 This is Dave Vellante, and we are live. Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org. I'm here with my colleague, Stu Miniman. He's also from Wikibon. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld Live 2011. This is theCUBE, where we extract knowledge from what we call smart nodes. And we have a smart node here, Raphael Myrowitz, who's a vice president of Presidio. Actually assistant vice president, but it's just a matter of time, Raphael. I predict good things for you. Thank you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. And we're talking about VMware, VMware integration. Raphael, why don't we start, share with the audience a little bit about Presidio, what you guys do, and what your role is there. So Presidio is one of the largest EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and HP resellers in the United States today. What we provide to customers is we provide end-to-end service, professional services, we strategically, we'll put solutions together for customers. We do a lot of conversions today, and we actually integrate with a lot of bleeding edge technology as well. So we're talking about VMware integration. I remember my first VMworld, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Wow, storage is really way behind here. There's a lot of work to be done. And in the last couple of years, that work has been done, and VMware has stepped up, the vendor community has stepped up. What have you seen in the customer base in terms of the impact that that has had? Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting as well. This is the fifth time that I've been to VMworld. And what I've seen this year is I've seen more integration points from the storage vendors. In terms of the solutions that we actually sell in today, customers are looking for ease of use. A lot of customers are looking at convergence today, because convergence is simplicity. For a lot of them, FlexFabric, also UCS, is something that a lot of customers are looking at. And then also on the FCOE side, customers are also looking for easy ways to deploy FCOE. And we've even seen that with vSphere 5, with VMware coming out with FCOE initiated inside vSphere 5. So they obviously also think that the FCOE is going to take off as well. Okay, so you're talking about really some bleeding edge technologies. I guess from our survey, one of the things that we found is that over half the people using VMware out there today are using less than half of the advanced features. So we talk about things like SRM, we talk about things like cloning, and really using VMware for really still kind of basic functionality. How are you helping drive adoption of those new technologies out there? So I mean, basic functionality, a lot of customers today, what you find with the, especially in the upper end of the commercial market, you have a network admin who's also a storage admin, who's also a server admin as well, right? So you can't spend a lot of time focusing necessarily on the storage integration. When you look at the upper end of the enterprise market and a lot of enterprise customers where they have dedicated storage admins and even dedicated VMware admins today, they'll spend more time on integration points and also an ease of use in deployment. Okay, so if I can play that back for you, I guess what I'm hearing is most people are using the stuff that's just kind of baked in there and easy and they get for like not working. They're really enterprise guys that are going to work on those harder pieces that might deliver some more value but take them a little bit more work. Right, I mean, correct. And in healthcare as well, I think healthcare is kind of one of those verticals as well where a lot of customers are replicating and they're all using SRM and they're looking at also easy integration points as well. And what also what customers are looking for today is they're looking at something that's cheaper on the storage side. And you can even see that with Site Recovery Manager with SRM5 with the standard version, VMware's making it a lot easier for customers to replicate. You know, you don't need another array on the other side. So was vSphere 5 the tipping point in your mind in terms of when, you know, we really sort of crossed that complexity barrier or do we still have a long ways to go? I hope so. I think for a lot of customers, I think they're also hoping so. A few reasons that I say that is because you look at some of the other customers, some of the other partners that are out there, VMware partners like Veeam, Vision Core and some of these other guys that have been doing host-based replication on the storage side for a long time, VMware's finally woken up and said, this is something that we need to bake into our product because customers don't necessarily have the money to buy multiple arrays and they don't necessarily even, sometimes even have the bandwidth to replicate from one side to another. So what do you expect for vSphere 5 adoption? I mean, I know there was some initial concern certainly about the pricing and the licensing. VMware did a sort of redo on that. What are you seeing? So what I see with the VMware 5, I think the pricing discussion has kind of gone off the table now. I think VMware corrected that very, very quickly. Well, I guess the question is, have they fixed it or have they just delayed it for another year or two and we're going to have to revisit it because VMware's obviously trying to monetize what they're doing here. So, yeah. But to your point, they've taken it off the table for now, right, Raphael? I mean, that's really what you're saying. So I think we're going to see a mass adoption of vSphere 5 and I think especially in the mid market, I think a lot of customers are going to upgrade to vSphere 5 and are going to be early adopters because they need those advanced features. Even some of these customers are looking at VSA and deploying virtual storage appliances as well because for the most part, it's going to be cheaper than buying an array. They can reuse servers and they can reuse some of the infrastructure that they have today. Raphael, my last question is, you hear this notion of storage becoming invisible? Now, first of all, do customers ask for that? Whether they ask it directly or indirectly? And is that a reality? Can that happen? Yeah, I think for the most part, that's definitely a reality. I think what we're seeing today, if you walk on the floor here today, I would say you probably see over 50 storage companies. They're not invisible. They're not invisible, right? And they're all VC backed and all of them are looking to be acquired by NetApp, BMC, HP, wherever it is. And, you know, DAL especially, what I've started to see from DAL is, you know, the EMC relationship is very, very sour at the moment and DAL's really leading with their technologies and they're trying to sell into the existing account base, which that existing account base is mostly EMC. All right, well, Raphael, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and Stu, appreciate you participating in this panel. Great to talk to you. We will continue to cover this topic in depth in this spotlight, so please keep watching. This is Dave Vellante and we're live with SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2011. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. Thanks.