 It's theCUBE. Here is your host, John Furrier. Hi, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with David Floyer, CTO of Wikibon, also CUBE host as co-host as well. We are here live on the ground at VMware's event. And David, we heard VMware roll out one of their big announcements. All the press corps was here, top analysts. Pat Gelsinger brought two customers, Jeffrey Moore, Quinton from the New York Times, big writer. They rolled it out, they're pumping out heavy. Big announcement, very foundational, very geeky. So it's not a lot of pumping circumstance other than bringing the core people together. Big vSphere six announcement, got a lot of NSX, V-Vol's in there, vSAN, vCloud Air, all this is going on. Break it down for us. What the hell's going on with VMware? Is this a land grab for the software defined data center? What's your analysis? Well, I thought the initial discussions that they had today on what disruption was were very interesting. If you can make, if you can release resources, that's a good thing. And that's what VMware did at the beginning. They took cycles and made them available to other people. And they're trying to do the same thing with NSX, with networks, and they're trying to do the same thing with networks, with the storage as well. So it's a very ambitious objective they have, and it's a very worthwhile objective. Are they going to succeed? This is a very, very ambitious program that they've got. Are they going to succeed? Well, the question is, if are the benefits that people are going to get from this better utilization worth the increasing cost of all these layers of software which are coming in? That to me is the key question. The question is how they consume that, and that's going to be interesting, because there's a lot of variety of different EMC. You've got a little bit of this, now you've got VMware. So all that's kind of coming together. How do you make sense of that? Absolutely. Well, let's go down some of the things, for example. I mean, some of the things, they're well ahead and really doing very well. So NSX itself is really good technology, and providing that across a private cloud, a public cloud, and a hybrid cloud is good news. There are many, many people who will want to do that. Long term, the question is though, is that the right place, or do you want to be able to keep your NSX or your virtual cloud or virtual communication separate from the other things and have that going across a broader range of things? I'm not sure whether you will want to tie it in to vSphere as your only foundation. You might want to put it on your open stack as well. So there's some interesting extensions I think they'll need to make to NSX. Looking at some of the other things, good announcements on vSAN, good announcements on vVols, but to be honest, they should have been two or three years ahead of where they are now. I mean, they're really... They're late to the game. They're late to the game. I'm sure they'll do a good job, but they were definitely held back by EMC and they put more resources into making the old stuff work. Why were they held back by EMC? More of a legacy, Federation, Command? Yeah, the emphasis being on getting the old V-Maxes and everything else to work with it. Instead of going full head and saying, again, how can we disrupt this? How can we add value? So that was a boat anchor for them, kind of dragging them along? Yes, yeah, but now it's out and I think it's going to be flying well with vSAN and vVols is still a long way off, but those are simplifications. Those are ways that people really will be able to make a difference. And what are the other things then? There's open stack. Distribution of an open stack. That's interesting, isn't it? What's that old Microsoftic saying? Embrace and extend. I mean, do you feel a little bit of that? You're going to embrace and extend open stack? Open stack is a thin layer, isn't it? You know, it's cheap and thin. And... Why not support it? Well, support it. But they're supporting it by putting this huge, great heavy layer of all the things on top of it. I'm sure there'll be CIOs there who want to say, I'm supporting open stack and do it nicely through VMware. I'm not sure whether the people who are going to open stack will want to put that amount of software on top of it. It's like when I go to Boston with Dave, that people always want their lobs just cut up for him. They don't want to take the meat out of themselves. That's kind of what that is. This is like, here's an open stack. You can just do whatever you want with it. Exactly, yes. I mean, open stack's a heavy lift. I mean, it's a hard... Oh, no, no. It solves the short-term problem. Which is easy to use. Here's some open stack. Bang, done. Here you've done it. The trade-off is bloated software potential. Exactly, yes. I mean, you're going to have to put a lot of software on top of that to... That's going to be their challenge. How can they innovate on that? Do they make it more modular? Or how can they reduce it? Make it, as you say, more modular. A thinner layer on top to reduce the cost. Make VMware simpler in itself. And I think the last thing, I think, there were some really some... A whole lot of very good individual announcements at a detailed level. One of the ones they spent a lot of time talking about was remote... Vemotion. Vemotion. Which is... Sounds fantastic. That's the Holy Grail. Holy Grail. But, you know, the speed of light still exists. So what they didn't say was, what are the limits of that? You know, how big can you... Can you do a large terabyte system and take that several thousand miles? I don't think the answer to that is yes. So they didn't put some constraints on when and how that might be used. Well, we talked to some Oracle customers that are using Infiniband, they're using some other things to move datasets and replication across them in real time. Sure. They're talking about across the globe, right? Yeah, well, it only becomes of interest if you're talking longer distance. Now, sure, there's a lot of use of that technology actually within the data center itself. And that will be really, really good. So it's not saying it's bad technology, but the idea that you can do it over thousands of miles. So I got to ask you the question because you're technical. We were at the Google event, Google Compute Platform Summit, whatever they had. Great event. And we were reading the tea leaves and Google has their own peering network. They have a lot of dark fiber. Pat Gelsinger and Bill Fathers are saying the networks the holy grail. What can they do to get out of this Netflix problem? That's what I call the Netflix problem. People on their couch can realize what happens in Netflix. Service providers got to traverse the packets across multiple networks that's paying the butt. So why not just own your own network? So that's interesting. Do you think that they will have an opportunity, VMware, to own their own network either with partnering with service providers like Google and others? Is it possible? I think they will go down a slightly different route for that. The key is getting things close together that matter if you want to share the data. So if you have a mega data center with VMware or VCloud Air or Amazon in it, and you can put your key application outsource your key applications to or co-locate those key applications to the same place, now the world becomes a whole lot simpler because you can go locally at whatever speed you want and it becomes real. So I think it's going to be increasing by industry mega data centers which are where people are going to put their co-location and their VCloud Air and other VCloud services relevant to that. So good announcement for you, you feel good about this? Oh yeah, it's a tremendous lot of individually good things. The only area that I'm in slightest bit, I mean it's very ambitious as well, but there's a lot of eyes and tees to cross to get to that. Getting the details. Getting the details. All right, so I got to ask you the fundamental question for the ecosystem which is a big part of their world. VMware ecosystem, they have their partner exchange going on here this week in San Francisco. What does VMware need to bring to their ecosystem? And what is that ecosystem evolving into? I mean you've got service providers now enterprises they got locked and loaded in there, clearly a good install base. But what's their ecosystem look like and what do they need to get delivered to them from VMware? Well, I think they've got that. True question. Absolutely, that's a long question. You're the burning bush right now. Come on, deliver it. And if Pat needed the answer to that, he would have told you already, wouldn't he? He kind of didn't answer the question. No, well, I think the network. He said the network. The network, well, the network needs to be solved. And I believe that the way to solve the network is to reduce the impact of the network as much as possible. He's absolutely right. He's got to focus on doing that and getting vCloud air into it. But I think overall, you're looking at an environment which is going to go increasingly towards the cloud. The cloud is not going to be sustained, that level of software, and that cost of software. You're talking about the bloated layers of software. The bloated model cannot survive cloud, that's what you're saying. So they have got to come out with a way that's going to help service providers put in the vSphere, the goodness of vSphere, in a much reduced layers of complexity and at much lower costs. And if they solve that problem, then they're in there for the long haul. That's what Quentin Hardy was trying to tease out on the panel around disruption versus legacy, or he didn't necessarily wear the legacy, status quo, they're old. Exactly. They have a big install base. Yeah, exactly. And they should service it. They have to. It's really going to build them up. Okay, this is theCUBE. John Furrier, David Fleurier on the ground in San Francisco covering VMware's biggest release in their history for vSphere. As Pat Gilkin said, VMware's on the march, great earnings, great sales kickoff. Things are pumping, they're all cylinders pumping. More importantly, they got competition. The competition is out there. David, final word to you. The heat in the kitchen right now for VMware. Is it hot and who's around them? It's hot. But the people around them are people like Microsoft with Azure, people like Google, a bit slower coming up, and a myriad of service providers and software as a service providers who need the lowest cost, cheapest infrastructure to be delivered. And that's where in the long run, they have to survive. I say no cost structures, not low cost structures is the answer. If they can get to that, marginal cost would be zero. This is theCUBE. Keep watching. You're going to see us at VMware. Obviously we'll be there again this year. Obviously we're going to go on the ground at the partner exchange. Keep watching SiliconANGLE.TV and of course theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, David Fleurier, signing off here in San Francisco at VMware's launch. Thanks for watching.