 Okay, we're back live in San Francisco for the post-EMC V-spec event. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, where we go out to the events and cover them and extract the signal from the noise and wrap that into analysis and commentary. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we've got a great guest today from VMware, Hadam Nagheeb. Welcome to theCUBE. Hadam, you manage the Cisco, the EMC and the VCE relationships, correct? That is correct. Thank you very much for having me today. Great to have you. So what's that all about? Tell us what that means that your team manages those relationships. What does that entail? So from a VMware perspective, we have very deep strategic relationships with Cisco, EMC and VCE as partners. Those relationships come to both go-to-market activities that we do, so selling together, the marketing, the messaging, but also extensive engineering work that the two companies would do together as two-way relationships to help expand the adoption of virtualization and their infrastructure components into the market. The VCE piece is interesting because you use Cisco, EMC and VCE, you are VMware, which is one-third of the relationship and then Cisco, EMC, the other two-thirds. There's like an Excel circular reference in there, isn't it? You guys, I know you swap a lot of DNA between those three organizations. We manage our three-way and two-way relationships as effectively as we can. So from a technology standpoint, where do you spend the most time? Is it obviously vSphere in view, or is it? I think it crosses all levels of the platform from a VMware perspective. vSphere, of course, being the kind of the foundation and having a lot of differentiation on both the storage and the server side, making it critical for both Cisco and EMC. Converged infrastructure, really bringing to bear, I think, a new paradigm within how customers are consuming their infrastructure and virtualization. So the management story becomes really interesting and a lot of work being done with VCE around how we have a unified management story to help kind of accelerate the adoption of that. We've been talking on theCUBE a lot about how, and every guest we've talked to going back on at least a year, Dave, has been talking about how cloud, mobile and social, mainly cloud, reminds them of client server, right? And that enabled a lot, right? Many computers and lands, et cetera. But now with cloud, that kind of dynamic is really kind of happening in a different way, more open, more stack choice, a few other things. I'd say the data center's impacted heavily in the enterprise side. With client server came a slew of opportunities for partners and innovation in particular. What do you see out there that's going on in the data center specifically around the infrastructure and what it needs to support given this heavy focus of apps, agile and mobile? What are the new areas that are just like, wow, we saw that coming, it's ready for prime time, or we didn't see this coming, and it's a new trend? What are you seeing as those core enablers? I think from the customer's perspective, from an IT perspective, and we look at the end customer of who we're really trying to serve, they're under an enormous amount of pressure to accelerate their SLA back to their end business customers. And they're seeing the consumerization of IT, where people outside of a traditional technical background are gaining access to technology, be that through mobile devices, be that through Facebook and social media in a way that the business needs to be able to accommodate and accelerate as quickly as possible. So virtualization was kind of that first impact that happened to the data center, which created I think a convergence of storage network compute. But what's happening a lot, what we see is that end customers want to spend less time putting things together and more time building business applications that are going to provide value to their end customers, less time maintaining the infrastructure and the putting of the pieces together and more time really optimizing for a more cost effective and cost based solution back to their end customers. So when you look at, and the insurance company is a great example, right? Being able to move their applications to be much more web and social media aware and so forth is a top priority for them. Access on an iPad and an iPhone. And data is a heart of that problem, right? Data is a great example, right? I got data that's going to come from a big data perspective to all different platforms that I need to manage. Why VSpecs is fantastic is because it brings together a solution architecture to those end customers that takes away them having to put all these pieces together and allows them to leverage their resources more effectively to address the core problems for their business. We talked a lot about this on theCUBE John and had him, you just mentioned it, that IT is under tremendous pressure to deliver better SLAs and a big part of that is if they don't they're going to get outsourced. And you know, there've been people in theCUBE that say, hey, the traditional IT shop is 10 years behind Google and Facebook in terms of innovating with architecture. But yet, the IT is a very interesting organism, John, you mentioned client server, right? IT eventually embraced it. They're very resistant to change, but eventually they embrace it and then sort of figure it out. Well, what do you see there? I see we put on them, so I have an IT background. I started off my career in an IT organization and application development. They have constraints that other companies don't have to deal with or the departments don't have to deal with in terms of compliance and security and expectation. When email is not working or when there's a security breach, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on IT organization to make sure that these things never happen. And that does, I think, force them to have to be a little more rigid and a little more slower in adopting new technologies. Hopefully, things like what we're doing with our partners around the solution innovation that we're doing, but also with virtualization with VMware, give them the flexibility to accelerate some of the adoptions associated with that because their constraints are really holding back, I think, a lot of the differentiation that they want the business to be able to drive when they look at the compliance they have to map and the security they have to map and so forth. So the fact that you're an IT practitioner or a former IT practitioner is quite interesting, so we all remember the Nick Carr book, IT, does it matter, does IT matter? And the premise of the book was IT doesn't deliver a competitive advantage and then since that book, you've seen Google, Facebook, Zynga clearly IT gives competitive advantage. Now, maybe he would argue today, yes, but for the vast majority of companies, it doesn't and I would even debate that. I want your take on that in terms of do you see that IT, especially given data and analytics and big data, as really able to deliver competitive advantage even as brokers of the cloud? What's your take on that? I don't think that has changed. I think IT does give competitive advantage. I think your examples are spot on. I think there are examples when you look at a company like Amazon and its ability to really offer to its end customers a unique user experience. That's all IT, IT based. We have to, I think, distinguish between the IT of here's your Windows laptop, right? And go do what your Word document has to provide for you versus the IT that provides the American Airlines saber system and gave us the ability to really make reservations online. Those are two different ITs and I think there's a clamoring in the business to become more of that innovative side of IT, the Google, the Facebook type of capabilities where businesses really look to that to be able to succeed. The less work that has to be done on plugging in servers and storage and the more work that can be done on optimizing around an application user experience and giving people the mobility to reach their work anywhere they want to be able to do it, the more that competitive advantage becomes a critical success factor. And bringing it back to convergence and generally in VSpecs specifically, John's team at SiliconANGLE's launched a new publication called DevOpsANGLE. And you know, there's a very labor intensive business we're in. The spending on labor has increased about two and a half X in the last 12, 13 years in IT. So you guys have been following the DevOps trend. Are you seeing that occur? Will this converged infrastructure trend facilitate the intersection of development and operations so that there is more cross-training so that we can truly attack that labor problem? But the premise is it's not just infrastructure. There's got to be processes that take advantage of that new infrastructure. What do you see there? I think what we're seeing is the infrastructure having, as it becomes more converged, becoming more cloud aware. So the concepts of silos that used to exist around I'm a storage specialist or I'm a network specialist, when virtualization started to bring all that together, everybody had to become a specialist across all those pieces. So now the virtualization person at the company really does bring together all those components together. And as they look at a private hybrid public cloud strategy, they have to be cognizant of scalability and mobility concepts that they would have not had to be in a more confined IT organization. The developer used to think about how do I get the device driver for a specific piece of hardware to work very properly with the application. That paradigm is now going away. And they're building applications when you look at some of the stuff we're doing with Spring, when you look at the V-Fabric concepts, those are now becoming cloud aware types of applications where the application sits, where it gains its data, are no longer part of that. So I think the convergence of the dev and the ops, I think you bring that up very nicely. I think it's coming together and they're merging towards a much more SaaS and cloud aware type of architecture that they've got to be cognizant as they develop their production, test, and development environments. So I've been an observer of this converged infrastructure trend since VCE kicked it off. And then you saw Oracle with Exadata and HP came in a big way, certainly NetApp and now Dell and IBM yesterday, big announcement and others. Everybody's saying the same thing. It's about simplification, speed to deployment, integrated infrastructure, reducing risk. As a practitioner, how do you differentiate? How do you squint through all the marketing and really get down to what's different? What's different between each of? The different approaches. Yeah, the different approaches. I mean, how do I discern where value really is? If everybody's saying the same thing in the same message, is there a difference? How do you determine the BS from the reality? Because CIO looks at, you've been in IT, hey, I got a business to run, I got vendors coming in, doing pitches, telling me their bridge is better to cross than the other guys, but all this stuff's going on. With everyone kind of going now into the converged party, they're all kind of looking the same. So how do you vet that out? Tell you're in VMware and you're approaching where it is. I hear that today it comes down to value, but the value propositions are kind of men kind of coming together, they're all copying each other or copying VCE. I mean, look at it. How do you kind of differentiate that? I think you gotta look at, so I think you bring up a really good point. I mean, two years ago when VCE came to the market with this, the VMware component was the foundation of what was driving this converged infrastructure philosophy. VMware is not simply just the hypervisor. We bring to bear a huge amount of technology and features that cross all different layers of the IT infrastructure from the end user, the desktop components to the application development. And so those who adopted that converged infrastructure paradigm who recognized it not as a hardware play, but as a cloud play and levers the software assets more effectively, I think that brings a level of differentiation that I think an end customer needs to look at. Am I looking at the software piece as an OS in this or am I looking at it as a true enabler from both a management perspective, an automation perspective and a simplicity perspective? How deep is that convergence occurring on that software layer? Is a key differentiator for a lot of value? So obviously you mentioned spring earlier, so we have like one minute left, so the final question will be, okay, with the barrage of frameworks hitting the scene, we're seeing, we covered one, or I think we covered one yesterday, at least I drafted something up Meteor who's a new framework was launched yesterday, guys who did Etherpad launched one, very compelling, HTML5, we've seen a lot of mobile stuff, very turnkey software development environments, very much like the old Visual Studio kind of stuff out there in the old days. So with that barrage of software, what has to be supported now grows. So it's now the other problem, the infrastructure needs to be aware of more apps. So how do you talk about that in terms of like from looking up to the apps as new apps come in, how do you determine what framework fits where? So I think it's a great question. One of the things, I've been at VMware for six years and we started off as very much an infrastructure focus company, but since Paul has come in as the CEO, you've seen a dramatic shift in our focus to really not just look at the infrastructure, but look at developers. And developers is being kind of at the flagship of where technology innovation is going to be. There's a small number of developers in the world and when they adopt a new technology, it completely changes how the infrastructure's going to be. It's not the other way around, right? We didn't get into client server because somebody thought this type of connectivity would work better. It's because PowerBuilder and Visual Basic and a bunch of different ways of looking at the application drove the infrastructure to make that modification. Power work from a student. I asked Pat Gelsinger that question two years ago and he gave me kind of a middle of the road answer. Yes, I do. Which powers what? Infrastructure enable software or the other way around? Nice. Thanks for aligning with my answer. Pat was kind of straddling the fence. I'd say he was aligning with me too, but. You know, in many ways, from an end customer perspective, it's that experience that will define what that infrastructure is going to be. Look at the Apple App Store. When that thing exploded, that's what made the iPad and the iPhone successful. Instagram wouldn't have sold for a billion dollars if there was no App Store, period. They just launched Android three days before they sold. A billion dollar business in two years because of Apple. It's the same paradigm in the entertainment business, right? TV shows are what make the technology not necessary. So is there an Instagram in the IT environment? The answer is there will be, not necessarily that huge valuation, but some innovation will happen. A flower will bloom. I think what you're going to see is what we experience out of work is going to converge much more closely to what we're going to be at work. It's actually dramatic how different it is when you're at work than when you're not. But it's getting better. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. At least you can bring an iPhone to work, right? True. Virtualization on the desktop, things are happening. But the experience of gaining a new application and being able to have your personality mapped to that application. Can you imagine an internal conversation in the accounting department basically competing for the desktop app for the users internally? That could be the future. It could be the future. Okay, we're going to break any final questions? No, I think we're out of time, unfortunately. That was great. Thank you. I really appreciate it coming up. We'll be right back with our next guest. Take a short break. We'll be right back. 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I think it was RSA one or RSA two and it was down in the basement of the Fairmont back when it was just this little bitty conference. Also, you go on the other side of that wall. I wonder about these designations though because would you really want to go talk to someone who's a troll? Courtney just did. I know. You seem like a pretty nice guy too. Yeah, trolls get a bad name. All right, all right, so sorry. I apologize to all the trolls out there. I'm sure you're all lovely people.