 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back. Everyone here live at VMworld for day three, winding down VMworld. We're here, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We'd like to bring in entrepreneurs and industry veterans to kind of help us break it down. And as kind of guest analyst that I got, Mendoza Dugar, who's the entrepreneur and executive in the industry. Big time, multiple serial entrepreneur. Watch them do a lot of multiple exits. Knows big data, knows cloud, knows security, knows everything. Overall, great guy. Thanks for coming on and spending the time to share your thoughts on hybrid cloud and public cloud. Thank you. It's great to be with you. Last year's obviously Pat's Clarity, finally VMware, post-Federation, post-EMC, now Dell Technologies, is laying out some clarity. It's a data center play. Right. It's the data center, back to their roots, simplify, try to abstract away complexities. No big cloud play at the vCloud Air network, but it's going to be inter-clouding. This means they're finally acknowledging public cloud. Yes. So what does that mean for that data center and hybrid cloud? I think as you just kind of narrated in last one, two days of your interviews, I think public cloud is here to stay. The train left the station, right? I'm seeing with the customers and workloads and applications, data being moved to the cloud, applicants are moving to the cloud, whether it's ERP, CRM, whether you take productive applications, whether it's SharePoint, Exchange, then you have workloads which are data intensive workloads are moving to the cloud. That means, and these are public cloud. So now VMware has to think through, in this new age of public clouds of Amazon's, Azure's, and Google's, where do they play? What is the role? Do you want to arm the public cloud vendors? Do you want to support the existing apps which requires a platform like VMware to run in the clouds? I think that's the strategy that Pat is going after, saying that look, if the workloads needs to be moved to the public cloud, can they run on the VMware? Can we support the existing workloads without being changed? So that's the strategy Pat is playing. But is it a viable strategy? Because I've been squinting through the announcement, and again, it's multi-year, there's some stuff that's going to be vaporware that's not going to yet hit there, but they've got some good traction with NSX, they've got a vSAN, finally growing, post-federation. But if I'm not going to play ball, Amazon might not play ball with VMware or Azure. I mean, Amazon's, they're publicly on record, certainly on the queue by saying, Andy Jassy says, why would someone even build a data center? So I would agree with you that I think public cloud is being minimized, probably more movement to the public cloud, certainly on a green field basis than hybrid. But what if Amazon doesn't play ball with VMware? What if Microsoft comes out and creates a little bit of stickiness in their stack and says, hey, it's not lock in per se, but it's kind of lock in. VMware might not have an open invitation. So slinging APIs around might not cut it. So your thoughts? No, you nailed it. I think my concern that I see though is similar to what you're saying, which is if you have the new application that you're going to build, John and Muduva to build a new application, new company, will I build it on the SDDC of the VMware? Would I build natively on Amazon, Google, and Azure? I think the new applicant for sure will be built natively on public cloud. Every new, pretty much almost 100% every new. Whether that is the public companies on public cloud. Right, whether it's a public company or an entrepreneur or a VC, all new apps are being, now the question is what are the existing workloads that they can get a piece of the pie? Now the question is that pie is shrinking. As you move the more workloads to the public cloud, can they really have to rewrite the applications? Is there a market you want to go after where you are arming vendors like VIPROs, the cognizance, the Verizon, the telcos vendors to see? Can they play in this public cloud market? So VMware strategy is to go after those guys, arm those telcom guys, arm those other vendors to see if they can get a share of the pie. That's essentially the vCloud AIR network. What? Essentially instead of doing the vCloud AIR cloud, they just said, okay, we're going to do more support for VMware in the service provider. I think there's an angle. I don't know where VMware will go. If I were them, I would do one more thing. It's not just giving the bits and bytes of software. If I am VMware, what I will do is I will also manage this SDDC as a remotely. Think of the Cisco Maraki model. As manage it, what is, internet working? As a DevOps. Oh, DevOps. So that means I'm not just giving you my software of SDDC, I actually manage it for you. So in a way, the telecom guys, the hosting vendors, they manage their infrastructure and service, but SDDC management will be owned by VMware. It's like the old Cisco Maraki model where the switch is on-prem, but the brains are with them. And they could also be a sales engine for the cloud guys, too. So not so much a technology play. If they go that route, it's not so much a sale, I mean, technology play, it's a management play. It's a management play. Now, given all of that, though, I think the key difference that I see is the world, the new age application, new age data-driven application where everything is going to machine learning AI. What I don't see is, where does VMware is going when the world is going towards data-driven AI, machine learning, big data? In that world, where are you going after? The tensor flows, the deep learning, those things require new substrate, new public cloud, new models. Are they really embracing that? Are they actually not looking after that and going after only the existing? The existing could be become the mainframe. It may never die, but there'll be a small amount, like mainframe. It'll be a shrinking market, for sure. IoT certainly came up. I asked Michael Dell if he's worried about missing anything like Bill Gates did in 1994 when he wrote his book, The Road Ahead, and he missed the internet and the web. So, I got the feeling that there's a big shift going on. All the young developers are all going to the cloud. They're all interested in AI, machine learning, and autonomous vehicles, a new kind of digital substrate. So, it's interesting. I mean, this is a provocative conversation. And my view is, in those cases, they have to be relevant there. Are those developers, because my view of the world is like what Steve Bowman used to call developer, developer, developers. If you don't embrace the developers, game is over. So, what, if I remember, it's not just looking at the hybrid cloud and SDDC. How can I enable the developers? How can I commoditize those developers? How can I be relevant to them? How can I make their job easy? That hasn't come across in this conference yet. That's a great point. We'll leave it there. And again, developers, developers, developers, this probably will be a next sequence. Today, I think at this show, finally wrapping it up, they're just laying out the straight and narrow. So, hopefully, they get to the developers. Madhu, thank you for sharing the feedback. Thank you, John, always. Expert in the field, multi-times, serial entrepreneur, multiple exits, an executive in the industry. Madhu, thank you for joining us. We'll be right back with more live coverage here at the Mandalay Bay in the hang space at VMworld. We'll be right back.