 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, the hang space of VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here for the day two wrap up with all the best analysts in the business. We've got Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon Run SiliconANGLE Media. Stu Miniman, obviously the man, the myth, the legend. Stu and Keith Townsend, CTO advisor, our new guest analyst from the community. Guys, great job today. Keith, welcome to theCUBE team. Thanks for sharing your analyst commentary with the guests this week. It's been fun. So guys, day two, let's get right to it. Stu, Keith, Peter, you've been scouting the landscape. You guys have been here on theCUBE and walking around. What's the big story from day two? What is the number one thing that pops out from today? You know, I'm surprised at how many hallway conversations with customers. They're really excited about the level of integration VMware has done with VRealize, all their products. Even the announcement with the ProfCloud, NSX integration, they are really excited about their jobs becoming easier. It's been a hallway conversation. You've heard that multiple times? Multiple times. NSX in particular, what's with that? Well, that seems to be rising to me bubbling up. What's your thoughts there? Well, you know what? It's been that NSX has been the enabler. I think it's refocused VMware that they are trying to get as much value out of that product as possible. And so they're putting hooks into Workspace One. We heard about that on stage this morning. VMware integrated OpenStack, VMware integrated containers, all tie in to Vic, and as a... I'm sorry, all tie in to NSX. And as a consequence, you'll get better integration throughout the products from a just presentation later. Peter, you've been out doing meetings. You've been talking to folks who scout on the landscape, doing some cubes spots as well, but most of the time you've been out talking with a lot of the VMware and industry folks, what did you learn? What's your story? One word, data. Data, data, data. Increasingly, it's about the idea that we have to focus more time and energy on data as an asset. It's the idea that VMware is allowing us to liberate data from underlying hardware and capabilities that we can now extract and externalize data from applications and start treating data as something that the overall business has to worry about. Going back to the notion of NSX, if you take a data perspective, it makes enormous sense that you could, it's because the world's becoming increasingly distributed, data is distributed, the two go hand in hand. It's natural that NSX would become a centerpiece of the conversation because as everybody talks about data and the distribution of the data and how you manage that, and how you put controls on it and how you integrate it, that's the type of stuff that's gonna come to the fore in the conversations on the hallway. The other thing that I'd say, John, is that there's a lot of activity, but it's kind of interesting. It's, you know, when you go to an application show, the applications are exciting themselves. When you come here, people are excited about the life being easier, but it's interesting to see how much more on the show floor people are using gimmicks to bring folks in. And so there's this interesting excitement that's being generated around almost a party atmosphere in anticipation of the upcoming close of the deal and some of the other things as people celebrate what's happening with the ecosystem. Well, VMware is also a lot of geeks so that those gimmicks work well to make infrastructure exciting. As we know, it can be geekies too. Your thoughts on what you see and what's important, most important stories bubbling up. John, you've had a great line you've talked about and many of our interviews this week is talking about, you know, is it a reboot or an ecosystem 2.0? Because the thing that I'm finding really interesting are things like VSAN and NSX, not the product standalone, but all the places they're getting integrated. And that's a, you know, that shift as to who's partnering, how they partner. It's not just the hypervisor and let me sell a bunch of hardware underneath it. It's who's going to help package it, who's offering services and who's going to help build that. But as VMware has expanded, really, you know, the market that they're trying to go after that is a shift of the ecosystem. And there's been some ripples and waves as to how that happens because, you know, we've seen this story before, you know, Microsoft, Intel and others as they try to have more power out there, there's going to be some fits and spurts. And it's really interesting to hear Keith's take on some of the, you know, management piece of it because, you know, VMware, they've done okay, but it kind of feels to me, it's like, I feel like every year it's, you know, slight tweak and adjustment and rename of that portfolio. So I'm glad to hear some of the hallway conversations are positive. Yeah, my big takeaway, and this lead into the next question for you guys, is that VMware has moved from a one product company. It's pretty obvious when you look at it, but once you look at it, it becomes so clear. One product company and ecosystem to a multiple products and technologies, much broader, mature company technology and solutions to make things easier for customers. So that makes the makeup of the company, hence the personas of the buyers different, which will change the ecosystem 2.0 stew. So that's going to be very, very key. But my next question really is the competitive strategy question. Pat Gelsinger basically saying, is we're going to be cross cloud architecture, cross cloud and everything kind of foundational and stuff. How this competitive strategy plays out, are there fatal flaws in this strategy? I see IBM clouds on stage, if Microsoft Azure doesn't play ball in a certain way, Pat Gelsinger's answer is I'll sling some APIs around and we're going to be connecting to Amazon. But is that good enough from a functionality standpoint? And so the question is this, is there a lock in spec for vendors now in the cloud? And is it data and the customer's data? And because Microsoft's going to have to make a move here. Pat's put the pressure on this inter-clouding. Is there a lock in spec for these pure play cloud providers like AWS, like Azure, like Google and others? Not yet. And I don't think it's going to be for a bit of time. The whole notion of cross cloud is real. There's going to be, the way I liken it is many, many years ago, there was all these many computers networking standards and TCPIP and Ethernet came in and flattened it all and put them out of business. The inter-cloud problem is going to be a real problem. Two to three, you go to talk to a CIO, they know about two to three cloud relationships that they have. You start peeling back the covers. It's a lot more because the business is out there bringing some stuff in. So as a consequence, I don't think it's locked in. I think this whole notion of inter-cloud is real. I think especially as we start bringing in IoT and what happens at the edge makes that a part of it. But at the same time, it's not clear that there's going to be a one platform to rule them all either, whether it's VMware or anything else. This is a scramble. Everybody's trying to get the high ground and VMware is in the hunt. Keith, your thoughts on what Peter just said and thoughts in general, what are the questions? And I think it depends on the customer. If you're a extremely forward-thinking customer and you're using things such as Lambda, serviceless computing, VMware really doesn't have a plan that. You can't get in that data path. And if enterprises start to, I call that the addiction to cloud. When you start to use those cloud specific APIs that you get addicted to them, VMware can't inject themselves today into that conversation. And I think that's the danger. But I think, again, the core VMware customer, I don't think is using the cloud in that way today. So VMware most definitely has some time to get in front of that. Stu, thoughts? Yeah, so if we try to line up the horses on the courses, I still don't see VMware, they're not lining up against the big public eyes. The ecosystem they're building is more what we call true private cloud. How do I live in the data center? And I'm sure I have hooks and I interact with, whether that be virtual stream, maybe there'll be some AWS and Azure hooks there. But it's interesting to see where they've gone there. And yeah, I mean, VMware's making progress, but it's still, if I was a VMware stockholder and I hear Pat say, five years from now, 50% of the data will be in public cloud, they have a play there, but I still wonder if it's a smaller pie than they have today, unless something else changes. All right, final question for you guys. In the conversation space out there in the community that you guys are paying attention to and here at VMworld as a conversation space, have you heard anything about VMware or ecosystem missing anything? Usually at a show, you get a scuttle, but oh, they totally missed the boat on blank. I'm not hearing that. So what thoughts on critical analysis of, did VMware miss anything this year? Or is stuff noticeably absent besides some few executives that don't along with the company, but. So John, I guess I'll start off. I've heard a little bit of grumbling. Every year, the conference goes through some adjustments. First of all, a lot of people don't love Las Vegas, but Moscone's under construction. So that's been there. The partners that came in, Pax used to be a separate event and the overwhelming feedback I've gotten is they loved it as a separate event. They could go a lot deeper. And here, it was a little lightweight with the feedback. I heard on that. And third, last year they did a small developer event and heard some good positive things on it. They kind of integrated it in there and they felt it kind of lost some of the focus and the message that this year. The integrated in. Wasn't received nearly as well. There wasn't a great keynote developer person and much of the messaging they felt was for the ops team, not for the dev team and speaking to kind of the admin. So that's the scuttle I've heard. So surprisingly, a lot of the conversation has been around. We like, we realize, we like the insight that it gives the organization, but it's expensive. And I think that's one of the things that VMware really needs to make sure they turn and not look carefully is making sure that the customers are not having an Oracle-like reaction to some of the pricing that they've been giving for some really cool features that has value. So I would say two things. One is I totally agree with you, Stu. The developer piece could be amplified, could be bigger. And the second thing is most of the interesting IoT stuff, and I know IoT is a lot of hype, we actually have some opinions about how it's going to become concrete very quickly, but most of the interesting IoT conversations coming from partners and not from VMware at this point. All right, final rapid-fire wrap-up point I'll start with me is big surprises that knocked you off your chair or made you take notice here, this year, this is so far this show. I will say that for me, it was the strategic presence of NSX and the real growth of VSAN that got my attention. And third thing is Sanjay Poonan's elevation with the end-user computing group was quite impressive. So those are kind of my big surprises that I took notice of. I don't really have one, and there's a lot of reasons for that. It's, I guess with anything, my surprise is that it all makes sense because you come to a lot of these shows and it's just bells and whistles in Kumbaya. This show has made sense. The conversations they've had have made sense, the storylines have made sense. I think it could be better in some areas and they could spend less time in others. But overall, the story makes sense. When Kid Corbett got on stage and talked through the cloud native conversation, I understood it. I understood the difference between his conversation that he had with us today and the one that Pat had us with us yesterday with cross-cloud, what I used cross-cloud with yesterday and what I would use cloud native with today, I understood VMware's cloud strategy. That surprised me. Yeah, I thought last year there was all the kind of containers, containers, docker, docker, docker discussion. I'm not super surprised that that's gone down in buzz and as Peter said, IoT, big discussion. Pat mentioned it as one of the two big things that he wanted to make sure they are well positioned for across the thing we see, Amazon, IBM, lots of companies looking at, so definitely hot air or something Wikibon's digging deeper into later this year. Great job, Stu, I want to give a shout out to you that you're going to great plug in the keynote on the server sand report from Wikibon. You guys did a great job as a team and got a big recognition and certainly the marketplace as well. That's actually true. David Floyer's report on server sand has been all over the place here. Yeah, absolutely. And John, I got to love the Pac-Elseger quote, I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE, so great to have them on. Big shout out for Dave Vellante, who unfortunately couldn't be here and Pat said Dave, you better be here next year. So, Keith, great job today, good to see you. This thing wrap up from day two. We got a wall-to-wall coverage day three tomorrow. Stay tuned, more Cube action if we are here, live in the hang space at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. You're watching VMworld exclusive coverage here from theCUBE. We'll see you tomorrow, day three coverage. Thanks for watching.