 Back at live at VMworld 2012, this is SiliconANGLE.TV's The Cube, this is our final wrap-up day three. Continuous exclusive coverage of VMworld 2012, boy what a set of interviews. I'm John Furrier and I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. I'm Wiggy Bond, the analyst, doing all the research, getting all the data, making all the opinions, making moves. Dave, what do you think? Well, first thing I want to say, John, is having done this now three years in a row from VMworld. VMworld 2010 was our first real breakout show. Our first show together was EMC World in 2010. And I just want to say, John, I'm just so thrilled at the way that SiliconANGLE and The Cube is changing the media business. You know, democratizing media, bringing this great content to the masses. I mean, we're sitting here watching The Cube, Pat Gelsinger is on the big screen here, and there are VMwares running the rerun of Pat on The Cube. You know, I'm very proud and pleased to be part of it, so thank you for including us. Well, I would also say that, you know, seeing you at AT&T Park on the ground with all the execs at the NetApp event, getting all that B-roll, we are the agile media company. And then someone came up to me and said, what you guys are doing is kind of like what VMwares doing in the cloud and data center. You're agile media, you're taking a new approach. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to use that. So, you know... So, big pat on the back for us, and high five, John, I'm really impressed. Now, the second thing I want to say is, in 2010, you and I talked about, on The Cube, the VMware economy in the enterprise. And we made the prediction at that point in time that VMware slash EMC, VMware, EMC owns VMware, will be the next $100 billion company in the enterprise. Now, SAP is still a bit ahead of them, at about a $70 billion market. When I say $100 billion, I mean market value. We stand by that prediction, it's clear that this is the main enterprise event, the VMworld, the VMugs. The VMware economy is in full swing. The train is in full motion, the NYSERA acquisition, driving networking. VMware is in the driver's seat, John, just as we had predicted, and I think it's just going to be expanding even faster. You know, I think one of the things that we really drilled on in 2010 was, one, we were very excited by the math that Paul Moritz put out. We said this is an operating system. That's ratified now three years later, two years later, with the messaging of Abstract, Pool, Automate. But really, Dave, it was the ecosystem. We talked about the ecosystem play, was their key to success. Todd Nielsen at the time was talking about that. That's definitely happening, and with Pat Gelsinger at the helm, and with acquisitions like NYSERA, the talent acquisitions and the technology acquisitions that VMware is putting together is quite an impressive set of activities and quite a run. Yeah, I think what's happening here is that VMware, VMware be extremely aggressive. I think that frankly, again, EMC is driving VMware in that direction. They are getting really aggressive about essentially owning that entire stack. I mean, just even the notion of dynamic ops being able to manage multi-vendor hypervisor. Yeah, Dave, if we look back, EMC many years ago moved above storage to really become more relevant to CIOs in general and across the entire infrastructure, what they're doing in big data, what they're doing in software and what they're doing in services really kind of grew EMC. And we're seeing VMware, as you know, much more than just a hypervisor company. We talked about how the acquisition of dynamic ops, Wanova, Cetus and NYSERA are all getting beyond just VMware vSphere environments, physical multi-hypervisor environments. Distributed computing is where VMware now has a lot of talent and they can really help transform a greater part of the IT environment. Yeah, well, sometimes these things are a bit fuzzy, but I think it's clear that the vision that VMware is putting forth is quite compelling. A lot of that, you know, you've got to give credit to guys like Paul Moritz and Steve Herrod who have really driven that vision. And so I think it's clear that the practitioners are lining up behind that vision and adopting, despite the fact that, hey, I mean, look at Windows Server 2012, looks good by all accounts. No question from a functionality standpoint that Microsoft is closing the gap, but in some respects, you know, this, John, it really doesn't matter. I mean, VMware's got such momentum and it's putting forth a vision and it's so compelling for people. In the near term, I think it's impenetrable, unless they too quickly show up. Well, I think, I mean, obviously, you heard the developer story again, now Todd Nielsen's heading that up. And we've, again, we've had Todd Nielsen on theCUBE, Mark Risen-Hobbgens. You know, we are talking about all the footage we have going back to 2010. We have so much footage from VMware. Go to YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE and go check out all the footage. And I've had guys come up to me and say, hey, can I play with some of that old footage and put together some trailers and stories? You may see more of that. But we heard about the developer focus on Todd Nielsen two years ago and I thought what was strikingly about this one is that they are leveraging Cloud Foundry as a stalking horse to start pushing that platform as a service to make the productivity for developers really easy. At the same time, they're going down deep with the total alpha geeks at the low level with Nasirah, Dave. So that was one bright spot. The other bright spot is Dynamic Ops and VDI. Having that equation, if they can put that together, I'm going to, I say we're going to look back and say, it was Dynamic Ops and VDI really made a difference at the top of the stack. And Stu, I'd like to get your perspective on what you think about that. Yeah, great point. So when we kind of kicked off the coverage for this year, we talked about data infrastructure and the data that I've seen at the show is that VDI actually surprised me. Every storage company that I talked to was talking about significant percentages of deployments with VDI. I put an article up last week, is VDI the killer app for converged infrastructure? Because you saw somewhere between 25 and 75% of all converged stack deployments have VDI in them. And even a lot of the Flash guys are in the 30 to 50% deployments being four VDIs. So while 2013's not the year of VDI, there's still some strong momentum in rolling out those VDI deployments. Well, Stu, that's a great point. First of all, great post, by the way. And again, Wikibon continues to lead the way in the research side. I mean, you guys just lead it. And of course, SiliconANGLE does it. It's all a real-time action. You guys are doing a great job. But Ping Li, when he was on here, Ping Li being one of the leading venture capitalists in big data. He works for Excel Partners. He said that VDI surprised him. He's seeing a lot of entrepreneurs coming in with startups built around the VDI concept. And although it's changed a lot, it's really finding a nice home. Yeah, and John, in the VC, you've been talking about where there's frothiness and where things are a little bit overvalued. Talk about what is hot. VDI pales in comparison to Flash. There are so many Flash vendors here. We had two panels. I think three-quarters of the day on Monday was some Flash engagement. So something that we are watching very closely, helping to segment the market, understand the differentiation and who's going to succeed, who probably is going to be acquired, and where the real value in the marketplace is. Dave and Stu, I want to get your perspective on something. When we started VMworld this year, I put out the notion of data infrastructure. Actually, we talk about it internally. You guys kind of filled in the blanks. Dave, I want to get your take and Stu as well. One, what do you think about data infrastructure? Now post VMworld, as this show ends down today and tomorrow, about the notion of data infrastructure and the interplay with big data. Data-driven infrastructure, data-led infrastructure, data infrastructure as an extension of conversion networking. Dave, are we good call? Soso, Home Run, what's your angle on that? Well, I think it's a very good call. I think it's the right framework for understanding how the data center is going, and infrastructure is going to evolve over the next five to seven years. Having said that, I think we've got a long way to go. Steve Herrod, I think, summed it up very well. We've got an A on the servers, maybe a B, B plus on the storage, and C, maybe C plus on networking. And that's clearly where all the effort's going in right now. But to me, John and Stu, the evolution of Flash is going to really drive and accelerate the need to fix the networking piece. What's still missing, I think, is the bringing together of those big data analytics applications feeding real-time transactional applications and driving new business value. That's where there's a long way to go. So, we've got to start somewhere. Stu, what do you think? Starting with the network and the infrastructure is absolutely right on. Yeah, so I think, echoing what Dave said, that the infrastructure piece needs to be able to complement, really serve the application and the data. So, what David Fleuer says, the IO-centric model of the future needs to help, you know, eliminate the bottlenecks, serve things up, and help IT get their job done better. And big data is a tool that's filling into many environments now. You know, one of the kind of, really, you talk about the alpha geeks that are here, Cloud Physics is a company that came out of stealth. We actually did an appearance site with them the week before the conference. Mendel was there. A lot of the original developers from VMware and, you know, they are helping to take configuration information and use analytics to make that actionable so that we can really, you know, get much better utilization out of our infrastructure and simplify and automate things. So, soon we'll be able to put out a new product that we preview here, Dave. I wanted to share with you, Dave, our vFinder preview. We previewed a lot of new tools, SiliconANG will be born, powered by VDP Finder. And just right now on our, quote, top conversations algorithm that we put together for the VMware ecosystem, obviously, VMware is number one in VMware, the topics. Cloud computing, virtualization, and horizon top the list right now. So, cloud computing being defined as private, public, and hybrid. SAS, vCloud, Azure, vSphere, private cloud, and cloud apps. So, it's a cloud friendly crowd. Yeah, John, what about mobile? You know, horizon and what they were talking about. You know, what's your take on the whole mobile side of what was at the show? First of all, great messaging. I think they're right on the money relative to the trajectory of their strategy. Multiple devices and managing that directly with a service fabric like dynamic ops is absolutely the way to go, I think. So, that's good. But we talked with Chris Hoff on the security side, too. There's some real issues that need to be resolved on the security side, multiple endpoints. We also had Simon Crosby on, who's an entrepreneur and the co-founder. He might have another founder, Abromium, who's just taking a unique approach to solving some of these problems. So, you know, we heard from Todd Nielsen talking about application hell, application server hell. So, I think, you know, yes, it's the right way to go. I think the theme of rewriting applications, the more core apps it has to happen. So, yes, I totally think mobility is driving that. And I think what really no one connected the dots on yet is the big data aspect. I know they did the project, what's it, Serengeti? Yeah, Serengeti. Serengeti, did a little demo. It was just a demo. But ultimately, the big data was one part of the show that I didn't see a lot. So, to me, if you're not talking big data, mobile's nothing. Yeah, well, Serengeti handles the infrastructure component of big data, not so much the analytic side. But that didn't really come across loud and clear. Yeah. I mean, from my take, it's like, yeah, they did this little demo. I mean, come on, Stu, what's your take on it? Yeah, no, it seemed to be kind of marketing fluff. Yeah, well, so what VMware's looking to do is we're 60% virtualized today. And if we want to get to this, Pat laid out the audacious goal of over 90% virtualized. The concern is, does big data become a silo? You know, John, I mean, you've been at the start of all the Hadoop action. And they said, I don't want legacy storage. I don't want sand environments. And VMware comes in and says, we want to take your big data environment, virtualize it. And therefore, I can put it on infrastructure, much of which today is more of that legacy environment. And Stu, I mean, you bring up a good point, just to riff on that a little bit. I mean, obviously, things that I see in the show that popped out that were like the obvious, you know, shiny pebble that pops out of the show was one, storage validates our original thesis. I mean, not to pump ourselves up anymore, but storage, yes, is at the center of the value proposition. We made that right call. But the other one is, is that when we had Martinon from Nassirah, he basically said some really cool things that apply to what's happening at VMware. They're disrupting. They want to change the game and use virtualization as that lever, that real enabling technology that's going to be the lever for all this. So, you know, doing it at the network layer, network, I mean, networking side, then the low levels is fantastic all the way up to the top. So to me, I think the mobile equation with big data, the virtualization gives them a lot of flexibility. And then they had conversations like stateless applications. This is the future. So, you know, VMware's got the messaging down, old way, new way. And I think the new experiences is just right spot on messaging. Now reality, how fast they get there, probably a subject of their execution. Yeah. Okay. So that's going to be a wrap. Unless, Dave, you want to say anything else? Well, again, John, it's just really a pleasure working with you. I think that the things that we're going to look for here are really the execution of that software defined data center. Number one, number two, the ability of the ecosystem to plug into that vision. All the marketing is there. We heard from everybody who came by, yes, we're software defined data center. Yes, we're software defined storage. Yes, we're software defined data center. Everybody's hopping on that bandwagon. Everybody's claiming leadership position there. So we're going to have to, over the next 12 months, sift out the pretenders from the contenders. And we'll be doing that here on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and just really look forward to sharing that with our community. Well, that's a wrap here. I want to thank Markers and Hopkins and Keyin for holding down the fort and the folks from Moscone helping us out there, the extra hands. Stu Miniman out there getting the pound of the pavement, getting all the scoops, doing the analysis, setting up briefings. Hey, guys. Hey, guys. Lattimore's been blogging and the whole team. Yeah. Scott Lowe, Jeff Kelly back in the home front, working on the schedule. And guys, do you know how many people have come to me and said, I don't know how you two do it? So when I put this schedule together, I said, you know, let's mix up the hosts and everything. And you guys said, no, we've got such good guests. You guys are going to go do it. You plow through it. Phenomenal guests. Great conversations. Big buzz across the show. So, you know, awesome job, guys. Great job with the team. Kristin Nicole with our Skype remote's in. We're going to do that as a matter of all of our events now. You're going to see a lot of Skype calling in. Go to siliconangle.com for the reference point of tech innovation. All free content there. Go to wikibond.org where you get all the free research. We do not have a paywall. There's no charging, all free content. We want to provide the data, the data infrastructure and the big data world. All free. Use it. We'd like to serve that that way. And this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE.tv. That's a wrap from VMworld 2012. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante Institute of Management. And we'll see you at the next show.