 Live from New York, it's The Cube, covering Big Data NYC 2015. Brought to you by Hortonworks, IBM, EMC, and Pivotal. Hi everybody, this is Sam Cahane over at Big Data NYC at Strata. We're here at The Cube party in NYC. I'm here, Martin Yip and Justin Murray. Guys, welcome to The Cube. Thank you for having us. Thank you, it's nice to be here. So they are part of the VMware Big Data team? Yes. So gentlemen, what brings you to the event? Well, you know, big data fits right in with what VMware wants to do. Really the role of infrastructure, whether it's physical or virtual, is to support application. That includes traditional business critical applications like Oracle and SAP, as well as modern cloud, mobile, social and big data application. And that's what we're here about, virtualizing big data. Great. So a lot of the VMware customers want to use VMware under their big data, and we provide tools and infrastructure and guidance to them on how to do that. And it really optimizes their infrastructure. So what do you think is the most exciting part of what VMware is doing in this field right now? Well, one of the most exciting things is large Hadoop clusters are moving over to virtualization. So we have clusters that are more than a hundred nodes of Hadoop running on vSphere. And customers are thinking about this as opposed to putting it in the cloud. So they're doing it in-house because in certain cases it turns out to be cheaper to do it that way. Great. So speaking of customers, do you have any good customer stories that you want to tell to theCUBE? Yeah, we have a very large digital marketing company that has deployed Hadoop on VMware in production using ISO on storage. We have a cloud provider in the UK that provides UK government services. Skyscape is an able company. And they service their citizens using Hadoop on VMware. Yeah, there's a huge demand right now. It's a huge demand. I think we've talked to about 200, 250 customers over the past couple of years on this. Fantastic. So, gentlemen, what are you hoping to see at the show this year at Strata? What are you looking to learn? Really, it's all about reaching out to our customer base, helping them along their journey of virtualizing big data, answering any questions for them, and just really showing them how to actually go about doing it. And what we've seen at the show particularly is Spark, the new in-memory technology, is going mainstream. Last year it was a new thing. This year people are actually using it. And we're putting that on VMware as well. So large memory virtual machines running on VMware are not an uncommon thing. And we can do Spark on VMware as well. And that's very exciting because it's a key enabler for machine learning and all the new ideas that are coming out in Hadoop. Great. So I want to leave our viewers with one strong fact to go with. So if you're going to say what's a big takeaway from this interview, what would you say? We'll start with you. It's absolutely possible to virtualize your big data applications. And the key is to just do architecture correctly, start small and then scale up with it. It is possible, start small and grow from there. Yeah, those are very fair points. You shouldn't be afraid to virtualize. You're not going to lose performance if you do it right. You can indeed start small and scale out using our tools. So the Big Data Extensions tool is a specific product that we give you for free to build your Hadoop cluster on virtual machines and then scale it out. And that's going to make an easy on-run to virtualizing Hadoop. Great. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. You just heard it from the VMware Big Data team. So this is Sam Kahane over at Big Data NYC at the CUBE party. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Nice to meet you. Thanks, guys.