 James, our new blogger from ReadWriteWeb, editor of the enterprise section. Hey Alex. Hey, how you guys doing? Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Welcome. So what's the stories out there? What are you seeing? Obviously, you published last night. I wrote my piece about OpenStack and VMware and OpenSource. We're seeing the cloud proprietary versus the open. You know, you saw it immediately when you got off the plane at the airport and they had advertisements there for public, private infrastructure, checkbox, VMware. And that's really what we're hearing today at least is this story about the public cloud, the private cloud and really how the platform really is becoming the key story here in the middle of all that. So Alex Williams is our lead blogger, editor on the ground here. He's out getting all the stories. We have our team back at the ranch putting all the stories out on SiliconANGLE.com. So what are we expecting to hear today? What are we expecting to hear? Well, I think what we'll hear a lot today is about this whole idea of connecting globally through these service providers. So like taking, you know, I'm a company to have like that private infrastructure, that virtualized infrastructure, but then connecting it into this global environment. So they actually have a services connector group with different service providers in different parts of the world. So for a customer, that means one contract, but potentially accessing a series of federated clouds, correct? That's correct, yeah. So Alex, what's the enabler there? I mean, it's got to have some degree of, I mean, you think about Amazon, there's a lot of homogeneity in their cloud. VMware is trying to populate its technologies across these cloud federated cloud infrastructures. So what are the enablers there to make that happen? Is it the cloud infrastructure? Is it security layer? Is it the whole stack? What do I got to have to actually make that a reality? Well, you know, VMware's goal is to virtualize everything, right, you know, and so that's really, I think, you know, that's the, you know, I think that's where the route that you're seeing things go. And you were seeing it in terms of, you know, the security aspect of it for sure. That's what they're really banking on in contrast to Amazon web services and then the other public cloud providers. That's a key differentiator. How about this notion of database as a service? I caught my eye in one of the announcements. What do you think, what do you make about that? I think that that's really interesting and it's similar to what we're seeing, for instance, from companies such as salesforce.com with database.com. And that's providing that database for developers inside the enterprise who are increasingly using agile methodologies to develop applications and what they're needing is an ability to update every day and what they've been doing over the past few years is creating this shadow IT organization. So they're using their own, you know, so they're like, so they're spitting up their own databases and now they're kind of just everywhere. There's a sprawl issue. And so the idea here is to bring all that together into one consolidated space so they can, you know, so they can manage it more effectively but also provide the services developers need. So is any Postgres databases, I understand it. So eventually, I mean, eventually you'll see Oracle databases that play as part of this. You don't need Oracle's permission to do it. I mean, Oracle necessarily doesn't want to support it but our customers want it, need it and they're going to go forward and, you know, tame the torpedo, so to speak. We have a lot of clients in the Wikibon community that are having great success virtualizing Oracle databases, so it's inevitable. What do you make of the whole Cloud Foundry play? Let's shift gears a little bit. You know, where's it fit in that whole mosaic of platform as a service? Well, really, what's the big story that we will hear over and over and over again at this event and others? And it's really about data and it's about building applications with lots and lots of data. So that's where the database, I think, functioning all capability comes into play there as well but it also comes into play with, you know, being able to build applications very quickly on a platform. And that's where Cloud Foundry comes in. And what I think is really interesting is you would not see companies here this year that were, you're seeing companies here this year that were not here last year. These are like young companies that fit into that partner ecosystem. That's what's really, I think, different about this year at least in the play, you know, as it relates to the platform space. Okay, Alex Williams, our star leader in the enterprise space, formerly from Read Red Web, congratulations for your first big official VM world with theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be here. We know you're going to be roaming the hallways, getting some stories, so we'll see you later today. Great, great guys, thanks a lot.