 Okay, we're back, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com And I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Tim Young, who's the CEO of Socialcast and now of course VMware. That's right. I'm the CEO of VMware, not yet anyway. No, no, I'm not. But Socialcast is now part of VMware. Yep. So welcome. Thank you. Tim, congratulations. You know, your story is great. I mean, obviously I've been following the social space for a long, long time, as you know. And watch you guys come out of the woodwork at funding great venture capital back in you guys, true ventures, right? Yeah, true ventures and also menlo ventures. Menlo ventures. You guys really came out of nowhere, great product and also boom, rising stars and bang, you get bought out by VMware. So let's, we want to talk about that. We also want to talk about what's changing at the top of the stack in terms of applications. We all know Apple's got the App Store and everyone's going crazy on that. But you know, last year, VMware was really weak talking about what's happening at the top. They had the Zimba acquisition under their belt and it was clear that Palmer had laid out, in essence, an operating system concept. Lower into the stack, application support, spring source framework, and then obviously at the top of the stack is application. So first question, how do you feel as an entrepreneur, you sold your company, made a little dough, now you're at the growing company, not yet a big company, but bigger than a startup? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it feels great. You know, as an entrepreneur, you know, I mean, essentially that's one of your dreams is to have the company be acquired, but most importantly, have the vision that you set upon with you and your team really kind of accelerated at scale with a company the size of VMware. You know, we really hoped to continue the mission that we were on. Talk about that vision a little bit. I mean, I think of socialcast, I think of Facebook for the enterprise. I mean, maybe that's a little bit too trivial, but talk about that vision. Well, I mean, I think, you know, what we set out to do was not just build, you know, a Facebook for the enterprise. What we really want to do is change how work is done. And so when you look at, you know, kind of today's tools and what companies have invested in for employees, it's really been over the last 20 years in that back office suite. And, you know, what they really need today is a more flexible communication dynamic, you know, that goes beyond email and goes beyond mobile. So the question I wanted to ask you is, you know, obviously, well, as a startup, you have very limited resources, right? So VMware is obviously, we hear that from all the startups. Oh, yeah, I'm excited. The big company's got resources and you feel like you just got a whole another level of dry powder, if you will. But the world of social has changed everything, right? So, you know, in Twitter and Facebook, take a look at Federation. Federation is a buzzword we hear in the enterprise now, especially with cloud. So how is your socialcast transforming with virtualization? How is virtualization enabling you to take it to another level? Yeah, I mean, so socialcast has had, you know, a great working relationship with VMware for, you know, over three years prior to the acquisition. And what's really unique about our platform is that for companies who still require things in their own, you know, private cloud or behind their firewall, they can run our products securely on top of the vSphere layer. And so that flexibility of deployment, being able to, you know, run, you know, a social platform behind your firewall, virtualized, or you can run it in a public cloud and be able to go back and forth in that hybrid scenario, you know, is really attractive to customers and why, you know, I think VMware saw that we were a really good fit. Can you share with us some metrics, I mean, in terms of the scale that you achieved prior to getting acquired and, you know, users and growth and things of that nature? Yeah, so I mean, socialcast has always been targeted really at large enterprises. So, you know, we're used, you know, widely by global companies like Philips, General Motors, Humana, and what's unique to our platform is that we really work closely with those CIOs to make sure that the platform is deployed not just virally, but at scale. Because this is a network effect tool and you really need to have the entire employee base on it. And so that's what we really, you know, focused on was going out and attacking kind of that Fortune 2000. Enterprise social software's a little different than traditional software, isn't it? I mean, it's not like, okay, here's the new email system, you will use it. Like you said, you got to get, it still has to be viral within the organization, right? So how do you deal with that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different approaches to rolling out social software. And I think, you know, what social software provides is that, you know, kind of a better nervous system for companies that's built around community. And I think, you know, every community of people, whether it's online or offline, it has rules, it has leaders, it has expectations. And so when you think about rolling it out, you do so in kind of small stages. So the question I want to ask you is obviously being a startup entrepreneur, and now you're at the big company, share with the folks out there what they could expect to hear from VMware this year. Because obviously every year, VMware is kind of adding more and more and they're delivering new products. Cloud Foundry was a success. We're seeing some of the gaps fill in in the architecture. What will the folks expect to hear? I mean, from your perspective, you're, you know, I know you can't really talk, unleash the secrets, but what can they expect to hear? What's some of the themes? Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme, at least for our group, is really how do we help companies unlock the potential of their human capital? And if you think about the history of VMware, you know, our company's done a great job at helping you unlock, you know, the power of your computing power. And now we want to be able to take that actually to kind of the human cloud. So, you know, above all of, you know, your applications sit people who are essentially problem solving. And, you know, we think just like virtualization, we solve a lot of problems with time and space. You can do that with your human capital as well. So, so virtualization, obviously, even just five years ago is completely different than it is now. It's obviously changing. And the business model of VMware is changing. Our next guest coming on this morning is Amar Awadala, the co-founder of Cloudera, where, you know, he's pioneering Hadoop and that whole movement, where, you know, his angel investor was the father of VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, and so you got the Hadoop Big Data thing, which you know about because you guys have to deal with that social data and everyone's talking about Hadoop. So what has changed in your mind over the past three years around virtualization? Not some of the, you know, issues around hypervisor, but like in general, virtualization as it enables and with things like Hadoop and open source, you know, the cloud business is really going to be intersecting with the big data sector. So how do you view that? What's your vision? Yeah, I mean, I think how we think about it is that, you know, companies in terms of their kind of big data, data used to be fairly scarce and hard to access and now it's becoming super abundant. So I think, you know, what the virtualization layer does, whether it's for computing or for your human capital is really allow you to maximize the utilization of your resources. And I think that's really the most exciting aspect, you know, for large enterprises. You know, Tim and John, last year, John, you recall, was Zimbra, was the application play, right? And relatively new, we were kind of scratching our head at the time saying, all right, what's this all about? But now we've got some cousins in the application portfolio, right, with of course, social cast and slide rocket. And so what's the play there? Can you talk about that? Is it an app store that VMware is building out and is that the right metaphor? Should users be thinking about it that way? Well, I mean, I think the strategy, as you'll see over the next couple of years is definitely unfolding. So I think the key thing to really think about is we're trying to help companies understand that there's a new way to work for employees. And a lot of this is driven by things like cloud and big data, but it's also being driven by how we communicate and our communication behaviors outside of the office. And so we want to help companies enable those abilities inside on top of the virtualization stack and really help them unlock that potential of their employee base. Okay, so but is the app store the right way to think about it? Are you guys trying to build that out? Or is it more, that's sort of the consumer mindset? Well, I mean, I think you'll see at the show when you look at other products that we have like Horizon, that you're going to start to see that strategy emerge. And I think application management and provisioning for IT moving forward is a big issue, especially when you're talking about employees who are bringing their personal devices in, employees who want more flexibility, and that's only compounded with constraints that IT departments face today. So as we think about our core customers, we want to look at how do we help them move their budgets from just being focused on operating costs to really being focused on innovation? So how can IT departments really help their business customers really innovate? And part of that you'll see through a little bit of that app store concept with Horizon. So your competitors, well VMware's competitors, now that you're with VMware, companies like Citrus who we'll have on here talk about the iPhone and the iPad being revolutionary. That brings up the whole consumerization of IT. So the iPhone and the iPad disrupted the enterprise with the whole notion of, oh it's not supported device to, hey we need to support this from the CIO down. How does the apps, how's the collision of the apps world changing? Obviously you're familiar with some of the social stuff with Twitter and other, you know the data. And you know people are experiencing, is that crossing together, is it crossing over? Is it colliding? What's your view there and how do you tackle that problem? Yeah I mean I think it's a problem that everybody is still kind of struggling to solve when we talk to customers. They're obviously seeing a lot of kind of non-corporate devices come into their enterprise. Employees are bringing their own personal equipment in and deciding that they can be more productive and effective using that rather than using the corporate supplied device. So I think you know this whole concept of apps and app stores and the consumerization of IT is really kind of unstoppable. But what's going to happen is that IT really needs to kind of begin to shift how it's traditionally been done. And it's definitely beginning to do that as we see in a lot of our customers. But companies are blocking Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and saying no you can't use these time sinks or time wasters as they say. So you know how do you bring a social application framework into the enterprise without making it a siloed walled up product and you know letting users not use what they normally use in their everyday life like Facebook and Twitter. I mean that's a challenge isn't it? I mean it is a challenge. I think the idea that we've always had with a social platform is that it really needs to be in the flow of work. So we're not trying to create a parallel Facebook inside your company. We're really trying to use that social graph, that map of all the employees and their relationships to actually accelerate business processes. And if you think about a lot of kind of enterprise applications today that the average employee uses you know basically when they're using it they have a submit and a cancel button and that's really it right. But a lot of times what they really need there is a discuss button. You know the ability to actually talk and so you know in order to solve that problem you know what do we get? We get blizzards of email, we get calendar requests and then we get stuck in these long meetings. So the idea is if we can situate the social software in kind of overlap to those business applications we can get people focused on using the social software to actually be more efficient rather than kind of the traditional uses of Facebook. And you know I think the whole social word is so overrated in this space because I think what was smart about what you guys did was I mean use the word social cast because it's got kind of that whole social media feel but it's really using the technology of what so you're modernizing essentially the software layer at the top with a social graph. And it's not so much social media it's just the technology's changing. You guys modernize it. So I think you know that most people think like social it's a time waster I really don't want that in my network. You know what in reality it's just how user experience change. You're modernizing the applications. Yeah I mean if you think about it everything you know in business is really conversation at some point and so what we're trying to do is essentially enhance the ability for employees to have the right conversations with the right people as fast as possible so that they can become more efficient and actually drive better operating metrics for their companies. All right so you're talking about this really as a productivity play in a way right? And can you talk a little bit more about specifically how you're integrating with that traditional business software. I mean can you give an example that might help? Yeah so we have a product extension at social cast called Reach and that is the ability to embed kind of these conversational streams inside existing business apps. So you can take something like Salesforce or SAP or SharePoint and actually embed this real-time communication layer into it and kind of the consumer analog to this would be something like Facebook Connect. So the ability where you know like if you go on to a CNN story you can see all your friends who have read it you know if you're in your ERP system and you pull up an account now you're going to see all the conversation in context you know who are the experts who works on that and now you can actually collaborate around those issues in that app rather than having to go to a silo place which has really been the downfall of prior kind of knowledge management endeavors. So Tim just as we kind of wrap up the segment here thanks for coming on theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with Wikibon.org just theCUBE our flagship telecast. A couple things just give everyone the folks an update on your current title and what you're going to be doing at VMware and what your objectives are for the year. What's your goals? Yeah so as you mentioned I was the founder and CEO of Socialcast we were acquired in May and now I'm the vice president of Enterprise Social. So I'm basically in charge of really focused on expansion of the Socialcast product and also its distribution in the market. What's your objectives for the year? I mean any particular points or like specific goals? Yeah so I mean we have some really incredible new product extensions coming out one called Strides and we're actually demoing that today at the booth and I'll be talking about it in a session at 2 p.m. And then we also have some smaller analytics updates that we're going to be really focused on this year. How do we help companies understand their social graph? Are there any other goals like personnel you're looking for particularly obviously more engineers everyone's looking for more engineers but any market goals in terms of share can you talk about any specific business metrics at all? You know I can talk about those right now but you know in the future you're in the queue, you're feeling good, you know? We got a lot of green around us, green hedges and everything, it's relaxing. Green is good. All right so final question, what's your vision for the next five years? I mean shoot the arrow forward, show us a little bit of the entrepreneurial vision while you still have it from the carryover. I'm sure you'll still have it but seriously five years what's going to change in the world VMware and software and user experience? Yeah I mean I think the big thing is that you know what really motivated me to build social cast was I saw a need at least in the economy that we as we move into this information and knowledge economy we really need that productivity boom and I really believe that social software can really help accelerate and kick that off and if you look at the parallels in the 1800s of the Industrial Revolution at the World's Fair when the American system and manufacturer came out that really kicked off you know that big Industrial Revolution that led to about 180x productivity enhancement. So I really think that you know now that we're been acquired by VMware we can really bring this vision of accelerating the human capital component of companies forward and really drive a productivity boom you know for the next couple decades. What about the, what are you hearing from customers? Obviously you guys are very successful. What's the number one trend and I don't want to say pain point but challenge opportunity that you're hearing from your customer base what can you share with the folks out there that you're seeing out there? I mean I think they're big challenges that the way they do business now is much different than they've done in the past. If you talk to a lot of our manufacturing clients you know they'll basically tell you that you know even as recent as 10 years ago they would design and build a product with a team that was in one physical location and everybody could stand around a whiteboard and discuss it and today the world is very different. You know all the components are made in different countries with different teams there's locations that have specialization so being able to not only connect those with virtualization at the computing layer but to be able to connect the conversations of those folks is really a value add for them and that's really what they're focused on. Well congratulations on your success this year I'm really psyched to see how you guys built your company you worked hard, went to the market we were successful and acquired by VMware so congratulations on that and good luck this year thanks for coming inside the cube. Yeah thank you. Tim Young social cast great to have you on. Thank you. Appreciate it.