 at HP Discover 2011, where SiliconANGLE.com is checking out all the news around the web here, but we're live at HP Discover with theCUBE, our flagship telecast where we go to the events, go on the ground, talk to the smartest people, executives, bloggers, thought leaders, whoever has the smartest knowledge that we can extract and share that with you. That's our goal, and we're here with David Scott and Carl Eschenbacher. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. David Scott, Senior Vice President of the Storage Group, formerly the CEO of 3PAR. Great to be here, John. Godfather of thin provisioning, which everyone copied, and Dinah here, what's next. And Carl, you're the co-president recently, part of the promotion of all, a new president, co-president role at VMware. That's accurate. Welcome. You guys were having a meeting before you came on. Can you tell us what you were talking about? Plans. Plans. Yes. And you guys know each other. You guys are friends, personal friends. We are. We are. You know, we spend the occasional dinner with each other. So this should be fun. So VMware, actually, at VMworld, we were at theCUBE there as our first big production that we had, kind of continuous multi-day coverage. And Paul laid out his plans for what is essentially a cloud operating system from what we were analyzing it. And you guys have a lot of plans involved. And the ecosystem message was great, $15 of revenue for every dollar created from VMware. Juan, how's that going, Carl? And what's the update quickly from VMware? Yeah, so there's roughly about a $45 billion ecosystem that's been generated through VMware's cloud infrastructure platform. And that's because virtualization drives the convergence of all different assets in the data center. And with convergence comes disruption. And that's why the ecosystem that surrounds VMware is so large. And one of our best partners in the industry is our friends here at HP. And it spans more than a decade. And we're really excited about some of the announcements that have been made this week in joint partnership with HP. And the ecosystem is alive. It's vibrant. And I think it will continue to grow as people look more and more at these converged infrastructures. So saying, David, you guys were doing thin provisioning before it was cool. And cloud kind of stuff before it was cool. And now everyone's copied that. So what's the three-par story with VMware? Because you guys, VMware is Switzerland. And although owned by EMC, has to deal with all the storage vendors like NetApp and others in HP. So what's the story here with three-par? Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, three-par and VMware had a really strong relationship from when three-par was still an independent company. We did a lot of joint work in terms of supporting kind of interfaces, APIs very early on. And that was really driven out of the fact that both companies were looking at some joint target segments, particularly in the hosting service providers, where fundamentally the complete virtualized environment was what was of best of breed components was what was differentiating us. In fact, I think it was about four years ago, HP three-par is an independent company, and VMware actually jointly announced one of the first kind of solution blueprints for the cloud, and we named it 3CV. So the relationship's been going on very tight ever since that time. And it continues obviously with three-par within the HP fold. So what's the reaction on the market, Carl, and you're in, VMware's out there. There being independent three-par, I was using some good technology. What's been the reaction of the market in terms of the three-par acquisition with HP and its impact to VMware and the relationship? Well, I think if you're kind of following on what David was speaking about, everyone is looking at how to drive convergence in their data center. And HP had a lot of good storage solutions, but they were looking for something that could take them to the next level and really provide multi-tenant cloud environments. And that's what the three-par acquisition has given HP. In VMware, yes, it's true. To your point earlier, John, we are a company that has a majority shareholder in EMC, but at the same time, we also understand there's a vibrant ecosystem out there and people need choices. And the relationship with three-par is as strong as ever. And as David said, before there was probably any vertical stacks or any converged infrastructures even brought to market through this three-CV initiative of three-par C-class blades in VMware, we actually brought this to market almost four years ago and there was a lot of success. And it may actually be what's driven all of us to really talk about virtual systems this week. So even four years ago, that's like, you know, decades ago, you know, in terms of cloud time. I mean, just last year, you guys transformed, VMware has transformed its business significantly, even in the past year, under the paul and the stack that these laid out is very similar to what HP is talking about here. So what's changed in the marketplace relative to that proposition you just mentioned from four years ago? Specific to the infrastructure there, John? Infrastructure layer and the marketplace. You've done some acquisitions at the top of the stack. So what's changed in the cloud relative to virtualization? You have cloud foundry out there, cloud foundry specifically. That's hypervisor in the cloud summer saying the freemium model, is that, tell us what that's about. Yeah, sure. So I mean, you know, this whole cloud word has become very pervasive in our industry and everyone's using it. And I'm not sure anyone has a common definition, but the one thing we do know is that cloud, if implemented the appropriate way, whether it's in a private or public setting can reduce the cost for a customer to run their applications as well as to support their infrastructure. So VMware, while we've historically been focused on the infrastructure layer, we've also started to take a look at how applications are written and really try to focus on delivering the new next generation frameworks to allow applications to be modernized. And we think there's a tight coupling between some of the things we've announced around cloud foundry, which is an open source developer community cloud and what we're doing in the infrastructure. And those two shall converge over time as well. Is that a freemium model? Is that a freemium model? Are you giving away for free? The cloud foundry is being given away for free. And we actually have a sandbox that we stood up to allow developers to go and actually get access to it today. David, how's the impact above the infrastructure applications? As you know, VMware recently bought a social company. So I think what's social cast was it recently, as you had Zimbra. It's not a lot going on at the top of the stack in terms of apps, but there's a ton going on in mobile. What are you seeing on the infrastructure side that's happening? Again, you guys did thin provisioning. That was great. Everyone copied that. You guys were leaders. So what I'm trying to get at is what's next? What's the next big thing that you guys see that maybe others don't? Well, I think the next big thing is making resources kind of work together on across data centers, across metropolitan areas and across long distance. It's an area that we talk about as federation of the infrastructure. And actually HP's had a tremendous head start in leading scale out software that is federated. In fact, another partner of VMware's very early on was Left Hand Networks, which is now part of HP. And that has a federated scale out software model and has been one of the environments that really is tightly integrated with VMware to provide kind of long distance the motion support across metropolitan areas. And we think that that capability, peer-based federation, is going to be extremely important in all software architectures moving forward because the way you try and federate to join resources together, you got two choices. Are you going to put appliances in front of your storage arrays as some vendors would describe or are you going to make it peer-to-peer? And we think the answer is peer-to-peer federation, just like VMware's vMotion, it's peer-to-peer. Is the marketplace ready for that? Are we there? What inning are we in on that peer-to-peer? Because some are saying there's a lot of white space, especially in the VMware stack, because you guys are growing and it's ready. I mean, what's happening with that? I mean, what do you peg the inning on this? You know, I think it's early stages right now, but thin provisioning was early stages. And the point when thin provisioning was early stages, people said, you were never going to ever want to do that. It's a crazy idea. Now everybody in the world feels it's the must have. And I think you're going to see the same thing in federation. Carl, how does vMware keep up with the pace of change? I mean, even just from vMworld, we were watching you guys, obviously the acquisitions, everything else is okay. But you have a lot's going on in the middleware and the platform side. So above the infrastructure at the platform side, you've got a lot of white spaces and there's a lot going on with the big vendors. Obviously Oracle, other vendors like SAP have different approaches. You have to close and open. This peer-to-peer really talks about open. Can you talk about what's going on the platform level? Yeah, sure. So as I said earlier, the Cloud Foundry announcement we made a couple months ago was a really critical announcement for vMware because it put us in the forefront of how people are going to generate and build and write their next generation of applications. And two years ago now, almost two years ago, we made a critical acquisition for us of Spring Source, which is the industry leading Java J2E framework that's out there today. So we see a very tight coupling, as I said earlier, John, between the infrastructure and the applications. The infrastructure needs to become much more automated to support the rapid requirements of the users and the next generation of applications that are being developed. So we believe as we move up stack and focus on these new frameworks that historically haven't been part of our DNA, we believe we're going to see people start to say, wow, I'm writing now in a vMware framework in an open source type of a cloud and we're also going to then deploy that in a virtualized appliance on top of a highly virtualized infrastructure like what we're doing for the virtual system. So we see the two coming together. And in fact, it's very complimentary. I mean, HP's recently announced virtual systems. It's all about tightening up and providing kind of Bessebreed functionality, integrated server networking storage stack that's tied in with the virtualization layer, infrastructure layer and the applications beyond that. And we also announced the cloud system approach which is allowing people a complete infrastructure to build out their own private clouds. And the great thing is that you're able to upgrade from virtual system to this new cloud system world, leveraging kind of technologies both from HP and VMware. The other thing I'd add, John, that we just announced jointly with HP last week is a lot of people historically have looked at a converged and virtualized infrastructure for more infrastructure type applications. We're seeing a rapid adoption of tier one applications moving on top of this environment. And last week we made an announcement with HP and SAP that the converged infrastructure with B-Sphere can now support and is certified to support SAP applications. So you can see us moving up the stack and looking at the heavier weight mission critical tier one applications to run on this environment. Yeah, I mean, we were at SAP Sapphire and then the message there was very clear. I mean, obviously mobility, but the data, they didn't really talk about big data like everyone was hyping it up. They were really talking more about almost an assumptive way, vast data, and that's the term we called it. They want the information really fast. So they were talking about virtualization and we were trying to get out some questions we didn't really find many customers to talk to there that could answer the question, but how many SAP environments are truly virtualized in production outside of the test and dev? Are you seeing more of the big app guys like the SAPs virtualizing in this environment? Yeah, clearly. Again, if you look at- Can you do percentages like pie chart? I don't know the percentages off the top of my head, John, but I know a large percentage of our customers are running databases in general on top of a virtualized converged infrastructure. So we do definitely see that adoption happen. And in fact, and as you'll see in a video that Paul will, that David will run on Paul, it talks about how there's now more virtualized workloads being deployed in physical servers. And this year alone, many analysts predict that there will be more applications virtualized and it's been virtualized in the last five years combined. So it's not if you're going to virtualize, it's when and how fast, and how can you take advantage of these new converged infrastructures to really focus on business agility? You know, we, it's looking at angle.com where we try to cover all the tech innovation. We like to pontificate a lot, but also speculate. But one of the things we've been speculating on is the internet operating system for years, you know, and now we talk about the cloud is so really rocking and rolling in terms of hype and reality, Steve Jobs was talking about iCloud. So, you know, that's going to make cloud even more mainstream in terms of vernacular. But, you know, we also cover Microsoft and, you know, we talk about Microsoft in the old sense and they're trying to get back on track. But is there really a cloud operating system? Because, you know, you have Paul Moritz who knows that business in the operating system. He worked at Microsoft and, you know, we at VMworld last year, there was a cloud operating system kind of pitch. I mean, it was, you didn't say cloud operating systems what we were saying. So I'd love to get your perspectives, David and Carl. What do you think about the cloud operating system concept? I mean, it's a systems play you mentioned in our last interview. I think the definition of what a cloud operating system will be is the question mark. People have having difficulty defining what the cloud is let alone what a cloud operating system is going to be. So, you know, I think there's plenty of room for innovation and that's at the heart of what is making the industry so excited at this point in time. You're getting this tremendous transformation from kind of traditional IT to the delivery of IT as a service and all of the building blocks have to change. VMware was very early on understanding that kind of the virtualization of the server environments was going to have to be one of those elements of change. At three par, we recognize that you had to change the storage to the same thing. The operating system environment is clearly kind of one of the next areas to be focused on. Yeah, I mean, I'd say the same thing, David. I mean, the industry's going through a radical transformation here and existing operating systems as we once have known them will probably have to migrate and take a different role, especially when you look at it from applications and how they're being developed. And if you think about it, if there's more applications being deployed in virtual environments and physical environments, there's an abstraction layer now called virtualization with things that HP is doing that actually becomes, if you will, the underlying architecture for service delivery. So it's not a hardware delivery, it's a virtualized delivery taking advantage of highly optimized infrastructure that, for example, HP's providing. Yeah, I mean, I just find it interesting that the subsystems of storage, compute, and servers, HP has under one roof now. So you think about what we've seen. And networking. And networking, yeah. So we've seen about what you guys have done with three parsons, the acquisition. I mean, you got some systems tools in there and you guys are spinning with virtualization. So we're just watching that area closely. So I just wanted to get your take on that. I can get in the hook in my ear here. So I know you guys got to go. But final question, this is John Furrier from SiliconANGLE.com. We're inside the cube at HP Discover with Carl and David from HP and VMware. Final question for you guys is more of a philosophical one. So you can take your corporate hat off and go personal here. What's the future going to look like in five to 10 years? The world we're going to live in, society, obviously virtualization and some of the technology you guys are building is going to change a lot of things like how we interact, how we govern, how we do things with mobile and others. So what's your view of how this tech will translate people's lives in society and technology and industry, whatever, it's a free question. Okay, so I'll take my corporate hat off and although I didn't have one, I'm plus it would mess my hair up David, so I wouldn't do that. So I think every decade or so our industry goes through tectonic shifts and we're in the next tectonic shift to cloud computing and the underlying architecture for cloud computing is virtualization with converged infrastructures. And I actually believe what's going to happen are we're being driven by a consumer world and it's bleeding into the enterprise so it's going to be about any device getting access to information and applications real time in a very secure environment. So we as IT need to find a way to try to consumerize the infrastructure to make it very consumable, drive the cost out and make it all done in a self-service way where the consumer is getting access to services from IT and IT isn't the bottled neck any longer. That's what I believe we're moving towards. I think Carl's spot on, I think as you go out 10 years it's going to be increasingly difficult to separate one's professional life from one's personal life. You're already starting to see that privacy to the parts of your personal life that you want to keep private but it will be a blended melded world. Okay, well thanks for coming in. David Scott, Senior Vice President of HP Storage. Carl is the co-president of VMware. Obviously, storage is a big part of the cloud operating system. Lots of changing, the software environments are growing and evolving. Thanks a lot for coming in the queue, appreciate it. Thanks John. Thanks Carl. Thank you, David. Great to work with you Carl, thanks. We're here.