 We are here inside theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's flagship event. We go out to the events and start to signal from the noise. I'm here with Leslie Miller, who's the dynamic ops founder you sold to VMware. And I got your card here from VMware. And the title, I just want to read, because you know I'm always curious on acquisitions, how they bestow title on people. CTO and Chief Architect, Cloud Automation and Management at VMware. It's pretty long, right? Congratulations. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Dave Vellante, my co-host. Dave, so Dave, we talked to Steve Herrod this morning about where dynamic ops fits. So Leslie, he was saying it sits on top of vCloud because of the abstraction of the complexity you guys do and the ability to go to devices. So can you share with us, is that right? Did he get that right? And what's your view? No, he got that right. The reason VMware brought us in is really to, they want to keep focusing on providing that virtual data center, that piece of fabric that they then want to deliver to the business. The job that we provide or the value we provide is saying, is connecting the end user or the business person and bringing them to the right piece of fabric. So you might have a couple of pods. You might have a vSphere space and you might have an external provider making the decision whether you want to bring a end user who might be a medical researcher onto the right piece of fabric. You might not want them to go to EC2 because of sensitive data, et cetera. So that policy decision to place them in the right place, that's where dynamic ops will fit in on top of the VMware stack. So for the folks out there that are kind of not in the know around your company, dynamic ops and the relationship with VMware, they bought the company that you founded. Explained to them really the premise of dynamic ops and kind of where it all came from. I think they talked about in the keynote. Just quick history for the folks up there. Quick history. The company was founded in 2008. We, I started this product in 2005 within the credit Swiss IT department. My mission was to create technology to enable the data center of the future. And that was really dynamic ops vision. It was to make or enable the data center of the future and be the nervous system of the future data center. 2008, we started with 3 million bucks and three people. And here we are in 2012. We were 120 people doing very well and very happy to be part of the VMware family. And a big lowering part of the value proposition is the ability to manage multi-hypervisor environments. That's correct. I mean, that's what I always caught my attention, but am I overstating that? And that's clearly a big deal, right? So when I got my mission in credit Swiss to go build this product from the CIO, what I had to deal with was multiple divisions in the company, you know, private banking, asset management, investment banking. They were all different IT departments, different platforms, different everything. And so to build something and encourage people to come and play on this one piece of fabric, you had to be heterogeneous. You had to be able to deal with different hypervisors, different operating systems, different provisioning processes, different methodology, different everything. And so the key thing about future of cloud computing self-service is that personalization, knowing who you are, knowing what process to follow for you versus someone else, understanding that the life cycle behind what you need is very different than the guy sitting next to you. So no longer a cookie cutter approach, no longer saying, here's a production line producing black model T-forwards, and you know, you can have any curler except black. No, we'll give you infinite choices and we'll produce them in real time, but put them on the right piece of fabric for you with the right SLA, the right policy management behind that. So the priority now is to integrate into V-Center to make that the central point of control, is that right? That's correct. First mission for the end of this year, Q4, would to be have integration with V-Sphere and the V-Cloud APIs, which is what we're doing. We'll have that ready by probably mid-November and that will be announced later in Barcelona, the details around that. And then very rapidly by mid next year, integrate with all the other products, such as app director and some of the monitoring tools, et cetera, but not losing the heterogeneity. So we'll still talk to Microsoft, we'll still talk to EC2s and other platforms. Just to be clear, that's a commitment that VMware is making. They are absolutely committed to that. I mean, oftentimes you find heterogeneous led products brought into companies and all of a sudden they become subsumed into the homogeneity. It's sort of this perpetual lock-in approach, but you're reaffirming VMware's commitment to that. That actually speaks to John's comment about my title, which is, I am the CTO of Cloud Management. And so therefore, I keep my team in Burlington, I keep my engineering group. They will of course integrate with VMware engineering to some degree, but we will keep those elements of Microsoft, Zen, and other cloud providers. We'll keep that and we'll keep that going. Yeah, that vision of taking 60% virtualized to 90% virtualized. I guess that could happen without heterogeneity, but the value of doing that in stovepipes is not going to be as great. The truth is that Future Data Center is 100% virtualized. I might be short for saying it's not maybe all VMware. It might be, we hope it is, but it might be other providers. It almost definitely won't be. Of course not, right? So let's be honest. So the truth is, and there's bare metal. There are still people who want to go direct bare metal. And one of our value propositions is that we enabled you to provide bare metal as like it is a virtual machine. Our ability to provision onto that bare metal and make it seem like it is a virtual machine was absolutely key as part of the acquisition as well. So what again, going back to that personalization, the four, if you don't mind me, going down this road, the four attributes of that Future Data Center is virtualized, everything. I'm not just talking about an operating system. I'm talking about the network, the storage, the apps, everything. And we're starting to see that. We're seeing it with the acquisitions that are happening. The network space is extremely hot around virtual networks and so is storage going to come online. And that virtualization is extremely important. The second thing is automation. You absolutely want everything to be automated as much as possible, because it's that time to market. You want to push a button and have it now. This is the consumer behavior, right? We want something now. You don't want to wait for it. Look, you buy a book from Amazon. What happens? You pay the extra five bucks to have it delivered the next day, right? You don't want to wait the three days. Exactly, it's instant. So that instant consumer behavior is starting to represent itself in the data center. That's what we're enabling. The third thing of that, of course, is the deconstruction or dematerialization of the data center. What do I mean by that? It's the, here, do you still rent DVDs from a shop? No, right? You stream them online. You mention Kindle. You buy virtual books. So we're no longer bricks and mortars containing our bits and bytes and protecting them. It's deconstructed, right? You have Zipcar. I mean, you see Zipcar everywhere. People don't own a car. They deconstruct their car and rent one when they need it. So that is part of the future data center. And what's number four? Number four is personalization. Consumerization, personalization. You want an individual service, right? Why do you use online streaming with your TV company or your DVRs? Because you can personalize your viewing. You can control when you want to watch that program and when you, and what program you watch. This is the same thing. Personalization is the key. Virtualize everything, automate, deconstruct, instant gratification and personalization. Exactly. Fantastic. Leslie, take me through the vision for the data center operating system. As we called it back in 2007, we were doing some, 2008 when I first started talking to folks like HP. HP Labs had some cool stuff. It's a bigger vision, this operating system, I mean data center of the future because there's the inside of the data center and then the services that go out to the edge which you guys are working on. How deep do you go down into the data center relative to some of the innovation that you guys have done? For example, there's all kinds of big data analytics going on at the probe level, system component level, power and cooling. Just take us through your vision of how you see the data center in the future up and down the stack with new disruptive approaches. That's a big question. So. Put you other spot there. You really put me in the spot. The truth is, we are abstracting from the hardware with hypervisors, we're keep going up that level and essentially this is what VMware's doing with vCloud director, vSphere becoming one product over the next 18 months. It becomes a black box. You don't think about it. You don't care what goes inside of that. So a lot of the analytics that some people talk about today, that's all inside that box and you will have other providers doing exactly the same thing. Microsoft's doing the same thing. EC2 is self managing the little bit of space you buy from them as you're all these guys. So that's the first thing we have to kind of get above that one level. No longer do you have operators messing with the individual bits and bytes and tweaking the CPU. It's not interesting anymore, right? These things are powerful enough to self manage them. Now you go one layer up. Now you start talking about applications. Well the question is that application has an SLA to the end user I mentioned. So those SLAs are something we still have to solve. I don't believe there's a good language here to describe the SLA as you as a human with the application. I'm not talking about is my CPU running at 90% and memory does that. It's giving you the service that you actually want. The user experience. The user experience. The preferred user experience. Exactly. Okay so on that thread, let's stay there. So there's obviously two approaches. Port apps to the new environment or rewrite apps, right? Obviously rewrite apps is the preferred way because then you could unbloat them, make them skinny and thin or whatever based upon the devices and what not. Harder to do. Which is what the preferred way is in my opinion. Versus the port which might not be multi purposeful if it's mobile for example. So what's your perspective on that? I mean everyone's moving to mobile from website based stuff to mobile and social and cloud. So the apps got to move. The apps have got to move. Apps will be rewritten over time. The truth is. It's a rewrite. You're of the campus of rewrite. Well I am. I believe that when you rewrite these applications, SAS applications on these new platform, on these past platforms, you then can build an application that can happily run on a highly scalable, highly distributed environment. But I come from the enterprise, right? You have a catalog of 10,000 apps. You're not going to rewrite 10,000 apps. You're going to write the top 100 apps that could use 90% of the time because those are the ones you're going to rewrite. So what do you do with the other 9,000 apps? Well you go put them in legacy containers, the old virtual machine with the right connections. The key here is then enabling that container that's running that legacy app. You don't have to rewrite it. You don't have to re-architect it. You hold it in there, but you make the container mobile. You make that container being able to move. It's just a compatibility box basically mode. So in a way, don't kill yourself to rewrite the apps that may not need to be rewritten. That's really more of a management question. Well so you're going to have that legacy applications that live inside a traditional VM and is connected to the fabric. What you're seeing VMware and Microsoft and everybody else is doing is making those containers mobile so that I can run two of them in redundancy. I can do stuff. So when the app can't be redundant, make the environment redundant around it at very low cost. And if I need to move the app from London to New York, I can enable that. Okay so share with the audience out there the most disruptive thing that you guys are delivering with this new era. We're calling it the modern era of computing, the modern era of Hadoop, the modern era of the data center. Whatever you want to fill in the blank, the modern era of blank. It's the new way, not the old way. So you guys are on the cutting edge of some really serious work at the top of the stack and to the end user. What is the key thing that you would want to let people walk away with about what's really happening in that part of the market? Technically and in the business side. I'm actually not going to answer that technically. What I will say from a business point of view, to me the most disruptive is, we're moving from what I traditionally have seen, I relate IT today as a communist state. It is communism all over, right? There's a central management team. There's only one of everything. Everything's gray, everything's, there's one choice, end of story. That gets tweeted out. That's a tweet. We're moving to a market economy. We're enabling those market forces. That is the disruption. And when you move to a market economy that's driven by a market, consumerization and personalization is the number one thing that you want to deliver. So we were talking about social media and we were showing you our vFinder tool that we were previewing here. So first, what do you think about it? I think it's awesome. It's fantastic. And this is the kind of the data driven, data led kind of model we're going to. So like you mentioned, market driven. How do you see the role of data in things like social media and comments on the social media influencer versus your perspective there? Because that's a crowdsourcing, self-governing, self-healing or self-destructive. It's a market. It is actually a market. It behaves like an economic market. Let's face it, right? And that's what a self-governing system is. And what you're doing is enabling that. So you're giving metrics into that. I think the important thing of what you've done and what I love about this is you have key people, key influencers that aren't always up there waving their hands who are quietly just getting on with it. How do you define those people? How do you find those nuggets and the connections that they make? And I believe you've been able to do that. And the second thing is you're enabling that personalization of the marketing and targeting the knowledge as a personal thing to somebody specific rather than carpet bombing the entire market in one go. Great. What do you think about the another trend that I want to get your thoughts on? Because again, mobile is a really low latency driven situation and what needs to change in your mind if you get the point and kind of poke the stick at some areas that need quick improvement or whip people into shape with a carrot or a stick. What areas would you say, let's get these areas fixed quicker? In mobile space, it is still connectivity and data. It has to be just everywhere. You need to be able to connect everywhere. There has to be no constraints on the data pipes that you have. And of course, lessons should be also learned as to what happens in Africa, South America, China. I mean, these markets are mobile but they're still operating on SMS. And we're sort of creating this very disconnected world. I think very importantly, we have to build up the infrastructure. The apps are there, the imaginations there. What we can imagine, we can build it today. If the data is not there and you can't move these things around, that's the problem. Leslie, great content, great to have you on theCUBE. You're fantastic. I got to ask you one last question because we had Martin on, talking about network virtualization and I'll see the software defined data center which is the path that he's going down for the entire company. But we also had before that a security panel. So you worked at Credit Suisse, obviously no stranger to security issues. Obviously under siege all the time being the kind of size and kind of company you are. And to now in a world where these new environments, new experience, the modern era that's being reconstructed and architected, what's your view on security? Where do we need to be improving? Is it more of a philosophical issue? Is there technical issues? Virtualization play a role, stateless applications? What's your perspective? I'm actually going to say that security is obviously bits and bytes and encryption and protection of data. These are just table stakes. I mean, we all understand that. Security is about reputation or risk. It's about the reputation of your business. You're not going to do well if people don't trust you. So enabling that and securing that is important. And this is very important in cloud because when you are operating a system, you want to know that the data is in the right legal region, that you're not breaking some law, LCD compliance, et cetera. So that placement engine of where I'm going to place your workload, because I'm providing a personalized service, why I better put it on the right place that I don't accidentally trip over a government regulation. That is also security, protecting that data, putting it in the right place, et cetera. So security is not just bits and bytes. It is about the reputation and how people perceive you and what they come to exactly. Holistic view, Leslie, great to have you on a walk on from Dynamic Ops, acquisition of VMware, last minute guest on theCUBE, CTO, he's got a lot of technical chops, he's an expert in the field and he's now at VMware leading and charging chief architect. Good luck with that and user computing's rage is going to expand. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with a wrap up of VMworld day three right after this short break. Thank you.