 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Wikibon.org, and we are here, live at EMC World 2012. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of EMC World. We've been here all day Monday. We're here all day today. We'll be here all day Wednesday. This is theCUBE where we bring you the smartest nodes on the planet. We extract information. We try to get the signal from the noise and bring it to you, our audience. If you've got questions, email, or sure, email. Forget email, I'll never see it. Tweet me at D.Vellante. I'm here with At Stu, my colleague from Wikibon, and go to SiliconANGLE.com, go to SiliconANGLE.tv, go to Wikibon.org, check out the resources there. You've got questions, hopefully we have answers. But we're here at EMC World, big event, live, 13,000 people here, and we're here with Adam Nagy, who we had on recently on theCUBE in San Francisco at the VSpecs launch. He's with VMware, and I'm sure you're excited to be here. I'm thrilled, thank you so much for having me here and I'm really enjoying EMC World. I'm actually blown away. I think these guys have done a fantastic job. Yeah, big day. Huge number of people. Big day this morning, you're CEO, Paul Moritz. Paul did a fantastic job. Pat did an incredible job yesterday with his keynote. Joe was on fire, so it was really all-round, very, very exciting to be here. You know, I'm sensing a different philosophy, maybe his philosophy's not the right word, there's a different feel for the show this year. And I think actually, I've made this observation with Chuck Hollis, is I think that EMC has taken a page out of VMware and VMworld. Now, it's not quite as ecosystem-friendly, right? It's still very EMC-heavy, but when you go to VMworld, it's all about the ecosystem. You know, you talk to guys like Todd Nielsen for every dollar spent on VMware licenses. There's, I think, 17, that number keeps going up. It's 19 now. It's 19 now? I don't know who does these numbers. I believe it, though, because this show is all about the ecosystem. And you're starting to see EMC really fill the void for partnerships in the IT business. You got the Red Stack with Oracle, IBM Big Blue. I mean, they're great companies, great brands, and obviously they have a big ecosystem, but there's a vacuum in terms of the partner-friendly nature of these systems. So we're seeing much more partnerships going on. The VSpecs announcement was a lot about those partnerships. So is that just my, you know, the correct censor is very insightful. I think you're picking up something that I actually pointed out yesterday to a couple of EMC guys as well. I'm sensing that it's more than just storage and more than just EMC. There's a broader ecosystem play that touches multiple facets. VSpecs is an outstanding example of it. They brought in five, six, seven different vendors, put together the reference architecture. I've talked to maybe 10, 15 partners since then, and I've heard nothing but praise about the program and having access to this type of reference architecture and accelerates the sales cycles. So EMC is kind of really leveraging itself in a much more effective way by looking at some of these third-party resources and really helping accelerate the go-to market. I mean, it's a strange dynamic, right, because you're owned by EMC, but you're software company. So I mean, to you, you want to be friends with all the hardware guys, and you are. I mean, VMware has to be independent in that regard. Very much so. How do you walk that fine line, though? Well, I think you really look at what makes, what customers are looking for, right, are really solutions to problems that not one vendor is going to be able to provide, and when you're able to really bring those solutions to bear by bringing a differentiated value from a hardware partner and a differentiated value from maybe another software partner, and bring that together, that's what successful partnership really brings to bear. So what we focus our attention on is, look, we've got a platform, we want to have the APIs as accessible as possible, we want to be as open and enabling as possible, but we feel strongly that when we do our best, our partners can do our best, and their best, and that really drives the right levels of solutions. A great example, right, this announcement we made yesterday with the VNX Storage Analytics. VNX is a fantastic platform for storage. Customers are driving huge amounts of adoption with their mid-range storage story. We take something like VCOps, which Paul talked about this morning, which has the heuristics ability to really take analytics across multiple VMs and really bring back data. Paul brought up the example of 500 million data points coming back from one customer. So bringing that with the mid-range storage platform so that VNX monitoring capability can be exposed through VCOps, that's the best of both worlds. That's where customers really be able to optimize their infrastructure, leveraging VMware's technology. And so we look to those types of relationships with Cisco, be it with other partners, those are enhancements that I think the customers really appreciate. Dave, I'm wondering if I can pick up on that. So we were discussing the keynote yesterday, and it seems for the last three or four years, Joe and Pat have been talking VMware, VMware, VMware. And it was a different message yesterday. It was no longer about, we know virtualizing mission critical applications is important and they're making progress there, but with the mega launch announcement, you could actually see really deep integration and not just something qualified for VMware, but some of the kind of IP underneath working with VMware. So as Adam was saying, VNX has the software that's kind of built with it. So we've seen I think a bit of a progression as to the synergies between the engineering organizations. That's an excellent point. We can all certify, but when we look to investing engineering resources so we can make differentiated value, I mean that's a real test of whether this is really a partnership or we're just putting brands up on it. So let me just make sure I understand this. You're saying, Stu and Adam, that you're talking about a deeper level of integration that creates value. Can we, can you add a little color to that? What specifically are we talking about here? So what we're talking about here is that VCOps has the ability to capture data across physical and virtual, and you can establish collectors for certain types of hardware so that it can capture all the monitoring information that comes out. But as Paul talked about, he says, look, we can, we go into a customer with VCOps and when there's an outage two months ago or a month ago, we take all the data from the point of that outage and we can collect it and analyze it and give it back to a customer to say, look, now VCOps will be able to do predictive work over the next three to six months so that you can avoid these types of outages in the future. Well taking that collector, adding onto it what EMC knows about what could happen to a VNX gives that true value add back to a customer so that VNX is enhanced looking through a VCOps portal. We're creating something called the storage analytics solution with EMC so that they can be able to provide that for the VNX. Okay so that's added value above and beyond I see a storage piece in VCOps. So you create a platform on top of which I can build predictive applications, is that right? On top of which we can do predictive monitoring through the VCOps management. So predictive monitoring meaning what specific? The application is already there, that predictive monitoring application exists? What it means is that when I'm capturing tens of thousands of data points, sometimes the red alerts are not really, I need to stop everything and turn it all off. There's actually a sense that a red alert is an okay thing and what VCOps is actually really capable of doing is capturing all that data, analyzing it historically and then being able to look and say so these set of red alerts we can ignore, we'll put it as yellow, but these set of red alerts has historically created problems. Real red alerts. And you know when you're looking at this volume of information that's how you have to be thinking about it. You can't be looking at one app on one machine and Nick Drive has gone out, well what am I going to do? If Google has over a million servers, they don't have a guy running into a server room to pull out a Nick. They're trying to make it as automated and operational efficiency as possible. We're trying to come as close to as possible. Yeah so you're talking about a truly self-healing environment. Yeah at some point. Eventually you want to get to that. Yeah. You fix that component, but essentially getting to a state where that's really the only thing that a human has to do is maybe pull something and put it in and replace a component. Ideally. We think that's the ideal goal for it. Well I mean Google's sort of the gold standard of that right? And it's a mix right? I mean there's an infrastructure component to it, there's an app component to it as well. You develop a certain type of app. Google's got a very unique app, but hopefully enterprises can take lessons, learn from both of those. Well that's a challenge for enterprises. There's a lot more complexity and diversity and the applications need to be maintained. So we're doing the best I think for them given that they've got an infrastructure they have to maintain, a security profile that they have to maintain, but they can still get some of the advantages. So VM we're obviously early on part of the VCE coalition. Yes. V block any flavor you want as long as it's chocolate. Or I could have picked vanilla or I could have picked strawberry, but some really good chocolate. Yeah right. A good diver. Chocolate. It comes in different sizes. Yeah so maybe it is. Maybe the analogy is chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. So yeah as long as it's that. You can't get pistachio. It's the neapolitan of the convergent. Right right right right. So now we have V specs coming in. And so you guys obviously made a lot of in rows there. So V specs coming in. What does that mean to you? Give us an update on what's happening. Sure. You know there I know you're not the V specs spokesperson. No no I'll be happy to. So VMware's perspective. Look for V blocks we've had a tremendous amount of success. Because there is a certain customer set that says I want chocolate, I don't want to make chocolate, I don't want to be in the business of developing this. I want you to bring me the best of breed, pre-build it, I'll buy a SKU, implement it. And they've had tremendous traction, hundreds of customers. And one of the statistics that I love to hear from them is you know 40% repeat buy. So a person brings it in, uses it and they're going to buy another V block. That's a tremendous indication given how much of an investment that is. Right. But from a partner perspective that offers a solution that can be expanded if I say look maybe I don't want to buy a SKU. Maybe I do want to do a little bit of customization. So maybe I want to have some type of enhancements that I want to bring in a third-party technology from a switching perspective or a third-party server technology that I want to bring in. The partners look to that level of flexibility. Or a different hypervisor. I mean that's. I've never heard that but I'm sure that. I'm sure it can be. It's technically possible, God knows why you'd want to do that. So you want to make this theoretical, I believe. But in essence, that partner gets the advantage of that pre-built, tested, validated infrastructure. But then they can go to that customer and say let me help you implement that. And they provide more value at that. So from a distributor perspective and a reseller perspective, like I said before I've heard nothing but positive praise as to how V-specs is being used and I think the traction it's going to get is going to be phenomenal. It serves both sets of customers. So Dave, obviously I've been looking at this space really closely and I heard a good analogy recently which is a V-block is a system and V-specs is a program. So systematically we've said, VCE is really the tip of the spear and there might be a reason that somebody needs something a little bit different or their upgrade cycles don't quite fit into what they need so there's plenty of reasons why that single skew won't work and what V-specs does is give EMC and VMware and all the partners that they have that big catcher's mitt to catch things that don't fall into the VCE bucket. And VCE can just focus on what they need to deliver that Neapolitan solution. So how do I wonder if I could switch gears a little bit and talk about the developer angle. VMware obviously has a very clear developer strategy. I think Maritz has driven that, Todd Nielsen as well. Very important component. We all saw what Microsoft did in the 80s with its developer strategy, the leverage that Microsoft's got out of that and I think VMware clearly is a modern day version of that. The converged infrastructure space brings new opportunities for development, particularly in the area of DevOps and we've been hearing a lot about the intersection of application development and operations and I'm wondering if you're actually seeing that occur in the customer base. I mean within the Wikibon community probably about 20% of the audience says hey we're doing DevOps and we're getting hyper degrees of productivity, you know cross training, application development and operations. Are you seeing that in the VMware customer base and is it an explicit part of the developer strategy that you're pursuing? You know, I am hearing there is more interest in this because I think what we've been trying to do is I think you rightfully say we focused on a developer community and we're looking at how we can take the development community and really make the infrastructure somewhat invisible to what a developer has to look at. In the old days when we built applications we actually had to consider that it was going to lie on this type of infrastructure, we had to write to device drivers, we had to really think about what that underlying infrastructure has been. We've taken I think a step with Cloud Foundry and some of the work we're doing with Spring to really enhance and map to a new development community that really doesn't know where that application is going to sit, doesn't really want to be considering that as part of the implementation but I think we've been looking at also the other side of it which says an app director type of solution that we're bringing to the customer base today can really take the profiles of how those applications have been built and really map those templates back out to an infrastructure so that you can have a bill of materials, almost a translation that occurs between the developer creating that application and the IT person responsible for promoting that out into production. It's a first step, I wouldn't say that it's the DevOps ideal just yet but without a doubt I can really see that combined with some of the software defined data centers concepts that we're thinking about where we can really bring network storage, compute artifacts up to a development community so I can map to a virtual data center and think about all the security profiles that I need to put with that. That I think is the beginning of where we're at the intellect to get to. Yeah and I think that a lot of customers I talk to are just getting to agile programming but I think that many of them have an opportunity to basically integrate the agile with the DevOps and I think the converged infrastructure pieces is a fundamental part of that strategy that really simplifies the ops piece of the DevOps so maybe it's ops dev. You know we took compute and we've been able to take say the provisioning of a server from 10, 15 minutes now which is what somebody can do from four or five weeks what it used to take before and I think what we're looking at is in the future apps should be able to be developed much faster with an agile type of methodology but also provisioned and updated and managed in a much more efficient way. There are surprising hindrances in the data center today especially around things like firewalls and load balancers and network security that I think if we're all working together to kind of map that with an ecosystem we can make some significant headway. Excellent. Adam Nagy, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you again. I hopefully we'll see you at VMworld. Yeah, absolutely. We'll be out there to sit with you and enjoy more time. Let's do that. Thank you Stuart, really appreciate the time. Okay everybody, we'll keep it right there. We'll be right back. We've got Bill Cook coming on who's the CEO of Green Plum, president of the Green Plum division. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.