 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Justin Warren. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017. Believe it or not, it's our eighth year covering the show, about 23,000 here in attendance and polls from around the world, even though there is a European show, but happy to welcome to the program a first time guest at theCUBE, someone I've known for a number of years, so great to pull you in front of the camera, Dan Frith, who is a consultant with Penguin Punk. We had one of my guests this morning said, this is the punk rock set, so it only makes sense that you've got the shoes and the hair and even hit a punk show here in Vegas when you first get here, so thanks for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so Dan, just for our audience, give us a little bit about your background, you're heavily involved in the VMware community, your VMworld leader, tell us your background, what you're doing these days. Yeah, sure, thanks to you, so I've been working with virtualization for about 15 years now, started with Workstation, went to ESX2 and sort of it all went from there, thought that was pretty cool stuff, kept me really busy for a long time, branched out into further data center technologies, so I'm really interested in things that go in racks and how they can help people do stuff better faster and smarter. I've been working with VMware for about the same time, 15 years, had a little bit more hair and less gray when that started. I love some of the IBM to TV commercials where it was like, where'd all the servers go, put it into, racked it all up and things like that to watch the evolution and the ebbs and flows in this community has been pretty cool. So, how important is VMware today in your ecosystem and what's going on? Yeah, it's critical to what we do every day. A lot of our customers are very VMware focused, not just for the hypervisor, it's all the management automation that we wrap around that stuff. NSX is becoming more and more critical to what we're doing. Got a lot of complicated cloud plays happening locally, so NSX is really helping us to get where we need to be, where traditionally maybe it was a bit of a slower, harder process. We've certainly found that stuff like that is really helping us get some good wins on the board, yeah. Could you unpack that a little bit for us? Because yeah, definitely coming into the show, I hear a lot about NSX, lots of customers doing when I talk to some of the ecosystem at large, it's like, well, when you really get in, there's some complicated pieces. I mean, networking security never going to be simple. So, what are some of the challenges, how do we get over some of them and what does this really deliver? Yeah, I think some of the biggest challenges with networking and security in the enterprise isn't the actual tech anymore. It's the way that we apply the processes to that tech, the policies, the frameworks and governments that, you know, the risk compliance assessments, all that sort of stuff that people don't necessarily understand that well inside their business. So, having something like NSX come in, it gives them the opportunity, I think, to reassess what they're actually trying to achieve, what's critical from an application perspective down rather than just thinking about the infrastructure and the tools that they're using. It's not just about switches, routers, firewalls anymore. It's about what I'm actually trying to achieve, what really needs to talk to what, and oh, now I can make this happen with this tool that's actually really flexible and agile and very easy to get up and running. But the thing around the security aspect of it, in particular, is that it's not the same sort of audience that you would normally be talking to if you're a VM-way sort of person. That's right. It's usually handled by someone completely different. Similarly, the networking can be a little bit funny as well because networking people are all about the hardware and the switches and things that plug into it. And this virtual switching idea, when I first heard in this example, you're going to teach BGP to virtualization people? And I think that's been very interesting as well. I think we saw the last 10 years, the storage and virtualization guys seem to come together reasonably well and start to cooperate on stuff. And we're finally sort of understanding what storage is to VM-way guys and vice versa. Whereas the networking stuff is still that dark art where you have to have a certain number of letters after you're named to make it work. And the security guys, again, they're a whole different beast, right? They're kind of like the DBAs of the infrastructure world. So how far along in that, using storage as sort of an analogy, how far down that journey of getting people together and to understand each other on both sides? Yeah, so I think it's still pretty early days. Like I know VM-way has been very bullish about what NSX can do to transform your infrastructure. But I think there's a lot of conversations that still need to be had at a reasonably high level in organizations to get people understanding exactly what they can do with this stuff. And I think realize the potential of what they can do. Sometimes it's not actually, you know, what they need to do now, it's what they need to do three years from now. And I think a lot of businesses just aren't planning ahead that far, right? It's still- Dan, I'm curious what your take on the keynote this morning. Pat got on stage. I thought good energy. I thought it was one of his best keynotes that he's given. But for your audience, kind of in your geo, digital transformation, kind of the journey to cloud, how much of that kind of hit home for you? Any, you know, critiques that you'd give? So cloud's obviously a half topic where I'm based. The VM-way on AWS story is getting more and more interesting. But again, for Australia, still not so much. You've got it in one geo right now. Australia's not going to be enabled for a while. It took AWS a long time to get a presence down there. I think if I heard right, they said within a year, by the time we come back to VMworld next year, which I think is going to be in Vegas, unfortunately, again. But they said we should be across all of the Amazon availability zone. So yeah. Yeah, in which case that could be tremendously interesting. But I've got to crunch a few numbers to make sure this really works. Because I like the idea. It's a neat idea. It's very good for those legacy enterprises that don't really want to get away from vSphere just yet. Who've got the kind of crusty applications that don't really run very well in public cloud. But they're in the middle of that transformation piece. Perhaps they're trying to get cloud native. This is a nice stepping stone. If VMworld can execute on it, and it makes sense financially, which I'm... Yeah, so what are some of the financial price points that you're seeing out there? We've heard over the years, VMware sometimes is, everybody's yelling about it. Sometimes not as much. Cloud is going to be the savior or a whale. It's really expensive. That's right. It sort of varies. And I think one of the points this morning, they said, oh, you can have a variable cost model. And a lot of the businesses I deal with, they hate that stuff. They need to know every month how much, every month how much they're going to spend. Yeah, CFO doesn't like uncertainty, right? Absolutely not. Yeah, and this kind of stuff can get out of control really quickly. So I'm not yet convinced, unless you put the right controls, governance framework on all that stuff on top of it, that's going to be the key thing, I think, for the success of this. And yet, there's a lot of talk about innovation, which involves change and risk. And so if we're trying to keep things into constrained boxes where we understand exactly what it's going to be, then by definition we're reducing as much risk as we can, which is kind of... Which is what's been fascinating with the customers I work with who are all traditional enterprises, thin services, those types. They've got CIOs coming in saying, let's go to the cloud. Everyone to the cloud. They've sent it all up there and they go, oh, my three tier application actually doesn't work in this cloud. I need to bring it back. We've got those people going through those cycles already, locally that's, yeah, there's a lot of innovation going on at a high level, but I think some of the homework hasn't been done to make that successful. And I think that's what people need to focus more on as an application centric, or even a business outcome centric. We use 2,000 applications in the enterprise. Well, what do they all do? What are they for? What are they for? Are they just there because they've always been there, or can we carve some of this stuff out? How does software as a service in public cloud fit into that discussion? Yeah. So I think they're going to be more and more critical. I think the maturity around some of the software as a service offerings has been really good. People are loving, I guess, the offload of risk and the offload of all care, no responsibility for SaaS. I think some of the problem is around, again, it's compliance risk. People aren't necessarily backing up their Office 365 stuff. They're sort of relying on Microsoft to have things in place. They're potentially not realising some of the risk they're exposing themselves to. Not that this stuff is dodgy, but it's tricky to navigate how you actually protect. Oh yeah, I was talking to a security person yesterday and they were like, oh yeah, no, no. Well, if I just use SaaS, I don't need to worry about the security, right? And it was like, no, you need to worry about it even more. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just... We've seen plenty of examples of people who've put data into AWS, for example, and then just their S3 bucket is just open for the world to see. That's right. The simplicity adds a bit more mystery where it probably shouldn't. Yeah, so doing your homework and understanding the tools that you're about to go and use is important. Yeah, understanding the risks and understanding some of the consequences of your actions. It's not just about reducing the floor tiles on your on-premises stuff. It's about understanding what the data is actually doing, where it's going and what it's going to mean to someone if they get hold of that data. Yeah, but it's not a new situation, really. I mean, Cloud's been around for over 10 years now. A lot of these ideas of IT working with the business because that's what IT is about. So it's not exactly a radical concept. It's not a great... It's not a massive change in what we're doing. And I think some of the problem is we haven't done that very well to begin with. Now we've just put another infrastructure construct in place and gone, oh, well now we'll work with the business on this. Unfortunately, when we still aren't working with the business, you've still got pockets of the business doing their own thing. It's poorly understood. IT's still a cost center, a drain on the business, if you will. And it's hard for them to, I think, bridge that gap. We need to focus a bit more, I guess, on making the gap between what the business is trying to achieve and what IT can do to help them. I don't think that Cloud necessarily takes that conversation away. Yeah, unfortunately, the technology's never going to be a silver bullet, but I heard you say that IT still is looked at as a cost center for a lot of your environments. I hear people, maybe they're too optimistic. They said, not only is IT not a cost center, they're working with the business, maybe IT's driving the business. Sounds like maybe you're not quite there yet. So I don't think that's happening in the big enterprises just yet. The more conservative ones are still struggling, I think, with that bridging that gap between IT and business. The ones who can't see the value of what they're doing from an IT perspective, they're always going to struggle with that kind of stuff. Yeah. How about just a general concept of digital transformation? In your area, is that something? People embracing it, I read a great article, actually, by a networking, one of the networking vendors, and he said, look, people might not agree with digital transformation, but digital disruption is definitely real. So, what do you see? If there's a way we can shoehorn a way of doing things differently into traditional business, into traditional IT companies as well, and making them understand that they're not just there to take all our money and not necessarily deliver on all their promises, and if the business can start understanding that there is some value in IT, then I'm all for digital disruption if that's a mechanism to make that happen. Realistically, I'm still faced with the same challenges of legacy software being out of support and hardware that's sweating the asset, taking it a little too far. Those kind of problems are realistically what I'm still seeing every day. So it's kind of like the concept that Pat talked about in the keynote today of cyber hygiene, just doing the basics of washing your hands. I think some people are struggling with those basics because they've either never done it or they've sort of forgotten how to do it, or they expect magically that their new shiny cloud will do that for them or their service provider, and that's definitely not the case. We're still pretty early in the show, but any announcements so far, anything jump out at you or anything that you've seen yet that you'd want to highlight? I'm excited about the VMware on AWS thing. I think it's good to finally see that announcement last year at VMworld US, and now it's generally available, limited but generally available. It was actually announced a month after the show last year, which was one of the things we were a little frustrated that there was a three letter name, big company that they made an announcement with which was up on stage talking about security today, but not so much their cloud offerings. So much about that stuff, yeah. So it's been a weird, I'm not going to say it's a pivot, but it's certainly a little bit of a twist. So you're also a Vmug leader. What are the pain points that you're hearing from people in the community? What do they look for out of the ecosystem that would make their jobs a whole lot easier? I think people are sometimes struggling with the complexity of the ecosystem. It's still fairly broad and diverse, and sometimes people struggle to actually navigate their way through what they need to get done. I think that's what a lot of our Vmug members are struggling with. So I mean, I don't see the vendors in the ecosystem solving that problem. It tends to be the distribution consultants and the like that will help explain that, because right, the problem we have, I mean, even if I just take storage or networking, these are really complicated things, and there's not going to be one solution that fits 90% of it. So that's why I need to understand, you said customer with 2,000 applications. How do I manage that stack of applications? How do I deal with that? You were consulting, how do you help people through some of these giant challenges? So I generally try to start with what's important to people, like what's really making the business tick, what hurts them the most when it goes down, what costs them money, and some people have a really hard time understanding how much money they're burning every time an application falls over. And then we try to just make some links between the infrastructure, the application that keeps that outcome running for them. Yeah, one of the things I've been poking at is there's too many things that IT is doing that they suck at. And I'm not trying to poke at them, it's what we call the undifferentiated heavy lifting. It's like, come on, I think we talked to anybody, you're no good at building a data center, please don't do another one, somebody else can do it. Now, I'm not saying it all goes to the public cloud, there's lots of options how you do that, but from the ground up and as we work our way, right, what drives the business, what creates value for the business, and finding those areas, role the CIO's changing greatly, role of IT, I think it's going to look very different in five years than it does today. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah. And I think people don't necessarily appreciate the value of consultants, you can help them on that journey because it's hard, IT is hard, enterprise is hard, and putting IT and enterprise in the same sentence, that really makes it very hard. Yeah, very hard. Yeah, it's a little pretty. You got to be careful, I saw that there was like, one of those sarcastic memes years ago was like, consultants, if you can't solve the problem, at least there's lots of money to be made, moving it along, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and redefining the problem is another fun one we did as well. That's always fun. Yeah. So Dan, people want to learn more about what you're doing, how do they find you, you know? So they can find me at penguinpunk.net, I've got a blog there, it's been running that for about 10 years now. You can find me on the Twitter's at penguinpunk and various other things, come to a V-Mug meeting in Brisbane if you're ever in the area, we'll buy you a beer and treat you nice. Excellent, love to do that. We've yet to do the Cube in Australia, but something that's definitely what we want to do. So Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks too. For Justin and Stu, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching the Cube.