 Live from San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for VMworld 2012. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier with my co-host for this segment, Stu Miniman, our analyst with Wikibon.org. Our next guest is Jonathan Donaldson, GM of Software-Defined Infrastructure for Intel Cloud Platform Group. Welcome to the Cube. Great, thank you for having me. We'd love to have the Intel folks on one because one, we're big fans of Intel. Intel really is the bellwether in the industry. Also, you know, the computer revolution happened on Intel's watch. They enabled that and obviously, story history. But you guys have really made some good bets over the past five or seven years in cloud, and when it wasn't fashion, you guys have done a ton of work. That's paying off in dividends. So I want to ask you, you know, what has been the big lever of innovation for Intel in the cloud? Obviously, Software-Defined Data Center is in the sweet spot, and that does some acquisitions. Mac-a-pee, we don't really know. But there's some stuff happening. Right, yeah. So obviously, the first thing is obviously the virtualization technologies, the VT technologies that we help develop at Intel and then kind of leveraging from there from whatever customers, the trends that we're seeing, what our customers are asking us for. And I'm relatively new to Intel, but some of the interesting things that I've seen since I've been there is that since we typically don't sell anything directly to the customers and we go and sit down with them, they're willing to open up and actually have a real conversation with us to tell us what their problems are, what their experiences are, what we can do to make things better, because it's really not a sell-to type discussion. It would be around a specific product. So we've really kind of encompassed and brought in a lot of that feedback, as well as a lot of the work that we're doing with the really big cloud providers, and started to think down the, you know, we call it Software-Defined Infrastructure, a lot of people call it Software-Defined Data Center, with our partners at VMware and other places we're trying to see, how can we bring that sophistication into the masses, especially in the enterprise and the tier two source of outer space? If you'd chair down the Software-Defined Data Center, Software-Defined Infrastructure, how would you break that down in terms of, you know, big high-level functional blocks of innovation? Obviously, big data is a big part of it. Your recent investment in Cloud Air speaks volumes to some of the kind of big data innovations, but big data has been a big part of the data center collection of analytics for years. So, I mean, big data is one part. What are the other parts? So, I think we've all kind of started to filter down to essentially the same kind of common blocks, right? So, you have the infrastructure as a service layer, which is, you know, hey, if I'm a developer or I'm an end user and I want to go in and I want to, you know, do the virtual swipe a credit card thing inside my IT, you know, through a self-service portal, that's kind of the lowest common denominator. And then underneath that, you typically have the same functional blocks that you would see and, you know, hardware-based, silo-based infrastructure. You've got, obviously, the networking components, the storage, the compute side, as well as the, you know, the automation orchestration layers that sit underneath that, underneath that end user portal. So, those are kind of the major blocks that we see. It's probably the same ones that most people see and the same things we've all been working on together. Jonathan, I'm wondering if you could help us understand how Intel fits into, you know, VMware's vision of the software-defined data center because, you know, software, in many ways, virtualization, change the way the server is bought, but at the end of the day, it's still like 86 sitting underneath it. There's, you know, VMware's vision of where the hybrid cloud goes and then there's, you know, the big cloud guys like Amazon and Microsoft who are also using Intel's products. So, you guys have, you know, a nice catbird seat to kind of watch what's going on. So, you know, to tell us kind of the strategy of what your group is and how that kind of fits into that ecosystem. Right. So, hybrid cloud wins, right? Hands down. That's just the way it's going to be. And if you look at kind of the amazing TCO, that the big three or big four service providers, the Amazons and Googles and Microsoft's achieve in their data centers, private cloud customers, enterprise customers are looking to achieve the same type of thing. And there'll be some workloads that stay internal to the company. And there'll be some that for the right reasons float external to hybrid cloud as well as bursting capabilities. And so what is Intel doing in that that area is, you know, we develop a lot of very sophisticated and a lot of troll property that goes into the Silicon that we give to our customers and sell out through our OEM partners. So what we're doing with VMware and with other entities out there that are in the software defined data center software infrastructure space is making sure that those features that our customers have paid us for are actually being exposed and being leveraged and being used. You know, the old joke that I say sometimes is, you know, much like you remember those BASF commercials, we don't make ice cream and make ice cream better. We don't make tires and make tires better. We don't make software defined infrastructure ourselves. We make that software better on Intel. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about just the relationship with the ecosystem. I think Intel has been a great example. If you look over the last decade plus, there's lots of functionality that Intel has pulled into the chipset. And in many ways that can put you, you need to partner with companies, but you're sometimes pulling some of the functionality out of what they're doing. VMware finds themselves in a very similar situation with do they build things into their stack which could pull some of the people value away, maybe push them towards, you know, Microsoft or others. You know, how do you strike that balance? You know, how does Intel maintain, you know, look at that and, you know, what do you see happening with VMware in this? Yeah, so from an Intel perspective, we try and, you know, the things that we pull in as an intellectual property into the silicon are things that, again, through those conversations, customers are telling us they're having a hard time with. Or through performance analysis with them, we understand that if we go do X, then the performance they get is significantly increased. And a lot of those are very base level functions, things like AES and I to help encryption and AVX to help math calculations. And then what we do on my team and on other teams at Intel is we go to, you know, VMware, we go to other partners that are developing that space, you know, partners that are developing databases or whatever. And we say, okay, these are the instruction sets that we have that can make your application run better. So if your application is doing storage and you have to calculate hashes for those storage objects, right, we can help you leverage the AVX technology in there to calculate even faster, more performance. So for our perspective, it's mostly about enabling the ecosystem, making sure that there's a broad spectrum of players out there that are all innovating, as long as they're, you know, hopefully innovating along with us on the Intel Silicon footprint. Jonathan, one of the big trends this morning is the hyper-converged story, obviously, in IT, other IT innovations, and there's a variety of use cases out there. But the one common trend is the simplicity angle. People want to get rid of the complexities. So from that perspective, you guys are no stranger to abstracting away complexities with chips and whatnot. So as software on a chip, all these things are happening in the data center, what's your view of that, those complexities? What complexities are you guys solving at Intel to make it simpler? Because now you have physical automation, virtual, topology changing, dynamic configurations, whether it's, you know, end points at the network layer from a software defined networking to, there's a lot of challenges, I guess. So what are you guys doing? What specifically? Yeah, so we're doing a lot of different work. So one of the things we're actually working in the community and with VMware with is on the open stack effort. We think that that as a control plane, if you will, for data center provides a lot of value to the customers. It provides a good place where they can innovate for themselves. We're doing a lot of things with VMware around what used to be Project Marvin, which is now the rail and the rack concept. We have our own that we've been working with them called the rack scale architecture, which is essentially the rack portion of that. And so it's kind of that whole hyperconverged making it simpler, making it more consumable is a common theme that we share with VMware and with lots of other companies out there because, you know, the IT days have changed a lot since when we were sitting behind the keyboard making sure that everything stayed up and it's transferred a lot. The complexities is, as you've said, a lot, a lot bigger. There's a lot more of the click click next type of UI as opposed to, you know, us sitting down at the command line trying to keep things live. Well, it begs the question, where's the server? Is it a server? Is it software? I mean, there's a server somewhere, even Brad Kessinger said on the queue, but software defined data center still needs it needs a data spread. Right. And we like that. That's absolutely. So our best goal in all of this is to enable this really broad ecosystem and see how it develops out there. And then as that develops, making sure that those the people that are leading the pack are absolutely innovating on top of Intel. Jonathan, you've got history with the convergence space. I wonder if we can click into that a little bit more. So, you know, server virtualization, you know, had some great consolidation effect for people that, you know, you weren't at Intel at the time, but, you know, we got down to fewer servers, usually beef your course. So, you know, I think Intel rode that out pretty well. It seems that convergence, one of the big savings is, you know, how do I simplify things? If I could get time to market faster, if I can really, you know, get new business processing moving, you know, where do you see as, you know, the biggest opportunity for us with kind of this new wave of technology? Yes, I think a lot of it is so you mentioned time to market, but time to value, I think is the biggest one that we've been trying to push on is that there's a lot of emerging technologies. There's, you know, new development styles that are happening out there. There's, you know, CICD. There's the whole DevOps trend that's happening. And a lot of that is kind of surfaced to kind of push forward the fact that if I'm quicker at what I do and I can get it out the market faster, then I can be strategic, right? I can actually gain benefit from that. So, the same thing for what we're trying to push in this is if we make it simpler and easier to consume and get it out in the marketplace quicker, then the time to value, not only for the people developing the software, but more importantly for the end users, it's significantly enhanced. And I think that's probably the best thing that we can do for the industry. So, if we look at IT, you know, before VMware got involved, the server was really kind of the unit of measurement. Right. Lately, it's been the VM. And I guess the discussion here is if something like Docker, really, which has had a ton of buzz picks up, you know, can we really make the application kind of the unit of measurement? So, you know, VMware, of course, has the VM as the center of the universe, even with containerization, it's going to sit on top of that. What's your thought on kind of the bare metal virtualization container type discussion? Yeah. So, I think that I think what we've seen over the years with the trends and even programming languages, right? You know, it's kind of like it's not one size fits all anymore. Right. If you're a developer, you probably know six or seven or eight different languages. I hear you've got guys still doing assemblers. Yeah, we do. All right. And we've got guys doing Go and we've got guys doing C. I'm not cobalt. Come on. No. They're probably a couple in the basement still. Just to stay fresh. Exactly. Four trans up there, too. But much like we've seen in that, there's not everything is a nail, right? So, you have to have a lot of different tools and toolbox. So, I think the goal there is, is there's going to be different ways of doing it. And we want to be able to support all of them. Well, I'm looking forward to IDF coming up. Any preview? Can you share a little bit of the buzz going into IDF? I know you guys haven't made any announcements. What's the big theme and just break down some of the things happening there? Yeah. So, I think IDF is going to be reinvigorated this year from a developer perspective. So, they've kind of taken the thought of, okay, so, how do we really, how do we move away from it being, you know, kind of product announcements, typical kind of marketing led type of discussions and really aim at our constituents, the people that are developing applications to sit on top of IA, of Intel architecture. And that's really kind of, I think the theme moving forward is to get back a little bit to our developer roots and really get some of them excited about some of the new technologies that we're coming up with. Certainly, Cloud has reinvigorated the developer movement. I hear people like, I want to win the developers. It's a winnable category. They're human beings now, right? So, having a humanization aspect to developers, I think DevOps has certainly shown the way that, and I think VMware's announcements today put an exclamation point on DevOps, which means more applications could be coming on more abstracted away complex hardware, Cloud. So, a tsunami of new developers are coming, a new generation. How do you guys categorize this new breed born on the Cloud, born in the Cloud, DevOps developers? I mean, these young guns have never loaded a Linux patch before. So, you know, integrated stacks, this is the new normal. What's your view of these guys? So, it's obviously a very interesting trend, right? So, it actually goes back, obviously, to that time to value aspect of it. So, if they're not sitting there loading Linux patches, they're actually focusing on the strategy getting their business further ahead. Now, the difficulty that places for Intel and for everyone else is, because they've never had to do that, they don't necessarily understand the value of the things that are sitting underneath them, and they don't understand the capabilities of that hardware also. So, one of the big things that we're pushing forward is, how do we expose the value that they've already purchased on Intel Silicon up into the realm so that they can actually leverage it for their own business purposes, see the efficiency, the performance gains that, you know, we've promised year after year after year. So, that's kind of really the main aspect for us on that one. Jonathan, thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. Sum up VMworld this year so far, the vibe, the direction of VMware. What's the top story? What's that top headline out there going to read tomorrow morning about VMworld? Oh, that's a tough one. I would say that this VMworld, VMware has really kind of reinvigorated their message, right? The new branding names, still learning them all, but that and their announcements around, you know, embracing the open stack community, their announcements around the V-Rail and V-Rack. I think that they're really saying, okay, we've listened to our customers. There's lots of different things that people want out there. We're going to focus on a few that give us the largest impact, and I think that's what we're going to see move forward, is VMware is back in the game to make a big impact. Yeah, interesting rails. So, is it a rail? You slide it right in. Right. Is it, is that flexible? A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks going to be coming out. Thanks for your time, really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Great market opportunity right now, the cloud's certainly hitting mainstream. A lot of convergence happening on the hyper-converge, but more importantly, VMware is in transition. You're seeing big focus on developers, and I think you're going to see a lot of explosion of innovation, and you guys lead in charge. Really appreciate it. Intel inside the cube here, live in San Francisco at VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be right back after the short break.