 And one of our guests coming on now is the CTO of VMware, Steve Herrod, Cube alumni, Cube alum from the beginning. Steve, good to see you again. Steve was in the Cube at EMC. We're all in our first Cube over a year ago and since then, millions and millions of people have watched us. Thanks for your support, Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware. You've come a long way since my first event here. This is great. Are we rolling? We're rolling, okay, we're rolling, okay. Okay, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at wikibon.org and we're here with Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware. It just came off of a great keynote yesterday morning. We all got up nice and early to go to a meeting so we could make your keynote, so thanks for that. How do you feel? You're talking to customers, you booked solid. Thanks for spending time with us. Tell us what's going on in the show here and then we'll jump into the keynote. Yeah, sure, so this is obviously my funnest day of the entire year. This whole event is just made for celebrating what we're doing as a whole. And as we clearly talked about, VMware is getting bigger and VMware is making a bigger impact across a lot of different areas. So the keynote yesterday for me was a great culmination of a story that we're really headed towards. And as I know you've talked about with a number of guests, the impact on the industry with VXLam, as well as the impact on all of us as users are what really excites me right now. How do you personally feel? I mean, you've been with VMware, God, from the beginning, right? As now, what Paul's doing here is setting the agenda for the industry. Pat Gelsinger said, this is an IT show now. This is a tech show, technology show. How do you feel? I mean, you know, feel good? I mean, proud? I mean, excited? Yeah, I mean, obviously it's a very incredible experience. I've been here officially almost 10 years now at VMware and worked on it before at school. But without sounding like we knew what was going on exactly, this is exactly what we thought the promise for virtualization was. We had studied history as one should and noticed just how big the impact was in the earlier generation with mainframes and client server computing of the old sort on Unix systems and thought, what if we could actually bring this to the world of industry standard operating systems, software and hardware? And it'd be too presumptuous to say it would get this big, but we knew it could have this big of an impact if it was done right. And the market reacted, obviously. So let's jump in the key now. You talked about a couple key things, performance, availability, mobility and security. How is the reaction from the crowd? I mean, one and two are solid. Mobility and security? What's the update on those fronts from the product standpoint? Yeah, I like mobility and maybe if I could step back for a minute, John, that the way that you really need to think about virtualization's true promise is to a, it's ultimately a tool for trying to do something. And I think the tool it's really about bringing efficiency and mobility, meaning that I could be able to run my applications wherever there are available resources for it. And so what I think we've done over the time is quite a good job on compute and storage with the industry partners on allowing things to really be mobile. But what I like about the announcements that we've made with our partners and you just had one on the show here is this notion of VXLan, which is in my opinion, the last real physical impediment to true mobility across parts inside your data center and across multiple data centers. So we're going to bring that same innovation around virtualization right into the core network, which is going to enable a lot more of this efficiency. So you've announced sort of, monster Godzilla VMs with the July announcement, I guess, and I think availability is a big reason why people have gone to VMware, fail over and fail back. I noticed you've changed the language around desktop virtualization or VDI, it's now end user computing. So we're seeing a really strong story there. And I'm interested, I'm intrigued. You talked about when you're at school, you studied, I was going to ask you, how'd you come, how'd you figure this out? And you actually did some detailed research and look back at history and Merit likes to talk about the software mainframe. I'm going to talk about it so much anymore, older guys like me, it resonates. And there's a lot of talk here about capacity pools and maybe getting, it looks like a old mainframe V talk. For those of us who remember that. So are we talking about potentially getting rid of the concept of lungs at some point in time? Well, maybe just a couple of points there. So A, this is obviously not just me, this is a huge engineering staff and a lot of great people at VMware. But the vision is, in the way we started at school, I like to talk about, it's good for two reasons to be in academia. One, you get to study history. And the second is you get to try things that like a normal person wouldn't try. And that is the source of where VMware started. These same concepts were absolutely done in a different era and providing value. And we brought them to a new domain, which is often how real innovation occurs. So that part's worked out real well, but as you were talking about it, the goal is really ultimately to satisfy the applications. And it is about performance, availability and mobility, meaning I can access it wherever it happens to be. And so we've had that vision for about six years now and how do we just go check off these different pieces here? And that's exactly what you're seeing here, is how we go and take one after the other. So let's talk about security a little bit because you had a great keynote. The story was fantastic, very confident. I think it ties into, we were talking to Rick Jackson about Rick, tell us behind the signs out there, people with the arms folded and very assertive, very confident. And I think your message was right on. The one area, and I said this to Mark Eagan this morning that I felt was maybe a little over-claiming, not just you, but I think just in general, the community, is the security. You gave the example of Deebold, but I think if you peel under the covers, you see some nuance there. So where are we really at with security and how do we really solve this problem? You know VMware is by necessity transforming the way security works and we have to as leading the way of this mobile computing, there no longer are physical places where you can put appliances or put these static checks where you used to have these bump in the wire devices. They don't exist in a world where you're moving around. So we've had to take ownership on creating the interfaces and the APIs where the existing ways of finding problems can fit. And so VShield and the different areas of VShield are absolutely about recognizing a more mobile world has to have a different way of doing it. Now we have a few of the security solutions ourselves, but actually at VMworld, I've been going from session to session. I was with Symantec earlier who's announced a lot of products. Obviously RSA is doing a lot of products. McAfee and all are really building on top of this. So the way I would think about it is by necessity of leading the industry on the cloud computing model, we have to be the one that can create the interfaces for this new model. And we've got a lot of good pieces in place, but we'll keep going for quite a while on that area. So I want to follow up on that if I could. So we're talking about an industry solving the problem, not VMware, but Marit showed some data yesterday and I showed actually for quite some time where I think about 50% of the, over 50% of the servers are now virtual and more applications are virtual than physical. So it comes back into your lab. And so do you see an architectural advancement where you're making security, I think I go back to my mainframe days of RACF, where you're making security a priority, they call it a level one APAR or whatever they called it back then, but it's a prioritization exercise. Is that architecturally something that you guys see as part of the solution or am I thinking about that incorrectly? Well, I should call it, so VMware is the middle of everything we're, security is the middle of everything we're doing and I want to call it, there's a lot of different angles. Our core vSphere engine itself is trusted by 250,000 customers. That platform itself needs to be as tight as possible. With vSphere 5, we've actually created a very thin architecture for it and that is a big reason for doing that is the smaller space you have to attack the better it can be. The other side of it is how do we enable solutions around the virtual machines themselves and I do ultimately feel very strongly the benefit of this will be better security and that is today you statically place devices around and then you count on things falling into the right domain. With virtualization, security can come right next to the application. I could literally instantiate these vShield points right up next to an app and that means it's always gonna follow the app wherever it is and also once you're right by an application, you can make things like firewalls a lot more restrictive than you might traditionally do. You tend to do a lowest common denominator security when you're trying to protect a whole chunk of different applications behind the scene. So when I showed a real brief demo of our infrastructure navigator, what I really like about that is it knows about an application and it will talk to the infrastructure to make the tightest customized security for it. So you see a silver lining in that dark cloud and over time security is better in the cloud and there's some clear advantage there especially if you have to remediate something. You can do it a lot faster and a lot better. So is it fair to say we're making progress? I would imagine a year from now we're gonna start to get really excited about some of the things that you're doing there and we got a little ways to go. Yeah, I think we're early but we're definitely on the right track. Steve, my question for you is where are we now? Last year you guys announced a great architecture and laid it all out. The conversation that we've had with the executives and folks up here has been it moved from that to product delivery, seeing a lot more labs, more products being delivered and then the prediction for next year is we're gonna see from PowerPoints to best practices, use cases, so I buy that. But I want to know from you, where do you see the work in progress in that picture? So you got network, WAN links, participation in say with the software developers and the top of the stack and use computing. Where's your priorities and where's the work in progress that you're putting in effort? Well so I'm definitely in charge of the future and making sure that we're going the right way and the things that we've already laid out we have a lot of work to do so we'll continue to talk about, I guarantee we'll talk about performance, availability and security in the platform layer. But what I really like this year we were able to show where we're going on end user computing as a whole and I do believe it's the first time we've shared our vision across the whole stack there and we've had a lot of products coming out with view and horizon application manager but by really showing how we're gonna play it out where it's about any application and your data and then it's about any device and the human on this side with a broker right in the middle. I feel we know absolutely what we want to do now. We want to have this switchboard operator in the middle that connects you with what you need and we have a lot of work to deliver all those pieces but I think next year you're going to see them in shipping form and a number of partnerships also built up right around that. What about big data? Obviously big data we've tied together with theCUBE we've been talking about big data and I still think I'll probably one of the first blogs to really cover it in depth early on but everyone we talk to is saying that's going to collide in with the cloud beautifully and they're not sure how it's going to pan out yet. It's going to still early, it's still unknown. So what's your view there on big data? Yeah we're absolutely tracking big data in a big way. I know you had Pat Gelsinger on earlier I believe. And Amra Awadala who you know from Stanford days. Yes of course, so we're tracking a lot of the different big data use cases and it ranges from being able to do analytics in real time to handling mass amounts of log data as you know to even just thinking about how applications use new types of databases and we have efforts on each of those. I do think the cloud has very good promise for things that need to do as much crunching as possible. That is exactly why you want to expand and use elasticity. So we have a number of lab projects that I'm sure you'll hear about next year where we're looking at how do you run things like Hadoop, Green Plum, other areas like that directly on the virtualization layer so that you can run it within your data center or you could run it out in the cloud when you need even more capacity. So it is going to be a very rich area of innovation. Do you sound excited by big data? I am, I actually, I like it quite a bit. It's a hard problem and it's early on when you're seeing real tangible benefits to customers who do this. We were just in a session talking about T-Mobile using new types of analytics to find out why people leave their network and it directly turns into real business dollars. First of all, we're totally intoxicated by big data so we're all over it. So my final question and let Dave ask this final question is what disruptive technologies are you seeing out there in the marketplace? Not just VMware around your ecosystem that affect this whole trend around real time. Everything's going real time, business. So what are you looking at right there? They say that's a real disruptive variable I'm watching that technology. Yeah, real time, Paul even called it out in his very first keynote as one thing that really is an interesting concept of the next canonical application. And so we're obviously tracking things at the hardware and the software level that are really affecting real time as well as the need for it. The need is obviously things like e-commerce and areas where if I can instantly tell someone, hey, you just bought this Harry Potter book, you might also like this. That directly turns into dollars which turns into IT spend. And so on the IT side, the technology side, I think the cool things are everything around flash technologies showing up in a number of guests you already had today. That changes the game on how you can access data in a fast way. And virtual instruments showed a killer presentation here. John Thompson was on about instrumentation at the management level. That's pretty exciting. So Steve, when we come to these events and we do a lot of them, we try to judge the quality of them by the messaging that you hear in the keynotes and the reaction of the customers. And I have to say that of all the events, I would say that the VMware customers are the most enthusiastic. What you're saying up on the stage resonates. People are very excited. And so congratulations, really appreciate you coming on the queue. Thanks for your time. It was a great job, really. All right, congrats to you guys as well. Thank you. I can't get over how many hours you're doing at this session. No, a lot of exciting times. And I thank you for the congratulations. Congratulations. Great to see you. Bye guys. Thanks for your time.