's been here a number of years. There's been so much press about some of the key people that are gone. Carl's not here this year. I think Sanjay is stepping into the shoes here. Kit Colbert got some real good kudos going on the stage. Yan Bing, rock star going up, talking about V-SAN. We've been highlighting some of these acquisitions and product lines that VMware's put up are being successful and moving VMware beyond just the base type ofizer, which itself is in many ways at parity with a lot of solutions out there. Another one, Stu, is what trends should the IT community focus on? Wow, so as we always want, John, it's IT is how are you providing more value back to your business? How are you being more responsive? How are you becoming more agile? It was great to see a couple of the customers on stage. Nike was there. We know Nike's going through a big digital transformation. I've seen them on a number of these shows that are developer-friendly. They were in the cloud-native section. I picked up at one of the cloud shows, a Nike, Code is King shirt, because we've said many times these big companies that are at many of these shows, that's what they need. They need that person that's coding, that's developing, that's moving business forward. So what we've always said for IT for many years now is if you're doing the same thing that you were a couple of years ago, you probably need to reevaluate it. It's not just the automation. It's about understanding where you're adding value to the business and what you can get rid of yourself. It's a core fundamental of what we believe at Wikibon is that you need to be able to shift things to platforms and to products. And VMware has a number of solutions as well as the cloud and modern applications out there. I got to say, today I'm impressed so far this morning. Yen being on stage talking about the V-SAN. I think the V-SAN is a killer opportunity for VMware. I think they got lightning in the bottle with that stew because that's the center of a lot of cool things going on. It's right in their wheelhouse with virtualization. And what they can do with that, with the data is really critical because it's now you're talking about storage and networking as you pointed out. But as it moves up the stack to the cloud native architecture, you're going to see that potentially be a real engine of growth innovation opportunities as well for VMware because the data will be the lock-in spec. In my opinion, if I'm a customer and I'm looking at Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, I'm going to say to myself, I need to have my data move around. I do not want my data locked in. And what I'm looking at and thinking that's why I'm really skeptical of Microsoft right now because they are the last shoe to drop. If they try to do a land grab on the data and make it sticky, then that's not going to bode well for VMware. So this whole premise of moving multiple clouds is not going to fly. Yeah, and I mean, John, when you talk about this integrated components in there, Azure Stack is not exactly apples to apples to what VMware is doing with the cloud foundation, but you look underneath it and you say VMware vSAN is something that they've been beating on for a few years. It's a much mature product. Storage spaces inside of Microsoft, there's quite a bit of, you know, I'd say warts inside there. It's not necessarily what everybody needs. There's all of these kind of underlying software pieces. Red Hat, it's got Saph. Saph's very good in a lot of environments, but certain performance, scalability, it runs into some limitations. So where's the boundaries as to what can be built in the software and what are they building in the partner ecosystem? There's definitely lots of room for maturity and we're going to be tracking this down. What Pat said, the next five years is when we're going to see some of the big moves. So, you know, we're ready to go. But five years still is a lifetime. I mean, just go back seven years. Paul Moritz was leading the charge at VMware. He laid out the architecture, which, as we said yesterday, he was right. What he laid out was absolutely where the industry actually is today, except it's not VMware. VMware didn't end up getting those pieces of the stack. They had to spin out Pivotal and they had that whole spring source and all that stuff into the Pivotal operation. And then VMware kind of had to stay on the infrastructure side and kind of create that hardened top and try to do that, that was a fail. So now they're retooling, if you will, and settling in on their sweet spot. So the question is, will that work in a multi-cloud world? This is the question. Yeah, and John, you know, what about the revenue? We only have one VC on the program unfortunately this year. There's a few trickling around, but today all of the cloud native and container stuff that VMware has, it's pre-revenue. We don't even have pricing on it yet. And somebody was like, oh, there's discussions happening on that. I said, well, there's discussions happen all over. I'm sure DockerCon, making money is like one of the big topics because we're not sure yet. It's all of these open source components, very distributed in architectures with lots of different components. And if a lot of them are open source, the big companies are taking them, they're building on it. How do we actually capture value and shift what's happening? Day two, a lot of coverage. We're going to be full again, a meal of content here on theCUBE. We're ingesting all the data. We're interviewing everybody. Great to see you. Day two kick off. A lot more coverage here coming from live from Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay. We're in the hang space at VMworld 2016 to theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.