 Welcome back everybody. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts at BMC Day. Hope we get some good B-roll here, Andy. Some good action out here in Boston Harbor. We're here with Brian Graceley and Stu Miniman. We got the part of the Silicon Angle Wikibon team out here. We've got our annual dinner tonight, legal seafood, looking forward to that. Check out the harbor side first floor. We'll be there if you're around. Dave, we're in the shadows of where the Cube first event was too. We're right back here in Boston. Chowda Fest, as we called it at BMC World back 2010. Yeah, so let's do a little wrap up on what's happened. You know, it's the time of season where we talk about what happened last year, or this year actually, and what's going to happen next year. So where do we start? I mean, what's the big news of 2015 from your takes too? Yeah, so I mean, Dave, when you brought me into the company almost six years ago, it was the discussion of convergence. You know, we talked everywhere about kind of, breaking away those silos. And the question we have is every new technology that comes out, is it just a tool? Does it just create another new silo? Convergence, hyperconvergence has grown quite a bit. We did a couple of years ago what we call server sand, and boy is that grown in leaps and bounds. One of the big news events of the year, of course, is Dell's acquisition of EMC. And I really see Dell's positioning to be ready for this next generation of how infrastructure is going to change, not only in data centers, but in the public clouds as getting ready for that. So what they get from EMC, how they're positioned from kind of the market power that they'll have and all of those pieces. So, you know, big area in my space, convergence and everything that's grown off of it has only gotten bigger. And you know, boy, my phone's running off the hook on all this stuff. So Brian, from your standpoint, first of all, you know, 2015, welcome to Wikibon. It's a pleasure to have you. You know, longtime industry watcher, participant, practitioner. What's your take on 2015? So for me, the big thing was, 2015 was the year that public cloud essentially reset the rules for IT. So, Amazon now announced their numbers, and while it's still, you know, eight billion dollars is a lot of money, it's not, you know, it's not everything, but it's forcing everybody else's hand. The on-demand nature of IT resources, the transparency of pricing, the speed at which new features are coming along. I mean, we're seeing an impact a lot of different things. We saw HP get out of the public cloud market, we saw the huge Dell and EMC Merge, you know, EMC Merge, well, acquisition, which we think, you know, cloud had an impact in that. So to me, the rules are kind of being rewritten and everybody is figuring out, how do I play in this new game, or how will these new rules affect me? Yeah, and I think I'd add to that. I mean, we're seeing, and we've seen this now for a decade, a slow-motion collapse in infrastructure hardware and software pricing, and it's really driven by two main factors, there may be others, there may be cloud and open-source software. And business models are changing, people are having to respond to that, not only from the vendor side, but also from the buyer side as well. And so to me, the Dell EMC acquisition was inevitable, the HP split was inevitable, companies like BMC going private, you know, have to happen in order for them to continue to be able to fund R&D. The big question is, okay, going forward, you know, what's the market look like? Stu, you're talking about server sand, you know, really completely changing that model, you know, the pendulum swinging back, we've talked about that a lot. The way in which companies leverage this digital fabric that we talk about all the time, we heard today all talk about digital transformation, really what that's about is taking advantage of all these technologies that are out there, it's not necessarily inventing them, it's applying them and creating new business models. Yeah, absolutely, Dave, you and I went to London with the MIT Sloan School and talked about the second machine age, so it's really about automation, it's about changing processes and you know, the discussion here at BMC Day has been that digital transformation, which is, you know, how much is the technology itself going to run itself, how much of it are we going to, you know, align our organization, our processes and our people to be able to take advantage of that and that, of course, is all going to drive the business. It's pulling together, I thought a great line today is it's no longer information technology, it's business technology, we have to talk about it, so the merging of those two, because as an infrastructure person, I always know the role of infrastructure was to deliver the apps and the role of apps is to help drive the business, so it's helped getting back to that kind of core of what we're working at, and it ties into kind of the discussion we've had of containers all year and all the platforms that are going on. Well, infrastructure as code is, you know, the hot buzz phrase, but people kind of kind of be careful what they wish for, right? I mean, it's great to talk about, but it's really certainly transformable, transforming from a developer standpoint, but it's really changing the economics of the IT business. Brian, I wonder if you could talk about that from both perspectives, from the IT organization that I should use, Evelyn's term, the business technology organization, what does it mean, and how do you see it affecting the industry? Well, I mean, we heard some numbers this morning, I'll sort of quote them, you know, this was talking about IT losing control, and we're at a BMC show, which is, you know, IT ops and trying to enable this, I mean, 40% of spend is going outside of IT, right? It's not that it's going away, it's going outside of IT. 80% of the people are trying to go around IT to make decisions, 60% are trying to bypass it, 30% of applications are moving to the cloud. IT needs to either kind of get on board or they're potentially in some big trouble, and the thing is, there's never been more technology, and in some cases, free open source technology to help them do that. They've got to get better at it because the baseline's being set by the guys in the public cloud, Amazon, Azure, Google, you know, how fast you can roll stuff out, and at the end of the day, if I run a business, I don't care how many ports you had to plug in or what you had to configure, I want the business to go faster, I want to grow it. There's a lot of change that's going to happen and people are going to have to figure out how to get better at these things. I think of that, you know, the old Microsoft commercials, what do you want to do today? I mean, are we going to enter an era, Stu, of virtually everything is a service? I mean, is that what the future holds for us? Well, yeah, absolutely, people want to consume it that way, and it's how fast we can respond to the business, and, you know, boy, you know, cycle times. Brian and I have been looking at this quite a bit. Think of the old, you know, typical software release. You know, it's 12 months. You look at what was going on in the open stack community. It's every six months, you look at what's going on in a lot of the open source, especially like, you know, Docker and that whole ecosystem, it's every two months. So, you know, we know that things are going to change constantly, just the speed of change and how fast we have to move at that. So, and absolutely, people want to consume it more in kind of that operational model. But it's, I think we don't agree maybe with the term bimodal, but I'm going to have, you know, some things that I purchase in a capital expense model and others that I manage in an OPEX model. So, we've been talking for years as well about the cartel. You know, the chess board is owned by a few, you know, select the handful, I should say, of large companies. And somebody makes a move and it ripples through the industry. I think we're seeing that with Dell EMC, but you can be basically IBM, you know, Oracle, HP splitting up, Dell EMC, Cisco. Let's talk about Cisco a little bit. You know, Brian's a former company. Just Chuck Robbins, you know, everybody in our little world is like, oh, they have to buy a storage company and maybe they do because if you don't have an integrated stack, maybe you're screwed. But if you're Chuck Robbins, I'm guessing your head is not in storage right now. He's thinking in and of everything and, you know, much bigger picture, but at the same time, there's a data center business there. So, with or Cisco? Well, so he's obviously brand new when he's been at Cisco for 20-some years, cleaned house a lot, you know, brought in a whole new management staff that, you know, whether he's doing it with John Chambers or not, we'll see. You know, the thing for them, so networking has been the one place that, you know, they still have a huge market share, 60 plus percent market share. I think we saw some data the other day. The white boxes are still in the, you know, single digits. So that phenomenon that has hit storage in terms of sort of commoditizing hasn't hit networking nearly as hard, but he's got to figure out how do I network those next billion, 10 billion devices? So that's a big deal, but the trick for that is, unlike the internet build out where, you know, you were building those roads, they got to play a role higher in the stack and that's going to be what's interesting for Cisco because now you're going to get into, am I interacting with the data companies? Am I interacting with the analytics companies? And Cisco acquires well, but that's a big jump in the stack from an acquisition perspective. We'll see how quickly they give them the big checkbook to maybe go do something like that. Yeah, I mean, Brian mentioned earlier that Amazon's kind of rewritten the rules. In some spaces, we're seeing massive changes. Look at what's going on in the compute space. The ODMs made a big push. Dell moving with EMC, HP splitting, IBM selling off the X86 to Lenovo. The compute space is changing a lot. I mean, Dave, I worked at a big storage company for 10 years. If you saw more than a couple of 10% move in the market, everybody kind of freaked out. Today, in 2015, there were big moves. I mean, not just the acquisition moves. In 2016, you're going to see a couple of points move in a few directions, product lines are moving, going through massive transitions, but as Brian says, networking hasn't really seen that change. White box, not only are the white boxes in single digits, it's flat. The revenue has not been growing. I was talking to a Wall Street guy last week, and he kind of walked through through the numbers and he was like, you know, Stu, it's at 2% of the market, and it's been that way for the last two years. So while many of us thought that things like SDN and baking in networking functionality might really disrupt Cisco, most people at this point think that Cisco has weathered this last wave. Now, as IoT comes to the market and some other big waves come, everybody always wants to go after Cisco. And as public cloud, you look at what Oracle's doing, look at what Amazon's doing, look at what Microsoft's doing. There's edge cases where they can try to eat away at Cisco, but Cisco's got a pretty strong position. IVM's another interesting one. My tongue in cheek is Dell buys EMC, IVM buys the weather company, you know, what the heck's going on? A lot of IVM's competitors like to say, oh, IVM's getting out of hardware, they're giving up on hardware. You know, they're not, you know, it's still, you know, Z, which is the original converged infrastructure, high margin business and, you know, the power of the open power movement, kind of interesting, storage is sort of going toward software defined. But the real shift in IVM is around analytics, around Watson, IVM announced the big IoT initiative today. They hired Harriet Green from Thomas Cook as a new executive, Dion Newman's now the VPA marketing. Classic IVM, right, they opened up, I don't know, eight new facilities, IoT expertise centers, a thousand developers, a bunch of new APIs, it's like this engine. It's a Watson, it seems to be this really interesting beast that nobody in the traditional enterprise, you know, is able to replicate and IVM's pouring, you know, a lot of money, billions into Watson. So I think it's, you know, going to pay off. Interestingly, you saw, I think earlier this week, Facebook announced it's open sourcing, it's AI capability, and talk to the real alpha geeks and they say, look, Google and Facebook have the best AI, Watson's big, IBM-like, monolithic, you know, you've pointed at a problem like healthcare and it'll take some time and then solve that problem, but in terms of flexibility, agility, it's, we've seen this movie before, Brian. What's your take on all this? So with IBM, I think you're right. I think at some point they win. It's just a matter of how long is that journey, right? How long can Wall Street wait? How long can Ginny, you know, kind of have results that she has results? The thing about, you know, people get worried about a Facebook or a Google open sourcing something, you know, does it impact a Cisco on networking or does it impact, that's a hiring play. That's essentially them saying, that is so important to my business. I need as many engineers around as I can get, I'm going to open source it. They don't have to sell it. They reap the benefits of it. It's a brilliant play by them. It's a brilliant play by the Googles of those guys. It's not so impactful to the IT industry, but it becomes, you know, kind of how do I feed this thing that drives what they do, so. The other big story, Stu, at 2015 that we haven't talked about much on theCUBE, every now and then, certainly Furrier talks about it, it's just the Microsoft, the relevance of Microsoft, the reemergence of Microsoft as a relevant player. I don't know if you saw the headlines where Bomber, you know, slapping down Satya, and who knows, it's media, but it's also Bomber, so it could be true. Was that sour grapes? I mean, don't you think Satya's doing a pretty good job? I do, and first of all, you know, talk about relevance in the marketplace. It was, you know, they were the punchline in the Silicon Valley jokes for many years, Dave, and Wikibon's research, you know, if you take SaaS infrastructure service and platform service, Microsoft's number one. I mean, you know, they might not be number one in SaaS standalone or infrastructure service standalone, but their number one overall, they have still, Dave, they own their applications, and you know, it's kind of say, okay, how many customers are using Office 365, all of them? Well, how many of them just got kind of moved into buying Office 365 and haven't moved to the cloud? Well, many of them are moving there, but boy, it's Microsoft saying it's okay to go to the cloud, we're going to be your good partner, you know, they've got so many different businesses. I mean, you know, Xbox is still one of the hottest gifts, you know, of the season here, so Microsoft is relevant, they're showing up a lot more places. The other one, I mean, we touched on Google briefly, you know, big move, you know, Diane Greene, you know, running the cloud group there, something I'm really excited to look at in 2016, especially all of us that, you know, watch the ascendance of VMware as to, you know, what Google's going to do there. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum, Oracle. So, we're all at Oracle Open World. Donna Telly's there in force, bringing some of his old buddies back, you know, Barry Burke now, working at Oracle, obviously Chuck Hollis is there, you know, hiring like crazy, going all in on the red stack. It seems to me that, you know, Oracle's playbook is pretty clear, it's, you know, our way or the highway, and we're going to run better, Oracle better on Oracle, and we're going to vertically integrate, and that's what we're doing. And so, they make no apologies about it, it's a clear strategy, it's well articulated, and to me, the big thing about Oracle is, they've always spent money on R&D. Oracle's Achilles heel is that sort of cross-platform, you know, open horizontal play, but you know, Stu, you were there, what's your take on it? Yeah, so you know, we often, the term gets thrown around a lot, data gravity, but if you talk about stickiness of certain things in the environment, I've actually been surprised, you know, specific storage vendor. It's kind of easy to, you know, change what storage I have. Even virtualization, customers going, you know, from VMware over to say Microsoft, or you know, just buying some solution and KVMs baked into it is easier to move. The application is the toughest thing to change out there, and Oracle's got the biggest baddie of them all. So, you know, moving that application, Oracle's taking done a lot of work to help pull it into the cloud. You talked about Microsoft's application, IBM of course owns applications. So, you know, Oracle's got a great place and they've got a strategy to help, you know, work on their customers, their install base, and you know, boy, they've got all those Java apps. Well, I mean, you know, we always cringe because our customers, you know, complain about Oracle, you know, licensing and pricing, but the thing about Oracle, like Microsoft, when Bill Gates was running it, is when the founder is the chairman running the company and says, we are going in this direction, it has substance, you know, so many, how many announcements do we see? We were just, you know, okay, and then, you know, a year later, it's a new strategy, strategy du jour. So, Oracle's strategy, I think it's very sound. Now, let's face it, most or much of Oracle's, you know, cloud, certainly from the infrastructure side is hosting, much of it's SaaS apps are hosting. They're going to call that cloud. That's okay, that's the game everybody's playing. IBM does the same thing. And Oracle's got some work to do to get to sort of true cloud, and it's got, you know, bits and pieces, right? It's got the SaaS piece, it's got the past piece, it's got the infrastructure service, it's got the storage piece, the storage piece is in pieces. So, it's got to bring those together. As I say, when you have a leader who owns the budget, you know, there's opportunities exist there. I know you guys are tight on time. Okay, let's wrap, sort of looking ahead to 2016, what should we be looking for and, you know, any final thoughts? Well, the big thing for me for 2016 is looking at, you know, we're talking about, you know, sort of digitalization here. How fast do those new applications take off? I'm going to be looking at how big that market gets, who leads in that, is that, is that, you know, Docker, is that cloud foundry, is that those types of things? Because that has a direct impact, as we saw all this all day today, on changing the business, of impacting, you know, differentiating the business. That's a big area I want to be looking at, 2016. Yeah, for me, some of the architectural environments out there, we've been looking, David Floyd especially at, you know, the all flash arrays and some of the technologies underpinning it, some of those building block companies, if you look at, you know, Microns, inside a whole lot of devices, HPE just launched Synergy and, you know, there's Micron, all embedded in there. Western Digital and HGST just bought Sandis, so that's going to, you know, move them up from kind of the number three and four position up to, you know, almost tied with Intel for the lead in that market. You know, we've been talking for years, David, as to how flash has been growing and that wave has just, you know, grown so much momentum that, you know, well, is the next generation going to come soon? Well, flash has still got a lot of runway to take environments and those are impacting, you know, the storage architectures, the server sand architectures and the cloud environments that go on. So, you know, massive change. So for me, it's, you know, deep throughout fall of the money, my thing is for 2016 is follow the value. And I think it's, for organizations out there, it's not, you don't have to invent, it's all about really how you apply technologies within that digital fabric to create a business capability. That's where you're going to get differentiation. I think as industry watchers, we always look for who's the next Intel, the next Microsoft, the next Cisco, the next EMC. It's really going to come from how you apply technology. So that's what I'm going to look for in 2016. Who's really doing that? Well guys, thanks very much for holding down the fort. When I was on my call today, it was great to see you guys in Boston, looking forward to our dinner tonight and thanks everybody for watching. We're here at BMC Day, you know, covering all the angles. This is theCUBE. Check out all the action on Wikibon.com. That's where all the research lives. SiliconANGLE.tv is where all the CUBE videos are. And of course, SiliconANGLE.com for all the news, CrowdChat.net. This is theCUBE. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Brian Graceley. We'll see you next time.