 Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is Silicon Angles continuous coverage at theCUBE of VMworld 2011. I'm here with Stu Miniman also of Wikibon. Welcome Stu. Thanks for having me back again. So theCUBE is where we take knowledge, we extract knowledge from guests, we present it to an audience. We're covering all the angles at VMworld and one of the things we're doing this year, Stu, as you know, is we have in-depth spotlights. And we are doing a spotlight right now on VMware integration. This is sponsored by EMC and we're going to go deep into the whole notion of integration. Integration particularly at the storage layers are very important, isn't it? Absolutely, Dave. And why is that? Yeah, so integration is really important. So when we look at, as we've talked in some of the other segments, server virtualization helped utilization of server resources but it had this effect of breaking some of the other pieces of the stack. So storage was broken. So there's been a large effort by vendors to work with VMware to make integration points. And VMware has APIs and it has projects and vendors have also created their own coatings to be able to integrate with technology. And one of the things we're excited about here is, Wikibon did a lot of research and also leveraged the community a lot to hear about what's really important and what's being used out there. And that's what we're going to talk about for some of this spotlight. All right, so let's break it down. Some of the big trends that we're watching here at SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, virtualization environments, they're growing like crazy. They are the growth engine of storage. You have a nearly $50 billion ecosystem. We heard today that for every dollar spent on VMware licenses, it's now $17, according to Rick Jackson. Excellent. So it's up $2 from last year. It's up $2 from last year, so it's growing. Not only is the community growing, the pace of pass along, if you will, is growing. And so a big, big issue has been storage for the last several years. Storage for VMware is challenged. It's clearly getting better. The last two years, VMware has done a much, much better job of providing APIs to the community, but it's still taking some time and we're going to share some data on that. Another thing we're watching is the degree of difficulty of integration compared to other hypervisors. I mean, what are you seeing there? Right, so first of all, I'll write it. It's not just about the number of integration points but how easy it is for the customer to deploy that and extract value from it. So the other hypervisors are a little bit behind VMware and Market Share, and from a full functionality standpoint, a lot of them are in test dev environments or not the robust enterprise high application stacks, so might not have the performance requirements that other hypervisors have. So the last thing is that, we're talking about adoption rates. We'll look at the function. We have some survey data on how fast these new functions are being up ticked, adopted. Not super fast, we got a ways to go. Yeah, so I mean the storage industry is notoriously slow at adopting new technology and inertia in the marketplace and organizationally they're just really slow to roll out new things. So let's take a look at the business angles. We got a slide up here on this. I'm going to go through this very quickly. The strategy, integrate fast, integrate often, be first. Right, so that's for the vendors themselves the ones that are leading in the integrations we found are leading more in Market Share than they are generally in the non-virtual environment. And API integrations are becoming table stakes. Yep, the journey's not done for APIs. VMware has more that they'll be doing and they're organizing it better, but everybody is going to be able to match these APIs, so that's not a differentiator. So key players, highly fragmented in storage, meaning there's a lot of players chasing. Yeah, I mean it's not like a certain market, you have a dominant player or a duopoly. We know storage is, nobody has a third of the market even. You got guys like Tintry coming in saying, hey, storage is a do-over, essentially. Because they have the traditional guys like EMC, HP, and NetApp who are saying that they've taken their more legacy environments and made them VMware versus ones like Tintry who come out specifically targeting virtual environments only. And then this notion of storage becoming invisible in virtualization environments can become commoditized. We asked Pat Gelsinger that question today. He said, hey, we made a lot of money with Intel inside. So I thought that was a reasonable answer. And then what's relevant about VMware here? All vendors are now multi-sourcing hypervisors. VMware is number one, but you see more competition and storage vendors are having to split their resources. Yeah, so the quick note on that is when you talk about all these integration points, vendors are spending a lot of time in engineering effort to develop for VMware, and that's a potential challenge in the VMware environment. So I want to jump into the survey. This slide shows the adoption of these advanced features. So you can see the advanced features across the bottom. The brown or the zero is customers telling us they have not yet adopted these features. So you can see all these advanced features. We still have a lot of white space. You see SRM with automated fail-back. Right, so. That's the lowest on the list. The others are creeping up more. It looks like a VU meter. Right, so SRM, which has a lot of value in the marketplace, is not as widely adopted as, you know, something like, you know, V-motion is obviously in their basic integration point. Right, and SRM fail-back is even newer, so. All right, good. So now, we did a study in Wikibon with an extensive survey of our community, and we also did an extensive analysis. And what we looked at was, if I understand it correctly, the number of integration points and the value of those integrations from a user perspective. And then you and David Floyer and Nick Allen helped on this, put together basically a measure, a score of all the various vendors. And here's the layout here. So you have, you did it by products. You got EMC, VNX, and VMAX led. You got NetApp right there on the hill. There's a great horse race. We love analogies in the cube. HP and 3PAR, also very strong integration, and Dell Equalogic. Right, so, yeah, so real quick on the scoring is, first of all, we didn't want to bias companies that had a lot of products, like an HP or an EMC against a company like NetApp, who's a single product. So it's per product so that you can't claim I have 27 integrations on replication. You have one replication per product. So that's sort of normalized. It normalizes the data if you're finding a common list across all the vendors. It's very tough to do and it's up for debate. But we feel we had a nice fair list and we did talk to all of the vendors on this list and gave them ample time to be able to add and comment on that. And I know, you know, it was interesting. A couple years ago, I was at VMworld. I thought Hitachi's presence was lacking there. They've stepped it up now with vSphere's five. But you see them sort of in the middle of the pack and then IBM left hand, et cetera to the right. Dell Compellant. Compellant, a smaller company, didn't get the SDKs, for example, for VAI until very late in the game. Now that they're part of Dell, they're going to get them much sooner. So we're going to see this horse race cluster, you know, around and differentiation is going to come from other places, isn't it? Well, one thing to point out on this, this was on vSphere 4.1. So we expect with vSphere 5 that the gap will actually narrow between these vendors. The likes of EMC need to keep aggressively going forward and adding more integration points and staying ahead of the pack if they want to keep that thought leadership. Now the last thing I want to share with the audience is we asked customers, who's your primary storage vendor for VMware? And who is the best VMware storage vendor? And interestingly, so here it shows, this is the response on the pie chart to the best storage. You can see EMC stands out and then we superimposed EMC's market share based on IDC Q4 numbers. So EMC has a disproportional mind share within that base as does NetApp. Right, so what you're looking at here is really kind of a brand measurement from the customer base and is what customers believe. And EMC and NetApp had more people that didn't even have EMC and NetApp as their primary storage but that felt that they were the top vendor there. If you go to Wikibon.org, you can see all the details and metadata behind this survey that we did. It's really the community talking about the value of that integration. So a lot of research went into this. We did extensive analysis of all the major vendors and products. So check that out on Wikibon.org and search on VMware integration if you're having a hard time, find it. Stu, we're out of time. Thanks very much for... Yeah, just a final point on that is it was a real proof point for how the VMware community loves to share and feedback into the community which of course is core to the Wikibon and SiliconANGLE motto, peer sharing with peers, bringing that information and exploding it out there into the marketplace. Okay, this is Dave Vellante and we are live at VMworld 2010. I'm here with my colleague, Stu Miniman, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage, The Cube, and we'll be right back.