 This is SiliconANGLE.DV's exclusive continuous coverage of VMworld Day 2. We're here excited to have the new CEO of VMware, a long time, seven time CUBE alumni, when he was a lowly president at EMC, Pat Gelsinger, with my co-host, Dave Lump. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you very much, guys. Great to be here. Pleasure to see you again. First time as CEO. So first of all, how do you feel? Tell us what it's like. Obviously, just for the folks who haven't watched the EMC World interview, I asked you a point in question. I said, Pat, if you were running VMware, what would you work on? So we'll get to that later, but it turned out to be true. Turned out, once again, once again, the CUBE got it nailed, I like all of this, right? Yeah, absolutely. So how do you feel? Just give us some personal color around the transition. Obviously, you know, Paul, you guys have great rapport. Obviously, on stage yesterday, you got a standing ovation. Who's being called the king on Twitter. He's got a huge respect. You guys work together. Just take us through emotionally, the Pat Gelsinger inside Pat. What went down there? How did it feel? And the way he said, handing over the custodianship of the community to Pat Gelsinger, that was really, I think, a great way to put it. Well, first thing, Paul and I are just great friends. Over 30 years, we've worked together. It's like a great pick and roll team in basketball, right? He knows when to pick. I know when to roll. We've really learned how to work together over the years, and just great respect for each other's talents. And to have Paul embrace me, and really endorse me to the VM world and the community in that sense is powerful. But it also is intimidating. A bit of a responsibility as well. And I had dinner with Tom Jorgens last night. It's sort of like, oh, two weeks ago, we were trying to kill each other now. My new best friend. So it is this very rapidly shifting role as well as we laid out a pretty bold vision this week. And you at Intel too, you understand the whole partnership dynamic. We talked to us in the queue of the ecosystem, VMWare, at the beginning of this massive opportunity of extending beyond the VMWare look. I mean, you announced, as an example, people who know VMworld, it's always been about VMWare. They've been dominant in the enterprise. But yesterday you announced change to the pricing. I mean, you guys are thinking bigger now. Is that part of the plan to think bigger beyond VMWare and extend to other vendors? Obviously, great love fest on the CEO panel yesterday, and also the demos up on stage. So talk about that mindset and what you plan to do to take it beyond just VMWare. Well, it is very much a community. And when you think about what we're doing with Software Defined Data Center, right, really it's touching everything as Paul said. It's virtualizing the data center. And to do that, you know, it's the networking guys, the security guys, the storage guys, the management guys, the new application vendors. Right, it really is this ever broadening community. And as part of that is both a great opportunity, right, as well as a great responsibility to all of those community players and how we innovate together collectively to bring about this next layer, right, of fundamental innovation, right, agility and speed for the Software Defined Data Center of the future. So we're going to get to that in a second. I want to ask you about Paul Moritz again, just to kind of come back to the policy. He has yet to be on theCUBE, so we're trying to get him on theCUBE and say it's a safe place. Does he not like you? I mean, what you do? Have you offended him? I don't know. People want to know about him. He made some really kind of cool tongue-in-cheek comments just say about Facebook's valuation and VMWare where everyone kind of good chuckle out. But talk about Paul Moritz as a person. He's rarely doing public appearance. He's a total tech geek. He's a cool guy. So share with the folks out there what he like. Well, I think of Paul as sort of the Michael Jordan of strategy and technology, right? You know, he is just, you know, well, I don't think of myself as a bad strategist. You know, this is like the best strategist operating in the industry today around technology and somebody who's deep, right, in the technology but also strategically very, very broad. And in that sense, his new role is really to allow him to really go focus on what he truly loves, his long-term strategy, understanding the technology trends and really going deep in that area. And the technology, right? He's actually a huge technologist. Oh, yeah. Right, you know, he's sort of like tops and bottoms, right? He's higher in the stack, I'm lower in the stack and boy, you know, right between us, we sort of cover from, you know, sand to solutions. Well, you said it's somewhat intimidating and you're a lifelong hardware guy now taking over a software company. How do you think about that and how do you think you might change the way you approach your leadership? Well, I think in some ways, I've always thought of myself as an infrastructure guy, right? And, you know, most of Silicon is done in software these days. So in that sense, I don't see it as that radical in that regard. But I have had the opportunity to really build the hardware infrastructure that every aspect of cloud is built on and now to be able to put tops on bottoms, right? To be able to layer that software on top of it. To me, it's just a great opportunity, right? To take on this next piece of finishing that overall portfolio. How does he fit with Joe Tucci? Because I just love the dynamic Joe was on there yesterday. You know, and we've had a chance, he's Joe's been on theCUBE and we've talked to him in person, great guy. He's just such a great executive CEO. And he's been around the block. Paul's like his sidekick now and those two guys are going to cause some trouble. What's your prediction on the Joe Tucci-Paul-Marist dynamic? Because you've got a strategist that no one's ever seen before in the tech of business in Maritz. Now with a canvas, painting a new canvas. He's done VMware. He's got that thing kicked off, laid out the roadmap in 2010. It's all feeling it nicely. It's all going great. You're going to take it from there and ride that ship and sail on the good waters. But now he's now painting a new canvas. What is Joe and Paul talking about? What's that next canvas? Well, if you sort of think about Joe, right? He's really become at this point of his career, I'd say, the elder statesman of the industry, right? Where everybody likes Joe, right? He makes everybody comfortable with them. And there's just this comfort, right? That Joe really brings to any situation, right? So here you have the big brains of Paul being combined with the experience, the relationships of Joe. And to me, I expect it to be a really powerful combination. You know, I was commenting to Dave on a lot of different things yesterday and tying in some kind of trendy stuff like Apple's market share value and looking at that percentage of market share. And then also when you guys were up on the panel, one of the observations was you got the elder statesmen in Tucci and the senior experience of Joe with Pat, you and Paul. And a lot of the companies like Facebook are run by people under the age of 35. So there's a generation of kids out there running big companies that have market caps of a billion dollars. So that's now coming onto the scene. How do you see that all playing out? Is there a trend towards business value? There's some kind of digs around, you know, the social media discontent and the market's changing. You made a comment about that. But is it shifting to business value? Is that kind of what you guys are trying to get there? What do you say to those young leaders out there? And also what's happening in that market? Well, I do think that there is this aspect of, you know, building infrastructure, data centers, right? You know, there's just this piece of, okay, it's hard work, right? You have to, you know, to transition people over time. Your customers are CIOs, right? You know, there is a level of security, confidence, et cetera that needs to occur on that side. And then you have the dynamism of the consumer trends, right? And you know, to cook at Apple, right? Clearly is the elder statesman of the consumer social side, right, of the world as well. And you know, he's not a teenager anymore, right? In that sense, but clearly is this ability to generate extraordinary growth, extraordinary new valuation, as you've seen with Google and with Facebook. And how all of that matures for social to become a sustained monetization model in the industry? Is it really proven yet? You know, I was really liking Michael Dell on stage, trying to really make his point, I'm not going away. Yeah, we did a direct business model. We're the PC guys, and then he's advocating and it's good to see him back in the game like that. Yeah, me too. I was, you know, I think Michael, over the last two years, you know, he has a tough job, you know, HP has a tough job to really transform those companies and you have to say, okay, Michael, he's really made it better. Well, a lot of those CEOs in that PC era that put a lot of, you know, East Coast mini-computer companies out of business, I think, don't want to see that happen to themselves. Absolutely. A lot more paranoid to use, you know, one of your old companies firms and really more aggressive about, you know, staying the course. Yeah, yeah, and Michael, I think, has clearly said, I'm up for this challenge and I'm going to take my namesake company through that challenge. So I got to ask you a hardware question, because, you know, you know that business, now you're going to be moving more into the different kind of, that is with virtualization and apps, but HP and Dell are classic PC vendors, they've innovated, they're part of the whole wind-tell generational shift. They have huge market shares still. Margins, yeah, are tied with the market's changing. You guys point about that in a new way. Apple has huge market value and they have single-digit share and growing in hardware, yet they're so valuable. So the logic is, if you connect the dots, small single-digit share, you get huge profits. Really great, good products, obviously, but they're wrapping services and other business models around the hardware. What's your take on that if you were at Dell and HP and saying, hey, you know, don't give up that PC business, just move fast, don't become driftwood, but what kind of services are they going to have to wrap around these products? Because the end user computing world, yes, it is changing multiple devices, but Apple has demonstrated that you can have a very strong hardware business and wrap around it. So what's your advice to those guys? Well, I don't think of Apple as a hardware business. In that sense, I think Apple has been focused on a user experience that happens to be embodied in hardware and services. And in that sense, they have owned the user experience. They're maniacal about industrial design. They're maniacal about that whole experience and have really innovated in how consumers buy, utilize their products. And I think any aspect of things that touch the user, they have to have that in mind. It's all about the user experience and they've done it well. And they've said, it's not hardware, it's not software, it's that integrated platform and experience. And my advice to anybody in that space, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo, RAM, Nokia, Microsoft, you have to really take that very aggressively in mind. So you put your man on the moon moment up on your keynote. You said, let's get to, virtually 100% of applications in first place. I think you said 90%. That's intimidating. I have a reminder of the climber who's climbing to the top of the mountain and it's like this false summit, right? So my question is, to get there, you're going to have to lick the complexity problem. And over the years in IT, we think we've got that problem solved. And then you peel the onion and oh boy, there's more complexity there. To get to that 90%, you're going to have to solve that complexity problem. Are we, have we solved it? Are we on that path? Well, I think we're beginning to lay the foundation for it. And I think some of the software defined data center pieces. Okay, you know, we got to attack management and orchestration. We got to attack the network and security. So clearly those are elements of it. You know, we have to make storage easy and available. But we also have to attack some of the higher level problems as well. And some of the cloud foundry, the PAS layers as well, because it's not just about modernizing the old, right? With things like Gemfire and data fabric and, you know, rebuilding the database environment. But it's also enabling the new and enabling those across the multi-cloud environments. And you know, so it's a lot of work to go do, but I think we've laid out the core pieces of the vision. And now my job is really to refine, execute, and accelerate that end game. Pat, I got to ask you about disruption and change. Joe Tucci made a comment that I thought was pretty Joe Tucci-like when asked about the trends. And he said, the horizontal's getting shorter and the vertical's getting steeper in terms of the time, the change in the disruption. And he's hyper-focused on that. I know you are too. And you tend to move fast and executive in watching your career. So let's take this software defined networking trend. I know we reported that you were in, when you took over AMC Ventures and looked at that, and you guys moved on some of those deals. So that's really key success. And we talked about it on theCUBE. But that's a game changer for VM, where like spring source was acquired, acquisition changed the developer landscape. Now you got the necessary deal. Is a game-changing statement. But you have existing stuff going on like VCE, which is pioneering a lot of the V-block stuff, right? So you got VCE out there. And now you got the software defined data center at the emerging side. So how do you sort that out? I know you're first week on the job or first second day in the job. I mean, you know the history. So VCE obviously is a flagship offering. It's V-block. How does that fit into this change? I mean, it's quickly, the disruption's positive, but they got to react. So a lot of the moving parts have to kind of get tweaked. What do you see there for VCE? Well, and clearly, you know, we have on the SDN side, before I answer the VCE piece of it, you know, we have two incredible assets, right? We have the whole V-shield VX LAN, right? Capability, which you'd say inside of the VMware environment was already well down the path of SDN. And now we have the NYSERA assets and MVP and open V-switch, et cetera. Right, so now, you know, job one for us is bring those together as the most complete offering for the SDN space, right? In the industry. You know, we got two great teams, bring those together and unquestionably, we got the top talent in the world. So we got to make that happen. And then we have to make that available for our partners, right? To be able to innovate with us, underneath us and on top of us. We announced Cisco partnership yesterday, right? You know, around how we're going to work together on that hardware software boundary. And then with VCE, it's used them as the world-class delivery vehicle for converged infrastructure. But now from the VMware role, hey, it's, guess what? You know, HP just did a great integrated demo, right? If they're converged integrated, you know, how are they going to participate with our SDN assets and how do we enable them? How do we enable Dell? How do we enable the rest of the industry? And VCE now, is that going to, how's that relationship, that's a separate company, but it's well-funded and they've knocked down some good deployments, it's pretty solid. Is it a high-end offering? Is it more of, I mean, how do you sort that out product-wise? Well, you know, VCE vBlock has always been a higher-end offering, you know, that's where UCS is positioned, right? You know, it really is the premier platform in the industry, right? And we expect to continue to invest in that and partner with them. And, you know, VCE is doing well, hitting a billion-dollar run rate, so we're happy with them. But, right, as I'm quickly, you know, learning, you know, I got other great partners as well. So ecosystems obviously are organic, they're ever-changing. How do these acquisitions that you make change the balance of the ecosystem? Well, every one of them is, right, aimed at, you know, can we do it through partnership or should we do it as an integrated offering? And where that line is is never the same, right? And we might make a decision that, hey, it's better done in the ecosystem today in two years from now, and it's time to integrate it into the core operating system of VMware, right? That's just the nature of how software and operating systems are built over time. Now, that said, hey, we're gonna be an ecosystem-friendly company, and even where we choose to integrate, we'll always have open APIs that enable industry innovation around us because there's more bright people outside of VMware than there are inside of VMware. And if we don't allow people to innovate with us, well, yeah, they're gonna go innovate somewhere else. Well, you have to move fast. I mean, you can't predict every innovation that's gonna come down the road and thome. That's right. Something like Nesero's start of 2007. I mean, you know, and I did a speech last year, I called it the Golden Triangle of Innovation, right? And there are three primary pools of innovation, what we do organically inside of an enterprise like VMware, what happens in the university community and what happens in the startup community. And we believe that we effectively have to participate in all three of those. You know, we have our roots from Stanford, right? And that community, right? Nesero comes from Stanford and Berkeley, so clearly we see the university piece of it, right? We see the inorganic piece of acquisitions and obviously organic, cool things that we're doing like the excellent inside of the company. You've done a great job. I mean, we can honestly say, in tracking you from the original interview, you did those things. And every year we ask you, we'll ask you at the end of this interview, what's your plan for the next 12 months? So congratulations on that. Question I want to ask you is, yesterday we heard abstract pool automate. Yep. Which kind of is like code words for operating system. You know, you got to abstract away complexities, have resource management and then automate and make all that link and load together. You're pretty smart, that's good. I had to look that up this morning at Wikipedia. So that's cool. And you've also talked about your historical experience at Hintel, cadence of Moore's Law. So the question I want to ask you is, as you take over the helm at VMware, you have a different kind of OS cadence going on. That's very rapid, as Joe Tucci pointed out. What's your Moore's Law for applications look like? Cause now you have an enabling infrastructure in the VMware products and technologies as well as the ecosystem. And you got to foster that enabling technology. So what is the cadence of the app market? Yeah, and you know, first I'll say, you know, at the operating system level, right with VMware, we'd say, boy, you know, we like this yearly cadence, right? And it's nice that it sort of matches with TikTok model at Intel, which I helped create. Right, and sort of the major, minor releases of VMware are sort of in lockstep with that. And you know, cause what sets a cadence? You know, why shouldn't it be three or four years? Right, you know, what should be the right thing? And hey, you know, we sort of set, you know, we build on a firm foundation of Silicon and we're going to align heavily on that. So to me, this TikTok through the stack. And then if I look to the next level of the stack, clearly, you know, Agile and Sprints and so on have allowed app development to occur, I'll say in a social, right, crowd source model and in an effective way. But I think fundamentally you got to say, what is your foundation? And I'd say, boy, you know, a yearly kind of major release cycle, right? I think there's good solid, right, technical foundations for that. And then making sure that you have an effective ability to continue to do continuous innovation. So Pat, for the last five or seven years this industry obviously is focused on doing more with less operational efficiencies, obviously the converged infrastructure trend. John talked about, you know, abstracting, automating, pooling and automating, all of those things really driving efficiencies. And you know the story with IT spending, it's flat, it's been down. But there's a thinking out there with big data and with new flash architectures that we can have major impacts on productivity. When John asked you at EMC World, what would you do if you were running VMworld, you answered, part of your answer was more tighter storage integration. I want to ask you specifically about a top-down storage integration. In other words, bringing flash really managed from the server level, doing atomic rights and driving new levels of productivity for organizations that go beyond just sort of cutting cost and better TCO. Can you talk about just the vision of is that the right place to do it? In other words, controlling the metadata from fast servers versus slow storage. You know, interesting transition from a storage company now to where you are as the head of VMware. Yeah, unquestionably. You know, we have to do a better job at VMware, of taking advantage of flash on the server side. Right, you know, the performance capabilities of that, the IO gap that's opened up, right, in-memory data, right, applications. But, you know, at the same time, we're seeing the polar extremes become more polar. Right, the size of big data, right, you know, will forever drive these larger and larger pools of scale-out data on the one end. Right, and now with in-memory and flash technology in the server side, the things that you can do, right, with extreme performance characteristics at the server or at the application level, and VMware has to do a better job of making that available and some of the things that Steve talked about with V Flash is an example of that. Right, and we are going to do a lot better job of enabling those high-performance in-memory characteristic applications on this end while an agent with larger and larger pools of shared storage on the other end. And embracing Hadoop, you want to infer that you're going to bring big data analytic applications and actually potentially feed those transaction applications that you're virtualizing in near real time. Yeah. Is that direction? Oh yeah, absolutely. But, you know, to me the phenomenal thing is the extremes that are emerging here, where everything used to be just in a shared storage array, you know, we're now sort of blown apart, right? You know, now we have high-performance in-memory on one end, right, and these massive scale platforms, the multi-pedabytes on the other end, you know, it's pretty spectacular. And I said, you know, I said you want to operate on both of them in essentially real time. What's interesting, Pat, when we were at EMC where I asked you, can there be a red hat for Hadoop and you said, and you, you know, editorialized that you don't think it could be. Well, we recently had that debate on SiliconANGLE and pretty much the crowd is weighing in that there is no red hat for Hadoop, mainly because then just the market conditions are different, so just, I want to share that with you and that we're going to continue to do that. You made some good- I'm glad they agree with me. I like that. You made some good calls on big data. The question I want to ask you is, though, is in the major presentation, yes, that you guys laid out the new experiences and you talked about old way, new way, access, it was access, app and infrastructure, PC users to mobile users, existing apps and new apps in big data, service to cloud. So I want to ask you about converged infrastructure because that's the old way. So a lot of the definitions around converged infrastructure has been defined as part of that old side, that side of the street that's old. Yet, in the new operating system future that we talked to everyone about, data is now a key kernel part of the design. So I want to ask you, data infrastructure, define what data infrastructure is as it relates to the new converged infrastructure, not replacing converged infrastructure, how has converged infrastructure changed from old to modern with data at the center of the value proposition? Yeah, you know, I thought, you know, my EMC world keynote speech touched on this a little bit, this idea of data gravity, right, where, you know, data gets bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier and as the networks become agile and VMs become mobile, right, you know, things sort of move around that, you know, gravity well of the data and I expect that to continue forward. So today, converged infrastructure, you'd say, what's at the center of a V block, right? You know, you say, well, it's sort of, you know, the UCS servers because that's where the apps run, right? And I think increasingly in the future, the center of converged infrastructure is more around the storage infrastructure because VMs are so mobile in light and comparison, right? But the idea of collapsing the boundaries between server network and storage, I think it's still a very fundamental concept. And you know, when you go look inside of a Google data center, they don't quite think about it the same way, right? It's this array of infrastructure, right? That is agilely available for their different applications and I think that's fundamentally the right model, right? And a cloud-scale version of converged infrastructure makes a lot of sense as well. And highly homogeneous and many have observed obviously the advances that Amazon and Google have and you're clearly the software defined data centers moving toward a homogeneous environment. Right, one common software layer across a set of services, right, that are embodied in converged infrastructure hardware. And historically, homogeneous is meant you don't get best of breed, but so how do you achieve best of breed? Is that through the ecosystem? I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit. Well, I think, you know, in this case, the scale operation characteristics swamp, right? The individual characteristics of best of breed, right? In that sense, right? And they become enabled through this layer. But that hardware software boundary is always a point of innovation, right? When virtualization and VMware first emerged, right, you know, Mendel had this paranoia we will rely on no hardware, right? Right, it will make it work on anything. And then over time, the hardware got better at doing things like, you know, page table mapping, memory breakthroughs, et cetera, for virtualization. And all of a sudden, it's sort of like, oh, the hardware is enabling better virtualization and you took advantage of it. And the same thing will emerge as you go think about converged infrastructure for networking and storage as well. The hardware will continue to evolve to better enable this virtualization layer of software and automation above it. We're starting to get the hook, but we know we want to go, you got multi-core, high megahertz clock speed right now at PAV, got a couple of minutes left. I have two questions. One is around the future of virtualization. We're following on siliconangle.com, some of the new advances around large data centers that have commodity gear. So you obviously, you know, the usual suspects are Google, Facebook and whatnot, having a lot of commodity machines. And low level virtual machines is a really big trend now looking at how to deploy VMs at a programmatic layer. I don't know if you're following that. So I want you to comment on what you're following relative to some of the new trends around VMs. Obviously, down at the low level, low level virtual machines and how they're playing up the stack. And then my final question after that would be, you know, next 12 months, what's on your to-do list? Yeah, well, you know, I think, you know, part of our task is sort of the, you know, the, today the leader in virtualization has continued to leading the trends, right? In that sense, you know, continuing to reduce the overhead of virtual machines. You know, IO stack improvements, right? You know, the flash example that we gave before is a big piece of that, continuing to enable, right, better app affinity. You saw the Hadoop work. You know, some of the big VM work around databases as well, right? And saying, how does, you know, because in many ways, databases, right, you know, VMs operate on under provision hardware, right? And be able to over provision, right? And databases are over provisioning a memory, right? You know, for an under provisioned resource of the database, it's almost the inverse. So how do we address that? You know, the Serengeti Hadoop work is another example of that. So there's lots of things, right, to continue to innovate, right, at the virtualization layer, both as you look down toward the hardware, as well as as you look up toward the application, right? And I think in that sense- Is that where the software kind of tie in? That's why you're not saying more software-defined networking, more software-defined data centers. Do you have some ranges there? Is that the- Oh, that's a big piece of it, yeah, right. And you want to, that's all become policy-based, right? Because you want to, essentially what, you know, Steve likes to call the virtual data center to associate the policy of the application requirements, as well as with the policy mechanisms of the underlying infrastructure. So that, you know, the virtualization, the networking, the security elements, all of those become embodied in that as a set of services to the VM or this virtual data center. Next 12 months, you know, obviously, job one is make the transition smooth. You know, job two is, you know, get plan 13 in place, you know, as the year concludes here. And then, you know, some of the key agendas are those we already talked about, you know, operate on the SDN, right? We just did 1.3 billion. I better make a good use of that. You know, figure out our storage and security virtualization strategies, our management stack. And some of the horizon things today are really pretty thrilling, you know, for that next generation end user experience. Pat Gelsinger, always a blast on theCUBE now as officially the CEO. Great to have you on. Well, actually I'm not officially, I'm at T-minus three days. Three days. September 1st. Okay, September 1st. Congratulations on me. Pat Gelsinger. Thank you very much. CUBE alumni, great guy and tech athlete for sure. This is theCUBE, silkenangle.com's flagship coverage of all the events extracting the signal from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.