 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. Welcome back to VMworld 2016, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program theCUBE. We've had two days of wall-to-wall coverage here. This is the director's set and I have a wrap-up segment here. This year when we were doing the program it was kind of bigger and more than ever. And what better way to kind of cover that to reach into the community and people that I've known through this VMware community, people that not only have gotten to know, but are friends that really appreciate helping us out this week. So really happy to have Keith Townsend, John Troyer and Mark Farley here. Gentlemen, thanks so much. We're almost at the end, kind of sharing war stories at the show. Thanks so much for everything that you've done this week. So Keith, let me start with you. Not only had you not hosted theCUBE before, you actually hadn't even been a guest before, which was kind of shocking. It's one of those things, there's certain people we have on the program and I'm like, gosh, I'm sorry, we should have had you on many times. But friend of the program, we'd had you in social engagement, definitely seeing you at lots of show. What was it like to be part of theCUBE and your general take on VMworld 2016? So first off, theCUBE is exhausting. It's a lot of work. You guys do a great job on Twitter, on YouTube, it looks very finished and very easy. You guys work hard to make it look that way. The show itself, I think a couple of comments on Twitter was, you know what, I didn't come away emotionally charged after the show that VMware didn't excite me. For me, I don't think VMware is in a position where they need to excite people, but really make people understand and believe that they have a vision for the future. And I think of anything that I've gotten out to show is that VMware, right or wrong, has a vision for what they believe their customers should be moving into. And I think they laid out that path extremely well throughout this past show. Yeah, great point. Keith, first of all, you're pro on this. They think you're natural. You've done lots of video yourself. Look great, sound great. Boy, we went into some of the networking pieces. I'm a networking guy by background. And boy, you would just dug right in there. A lot of great content. You know what? You write, it's a ton of work to go into it. And you guys did the hard work too. Yeah, you know what? And a surprising thing, I'd have to give it to you guys, like, guys like Dom who answered questions before you even asked them. And then you have to think of yet another question to ask it. That's pretty tough. You guys do a great job of thinking on your feet. So I'll learn that and move forward. All right, well, John, you know, we met through VMware and VMworld many years ago. You're a veteran of the show. We've had you on theCUBE. You know the communities. You do podcasts, everything else. What's it like being on this end of theCUBE and your first takes on VMworld 2016? Being a host on theCUBE actually was different. It is a lot of work. I think people also don't realize there's a 20 people standing behind the cameras. They just see us up here. I've done a little bit of this in years past. It is rapid fire. It is real time. It is live. You know, you guys are out there kind of with no suspenders on or whatever the right metaphor is. So I think I hope people appreciate the content. These are real conversations. These are not scripted, you know, and these are real companies who have real, you know, they really care about what they're doing, the people that we're talking to. The show this year, I didn't know what it was going to be like coming in. I think definitely you can still say this is the industry conference for infrastructure industry. Everybody's here. The booths are big. The sessions are well attended. People are engaged, right? People are not skipping out to go gambler or anything. People are there eight in the morning. The session is full. I'm going to echo what Keith said, I think. You know, VMware had laid out a vision. I mean, maybe you can drill down on that at some point. But I think I want to compare that to the what's going on in the container world right now. In the press, you hear a lot about the cutting edge stuff, what's going on in containers and cloud and orchestration. Right now, the container world is kind of ripping itself apart. There was talk this week about a Docker fork. That whole ecosystem is in turmoil. And one of the reasons is it's not stable. The code isn't stable. The APIs aren't stable. It's moving so fast. It's all brand new. And so I think VMware's job is not to be the cool kid on the block. VMware's job is to be the responsible grownup that is going to give you a place and a home for your production-ready applications. And as that stuff matures, it comes into the solid rock of VMware. And I think that, I think by being able to talk about the new, but not chase it like, you know, a great, I don't know, you guys all have kids like, dad, you know, hey, chasing your teenage kids. I thought it was a good show. All right, thanks. Yeah, really interesting kind of the balance of bleeding edge here. We kind of share a lot of the disruptive technologies. I went down and talked to the Docker people at the booth at the show. And they're like, you know, there's a lot of noise about not that much. And we try to help separate kind of, the signal from the noise on a lot of that. You know, so many pieces. So, hey, Mark, hey now. Look, you've been a guest host before. You're no, you know, novice to some of the real-time, various multimedia activities, but you know, hey, what's your experience been on theCUBE and outside theCUBE? I love being on theCUBE this week. It was a riot. I really, really enjoy it. And I think it's a lot more fun, actually, to be a host or asking the questions than answering them. I really like that because, you know, what you're trying to do is set somebody else up to talk about their stuff. And it's fun to tee something up and then have somebody run with it. And then when you have guests like Ken Barth from CataLogic, right? He was fantastic, right? It was great. You know, when he got going, you just see how enthusiastic he was. Really fun to do that, you know, and you know a lot of people here. And certainly people have commented, we've talked about it before, how it's largely a storage show or so much of the content here is storage. So, you know, I've been around the storage industry a long time. John, you're right. You know, this is the industry infrastructure show. The community here is fantastic. You know, you just walk down the halls and you can't, if you had to come here in a hurry, like I was doing the other day, it was hard because you see so many people that you know and you just want to connect to them. And it's like, you know what? I'm late like usual. I need to be upstairs on camera in 15 minutes. And it's really fun to see all these people. That was so well said. What you just said about the show was, I wanted to just put that in a jar and keep it and open it up later. So I guess I'll have to watch it on YouTube. Yeah, yeah. So we all agree with each other. Awesome. That's great. And Mark, I mean, look, I've always felt, you know, privileged to be able to, you know, connect with people. I mean, be great people like you. This show, it's always, you know, hey, can I have five minutes with, you know, some of my favorite people in the industry. I mean, back in 2010, first time I met you in person, Mark, you know, I like, I don't think I slept that week and, you know, had a couple of drinks maybe too. But, you know, you just want to, you know, soak it all up. It's one of those things I can get more accomplished in like the three or four days here of networking, knowledge, social engagement, building your career and, you know, building further friendships. Then you do normally in a quarter. I mean, it's just, you know, and these events are tiring. Doing the cubes exhausting, but it's one of those muscles you build up. You know, I always hope, you know, my goal is usually to help be the voice of the community. I want to ask the questions that people want to hear, help them understand more. And we are really privileged to have some great guests and, you know, thank you so much for all helping there. Look, any questions you guys want to ask each other? You know, you guys do so many different things. You know, the podcast and the community and everything else. So let me just open it up for a second. So one of the things that I get from, as I was walking back to the Cube set, I thought, you know what? This is the VM world. I wanted to have four years ago personally. You know, my first VM world was four years ago and I had all these huge expectations. And I got here, I'm like, and I was just completely overwhelmed. I booked a bunch of sessions and I just, I didn't get that initial burst of, not necessarily energy, but results that I was looking for. I'd like to ask you two, you guys, you've been to plenty of VM worlds and similar conferences. What's some of the advice you give to, you know, those first or second time goers that's looking to be on the Cube the next time? Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, a lot of this is about connection and connectivity. If you're an end customer, you're here, hopefully to connect to your supply chain of vendors and things like that. A lot of this, like most things, is human relationships. So the longer, you know, the longer you're in it, the more relationships you have, the more you've seen people. You know, if you've been around for, you've been in the industry longer than I have in terms of you know people, you've had drinks with people, you've done deals with people. So I think, you know, having an appropriate expectation for if you're just a junior assistant man and you're coming to this show, but you know, you take, it's a big buffet. So, you know, we've all been there. We've all eaten too much at a buffet. So you gotta pace yourself. But I think it's not just about knowledge. It's about connection. You know, I would say actually you should follow the Keith Townsend template because you've done a really great job, Keith, of coming in, engaging people. You're available all the time on Twitter. You're making really good content. You're getting it out there. You obviously hone your craft. You hone your speaking, your thought process. Boy, if somebody wants to come in and figure out how to do that, try to track what you've been doing the last four years. I'm serious, because you just started standing out. Appreciate it. You know, there's people that do this, right? You see him coming up, got like Matt Brender. Matt came out of nowhere, right? And you know, you saw him starting to engage. I think he was doing a support role at EMC, but you could just kind of tell that this guy had talent and he had ambition and he had desire. And you know, when you started talking to him, it's like, this guy's got a little electricity about him, you know, so you just have to bring it. And if you bring it to this community, people will help you out, I think. I think that's one of the great things about this conference specifically. You know, it doesn't matter if you're a junior CIS admin or someone's been doing this for 20 years. If you go over to the blogger's table, the hang space, whatever they call it every year, people are, you know, John is just as approachable as anyone. Thor, you mark. I really appreciate being able to just go to the community, whether I just left the blogger's table and a guy from Europe was asking another guy from the US about specific customer challenges that he was having. And they had to sit down for at least a half an hour, just talking through detailed designs and just career advice. It's that type of community and that type of conference. Yeah, so one of the things I don't get to do too much at the show is really go to the sessions. I see the keynotes, I try to make through to the show floor, check out some of the social, some of the extracurricular activities. I don't know if you guys got to any sessions at all, but you know, what other aspects of the show would you like to highlight, kind of, you know, highlights or things like that? So I didn't make any of the official sessions. There's... We were working for 11-2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was around a week. We had EZ and everybody else too, podcasting. Mark, how many did you do some ride casts this week? Yeah, I've recorded five so far. I've got a couple I'm going to try to do tomorrow. We'll see whether or not I actually get them done. And how many podcasts? We just did the one live podcast yesterday. John, you did a podcast? Yeah, I just did three today. Yeah, that's my four. Three today. Yeah, I did three today. You did some other videos outside of us? I did a couple of videos. We're going to have a surprise. I think tomorrow, me, Madden, Amy, and maybe one other guy from the community, Mark. But I think to your point, even if you missed the sessions, one viewer has them online afterwards. And the other one is that VMware has a really great blogger program that brings bloggers in. I was talking to one, Julian Wood, who just, you know, he's going to session after session. He was actually posting live content after those sessions and consuming that. And that's, I love it, because I'm able to go back and read that stuff and have commentary on a lot of the VMware world sessions. Well, Stu, I'm going to flip it back to you. You're sitting here in the queue, but you've been talking to the whole ecosystem. What's your sense of both of kind of the temperature of the industry and of the VMware announcements and news from this week? Wait, am I supposed to remember anything I talked about this week? It's a little bit daunting. We do some wrap-ups here. I know you guys have watched them. We put them in podcasts and go out. But it's interesting. I always like to look at things is, you know, it just depends what your point of view is and what your day job is. You know, some feedback. You know, we talked to some of the developers. We were talking to Matt Brender last night. He's like, the hackathon here was awesome this year. He said, last year, they called it a hackathon and it wasn't a hackathon. And then it was, you know, hackathon. We had some questions about sometimes if you name something, you know, and then people go in and it's not what they expect. It's like, oh, I came for a hackathon and you gave me like an intercession on something else. I thought I'd be coding and breaking things. That's not what I expected. So, you know, if you go to a round table and somebody comes up on a lectern and at the end you can ask a couple of questions. Oh, that's not a round table. You know, so what you're getting back. So, you know, all the different constituents here, there's so many coming on here. Had Lawrence Schwartz from Software One, a guy I've known for a long time said, you know, VMworld has the best mix of not only the good technical audience, but the business decision makers here. You know, kind of, you know, people in the polos and the people in the suits and in a good mix of that. And I think VMworld's still done a phenomenal job on that, you know, Keith's point. I don't think there was anything that was sexy this week or announcement that got us. It was, you know, the cloud message has gotten, it's gotten a little better. But, you know, we're still trying to struggle with, you know, where VMworld's going to live in that cloud world that Pat Gelsinger talked about. It's like, it's coming and it's big. So, you know, those of us that have lived with VMworld and worked in that ecosystem a long time, you know, there's a little bit of the, oh, I'm a little worried. What if this happens? We, people are trying to figure out their career paths and what they do next is something, you know, we've all talked about lots. So, overall, I think the energy was great at the show. The content was really good. There's always little things that we'll nitpick at and we're giving feedback back to, from the event standpoint, we're all crying a little bit that not only we're here in Vegas this year, we're going to be here two more years. So, other people complain about San Francisco, but, you know, conferences are conferences, but you know, the beds in Vegas are fine if you actually get to them. So, what's going on? I thought one of the themes that VMworld tried to bring out and I think they brought it out successfully was this idea of cross-cloud, multi-cloud. That was one of their themes and I think this industry has been chewing on the word cloud for so many years. It's almost lost its meaning and there are so many people who say, cloud is this or cloud is that or cloud is dead but they never say a year. And sometimes I think when they say, oh, it's all this sort of cloud, they're really talking about 2050 and not talking about today. Real people have real problems today that need to be solved with today's technology and that's going to be a mix of technologies. And I think VMware signaled to the industry that wait a minute, we recognize that we are not an island, that we participate in multiple ecosystems and multiple clouds. You know, the big announcement was with IBM. I know that there's more to come. I'm pretty, you know, I sense that it's going to, that's the signal of the direction they want ahead. If they can execute on that, I mean that's the whole futures business but I love the idea that one size does not fit all. You know, the whole world does not fit into the same architecture and that anybody telling you that is doing you a disservice. Yeah, I actually want to build on that and ask market question because there's some things that we've been beating our head against for decades and what excites me is when I hear customers that are willing to move a little bit faster, you know, the trope we've been saying forever is IT moves really slow. Networking moves really, really slow and storage moves slow too. There's some things that are moving pretty fast right now. We are seeing things change faster that it feels like it accelerating in my career. You know, especially kind of on the storage side, we talked to a couple of customers that, you know, things that I would have thought, geez, you're not going to try that with a startup and you know, it's risky and they're willing to make that move. They're finding good results and they are moving the needle on things. Yeah, right, so, you know, we had the interview this afternoon with Matt Rademacher. From DSW. From DSW, right? And you kind of think the shoe business, what about the shoe business? They have to compete with Zappos and Zappos is part of Amazon and that is a tough, tough thing to do, right? You think, well, does the shoe business really have to do this? Yeah, they've got to go DevOps and they've got to be really quick and agile and that's where this whole industry is going, right? You look, a few weeks ago, they had the Delta Airlines meltdown and you look at it's kind of like a metaphor legacy monolithic software technologies that just can't adapt to digitalization. And so, seeing a customer and interviewing them here talking about, you know, their path, knowing the business pressure they have making a gutsy decision, you know, to go with a new storage company to build their infrastructure the base of the infrastructure on top of really fascinating stuff. And of course, you know, VMware is a big part of that too, right? We didn't even talk about it, but it's a huge part of that. Yeah, great points, Mark. And I mean, the other thing for DSW, the supply chain is something that's hugely important to that company, a lot of companies, so many companies becoming, you know, software companies or becoming tech companies themselves. So, maybe that gets me towards the end, the kind of the big news for some of the industry watchers here is, you know, Dell EMC is closing and means VMware is going to be owned by, you know, Dell Technologies itself. So, hoping you guys can tell me a little bit. You know, what's your take on that? What do you think of kind of the future of VMworld? What are you hoping to see or want to see by VMworld 2017? So, I've been in a couple of Q&As on both the customer side, because I'm a VMware customer, and on the press analyst side, where Michael Dell was asked that specific question even after he addressed it during his, you know, opening comments, nothing about VMware would change. It will be an open ecosystem. And then the first question is, what about VMware would change after Dell acquires VMware? And I think there's obviously, even with the repeated messaging from Pat Dell and all the executives that customers in the industry at large feels that there may be potential change at VMware. I think Dell just isn't known for a company as a company to leave big brands along when they purchase them. So, I think that's a big question. Obviously, VMworld 2017 is set in stone with the dates next year, as is EMC World, because EMC has the same questions. I like, you know, I'm like every other VMware geek. I cut my teeth on VMware vSphere, or it wasn't even called vSphere at the time, on 3.5 ESX 3.5. And I like everything to remain exactly as it is today. I don't like the new name of the hang space. I like, you know, I still call it the hang space. So, you know what, I'm a traditional, it's interesting. Keith, Keith, are you trying to get a slot on the graybeards podcast? You were too young to be, you know, I'll be clinging to the past. Let's move forward. No, but... Have you downloaded the new stuff off GitHub that VMware has out there? Send it to me on CDE, we'll talk. But, you know what, on the flip side, I've gotten the chance to sit into conversations on the customer side and the analyst side with Dell. And Michael Dell is an exciting, just geek. And I'm sure that VMware would be, and VMware would be a good hands. You know, most tech acquisitions, and big tech acquisitions especially don't work. If any of them, any one of them has a chance to work, I think it's this one, right? EMC, strong culture, strong culture of federation, strong culture of not assimilating, right? It kept the pieces separate. They're leaving EMC, that piece of EMC intact to run the enterprise side. So as far as I understand, so that's interesting. I think VMware also, very independent, even under the EMC umbrella, very different culture, very different self-identity. And you cannot, as an ex VMware person, you couldn't, if you squeeze all the life out of it, if you squeeze the brand out, you squeeze the life out. So I think if any of these big tech mergers gonna work, it's this crew. The EMC and VMware people are not shy. And so hopefully they will find a working relationship with the Dell folks. Everything I've seen has seen positive. On a personal note, I mean, I have been super impressed with Michael Dell and how much he cares and how much he wants to make this work, both in the official briefings. Also, last night, we were at an event here at the show and VMware had a through a party, the storage business unit through a party and Michael Dell was there and he was there for hours and he was meeting people and he was, people were hugging him and they were taking selfies and he was talking to people when the music wasn't loud enough, it wasn't too loud. You know, he didn't have to be there. He could have gone to, he had many other things to do in his entire portfolio and he could have been in bed. But he was there because he cares about this and he wants to personally ensure, be driven to make this thing work. And so that's positive, those are all positive signs, you know, from as far as I see. Interesting, interesting to hear that he was at the party. I wish I could have got a selfie with him. Not sure that he would, right? But, he got a mark. Amazingly, I've been critical. So for the audience that doesn't know Mark, you did spend a little bit of time at Dell after the Ecologic Acquisition. I did, I spent some time and he was involved in that acquisition pretty heavily also. And that's where I met him and know him a little bit from was because he came there and did that. So I don't know, these big acquisitions are really tough but they did it, it's not part of the show but they did an amazing job of financial engineering when they put this deal together. The debt financing they got was really cheap. And so that means that this new organization is not going to be dealing with a big debt load month to month, year to year. They're gonna have capital to operate with. And that was, I'm a guy that's competed against EMC. My whole career has been basically competing against EMC. And when this deal was announced last October, it was a sad, sad day for me. It was almost like crocodile tears because I thought that's gonna be the death of EMC and we all need them. I'm thinking they might still be the same kind of EMC even though it's part of Dell technologies. I would like to see that. And it's weird for me to be pulling for them because in my work life, I've often been bad boxing with them. I would really like to see that vision happen. So after this show, I'm scared to see if you have a VMAX in your basement now. All right, just my quick take on that. First of all, Michael Dell, super engaged. If people think he's leaving or anything like that, he is paying super close attention. There's some cultural challenges between these two companies. So keep some of them, the EMC office is a little bit separate. If VMware can be left mostly on its own and maybe even pull out some of the EMC, how they were interacting on some of those pieces, there's some acceleration that VMware can do. So I'd love to chat with you guys for a couple more hours, but the good news is when these things come to an end, there's always another ones and we can always connect online. I always reach out, if people wanna reach out, all these guys are really accessible. I try to be too. So Keith Townsend's CTO advisor, John Troyer, Jay Troyer on Twitter, Mark Farley, Go Farley on Twitter, and I'm Stu Miniman at Stu on Twitter. Thank you so much for joining us for these segments. We are looking for more people on our team. We are growing some of our guest hosts at some of these events. So reach out to us if you have questions about the content, if you wanna know about the shows, go to SiliconANGLE TV, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE here at VMworld 2016.