 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is day three of three days of live coverage, live in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, get the scoop of what's happening at VMworld. I'm Joe, my co-host, Dave Vellante. Torsten Volk is here. Hi, everybody. He is an expert in systems management. He's a research director at Enterprise Management Associates. Torsten, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So a lot of talk about management. Enterprise Management Associates, I know them a little bit, but we're talking off-camera, but you're not about who's got the best flash drives or disk array or software-defined product or whatever it is. It's how do you manage that mess, right? That's what you do. So you help your clients, which are presumably, and user community and a mix of vendors, I'm sure, as well, squint through all that complexity, right? It's all about the application, as they said on stage at yesterday's keynote, the first keynote. It's all about how do we help the business units and their developers best manage the environment and best serve the business for competitive advantage. So what is the state of systems management today? I mean, even the name systems management is changing, right? So what is the state of it today? I mean, you've got a situation where you have a lot of bespoke system management tools and there's a lot of complexity. Everybody sort of knows that story, but take us through that and where we are today and where you want it to go. It's actually really interesting. Traditionally, we were looking at network storage and compute and how do we manage it? How do we make sure there's enough of everything? And today, we get all of those crazy requirements pushed down from the business units. We get big data projects. We get DevOps requirements. We get all kinds of things that business users think they need to have and they actually do need to have to have a competitive advantage. Now, systems management has to react to that and be much more aware of the business service because again, what are we doing, network storage and compute for? We are doing that all to enable an application at the end of the day. And the more we can refresh that application, the more we can push it out to our customers, the more the organization benefits. So is systems management as a future, as a service in our future? In other words, something that's embedded into the capabilities of the application that we're developing as opposed to sort of an afterthought that's pulled it on. Does it all talk about software defined data center? You know, what's the software defined data center? It is a virtualization of network storage and compute. Yes, sure, but that's kind of a mundane problem insulting a million people right now. A mundane task because all you have to do is you have to abstract the software from the underlying hardware and make it programmable and put APIs, northbound APIs on there so that the application can provision what the application needs to provision. But at the end of the day, yeah, it's really a much more dynamic discipline today. The software defined data center has been the message clearly from Pat Gelsinger. It's one of the top three priorities. Software defined data center, hybrid cloud and user computing. We had Sean Douglas on earlier from Service Mesh and he was an ex CTO at EMC, ran EMC Ventures and he just recently left the CTO of Service Mesh so he's kind of seen the landscape and he was on earlier, he said something interesting. When you're at the top of the stack and you're doing orchestration, you got to be able to bridge legacy at the same time enable kind of these green field applications, the ones our kids see and the iPhone and the CIOs say, I want my iPad, I want much new app and well, we don't have desktop virtualization. So you're seeing the trend clearly towards apps are coming, a lot of diverse apps. It's huge issues, right? So orchestration is an interesting issue and a DevOps mindset, the app gets built head up front with infrastructure assembling on the fly. So that's an interesting concept. So what's your take on this orchestration market and automation obviously plays a big part of that? What's your research tell you? Yeah, that's exactly the point. The research tells me that the business units, they do not care what's going on in the data center. They couldn't care less about that I virtualized my network. You know, what they care about is the abstraction that I put on top of the virtualized. So I have basically multiple layer of abstraction. I have my virtualization layer, then I have my cloud player and on top of that I have government, governance and automation and orchestration so that I can actually fulfill business requirements. And the more I can connect to business systems with my, the more basically my IT operations becomes aware of business systems and business applications. And we were talking about a service mesh and there's other companies solving similar, or slightly similar problems from a different angle. But what they all have in common is they kind of give IT operations a shot in the arm and say, okay, you know, developers used to be your enemies but now developers are actually becoming much, much more of a change agents. You know, they becoming people who delivering to the business and IT operations is able to help them through things like application release automation and as a service mesh abstraction and governments of a massively heterogeneous environment because at the end of the day the CIO is a proker of services. Why is service mesh so so so so? Sean basically said we have the only product really out there that does some of the promise of software defined data set and orchestration level. That's a bold statement. We have to dig in and we'll check. That is a bold statement. Is it true? Is it true? We have to check the facts on that. And so is it true? Answer the question, is it true or false? Is it kind of true? And then answer, why is service mesh so popular? Why are they getting so much traction? It's very interesting, right? Because they started getting all this traction coincidingly with the software defined data set and talk. That talk matured a little bit last year and like the beginning of this year we see service mesh with our customers pop up everywhere. And people ask me, larger vendors ask me, I'm not going to name names obviously. So what do you think of service mesh? Do we need to do something? And what do you say? Yes, by the way. That's what I say. No, I mean, they're actually doing some good work. Sean's, you know, and the founders, they are super smart. I mean, Sean, I mean, he saw it all. He basically was the driver behind the Nasirid deal. So he gets what's going on. Well, I mean, they solved the problem. And it's always a tricky question. You know, are they the only people doing a certain thing addressing a certain problem? I would say, I'm not going to say yes. I'm going to say they are the people that focus on governance the strongest of all of the vendors in the marketplace. I can't say that. That's a fair statement. There's no other company that is really focused that is building their company on governing massively heterogeneous environments along the lines of an application. And is that a key need? Absolutely. And is VMware in need for the virtualization stack to have a solution like that? A complete virtualization stack? Absolutely. We had Joe Arnoldon and Josh McKinty who are heavily involved in the open stack. So you got CEO of Piston Cloud and the CEO of Swiftstack. Great guys. We've done some great commentary with them. You know, they're like, hey, you know what? It's all about the right tool for the job, right? So what's interesting about what they're saying and what kind of Sean is pointing to is that there are going to be multiple versions of the truth in this cloud. And it's all going to be different by use case. So when you start talking about automation, one customer's processes that need to be automated are different than the other, right? So, okay, do you manually document that? And how do you automate that? So you have to have the ability to have a foundation and then kind of like a service catalog push button. I want a little bit of that blended together and then you got a solution. So that's kind of the mindset. So if that's the case, DevOps is interesting because DevOps, I call DevOps guys, the guys who are eating glass early on, you know, Facebook, building their own, tough as nails. I don't need no ops guy. I'm going to do it all. But now you're seeing more of, I'm a developer, I just don't want to deal with infrastructure. So now the mindset is, DevOps mindset is, I got an app and I need infrastructure to be working. But what Josh was pointing out and what Piston and SwiftSec do is that there's a lot of details that need to be fixed that some developers, I don't want to do that, so that's too much work, you know, positive compliance, LDAP integration. You know, there's little stuff that matters. So how do developers or enterprises protect against something, I'm not going to build that and causes a security hole or something? There has to be that scary term, no ops. I don't know if you've heard of that. Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, kind of makes a whole profession obsolete. And a lot of people took that the wrong way because I mean, what they really meant by no ops was that developers can really, truly describe in their code the, in all of its details, and there's a lot of nitty-gritty details that you and I couldn't understand without actually doing the job, you know, without going into the data center and figuring out what it means to configure that sand in a way that it best runs with a certain switch and application at a certain point in time, you know. So it has been kind of painted as that scary thing and no ops was kind of the culmination of that. And now I think we have a little bit of a pushback from IT operations, you know, saying, look, you rely on us for keeping your business, for keeping the lights on. So you've got to give us something. And IT operations for the first time, based on our research, really interesting. We see IT operations is actually starting to listen to business units, to developers a lot more because they see they need to. Because if they don't, we see massive shadow IT deployments, you know. It was all over the news, I believe in the New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on credit cards on EC2 without the IT organization knowing and what kind of data is there and what the liability that is. You know, and that's what companies like ServiceMash come in and take that liability away from you and put it back into the data center. So your research is showing that DevOps mentality, moving into the traditional enterprise. I mean, it's obviously, it's well understood with what's going on in the hyperscale. And we've actually, John, we've had to peer insight with a company, Munder Capital, you know, a financial services firm, they're doing DevOps. But how prevalent Torsten is that in your findings? Companies know they have to do something. And you can see when you go to the big four shows as well, you know, traditionally not known as necessarily the incubators of innovation, you see a lot of this type of talk, a lot of CIO as the service broker. You know, the CIO is really rethinking and there's a new generation of CIOs, rethinking their roles in terms of being aware, we have to compete. And if you don't compete with the external services, people will go somewhere else and the other business people, they are more important than we are supposed to enable them. And that is kind of this traditional shift. And it's a very cultural thing, you know, if you have been in your job, if I've been in my job, somebody tomorrow tells me, man, you know, you should have done this differently or you should do this differently. Torsten, I got to ask you, we're up on the break here, we're getting the hook, but I got to ask you a final question that's more on your current role as a research analyst. And David, I always joke about this, I use the word moving train, the market's like a moving train, it's hard to, you know, get a hold of something. How do you cover the systems management space when the systems themselves are being re-architected? I mean, you're seeing a lot of these guys that are leading the engine, they're system operating systems guys. So you got a complete rehaul and re-architecture of systems. So now the systems management are supposed to manage pre-existing systems, so it becomes a moving train. So how do you cover it? I mean, how do you get your hands on it? You just get on the train, ride it? You start with the customer, that's the main thing. You don't start talking to the vendors, you start believing in your research and getting as many customers in there and finding out what their pain is. You know, go to customers and talk about the SDDC. Customers are not like you and I, thinking about this 24 seven. Customers have specific problems that kill them that make them late for the kids for their dinner in the evening, you know? And that's where you start. So customers tell you, wow, you know, I can provision 500, or this vendor came to me, said I can provision 500 VMs in one minute, under one minute, 500 VMs. Awesome, you know, but it's not the Olympics. It's not an Olympics of provisioning VMs. If you don't have your network, if you don't have your security. Fun with provisioning. I'm not coming home for dinner, I'm reaching the queue again all night long again. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, start the vote, thanks for coming on, service mesh, good example there, great job, shout out to them and their role, Sean Douglas was on earlier, appreciate it. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles exclusive, extensive coverage, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're day three, just again, we're going to have Sanjay Poonan up at one o'clock. He's going to be talking about the end, he came from SAP, friend of theCUBE. We also have Tarkin Maynor who's a CUBE alum who's going to announce some, break some news. So stay tuned here, he's got a new startup and always a flamboyant and knowledgeable guest up next. Stay with us.