 Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone here live inside theCUBE in VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, Peter Bookman. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Global Stratosphere 3D, what's going on? Tell us what's happening with you and here at VMworld, let's jump in. Well, it's quite a bit, it's good to be back. When we last talked, I was at V3. You know, five years ago, September 2010, we actually started the hyper-converged movement with VDI and so it was exciting. We didn't call it that, but we're happy to be a part of the movement, especially during this show where it's all the rage and the space needs it. We need simpler stuff and it's great. It's always fun to talk to the folks who set the fashion trends up and then just could have called it back. We had Scott McNeely on theCUBE a couple of years ago and he said, I just should have called it cloud. Like, hey. And so in a way, all the stuff has happened by pioneers but when it becomes a reality, they put kind of hyper-converges, basically purpose-built. I mean, just call what it is. I like to call it drop-in, but whatever you want to call it, it's great that it's here. So we talked to Pat Gelsen, we said, Pat, crushes from the crowd chat was, they asked Pat how far up the stack as VM we're going to move up the stack. So, you know, Pat was very candid. He said, look, this is what we're not going to do. We're not going to make hardware. We love Cisco. They make great gear, right, ding. And then we won't make consumer apps, which basically puts the line right at the VDI level that you've been playing in. So what's your take on that? I mean, it's been around for a while, good advancements, but does anything under the hood change the dimensions of what's happening towards the top of the stack? Yeah, we definitely see a lot of change there. I mean, what happened with V3 is we sold to a company by the name of Sphere 3D, who I'm the global strategist for now. And it's really exciting what we're doing with hyper-convergence and applying it to distributed architecture. Sphere 3D had and has a technology called Glassware that has a radically new approach to application virtualization. It's very simple. It's microvisor based, but plugs in really well to this hyper-converged world we're talking about, and especially in a distributed space. So I see and we see a big opportunity, again, with the fashion trend, and setting the fashion trend to be able to have simplified deployments and continue this trend, and making a similar inhabit boil up the stack as VMware's talking about. Okay, so take a quick second and explain what Sphere 3D does and the company, what's their products, what's their positioning. We're not really familiar with much. Yeah, great, Sphere 3D started with this microvisor based application virtualization technology. We were using the same model of hyper-convergence to deploy it. It can be deployed geographically all over the world. They see each other, they adapt to each other. We're finding a lot of success in the educational space and healthcare with being able to help people to simplify virtualization where you don't need the certifications to be able to make things happen. You don't need to know the expertise and there's a big, we see a big gap there. So then V3 systems as the destination. That's for people who are onboarding to want to work with virtualization. You're creating kind of a front end abstraction to the complexity. Absolutely, very much like we're seeing with Echo, right, Echo. We're seeing make it simpler but apply to applications and desktops. Make it so the desktop people are managing physical stuff, can manage virtual stuff, and then extended there. Sphere 3D also announced it's acquiring Overland Storage, which brings some really interesting old storage, but very relevant and powerful storage families into this equation as well. So I got to ask you the whole buzz around VVOLs and Dave and I were talking about LUNs and admins are changing. So the admin of the admin of the admin is a meta approach. So what's going on there? I mean, at some level you will need provisioning which is getting better and better but then you got to manage stuff. So how does the admin role change? It used to be the old days. Okay, I'm managing volumes, I'm managing some storage and other things. What's your take on the automation and the impact of the admins? You know, I'm kind of happy that it seems to me, maybe it's just me, but this is the first year I'm not seeing BYOD as all the rage. It's like huge, like that's the problem we're trying to solve because for me it never was the problem, it was indicative of that question which is at the end of the day, the person producing the predict, being productive wants the tools they want. So I view what we're all moving towards is it has to get simple enough that the architectures and the distributed architectures all play together so the user's making an intelligent decision of what they want that applies to storage and it applies to desktops that applies to applications. That's where hyperconvergence and drop-in really appeals to us. Drop-in makes sense, but what about the interface? Talk about the interfaces, because at the end of the day, we see GE putting a front-end to machines with big data and you're talking about providing the tool that the customers want. At the end of the day also with automation brings a user interface question. So what is that interface? What do you see that happening? I think the more converges we can get, the better for now. I mean being able to all certainly take something that's simple for each audience because it seems like it's a lot more than what's there. We're very excited to see VMware take the approach they are doing of trying to provide a simplified interface for those who are trying to administer just desktops or just servers and applying that across the board and then like you described, moving it back up the stack so that I can manage them all is really what we see has to happen and is very valuable when that's happening because speaking for me as a user, I just want my stuff and I want how I want it, where I want it on the device. I know it's, we've been saying that forever. I know it's still corny, it was corny the first time, but it still is. I want my stuff. That's the reality, people are moving to that objective. Because the developers have the power. Exactly. So Peter, you know, that's all this talk about hyper-convergence. It's like, it's almost like welcome to the party. Yeah. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, so how we should think about VMware's entry and it's ecosystem's entry into this business, what that means for you guys, how you're innovating, you know, because you've been there for a while now, and which is, I see this as a tailwind for you, but what you have to do to stay ahead of that curve. Yeah, amongst our team, we talk about the welcome to the party, as Will said, because we joke about saying it's one thing to have people stand in front of a crowd and say, see, VMware just validated us. The harder question is, and what's next, though? Because if you stop, because, This is model, VMware validated us. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I don't want the pad on the back. I want to keep solving problems. And to me, it seems like we're just getting started still. And I think hyper-convergence is indicative of, call it what you want, drop in, what have you, but the cloud was meant, as Scott McNeely said, it was meant to be everywhere. It was meant to be how I want it. It was meant to be the network is the computer, whatever, it's put it in closest to me and allow me to make the choices. And I think there's a long way to go still there, and we're very excited, again, with the acquisition pending with Overland Storage, we get a portfolio of great 34-year-old storage platforms as well as a really sophisticated established channel who has the feedback mechanism to let us know what we need to do to make this easier, simpler and available to more people, because it's just not there yet. Yeah, but so with Overland, you get the channel, you get the stack, essentially, that they built over a long period of time, but as an independent or as a standalone company, they never could really explode out. So it helped people understand this roll-up that you, I think, helped architect and where it gets the escape velocity. Well, I think that we're a big differentiator with Sphere 3D is, I think hyper-convergence is great. Again, we were early on that, we're going to continue on that path, but I think that it still needs to be simpler and it still needs to connect everything together as we were just discussing. So being able to have an application stack which Sphere 3D already had and being able to bring V3's desktop silo to that and hyper-converge appliances for that and then being able to wrap in now storage of whatever type, whether that's virtual tape libraries or object-based storage or whatever else, is necessary to complete the solution and then applying that to the users who actually need it and are crying for it. The words we're hearing is clamoring for it. Whether we talk about use cases like education where it's great, hey, let's all do Chromebooks and now who's going to manage the legacy app part? Who's going to do that? Because unless we have that simplified deployment, that simplified drop-in easy deployment mechanism, it won't get very far. It'll find the same places we keep finding ourselves which is it almost worked. But it needs to be better, it needs to be simpler. Well, a key word there is solution. So the channel, I think, is clamoring for solutions as opposed to just sort of selling boxes. So what are you seeing in the channel? Thanks, well, go ahead. I was going to answer that question. Sorry, simply put, what we're seeing is while a lot of people are going horizontal with these, including in, again, the hyper-converge and appliances, the building blocks are very important to be able to build these solutions in a vertical fashion. So for us, and what we're hearing from the channel is the perfect storm of we need the horizontal building blocks that can be assembled vertically per use case. So they can differentiate. Absolutely, absolutely. Peter, thanks for spending some time coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to get your comments here. But I'll give you the final word. Give us your take of the Emerald this year. What is the show about? Some say it's a storage show that feels like, but it's really not, it's more about cloud. But what's your take on it? I did joke with somebody, so I'm a part of that, that if there's proof of the value of overnight, you can't throw a rock any direction without hitting a storage vendor, that's for sure. However, I think it's always been about and continues to be about. It's very exciting to be amongst thought leaders who are delivering these building blocks that are necessary to deliver the end user experience we all know we want. The one where I can have everything I want, how I want it on anywhere I want, contextually. Yeah, I love the DevOps ethos. I love the words kind of being batchedized around. It's really about engineering. Engineering's a great solution. So it is cloud. It's certainly coming down the software stack, leading the charge and the developer story is fantastic. It's about apps and the developers are in charge and dictating terms to the infrastructure. Absolutely. Peter, great to see you. This is theCUBE. We're live at VMworld 2014. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after the short break. Thank you.