 SiliconANGLE TV and Wikibon.org present a focus spotlight. Live from Las Vegas and VMworld 2011, host John Furrier and Dave Valente, a women's game. Cloud realities with support from NetApp. Innovative clouds are built on NetApp. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon.org. On SiliconANGLE TV's live continuous coverage from VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. Here talking on the spotlight for cloud realities. And joining me is a panel of cloud experts. Not self-proclaimed cloud experts, but well understood cloud experts. So let me introduce Jay Fry from CA, Brian Clashley from Cisco, and Matthew Lodge from VMware. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Brian's been on theCUBE before, so Matthew and Jay, who haven't been in theCUBE before, this is where we like to bring in the smart nodes and unleash information on the community and share that. So we're sharing from your smart nodes what's going on out there. So Matthew, I think I'm going to start with you. So we're talking about cloud realities, and I think hopefully we're really past some of those early definitional phases of cloud. I at least felt from last year to this year that the discussion was much more mature. I love the focus on the keynotes, talking about users, their applications, and not so much as blah, blah, blah cloud. So you've been doing some sessions here. I was wondering what you can share with the community about the reality of clouds and what you're seeing. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. One of the things that I did as a panel earlier on with some customers who've been moving to hybrid cloud and a vast range of different business cases. So what was interesting about this was really sheer variety. I had a guy, Chris Spence, who runs IT for the National Democratic Institute out of Washington, D.C. So if your country has been run by a dictator for the last 30 years, Chris and his guys are going to help you become democratic in 90 days or less. I mean, essentially what these guys are doing is you go into a country that's never had political parties before and they do all of the systems that do things like voter registration or you join a political party and you become a member of a party and things like monitoring elections for fairness and all of that stuff runs in the cloud. It's a fascinating example of the cloud use case. It actually runs better there because they, you know, they ran election monitoring in Burma and they got all kinds of denial of service attacks. So actually running it in the cloud is a better application for them than it is trying to run it anywhere else and especially trying to run it inside their own four walls. All right. So hey, Brian, if I can slide down to you. So I heard Paul Merritt say that infrastructure is boring, but when we look at cloud, you know, infrastructure obviously still matters and there are things that have to change a little bit in infrastructure to be able to build clouds. So maybe you can give us a little bit of your Cisco perspective on infrastructure for clouds and what that means today. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, Paul's been saying infrastructure is boring for a bunch of years. That's not necessarily new. I think, you know, for him, it's a much easier way to say, look, the applications have to scale. The applications are going to be written differently. So you can only wrap your head around so many things. But I think the reality is, and, you know, we saw the announcement, the joint announcement this week from Cisco and VMware and a number of others around how do you take the infrastructure and make it be able to scale and deal with movable applications. So, you know, from our perspective, we understand, you know, Paul's saying that we understand that it helps him, you know, wrap the idea that you're going to build applications differently. At the end of the day, the network A has to be there. B has to be really fast. But for us, in particular, what we've been working on has been, what do you start doing when the applications are really different? They don't stand still. They move around. You've got to move them in, you know, sub-microseconds. That's the things that we've been working on. And I think while it's plumbing, I mean, we've always said what we do is plumbing, you know, it's a different kind of plumbing. Without good plumbing, the house really stinks. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. So, you know, no discussion of cloud can be complete without a discussion of kind of management and orchestration. So, you know, Jay, I think we've been saying for years, you know, in general, when I look at most of the vendors out there, you know, management sucks. So, you know, you're probably, you know, from a CA perspective, where is the industry and how are we with management for a cloud environment? So, I think the interesting thing about cloud is it really brings management security right to the forefront. I mean, it is the thing that gets that to be a really central piece of what people have to think about. And a lot of the disciplines that people have been trying to get right for a number of years, now they really got to get them right. And I think there's definitely been a lot of maturity over the past year and a half that things have really gotten, taking a couple of big steps forward. You know, we started about 18 months ago acquiring a bunch of companies and doing a lot of internal development, focusing on the idea that you're going to have what you already run and you're going to have some cloud stuff and you're going to have a mix in there. And that's really the sort of thought process that we see. And I think a lot of customers are looking at that because it gives them a way of saying, I'm not tossing everything away. That's not going to happen. But I need to find a really good way to be able to look at this all together. And I think there's been a lot of successes over the past year. I mean, people basically have really gotten to a point where they've done the kicking of the tires. I think last year was a little bit about that and folks are actually starting to turn to the point where they can actually get real stuff done. Okay. Excellent. So Matthew, maybe if I can come down to you. I hear a big ecosystem partner message always at VMworld. I always think, I think I heard Carl say that it's over a $45, almost $50 billion ecosystem. So how has the ecosystem helping to build that cloud environment? I think we've got a nice selection of some of your partners up here. So maybe we can give a little color on that. Yeah. For most organizations, this is going to be evolution, not revolution. And so the partnership ecosystem is incredibly important piece of that. We've seen the examples of the extreme brand new cloudy applications, the sort of new paradigms of building applications. But reality for $50 billion worth of investment in the partner community is that I can't just throw that away. I've got to be able to take this and move it forward. And so the ecosystem is incredibly important for that because otherwise, it's not going to be the case that everybody rewrites their applications. They're going to have to take the application, evolve it, move it into the cloud to get the benefit of that business agility that they're all looking for. I mean, just a couple of statistics. We have 5,600 service provider partners now as part of that ecosystem. A lot of them are running on Cisco gear. Some of them are using CA management. That ecosystem has grown in terms of their bookings for their service, 174% in the last 12 months, right? That's in phenomenal growth. Last year it was 145, so it's accelerating. So that sort of gives you a sense of the velocity and the change particularly towards the hybrid cloud, the combination of what you do yourself inside your own four walls plus the service providers. Okay. So, Brian, you know, service providers, hot topic. Maybe you'd like to, you know, what have you been seeing kind of change and where are we with the service providers and their deployment of cloud environments? You know, I think the biggest challenge that when you look at service providers is trying to lump them all into one group, right? It's sort of like looking at all the countries in Europe and saying it's Europe and they're all the same, right? So, you know, there's obviously a number of service providers that are, you know, chasing Amazon, if you will, right? Trying to chase the super low cost, hopefully very simple type of cloud, although, you know, Amazon's obviously evolved. I think we see more and more service providers that are trying to, you know, do what they do which is differentiate, but they're doing things like Matthew talked about, right? You've got guys who are saying there are unique situations in emerging countries and maybe it's, you know, voting, maybe it's, you know, trying to help roll out a couple of mobile applications for, you know, a certain type of business that people are getting into. So we're seeing more and more of the service providers saying, I don't want to go chasing the bottom, I don't want to sort of chase to the bottom, right? I want to partner with some of the technology companies because you guys have customer bases that are commercial, that are government, that are others. Can you help me, you know, reach those people? And I think what they're doing is they're saying, look, how do I, how do I, their biggest challenge is how do I create something that people trust, right? Because every time there's a cloud outage, whoever, it doesn't matter who it is, that cloud brand gets tagged to some of them, right? So it's an opportunity for them to say, you know, we do things different than the cloud, whatever went down. But it's also a chance for them to go, I can go have a different conversation with my customer because they now have a different perceived risk. They have a different thing that they think is challenging. And that part has been really interesting. We've seen the conversation move from purely, I want to build cloud or infrastructure service to, I know how to do that. How do I now go after certain markets that I can be really successful at? Great. So, Jay, operationally, you know, CIOs have a lot of challenges with, you know, huge growth rates and, you know, flat head counts, you know, typically. And when I look at kind of my in-house environment and expanding to a hybrid cloud, you know, how are customers really managing that environment and helping their workforce, you know, the IT professionals to take, you know, manage those environments today? Well, I think part of it is they do start to rely a lot on the service providers that you guys are both talking about. And I think that set of skills is a different set of skills. And it's much more about vendor management than it is, I've got to go connect this wire to that wire. And so the IT guys themselves are having to make a big shift from I'm the guy doing the pieces to the I'm the guy orchestrating the pieces. And I think it's a hard one, but it's an important one to do because it's going to be the only way they're going to be able to get ahead of this. And I think what people are finding is that if you don't get ahead of it, then your users are going to take the opportunity to go do what they want to do anyway. And you definitely don't want that, right? So, rapid-fire final question. Matthew, I'll start with you down at the end. Customers that are looking at cloud today, what's one thing that they should check out that they might not be aware of? I think you should check out one thing. Figure out how much it's actually going to cost to get your application into the cloud. So take a look, make sure you are getting what you think you get when you get into the cloud. What are the cost, the switching costs of doing that? Take a close look. I think that's really important to do. Brian, white space in the marketplace? White space in the marketplace. I think there's a huge opportunity for companies that can either operationally help people figure out how to start to blur or bring together the operational teams that have been siloed or come in and help people do that. The biggest thing that we see is people who go, I see where I'd like to get. I don't exactly know how to get there. And some of it's technology and some of it's sort of operational. So there's a huge opportunity for people to come in and help do that. Jay, I'm going to give you the final word. Know what you want out of your business and apply that using cloud. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining your perspectives. All three of you I know are prolific out there in the webosphere, blogosphere, and everything. So I recommend that people check out Matthew Lodge from VMware, Brian Gracely from Cisco, and Jay Fry from CA. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us here in theCUBE. Thanks, Stu. Thanks a lot, Stu.