 Cover VMworld because the cloud has arrived, it's the reality of the cloud is here, and people have to figure out what to do. And VMware has a lot of sessions going on today, ton of announcements at the keynote, and our focus is the cloud as a reality. We're gonna talk about those realities, no hype, and only proof points. And so through the next four days here at Moscone, we're gonna be live with 23 customers of private cloud, hybrid cloud, all these new things, and 18 partners of VMware. They're all here, even Microsoft's here. So we're gonna cover that, but let's get right in, Rick. So let's talk about the show. How do you feel and what's the core messaging? Well, I'm excited about the show, as you can talk about cloud computing and how relevant it is. We've got over 16,000 people at this event this year, which is a new record for us. And I think that really speaks to how much people are interested in continuing their virtualization journey into the cloud. We're gonna deliver over 20,000 labs onsite this week, and all of it is being delivered out of the cloud. So we're actually using our partners of Verizon Business and TerraMark. We've got it all set up in the cloud, two locations on the East Coast, servicing 20,000 on-demand labs right here at VMworld. So we're eating our own dog food as well. VMware is known, obviously, virtualization is driving all this disruptive change and changing everybody. All of your competitors are changing, you guys are changing, and you're well known in the communities of geeks and the tech guys. They know all about VMware, certainly in the enterprise now, cloud service providers. What message are you gonna send them? And then, can you talk about the message that you're gonna talk to CIOs? Because they're now realizing that the cloud is a reality, and they gotta do something. If they don't do something, it's gonna cost more. That's right, the cloud is something you can't ignore. I mean, the great thing about the cloud is that it really represents a new type of consumption model. And with that consumption model, it's all about self-service on demand. So now what we're seeing is that IT organizations have competition. If you can't deliver that kind of service to your constituency, they're going around. They're finding new ways to go online, pull out the credit card, and actually purchase infrastructure on demand. So IT's got a shift. And the great thing about our customer base is that virtualization is the platform for cloud computing. It lays the foundation. It's what creates the architecture. So those customers can actually continue with the virtualization journey towards that cloud computing architecture, and then begin to think about changing IT, and how IT is consumed, not just produced. A lot of people have been talking about the cloud, but we all know what it really means. That means people can do stuff with less cost, but we all have things like iPhones. People standardize on iPhones. So the end user environment is changing, and enterprise have been slow to react. Talk about the messaging that you guys are going to talk about that. Absolutely. In fact, I'm a great example of that. I've got my iPad in front of me as I'm keeping up with everything that's going on at the event. My iPhone, really what's happening is that as we think about new models for delivering IT and consuming IT, we have to become more end user-centric. It's not about personal computers. It's not about desktop computing. It really is about end user computing and how end users want to work in this new world. And that, we do that in our consumer lives. We have the best technology experience in our consumer lives. What we need to do now is transform business IT to think about how that convergence of consumer IT and business IT needs to come together so that end users are satisfied in the business environment as well. So you can change the language a little bit. We used to talk about VDI, virtual desktop infrastructure. That's evolving. Absolutely. Absolutely. To really incorporate these devices. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. VDI is an important step in bringing the desktops into that controlled, secure, managed environment. Because the first thing we have to do is we need to liberate our information and our applications from the device themselves. If my information is stuck on a device, when I move to the next device, how do I get it? So that VDI is an important step of taking all of those Windows PCs and pulling the application and information from users back into the cloud environment so that now I can begin to have that strategy to deliver it to them on any device, anywhere, anytime. So it's an important first step. It's really about that mobile enterprise as well as that desktop infrastructure that's really starting to come together here. That's right. That's right. So talk a little bit about the three legs of the stool. You guys talk a lot about applications and infrastructure and the devices now and user computing. When does that come together at the event? Well, we see it as a three tiered IT stack for this new world of IT as a service. Obviously at the foundation of the stack is infrastructure. And infrastructure has to evolve to be completely elastic, dynamic and agnostic of location. So infrastructure has to be a model that bridges internal data centers to public cloud infrastructure to a point that it's almost seamless where I'm getting my compute resources from. So that's the foundation. But that helps with existing applications with existing infrastructure. The next layer of the stack is all about developing new applications for this new world of cloud computing and end user computing. And so we also have a cloud application platform that we're announcing this week at VMworld that really is about helping developers to very quickly develop new cloud portable cloud scalable cloud optimized applications that run in that cloud infrastructure. And then at the end of the day comes down to guys like us. How do we access it? And that's the end user computing layer. How do we change the model of end user computing so that it's easy to access that those applications and that information anywhere, anytime, any device but in a secure way. Because we always have to think about manageability and security when we talk about IT. So when we were talking earlier before you came on about some previous shows, we had the big data centers. That's not the case this year. That's right. You can talk a little bit about that and share with the audience what's new there. Yeah, we threw a little curve ball this year. So last year at the event we built an onsite private cloud. So it was a large data center onsite in the building and everybody came down the escalators and was like, wow, look at all the blinking lights and all these big hardware servers and all that. This year it's gone. And so people have been coming up to me saying, Rick, where's the data center? It's up there. It's visible. It's a virtual data center. It's actually in the clouds. So the data center is going virtual. We know that virtual machines have overpassed physical machines, which is a big tipping point. Big tipping point. How close are we to virtual data centers surpassing physical data centers? Or does that even exist? Well, I think that's a hard thing to define because the great thing about virtualization is that people are able to evolve their existing data center to that virtual world. I think the interesting point becomes when we see people leveraging data centers that go beyond their own four walls. And that's really what this is all about. The industry likes to talk about it as hybrid cloud computing. That seems a little technical to me. I think about it as ubiquitous cloud. Ubiquitous cloud computing means that I can leverage resources in my environment, whether they exist on premise or off premise, whether I'm managing it directly or I have a service provider managing it for me, but it all comes together as part of my... The workforce has changed. The IT consumer, the employee, it's changed to a desk with a PC. People have remote office, people work at home. People are mobile. I see mobile's driving in. Is that a key driver you see? That's the mobility? Absolutely, and in fact, if you think about the workforce that's coming in over the next decade, the workforce that has been digital from the time that they were young kids, and they only know how to interact with different mobile type devices. In fact, I find it interesting that, when you talk to kids these days, email is considered an archaic technology. So it is changing dramatically on how they consume and deliver information and interact with each other. Those concepts have to come into business as well, because that's the workforce of the future. And they require different network. I mean, we're in a new network architecture that's evolving, right? I mean, this new network that's emerging has certain criteria that has to have minimum to serve up these new apps and these new environments. That's right. And we're driving scale and amounts of data that we never thought possible. And it's been interesting being in this industry for a while how every kind of new IT shift, we think, wow, the scale we're achieving, the amount of people that are now accessing IT is so big, but yet we continue to just expand and expand. And so you really- Tsunami of data. Exactly. You really have to rethink the whole approach to how you deliver computing services in this cloud-based world. So a couple of final questions from me, and then I'll let Dave ask a few final questions. What proof points in the industry and then in the new cloud environment can you talk about from your perspective that you're seeing very clearly? Well, the first thing is that we watched last year how CIOs, one of the top questions on their mind was tell me about cloud computing. And it was very inquisitive and education-oriented. Going into 2010, early 2010, it was more of I need to understand my strategy. So what am I going to do to embrace cloud computing? Here we are, August of 2010, and we're seeing people on the bandwagon actually implementing cloud strategies. And we've got customers that are running well ahead of us implementing hybrid cloud environments. And so we're trying to produce and innovate technology to support them, but they're going. So we're actually seeing- The train is leaving the station for there. They're going for it. That's right, because they see that the opportunity for them is to really focus on that consumption value. And that's where real business value's going to come from. And happy customers too, and users are happier. I mean, they've got to be not happy having a BlackBerry and an iPhone. That's right. I've got to have freedom of choice and freedom of device. So I wonder if you could, when you've touched upon it a lot in terms of the cloud and your cloud vision, a lot of people in the cloud think about Google and Facebook and Amazon, how would you describe the differences between VMware's vision and the cloud and say Google and Amazon's vision of the cloud? Sure. I think that those companies represent the allure of cloud computing. And in 2009, there was a lot of questions that were formed from the perspective of how do I get that scale and that automation that a Google has or a Facebook has? How is it they operate their data centers so efficiently and at such a low cost point? That's what I need to get to inside my enterprise data center. So they created a value proposition that became interesting to the rest of the IT industry. Our goal at VMware is to create that platform and that architecture that we can deliver to both businesses inside their IT data center as well as work with the cloud service providers to provide that same infrastructure stack to the cloud service providers so that we create this world of compatibility, seamless management, seamless security, portability of workloads, across internal data centers and external data centers, but it's a world of choice. Just like I don't want to be told what device I have to use to access my environment, we don't believe customers should be forced into a single environment for cloud infrastructure. So we're creating this world of choice and interoperability. Okay, so what you mean by that is you'd love to see VMware everywhere, but the interest and exits into the system are open so that if you wanted to go elsewhere with a hypervisor for a demo, you could. We're going to watch the time I know you got to get going to your. I just want to respond to that one question. That's a great question. We have to do this in an open standard space wave. I'm very proud of the fact that VMware has been driving industry standards to create portability of workloads across clouds, whether they're VMware enabled or not. Great example of that is OVF, open virtualization format, which is now an ANSI standard. So we've gotten that through and that allows portable workloads across hypervisors. We've been working on vCloud APIs, which is a common standard for how to manage services at the service level across multiple clouds. And many companies and service providers are now embracing that API. So we want VMware everywhere, absolutely, but we realize that it's got to be a world based on open standards so that we continue to push on interoperability and freedom of choice. Interoperability is a strong community, open source, the spraying acquisition, big open source community, open source guys. That's right. Yeah, great, great. Final point, you want to say any few words about what to expect at the show, how many people are here, what the vibe is, what's your final parting? Yeah, well, you can feel the vibe all around us, right? We'll probably have, my guess is somewhere around 16 to 16,500 people at this show this year. Tremendous growth over last year. That tells me something about the topic that people are interested in. Tomorrow at our keynote sessions, Paul Moritz, our president and CEO, and Steve Herrod, our chief technology officer, are going to be talking about this three tiered strategy, the new IT stack for IT as a service, six announcements of new products and services coming from VMware, so very exciting news, and then just a tremendous event for networking. I mean, there are an incredible partner ecosystem here, experts in cloud and virtualization all around this environment, so what a great opportunity for everybody that's here. We're here with Rick Jackson, the CMO of VMware on siliconangle.com's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010. You can find us on siliconangle.com or siliconangle.tv and our new site we launched today called Cloud Angle, covering all the angles in cloud. So Rick, thank you very much and good luck with the rest of the shows. So far, so good. Great, thank you, thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming over.