 And we have the pleasure of having a great guest here, a repeat guest, Mark Egan, who is the CIO of VMware. Welcome, Mark. Thank you, glad to have it. Good to see you back. So Mark, you are in a position at a company that talks a lot about vision and products, but you're in a position of having to utilize technology to make your company more efficient and all the things that CIOs are challenged to do. So maybe you could start by just talking a little bit about, from a CIO perspective, what do you see as the major challenges that a CIO faces generally and that you as a CIO of VMware face specifically? I think as IT professionals today, we've been historically really looking at how can we save money? How can we be cost effective? And VMware has done a good job working with our customers in that space, but what we have to do is more than that. What we really have to do is how do we enable our business? How do we move faster? How can we be more agile? And I think that's really the challenge for IT professionals today. How can we enable our business, enable more revenue, save my money, and then provide better customer satisfaction? You know, Paul Moritz always talks about as an industry, we have to move from just cost cutting to more business performance, business value oriented. Are you doing that? You know, what does that mean to you? Are you doing that within VMware? Yeah, at VMware, we're really focused on speed and agility. So over the last year, we were able to deliver 39 tier one projects at VMware. You know, examples of these would be rolling out new sales systems to make sure that our sales organization is more productive. They were able to generate more revenue. We're able to put out a business intelligence system that enabled us to generate $50 million in incremental revenue over three years. So that whole speed and agility is what we're all about. How can we do more in a much shorter timeframe than we may have done in the past? So talk a little bit about what your vision is for the architecture of the future. I'm interested if, for example, an app store, you know, analog and the enterprise fits in there. Just talk a little bit about what you see evolving, you know, within your company and the industry in general. I think there are really three big challenges that we face in IT today. One is mobility. The second is how do you bring that consumer experience into the enterprise and in cloud? So around mobility, all these devices are out there. They're going to change all the time. And we as IT professionals have to have all the systems and data and so forth available on all those devices. From an application perspective, you have this great experience at home, the Facebook, the Twitter and so forth, really data rich, you know, great at UI and so forth. What we've got to do is bring that into the enterprise. We've got to take that same experience, all that information and provide it to our companies. And then finally, as far as the cloud, there's some great opportunities out there to put together a private cloud to really optimize your environment. And then to look at the public cloud as areas that you can potentially do things that you may not have been able to do before in a much quicker timeframe. Last year when we were at VMworld, Paul Meritz laid out the vision of VMware. This year we're seeing a lot more products being delivered. So it's really, really rolling out really fast. Wikibon did a survey with CIOs and IT practitioners that said less than 30% are really moving to tier one. So share with those folks out there who are going to increase their tier one capabilities so that next year, as we had predicted, there's going to be more use case driven. So what's your advice to them and share with them? How should they approach this next year? What I would recommend if you're starting to use a new technology, be it virtualization or cloud or anything like this, start off in an area where you can learn it more, understand and so forth. So take maybe a tier two app, get familiar with the technology, start to get it rolled out, get your staff trained. As you become more comfortable, then you can move to the second phase where you start to roll out your mission critical applications and so forth. And then after that, it becomes a way of doing business. It's you do everything in the cloud, you do everything in a virtual environment. But I would really follow that approach for any technology, start small in an area that's not going to be terribly risky and then move to the mission critical apps as you develop more confidence. You know, Mark, I know the CIO, you're trying to stay away from the marketing fluff. I would imagine, actually a lot of sales guys want to take you on calls with them or they pull you on your time to do that. Absolutely. So the reason I'm asking this question is last year, the industry used the parlance of desktop virtualization, VMware called it VDI. And I see things changing. You're referring to it now as a company and user computing. And I presume that's because of the whole mobile effect. So my specific question to you is, what are you doing within user computing? How far are you along in terms of integrating those mobile devices and really moving from a desktop-centric mindset to more of a mobile? Some of the things that we're doing at VMware is that we've actually rolled out view to about a third of our employees. It's able us to really in some specific use cases move much faster than we might have otherwise. We're also using the Horizon product internally. We've got more than half of our employees using that. And it's a great portal where you can go to, based on your role, you can get access to different applications. It deals with all the authentication for us is so forth. And actually a really cool thing that we've rolled out at VMware, probably the fastest application I've rolled out in my career would be socialcast. In pilot mode, we had about half the company on socialcast. We have the entire company today. And if you could think of it as like Facebook for the enterprise, you can share information, you can really tap into all the knowledge and experience of the company in really minutes or seconds if you pose a question. What's the feedback from the socialcast rollout? What did you learn? I mean, that's a new app. It's got some, you know, see, it kind of breaks down some silos, changes the work experience for your user base. But what did you learn as a CIO in that? I mean, it's new, you kind of pilot it and you end up buying the company. So what can you share there? The things that we learned in rolling it out, first of all, is the adoption surprised us. It was incredible how fast that everybody embraced the technology. And I think it gets back to that consumer experience in the enterprise. Folks are used to Facebook. So it really brought that into the enterprise. The thing that we did learn though, is that all company emails are something that you're going to get when you use a tool like socialcasts. So what do you want to share broadly across the entire company? So we had to come up with some guidelines on, you know, what type of information you would share. You wouldn't necessarily want to share confidential information with all 10,000 employees and so forth. So it really had us, you know, step back and look at some of the, you know, kind of people process elements of this when we roll out new technology. What can you share about your peers when you go out and talk to other CIOs? What are their biggest challenges out there? When you talk to them, what's the big pain point that they have? Well, when I look at, you know, cloud computing or virtualization, I really look at it from a people process technology perspective. And frankly, the people part is the hardest. So what I would recommend that you do is get good staff that really understand all the technology that's out there, especially like in the architecture area. You know, get a good enterprise architect that's comfortable with using new technology. I'll say some of the consumer products that's comfortable with, you know, doing things in the cloud and so forth and get those people on board in your organization because there's going to be a lot of change in the IT group as you go through this transformation as well as in your business partners. The second part is process. You know, you need to make sure that you have process and I always think of those as like breaks in a car. You have breaks in a car to go faster, not to go slower. So some simple things that you want to have that you, you know, I tell, you know, change control, release to production, those sorts of things that you want to have in place. But then think about, you know, how you're going to put your governance process in places when someone can go off with a credit card and buy some services. How do you want to monitor that where you don't slow the business down, but you're able to, you know, get all the things that you need done for the company? Last year we talked when we said, you know, you guys are dog-fooding or eating your own food with your technology. What's changed this year from last year? As CIO, you see everything, all the problems, all the great things. What did you see this year that surprised you, that's different, that you didn't expect that from all the work you've been doing by rolling out these products? Well, one of the things that we did was really interesting was in the application space where we had an opportunity to either upgrade an existing technology that we use for our portals or do something different. So what we ended up doing is that we used our V-Fabric products and completely rewrote all of our customer portals. And we not only saved some money in the process from a licensing perspective, but what we were able to do is have a much richer experience and then we're able to make changes much, much faster. So over the course of the last year, what we did is rewrote all the customer portals for VMware using our technology. Mark, Steve Herrod in his presentation, his keynote, I believe it was yesterday, the days are flying by. He really talked about four things, performance availability, mobility, and security. I thought it was a very strong presentation, really, really well done. In particular, the one area of concern that I'm still a skeptic in is security. He made the statement that security within VMware is better. And as I said, I'm a skeptic, but I want to hear from you as a practitioner. Is that true today and why is that? Well, I think security is something that we all, it will evolve. Because I think that every time you come up with a new solution to kind of protect yourself, the bad guys come up with a few more ways to break in. So I would say that by all means that we've improved in the area of security, some of our VCO products I think are very well done. And for instance, you can get some very detailed instrumentation with our products that's not possible in a physical world just by nature of the multi-vendor approach. So I think that that's a great advancement in that area. But I think that security is really moving away from protecting your enterprise to protecting your data. So what I would focus on is in your organization, where the key parts of the information that you want to protect, be it credit card information or customer information and so forth, focus on those, protect those, invest the money because you can't necessarily protect every single part of your enterprise. So it sounds like conceptually the framework is there with a great deal of potential, but more work needs to be done. Is that a fair statement? Absolutely. So how would you talk about the services business? So we've been talking since EMC World how the consultants business, the essentials of the world, the CSCs are under pressure of moving from that older model to the newer model. And with virtualization, it changes that, this different kind of methodologies, new implementation practices. What changes do you see in the services business, both on the delivery side and then also the services that are being put out as product? Well, I think what you have to do is you kind of have to do a little bit of retooling. So internally as well as externally. So it's those same skill sets. The staff that are doing the more traditional physical approach may not know how to do it in the virtual approach. They may not be as familiar with bringing that consumer experience into the enterprise. So I think it's really an incredible opportunity for the consulting industry and the services organizations. Those that are very nimble and innovative and have come up with ways to do this, I'm convinced that there are IT groups out there that are very interested in talking to them because we're all under pressure to deal with these trends. And I would encourage the organizations to retool and help the IT industry really move where we all want to move. Mark Egan, great advice. People process and technology. The people is the hardest. That was an interesting comment. So thanks very much for sharing some of your perspectives about the vision, the future, advice to other practitioners and what's going on at VMware. And thanks for coming on theCUBE again. Thank you. My pleasure.