 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE flagship program. We go out to the events. Extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined by Dave Vellante, my co-host from wikibon.org, and we're kicking off the day with an awesome interview. CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger, Cube alumni. Been on theCUBE, Dave and I, multiple times. So many times, you're like on the leaderboard. So in terms of overall guest frequency, you've been up there, but also you're also the top dog at VMware. And great to see you again. How you feeling? Thank you. Good morning, guys. Pleasure. Good to see you. So what's new? I mean, obviously you're running the show here and you're running around. Last night, you were at the NetApp event. You run through CIO, R&D. You got to go out and touch all the bases out here. What does that look like? What have you done? And obviously did the Tequino is awesome. What else is going on? You know, VMworld is just, I mean, it's just overwhelming, right? You know, 23,000 people almost. I mean, the amount of activities around that. And it really has become the infrastructure event for the industry. And you know, if you're anything related to infrastructure, right, you know, what's going on, right on the enterprise side of IT, you got to be here, right? And there's parties everywhere. Every vendor has their events. Every, you know, different particular technology area, a bunch of the things that we're doing. And of course, to me, it's just delightful that I can go touch as many of people and you know, they get excited to see the CEO. I have no idea why, but hey, I got to show up. You've been in the industry for a long time. Obviously you've seen all the movies before and we've talked about the season of change in the EMC world when you were there. But we had two guests on yesterday that were notable. Steve Herrick, who's now a venture capitalist, general catalyst, and Jerry Chen, who's a VC at Greylock. And you have a 10 year run here at VMworld, which is the theme to buy convention. But the first five years were a lot different than the last five years. And certainly the last year, you were at the helm. So, you know, what's changed in the past 24 months. A lot of stuff has certainly evolved, right? So the Nesira acquisition certainly changed the, changed everything, right? You saw software defined, data center now come into focus this year. But really it's about less than 24 months, a massive kind of change. What, how do you view all that? How do you talk to your employees and the customers about that change? Well, you know, as we think about the software defined data center vision, right? It is a broad, comprehensive, powerful vision for re-architecting how the data center is operated, how customers take advantage of it, you know, and the result in agility and efficiency that comes from that. And obviously the Nesira acquisition was sort of the shot heard around the world as the really, okay, these guys are really serious about making that happen. And it changes every aspect of the data center in that regard. You know, and this year's VMworld is really, I'll say, putting the beef on the bones, right? We talked about the vision. We talked about each of the four legs of it, compute, networking, storage, and management and automation. So this year it's really putting the beef on the bones and the NSX announcement, putting substance behind it. The vSAN announcement, putting substance behind it. The continuing progress in management and automation. And I think everything that we've seen here in the customer conversations, the ecosystem of partner conversations are, SDDC is real now, get started. And you've, I think, have some fundamental assumptions in that scenario, particularly around x86 in the service space. I mean, essentially if I understand it, you've said that x86 will dominate that space. So you're expecting status quo in the sense that it will continue to go in the cadence of cores and Moore's law curve, even though we know that's changing. But that essentially will stay as is. And it's the other parts of the networking and the storage piece that you're really where you're defying convention. Is that right? Certainly we expect that continuum momentum by the x86, by Intel in that space. But as you go think about software defined everything in the data center, it really has taken the power of that same core engine and applying it to these other areas. Because when we say software defined networking, right? You need a very high packet flow capability and that's running in software on x86. When you need to talk about data services running in software, right? You need high performance, snapshots, file systems, et cetera, running in software and no longer bound to your physical array. So it really is taking that same power, that same formula, right? And applying it to the rest of the elements of the data center. And yeah, we're betting big, right? That that engine will continue and that will be successful in being able to deliver that value in this software layer running on that core powerful silicon engine. So Pat, so honestly, when you came on board the first thing you did was you said, hey, the pricing, we're going to change some things. Hypervisor's always been kind of this debate, everyone debates about what to do with hypervisor. But still virtualization is still the enabling technology. So you kind of had this point where the ball's moving down the field and all of a sudden in 2012, it changed significantly. And that was a lot of part of the Eurovision with infrastructure. As infrastructure gets commoditized, what is going to change in the IT infrastructure and infrastructure providers and the value chains that's going to be disruptive? Obviously, economics are changing. What specifically is virtualization going to do next with software defined? That's going to be the enabling technology. Yeah, and you know, we're not out to commoditize. We're out to enable innovation. We're out to enable agility, right? And in the course of that, it changes what you expect and what the underlying hardware does. But you know, it's enabling that ecosystem of innovation is what we're about and customers to get value from that. And as you go look at these new areas, hey, you know, we're changing how you do networking. Right, all of a sudden, we're going to create a virtual network overlay that has all of these services associated with it that are provisioned just like VMs in seconds. We're creating a new layer of how storage is going to be enabled. You know, this policy-driven capability, taking those capabilities that before were tightly bound to hardware, delivering them through the software layer, enabling this new, magnificent level of automation. And yesterday's demo with Carl. I mean, Carl does a great CTO impersonation, doesn't he? And, you know- He's getting some celebrity action. He's like, he has Carl Aschenbach. Oh yeah. Steve Herrick gave him a thumbs up too. Yeah, yeah, Steve gave him a good job. But you know, and so all of those pieces coming together, right, you know, was really, and just the customer and the ecosystem response here at the show has been, oh, right, you know, SDDC, it's not some crazy thing out there in the future. This is something I can start realizing value for now. Well, it's coming into focus and it's not 100% clear for a lot of the customers because they're still getting into the cloud. And the hybrid cloud has become, I call it, the halfway house to kind of a fully evolved IT environment. But, you know, how do you- No, it is the end game. Hybrid cloud is not a halfway house. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I mean, too long utility computing. That's what, that is ultimately what we're saying. Halfway house? I mean, I mean, that way. You know- Help me, Brad. Okay, next question. What is- We're in a whole stop thing, Brad. How do you define the total address market of 50 billion that Carl talked about? Yeah, and you know, as we looked at that, we said across the three things, right, that we said, software defined data center, right, it was $28 billion, hybrid cloud, 14 billion, 8 billion for the end user computing, that's this 50 billion opportunity. But even there, I think that dramatically understates the market opportunity. IT overall is $1.7 trillion, right? Communications, the services, outsourcing, et cetera. And actually, the piece that we're talking about is really the underpinnings for a much larger set of impact than the part of what applications are going to be developed. How services are delivered, how consumers and businesses are able to take advantage of IT. So yes, that's the 50 billion dollars. We'll give you the math, we'll show you all the details of Gartner's and IDC's to support it. But to us, the vision and the impact that we're out for is far more dramatic than that would even imply. That's good news, because we said to Carl, it's good that your market cap is bigger than, oh yeah, your TAM is bigger than your market cap, right? And he said, okay, well now we're going to get- Yeah, we're about to fix the market cap piece, yeah. Yeah, he said, now we're going to get to 50 billion, so I'm glad to hear there's upside to the TAM. But I wanted to ask you about the ecosystem conversation. You talk about getting into things like, you know, software defined networking and software defined storage. What's the discourse like in the ecosystem? From guys like, let's take the storage side, EMC, NetApp last night, they say, hey, you know, software defined storage, I really like that, but we want to be in that business. So talk about that discussion. Yeah, and clearly every piece of software defined, whether it's software defined storage, software defined data services, software defined security services or networking, every piece of that has ecosystem implications along the way. But if you would go talk to a NetApp or EMC, they'd say, you know, you're an appliance vendor and they would quickly respond and say, no, our values in software, and we happen to deliver it as an appliance. And we'd say, great, let's start delivering the software value as a software appliance, right, through virtualization and through the software delivery, you know, mechanisms that we're talking about for this new platform. Now each one of them then has to adjust their product strategies, their, you know, business strategies to enable those software components, right, independent of their hardware elements for full execution and embodiment into this software defined data center future. But for the most part, right, every one of them is saying, yes, now how do we figure out how to get there and how do we decompose our value and body it in new ways and how can we enable that in this new software defined data center vision? And they've always done that with software companies. I mean, certainly Microsoft and Oracle have always grabbed a piece of the storage stack and put it into their own, but it's been very narrow within their own spaces and VMware is running any application anywhere. So it's more of a general purpose platform. So is it a trickier fit for the ecosystem to figure out where that white space is? Absolutely, every one of them has to figure out their strategy. If you're at five, right, you know, I was with John McCat and this morning, okay, how do I take my value? And he would very quickly say, hey, you know, our values in software, we deliver it as mostly as appliances, but how do we shift? You know, if you're checkpoint, okay, you know, they're already, right, you know, a largely software value or a riverbed or, you know, the various software vendors and security as well. Each one of them are having to rethink their strategies in the context of software defined, but customers are saying, wow, this is powerful. The agility and the benefits that I get from it, they're driving them to go there. So what's the key to giving them confidence? Is it transparency, just sharing roadmaps, join integration? Yes, yes, yes. Anything else, am I missing anything there? You know, also, you know, how we work with them and go to market as well. You know, how do we work with them as we go to customers? You know, they're expecting from us that, okay, you know, if this is one of our accounts, come in and work with us in those accounts as well. So we do have to be transparent. We have to have the APIs that enable them to do integration. We have to work with them in terms of enabling their innovation in the context of this platform that we're building. But as we work along the way, we're getting good responses to that. Pat, how do you look at the application market? Obviously end-user computing, you guys are beefing that up. You got Sanjay Poonan coming in, and obviously mobile, and we've talked about this before in the queue, but core IT has always been enabling kind of the infrastructure, and then you get what you get from what you have in IT. Now the shift is applications coming from outside IT, business units and outside from partners, whether they're resellers. How do you view that tsunami of apps coming in that need infrastructure on demand or horizontally scalable at will? Yeah, so first point to be is yes. Right, you know, we do see that, you know, as infrastructure becomes more agile and more self-provision, right, more aligned to the requirements of applications, we do see that it becomes a tsunami of new applications. We're also working very hard to enable IT to be the friend of the line of business. No longer seen as a barrier, but really seen as a friend, partner, enabler of what they're trying to do, because many of the line of businesses have been finding ways, how do I get around this slow-moving IT? Well, we want to make IT fast-moving and enabling to meet their security governance, you know, SLA requirements, while they're also enabling these powerful new applications to emerge, and that to us is what infrastructure is all about for the future, is enabling businesses to move at the speed of business and not have infrastructure being a limiter. And as we're doing things, you know, like the big data announcements that we did, enabling infrastructure that's more agility. You'll see us do more things in the app dev area over time, enabling the management tools to integrate more effectively to those environments, self-service portals that are enabling that, and obviously with guys like Sanjay and our mobile initiative, yeah, that's a big step up. Don't you like Sanjay? He's a great addition to the team. Yeah, Sanjay's awesome. He's been great, and he's had done a lot on the mobile side, obviously that is something that he can use as one. Yeah, that's an interesting way to get into that business for us. On the flash side, so under the hood, right? So you look under the hood, you got big data on the dashboard, your driver's driving this car to the new future of IT. Under the hood, you got flash. That's changing storage a bit, and certainly reconfiguring what it does is in NAS and SAN. Obviously you talked about BSAN in your keynote. What is happening in your vision with compute? I mean, obviously if you have more and more apps hitting IT, coming in outside core IT, but have to be managed by core IT, does that change the computing paradigm? Does it make it more distributed? More software, I mean, how do you look at that? Because that's changing the configuration of, say, the compute architecture. Sure, and a couple of things, if you think about the show here that we've done, two of them in particular in this space, one is BSAN, right? And BSAN is creating converged infrastructure that includes storage. Why do you do that? Well, now you have storage, I mean, that apps are about data, right? Apps need data to go operate on. So now we've created an integrated storage tier that essentially presents a integrated application environment in converged infrastructure. That changes the game. We talked about the Hadoop extensions. It changes how you think about these big data applications. Also the Cloud Foundry announcement, right? On, off-premise, a PaaS layer to uniquely enable applications. And as they've done that on the PaaS layer, boy, you don't have to think about the infrastructure requirements to deploy that on or off-premise or increasingly, as I forecast for the future, hybrid applications. Born in the hybrid, not born in the cloud, but born in the hybrid cloud applications that truly put the stuff that belongs on-premise, on-premise, puts the stuff that belongs in the cloud, in the cloud, right? And enables them to fundamentally work together in a secure, operational manner. So the apps are dictating to the infrastructure basically on-demand resources and then essentially compile them. The infrastructure says, here's the services that I have already, right, in catalogs that you can immediately take advantage of. And if this, you fit inside of these catalogs, you're done. Itself provisions from that point on and we've automated the operation and everything to go against that. So that concept of born in the hybrid is a good one. So obviously that's your sweet spot. You're going from a position to a position. Yeah, yeah. And this stupid halfway house hybrid comment. Yeah, I've never heard something so idiotic before. One person's opinion. Yeah. I don't know, it was probably an Andreessen comment or something. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, so he's done well for himself, Mark Andreessen. Yeah, that's right. So you go, okay, Google and Amazon obviously going to have a hard of time that, you know, born in the hybrid. What about Microsoft? They've got a good shot at born in the hybrid. Don't they? Yeah, and I think, you know, I've said the four companies that I think have a real shot to be, you know, very large, significant players for public cloud infrastructure services. You know, clearly Amazon, you know, Google, they have a large substantive, very creative company. You know, Microsoft, they have a large position, Azure, right, what they've done with Hyper-V and ourselves. And I think that those, you know, the two that sort of, you know, have the natural assets that participate in the hybrid space are us and Microsoft at that level. And obviously, you know, we think we have lots of advantages versus Microsoft. We think we're miles ahead of them in SDDC, right? We think the seamlessness and the compatibility that we're building with one software stack, not two. You know, it's not Azure and Hyper-V. It is SDDC in the cloud and on-premise that that gives us significant advantages. And then we're going to build these value-added services on top of it. You know, like we announced with desktop as a service, cloud foundry as a service, DR as a service. We're going to quickly build that stack of capabilities. That just gives substantial value to enterprise customers. So I got to actually talk about hybrid since you brought it up again. So software defined data center software. So what's happened to the data center, the actual physical data center? You mentioned about the museum. I mean, what is it going to look like? I mean, right now you're still in power and cooling. You can have out utility computing with cloud resources on demand. People are going to still run data centers. You're talking about the facility. Yeah, the actual facility. I'm still going to have servers. They're going to still be on-premise. Do you see that? How do you see that phasing out to hybrid and what does that look like physically for someone to manage the still power of facility management, all that stuff? Yeah, and in many ways, I think here the cloud guys, Googles and Amazons and Yahoo's and Facebook's have actually led the way in doing some pretty creative work. These things become highly standardized, highly modularized, highly scalable. Very few number of admins per server ratio as we go forward. These become very automated factories of cloud execution. Some of those will be on-premise. Some of those will be off-premise, but for the most part, they'll look the same in how they operate. And our vision for software to find data center is that software layer is taking away the complexity of what operates underneath it. They'll be standardized, they'll be modularized, you plug in power, you plug in cooling, you plug in network, and these things will operate. Basically efficient down to the bone, fully automated with software. And people will decide what they put in their private cloud based on business requirements, SLAs, privacy requirements, data governance requirements, I mean in Europe, it got to be on-premise in these locations. And then they'll say put stuff in the public cloud that allows me to burst effectively, maybe I DR because I don't do that real well, or these applications, it belongs in the cloud because of its distributed nature, but keep the data on-premise and really treat it as a menu of options to optimize the business requirements between CAPEX, OPEX, regulatory requirements, scale requirements, expertise, mission critical, and all of those things that are delivered by a sustainable position, not some stupid hybrid, halfway house, a sustainable position that optimizes against the business requirements that they have. Let me take one of those points, SLA, right? Everybody likes to attack Amazon, it's SLAs, but in many regards, yeah. I'm glad I got your attention. Yeah, that's good, we're going to come back to that. I have those six walk-ups going in my head right now. I don't think we're done with that talk track. So it's easy to attack Amazon and SLAs, but in essence, the SLA is the degree of risk that you're willing to take and put on paper at scale. So how transparent will you be with your SLAs with the hybrid cloud? And will they exceed what Amazon and Google have been willing to, and HP for that matter, have been willing to promise at scale? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're going to be transparent. The SLAs will have real teeth associated with them, real business consequences for lack of execution against them. They will be highly transparent. We're going to have true, I mean, we're going to measure these things and provide uptime commitments, et cetera, against them. That's what an enterprise service is expected. At the end of the day, that's what enterprises demand. And when you pick up the phone and need support, you get it. And the VMware support is legendary. I mean, I'm just delighted by the support services that we offer. And the customer response to those is, you know, hey, you fixed my problem. Even when it wasn't your problem, right? And make it work. And that's what enterprise customers want because that's what they have to turn around and commit back to their businesses against all of the other things as well. You know, real regulatory requirements, audit requirements, all of those types of things. That's what being an enterprise provider is all about. John wants to get back to talk about hybrid cloud. I want to talk about OpenStack. Because you guys are big behind OpenStack. And he talks about it as a market expansion. Internally, what are some of the development conversations and sales concepts with customers around OpenStack in terms of status, what it's doing, how you guys are looking at that and getting involved? Yeah, and we've clearly said that you have to think about OpenStack in the proper way. OpenStack is a framework for building clouds. And for people who are wanting to build their own cloud, as opposed to get the pre-packaged cloud, this is our strategy to enable those APIs to give our components to those customers to help them go build it. And those customers largely are service providers, internet providers who have unique scale integration and other requirements. And we're finding it as a good market expansion opportunity for us, put our components in those areas, contribute to the open source projects where we truly have IP and can differentiate for it, like at the hypervisor layer, like at the networking layer. And it's actually going pretty well. You know, in our Q2 earnings call, you might recall, you know, I talked about that our business with the public OpenStack customers was growing faster than the rest of our business. That's pretty significant, right? If you say, wow, you know, if it's growing faster, that says, oh, the strategy's working, right? And we are seeing a good response there. And, you know, clearly we want to communicate. We're going to continue that strategy going forward. And the install base of virtualization is obviously impressive. And the question I want to ask you is, how do you see the evolution of the IT worker? I mean, you have the old model DBA system admins and you know, now you have data science on the big data side. So with, so I'm going to find data center, the virtualization team seems to be the center point for that. What roles do you see changing with hybrid cloud and self-defined data center and user computing? Well, I think sort of the theme of our conference was defy convention, right? And why did we do that? Because we really see that the, you know, the virtual admin, the virtual infrastructure that they really have become the center of IT. Now we need the competence of networking, the security guys, of the database guys, but that now has to happen in the context, right, of a virtualized environment. DBA doesn't get to control his unique infrastructure. The Hadoop guy doesn't get his own unique infrastructure. They're all just workloads that run on this virtualized infrastructure that is increasingly adept and adaptable right to these different workload areas. And that's what we see going forward as we reach into these new areas. And the virtual admin, he has to go make best buddies with the networking guy and say, let me talk to you about virtual networking and how we're going to cross between the virtual overlay domain and the physical domain and how these things are going to stitch together for making your job better, right, and delivering a better solution for our line of business and for our customers. One thing you did to defy convention was to get on stage with Mark Andreessen. Talk about that a little bit. You guys said, I would call it, you know, slight disagreement. And just the future. Yeah, just a little. But I thought you were kind to him. And he said, you know, no startup that I work with, you know, like any servers. And I thought you were going to have, no, nevermind, I won't even go there. I won't even go there, too many friends. No, so talk about that a little bit, that discussion that you had, your view of the world and Mark's, how do you respond to that statement? Do they grow up into VMware customers? Is that sort of the obvious answer? Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of regard, you know, Mark and I have known each other for probably close to two decades now. And, you know, we've partnered and sparred together for a long time. And, you know, he's a smart, successful guy. And I appreciate his opinions. You know, but he takes a very narrow view, right, of a venture seed fund, right? Who is optimizing cash flow, right? And why would they spend capital on cash flow when they can go get it as a service? That's exactly the right thing for a very early stage startup company to do in most cases. Right? And Mark driving his companies to do that makes a lot of sense. But at the end of the day, right? If you want to reach into enterprise customers, you got to deliver enterprise services, right? You got to be able to, you know, scale these things. You got to be cost effective at these things. And then all the other aspects of governance, SLAs, et cetera, that we already talked about, you know. So, you know, in that view, I think Mark's view is very prospective. Well, also Zingen, those guys, when they grew up on Amazon, they went right to bare metal as soon as they started to scale. They had to bring it back in, right? Because they needed the SLAs. They needed the cost structures. They wanted to have the control of some of those applications. And rental is more expensive than that only. Yeah, right, you know. Somebody's going to pay the margins, right? You know, on top of that to the providers. So, you know, I appreciate the perspective, but to me it is very narrow and parochial to that point of view. And I think the industry is much broader, right? And things like policy and regulations are going to take decades, right? Not years, you know, multiple decades for these things to change and roll out to enable, I'll say, a mostly public cloud world, ever. Right? And that's why I say, I think the hybrid is not a way station, right? It is the right balance point that gives customers flexibility to meet their business demands across a range of things. And Mark and I, obviously, we're quite in disagreement over that particular point. And John, once again, Nick carved, you know, missed the mark. I think Mark and Jason wants to put everyone in that book. Everyone could be the next Facebook where you build your own. I think that's not a reality in the enterprise. They kind of want to be like Facebook, like with applications. But I want to ask about automation. So we talked to a lot of customers here in theCUBE and we all asked them the question, automation orchestration at the top of the stack, they all want it, but they all say they all have different processes and you really can't have a general purpose software approach. So Dave and I were commenting last night when we got back after the NetApp event was, you know, you and Paul Marins were talking in 2010 around this hard and top when you introduced that stack. And with infrastructure as a service, is there a hard and top where functionality is more important than which hardware you buy and there's more important than which hardware you buy so you can enable some of those service catalogs, some of those agility features in automation because every customer will have a different process to be automated. And how do you do that without human intervention? So where is that hard and top now? I mean, is it platform as a service or is it still at the infrastructure as a service model? Yeah, I think clearly the line between infrastructure as a service and platform as a service will blur, right? And, you know, it's really not clear, you know, where you can quite draw that line. Also as we make infrastructure more application aware, right, and have more application developer services associated with it, you know, that line will blur even more. So I think it's going to be hard to quote, call, you know, here's that simple line associated with it. You know, we'd also argue that, you know, in this world that, you know, customers that, you know, they have, you know, heterogeneous tools that they need to work with, you know, some will have bought in, you know, in big ways to some of the legacy tools and as much as we're going to try to help them move past some of those brittle environments. You know, that takes a long time as well. I'd also say that, you know, it's the age of APIs, not UIs, right? And for us, it's very much to expose our value through programmatic interfaces. So customers truly can, right, have the flexibility to integrate those and give them more choice, even as we're trying to build a more deeply integrated and automated stack that meets a general, right, set of needs for customers. So that makes a question at the top of the stack where end user computing is going to sit and you're going to advance that piece. What's the to-do item for you? What needs to happen there? Is it on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being fully baked out? Where is it? Where are the whitespace that need to be tweaked either by partners or by VMware? Yeah, and I think, you know, we're pretty quickly, I'll say finishing the stack with regard to the, you know, traditional PC environments. And I think the amount of work to do for the mobile environment, right, is still quite enormous as we go forward. And in that, you know, we're excited about Horizon, getting some good uptake, a number of partner announcements this week. But there's a lot to be done in that space because, you know, people want to be able to secure apps, provision apps, deprovision apps, have secure work spaces, social experiences, a rich range of integration to the authentication devices associated with it, be able to have, you know, applications that are developed in that environment that access this hybrid infrastructure effectively over time, be able to self-compose those applications, put them into enterprise, right, stores and operations, be able to access this big data infrastructure. There's a whole lot of work to be done in that space. And I think that'll keep us busy for quite a number of years. This is great, we're here at Pat Gelsinger inside theCUBE. We could keep rolling until we get to get the hook. But a couple more final questions is, the analogy of cloud has always been like the grid, electricity. You kind of hinted to this earlier. I mean, is that a fair comparison? Electricity is kind of clean, it's stable, we have an actual national grid, doesn't have bad data and hackers coming through it. So, is that still a fair view of cloud to kind of talk about plugging electricity in the wall for IT? I think that is so trite, right? And it came up in the panel we had with Andres and Beckelsheim and Graham and myself. Because, you know, it's so standardized, 120 volts AC, right? You know, hey, maybe it gets distributed in this four, four, four, three phase, but you know, it is so standardized, it hasn't moved, right? You know, socket standards, right? You're done. You know, think how fast this cloud world is evolving. Right, the line between IaaS and PaaS that we just touched upon, the services that are being offered on top of it. Yeah, all of these different things. You know, to me that is such a trite, simple analogy that it has become so abused and abused in the process that I think it leads people to such wrong conclusions, right? About what we're doing and the innovation that's going on here and the potential that we're going to offer. So I hope that every one of our competitors takes that and says that's the right model because I think it leads them to exactly the wrong conclusion. I couldn't agree more. The big switch is the big myth. I wanted to get tactical for a minute. I listened to your conference calls. I can't wait to read the transcript. I just got to listen to the calls. But just observing those and the conversations around here, I was going to ask you, I always ask CEOs what keeps you up and I always say execution. So let's focus on execution for the 12 to 18 months. I came up with the following. Maintain dominance in vSphere. Get revenue beyond vSphere. Broaden end-user license agreements. Increase end-user computing adoption and proof points around hybrid cloud. Are those the big ones? Did I miss anything? That's a good list. Yeah, that's a good list. That's the thing. Those are things that observers should watch over the next, say, 12 to 18 months as indicators of success and of what you're doing and what you're driving. Yeah, and clearly inside of that, with SDDC, obviously we think this environment for networking, right? We've really, I'll say, delivered that. That would be one in particular inside of that category that we would call out with regard to our hybrid cloud strategy. It's clearly globalizing that platform. We announced SAVS here, but we need to make this available on a global basis. You go to an enterprise customer and they're going to say, I need services in Japan. I need services in Singapore. I need to be able to operate on a global basis. So clearly having that platform building out the services on top of it is another key aspect of building those hybrid use cases and more of the value on top of it. And then in the EUC space, we touched a bit on the mobile thing already. So we'll have Martino on later, but his PowerPoint demonstration. What a rockstar. What a rockstar. We've had him on before. He's fantastic, but his PowerPoint demonstration was very simple, made it seem so simple. It's not going to be that easy to virtualize the network. Can you talk about the headwinds there and the challenges that you have and the things that you have to do to actually make progress there and really move the needle? Yeah, it really sort of boils down in two aspects. One is we are suggesting that there will be a software layer for networking that is far more scalable, agile, and robust than you could do in a physical networking layer. That's a pretty tall order. I need to be able to scale to tens, hundreds, millions of VMs. I need to be able to scale to terabits of cross-sectional packet flow through this. I need to be able to deliver services on top of this that truly allow firewalls, load balancers, IDSs, all of those things to be agile, scale, yeah, it is ambitious. This is the most radical architectural statements in networking in the last 20 or 30 years and that's what gets Martino passionate. So there's a lot of technical scale and we really feel good about what we've done of being able to prove that with robust scalability for which, like the hypervisor, it is more reliable than hardware today and be able to be able to make that same statement about NSX that just like ESX, it is better than hardware in terms of its reliability, its resilience, that's an important thing for us to accomplish technically in that space and then the other pieces showing customer value, getting those early customers and what a powerful picture, GE, Citigroup, and eBay. It's like, wow, these are massive customers and being able to prove the value and the use cases in the customer settings and if we do those two things, we think that truly we will have accomplished something very, very special in the networking domain. Pat, talk about the innovation strategy. You've been now a year under your belt at VMware and you're obviously with EMC and Intel and we mentioned on theCUBE many times, cadence of Moore's law was kind of the culture of Intel. Why don't you talk about the innovation strategy of VMware going forward, your vision, but also talk about the culture and talk about the one thing that VMware has from a culture that makes it unique and what is that unique feature of the VMware culture? Yeah, and we spent time as a team talking about what is it that drives our innovation, that drives our passion and clearly as we've talked about our values as a team, it is very much about this passion for technology and passion for customers and how those two coming together fundamental disruptive wow kind of technologies where people just say like they did with it when they first use ESX and they say wow, I just didn't ever envision that you could possibly do that and that's the experience that we want to deliver over and over again, right? So hugely disruptive, powerful, software driven virtualization technologies for these domains but doing it in a way that customers just fall in love with our technologies and as I got a note from Sanjay and I just asked him, what do you think of VMworld? And he said, right, it is like a cult geek fest because there's just this deep passion around what people do with our technology, right? And they're not even at that point, they're not customers, they're not partners, they are deeply aligned, passionate zealots around what we are doing to make their lives so much more powerful, so much more enabled, right? And ultimately, a lot more fun. I mean, it's like being a car buff, you know, you got to know the engine, you want to know the speeds and feeds, it is a tech culture. Yeah, it is absolutely great. Pat, thanks for coming on theCUBE, we've spent a lot of time with you here. I know we went a little bit over, appreciate your time, always great to see you. It's great to see you as well. Looking good, tech athlete, Pat Gelsinger touching all the bases here. So last night at AT&T Park, great event here, VMworld 2013, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break, Pat Gelsinger, CEO on theCUBE.