 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE. I'm your host, Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined for this special segment, calling it the independent wrap analysis, multi-hybrid focus with BlueCow. BlueCow is here, first time guest on the program, and BlueCow's brought a few of the friends. Friends of mine, people that I got to know through this phenomenal VMware community, also guest hosts on the program here. Been a pleasure working with all three of you. John Troyer from Tech Reckoning, Justin Warren from Pivot9, and Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming here. Now, we're independent when we come to this, and I don't think any of us are shy as to kind of sharing our opinions. I think all of us have said, I can't believe what you said on Twitter at least once. I remember when John Troyer was working for VMware, I did get a call every once in a while. I said, if I didn't get a call at least once a year from him saying, hey, Stu, can you moderate that a little? I'm probably not doing my job. So let's get into it. The first thing I'd say, it's 2017. We blinked and we're getting towards the end of it. Of course, there's the big party. There's still a whole bunch of sessions going for another day, but let's reactions on the show, high level things. Keith, let's start down with you. So first off, the energy of the show this year was, I have to say it was up a notch. There was a lot of uncertainty around the acquisition and even past future whether or not he would be here for the VMworld this year as the head of VMware. He announced, I think it was kind of like with a little bit of pride that he said, this is my fifth year as CEO of VMware, and he bought the energy Monday, and I think that energy has, I think transferred throughout all of the VMware staff and throughout the show for the past few days. All right, Justin, and then that question, of course, and how many selfies has Blue Cow done at the show? Not as many as usual, unfortunately, because we've been very, very busy with briefings and meetings. So we haven't had as much selfie time as we have, but we still make time to take a few photos around the show. And yeah, I agree with Keith, the energy this year, and I think it has started with the example that Pat set at the first keynote, which it's just been lifted this year. And I've been saying, I've been hearing it from a lot of different people and I've been having it in conversations as well, that this year VMware stopped apologizing for existing and it's embraced itself, and I'm sure that having the stock price hit a nice high of 107, I'm sure that helped with Pat and his idea of it makes you happy, makes it a lot easier to keep your job. Yeah, that's great. There was a comment actually, the first time most of us remember the week of VMworld, the stock actually was going up. So, John, you've got lots of experience with this community, your take. Certainly, more energy than last year. I mean, let's look at the micro and the macro. There's always tactical stuff going on. Last year, vSphere 6.5 had not been released, Dell acquisition, and nobody was sure what was going on exactly. This year, the big VMware cloud on AWS announcement, I think, is an acknowledgement maybe, we'll talk about that, wait a minute, once you get down to the nitty gritty plumbing infrastructure layer, you still need to partner with somebody like VMware. I think the industry and the analysts and the market, that's one of the things they like. And then look at the macro trends on the economy. If you look at the Expo floor this year, huge. Lots of money being spent, lots of vendors here. There's something macro going on as well with the people here. Yeah, let's talk about, you know, two things I look at, like, did VMware meet expectations? Was it what you expect? And what are we going to be looking back at when we come here? John, I'll start with you, you hit on the big topic we were, you know, from my standpoint, looking at VMware and AWS, you know, what will VMware look like in the future? They're going to be a SaaS provider? I mean, how does that transition from, you know, a infrastructure software company to, you know, different fit for how they do cloud today versus, you know, the whole vCloud error and everything before it. That was era, not error, even though, yeah. The vCloud era. Hey, they had a lot to do of messaging and a lot of product announcements and a lot of introductions this week. I don't know, let's give them a B for that because there were a lot of them and they had a lot to do in a short space, especially like through the lens of, say, the keynotes, which is what the lens of a lot of people have. You know, they, I think AWS VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story. I don't know, I predict that in a year or two, VMware will probably be the biggest VMware hoster on, yeah, a service provider, right? There's a lot of, I think a lot of workloads are going to shift over into the AWS service through VMware and that'll happen through excess capacity, it'll happen through a lot of different things. But I, that's my prediction. I'm sorry, you say VMware will. VMware will be the largest VMware hoster within a year or two. All right, I feel like I'm watching the NFL Network. Bold predictions, here we have it. VMware's got 4,500 partners, John. I have Ajay Patel on a couple of times talking about his, you know, his tears of partners and everything like that. But let's let some of the guys, you know, weigh in. Yeah, I'll extend on that. I kind of agree. I think that there's a lot of customers who will just do a, basically a lift and shift and use Cloud and I think having to choose between which of their children is the most beautiful and which one they love more has been really tearing them apart and I think that, I don't know, they don't have to make that choice. I think they're going to be a lot easier for particularly CIOs to just say, yep, I am doing some Cloud. The announcement on Tuesday, I think, sort of fell a little flat for me because they were talking about Google Container Services, which is running on Pivotal. Now Pivotal is sort of an underappreciated part of the whole portfolio, I think. There's a lot of companies doing some really interesting software development work there. But as we mentioned, the developer community, that's not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people. So that kind of whole announcement and what they were talking about on day two just kind of went, fell a little bit off for me. Yeah, I want to echo, I think a couple of statements that you've made. One, that VMware seemed to embrace, Monday, they seemed to embrace being VMware. You know what, we may pick on the concept of VMware vSphere being Cloud. That, you know, and VMware is very proud of calling their SDDC strategy, which is an important strategy and adds a lot of value to not just legacy IT, but current things that people are doing in their data center. And they embraced being what they do well on Monday. And then we had cloud pieces on Tuesday, which kind of broke that. But I think, I think I love the message for VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, this concept, this reference architecture, this validated design that I can run in my data center. I know that at a rack space, at a CNF, such as, take your switch, take your choice between switch and century link, et cetera, that I'm going to get that consistent open stack, what should have been open stack filling across cloud providers. But John, I agree with you, AWS is AWS at the end of the day. And it's a easy checkbox to say, VMware cloud on AWS, really easy to do and it's easy to consume. I don't have to go and choose between cloud providers. All right, one of the things that this show is, there's never enough hours in the day, even Vegas. I actually have to admit, I got to bed at a reasonable hour every night. We still have one more night for me here, so we'll see on that. Hallway conversations, parties, some of the really cool stuff to the show floor where we talked about a little. I'll start off with kind of from a customer standpoint. Some customers I talk to, a number of them, seem to be, I want to move faster, I'm interested in trying new things and price isn't necessarily number one on my list. It's further down the list, which reminds me, it's not quite there yet, but I go to Amazon re-invent and this will be the fifth year we're doing theCUBE at that show. That's the thing that really excites me when there's cool new things we're trying. I echo and agree with a lot of what you all said about day two, most of the customers here aren't ready for PKS. Sure, Pivotal has lots of customers that are using VMware, but the average attendee's not there, so kind of a wild card, customer insights, cool parties, things there. John, we want to start down your end. Sure, my channel check, and the most surprising thing that I saw this week were talking to SEs from VMware and saying that their customers were coming to them and asking help, I now have Kubernetes in the house, what do I do with it? And so that surprised me. I have been a Kubernetes and container advocate, but a skeptic as far as adoption, and at least anecdotally, the folks that I talk to, it sounds like actually it's now trickling its way and kind of to the mainstream to where the VMware accounts are going to be able to have to deal with it. Now I will say on the flip side, Stu, if you look out at the show floor, there are no developer tools, DevOps tools, cloud tools, maybe some cloud tools. That AWS side of the house, the people that are there, those companies that are there were not here, so if you were a customer, if you were an IT person, looking to this year finally to educate yourself on how to do that, that wasn't here at this show. For me, it's been about migration. This is about we have a whole bunch of stuff which is running on VMware, it's already there, and that was one of the reasons VMware was popular in the first place, was that you could take stuff that you're already doing and you could virtualize it and then you could increase the capacity utilization that you have and you could get some more efficiencies out of that. And then people started to layer additional services on top of that and to do interesting and new things on that. It allowed them to do that because they kind of freed up some time. I think we're going to see that again as things start to move to the cloud and people start to do them in different ways. The workloads will migrate, it's not just going to happen tomorrow. And some of the things that we've seen, one of the things that impressed me about the show was a company called Densify who had been around previously, they were called Serba and they did a complete rebrand and reposition and nailed it. And it's a very, very simple tool that actually sells about the business. It's not about the technology, they don't actually talk about how the thing works or what's going on underneath it, but it allows you to understand the effect of what's happening if you move from VMware here over to that cloud, this cloud or the other cloud and it shows you the pricing. You can, I looked at that and it's when I could walk into a CFO and I can sell them on the idea, just showing them this. I know that kind of experience, I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as people move to the cloud. So, Monday gave me a new catchphrase for VMware. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. And you know what, with hallway conversations, I still talk to, John, I don't remember, it's like one third of the attendees of VMware at all, first-time attendees, so I talked to a lot of first-time attendees and it's amazing because VMware has an enormous sales team and they're very aggressive getting into accounts and talking about the overall message. I had people coming up to me and saying, man, you know what, I just found out about this, we realized log insight and it's amazing. And I'm thinking, wow, it doesn't get much more traditional IT than log management and VMware has preached that for the past five, six years at the show. So, I think it just shows the delta in the community from those looking to do the developer and DevOps and cloud-native integration, us as analysts pushing VMware saying, hey, what's your digital transformation story? It's something other than cloud PISA to all the way to the, you know, keeping the lights on with SAP and Oracle apps that will not change and haven't changed and probably won't change for the next 10, 15 years. Yeah. Yeah, and actually it brings up an interesting point, I had a conversation with Pumalo this morning and we were talking about how it used to be, come to the show and it's the virtualization show. Now it's a pretty broad ecosystem and in some ways, it's, you know, I wouldn't say fragmented, but I'm grasping for a better word because you walk through the show floor and, you know, densify. Interesting, we had one of their co-founders on as to, you know, that kind of, you know, that cloud management, how all those pieces, you know, these big hairy issues that people are solving. You know, we've got people looking at analytics and data, you've got, you know, all the cloud pieces, security all over the place, networking, we've always had storage at this show. But I've been a little jaded coming to VMworld. It's now my eighth year. I've kind of re-energized it this year. I know some people have stopped coming. There's new influx that coming in. Let's, you know, fast forward to VMworld 2018. What are you hoping to see from this ecosystem? Any final things you'd want to say, you know, hey, this is what we can do better or this thing, do it absolutely again, especially we've got one more year in Vegas then I think we'll probably go back to San Francisco. So, you know, you've all been to many of these, you know, where do we start? Can I, I'll take two. One is I'd like to see more basketball players and wrappers, you know, we had a lot of- Did you hang with KD? I did not. I was busy. He called, his people called my people. And that's, I don't know if you want to, if you want to tee that one up, what that one is. You can mention that, absolutely. Sure, I mean, Rubrik was here but winner of the best of show of the VMworld. Also spent a lot of marketing dollars on Kevin Durant who was also an investor and also handsome- Did they make cards? You know, it's like, look, I'm on a trading card. How hilarious is that? Trading cards were cool. I have one. Yeah, absolutely. They came to play, man, and they brought it this year. So, marketing dollars spent. I actually have a second prediction which is that next year or the year after we'll be talking about, it seemed like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other. So, I think next year we might be talking about the Dell technologies, Red Hat wars in the cloud. Oh, open source comes up. It hadn't been discussed much except we did some Red Hat interviews here, Red Hat, absolutely hybrid cloud environment, Microsoft, VMware, in Red Hat, all players there. So, yeah, John's been thinking about this rap for a while, I know. Yeah. Well, I'm going to switch completely differently and look into the future of what I'd like to see. Just to shake it up a little bit. I don't think that we should be talking about AWS type things around containers. I think there'll be some of that conversation. But what I want to see is the VMware start hosting a function service. I want to see functions on VMware because I reckon that's where the industry is going to move to in the long term. Serverless, you're saying? Yeah, serverless. It got mentioned on day two? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to see a functions as a service on VMware on AWS. Oh, that'll happen. That's what you can go through. Well, you can already, you can tie it in the Lambda right now, right? You'll have your... Yeah, but if you tie it in the Lambda, that just plays right in AWS's hands. Give Chris Wolfe a call, and you know, amp kid Comer will make that happen. So, you know what? Full disclosure, I was part of the judging for best of VMworld, and Rubrik won best of VMworld. I don't want to see more data protection. I don't want to see more secondary storage. I think one of the driving elements that part of that discussion, pulling back the onion a little bit was about redefining something in the data center that had been forgotten. That API level access, you know, Rubrik pushes API level access to the data center. This is something that I've asked from VMware forever, which is to basically be the API to my data center. You may not ever, I may never get function as a service. I may never get past. I may never get all these cool things from a developer perspective that I want from VMware. But at the very minimum, you're the software defined data center. I want to have APIs into the data center. And that data center is not just my physical data center, but this whole VCF thing that's pushed, whether it's in my data center, in Rackspace or some other VCAM partner in AWS. My interface from a infrastructure, if infrastructure is going to continue to be VMware's customer, then you should enable me from a API perspective to manage my software defined data center, believe it or not. Yep. All right. Unfortunately, you know, I love to chat with these gentlemen for hours at a time if I can. We're limited with theCUBE. We only give you a taste of what's happening at these shows. If I mentioned before, you need to come to these kind of events to talk to these quality people. We also mentioned a few of the sponsors on the show. Sponsorship helps us bring not only theCUBE to the event, but helps me bring high quality independent analysis from gentlemen like this. So please check out all of our sponsors. Check out all of our content on theCUBE.net. These, all three of them, creating a lot of content. Go to their Twitter handle, CTO advisor, JP Warren and Jay Troyer. I'm at Stu. So thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of VMworld 20. So reach out to all of us. We really will get back to you. Love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for, thank you so much for watching theCUBE.