 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Well, good morning or good afternoon. I guess depending on the time zone, we are here at the Sands Expo day two of our coverage of EMC World 2016 here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman and it is a pleasure to welcome to our show, John Gil-Martin who is the Vice President and GM of Integrated Solutions Business Unit at VMware and John, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. Yeah, when I kind of say what's new, there's quite a bit new with you. You're all over the keynotes this morning. So a couple of big developments for you here today. Why don't you go ahead and follow up on those fours if you would. Yeah, absolutely. We're really happy to have Ray O'Farrell who is our CTO out on stage with chat just a few minutes ago. He talked about some of the really neat things that we're working on between my organization and VC, two really important things in fact. One is the enterprise hybrid cloud solution. So my team has worked very closely in building that architecture and building that really as an engineered solution in the marketplace. And then we also have collaborated very closely on something we call VX RAC and the SDDC nodes within that, which is really about kind of we package up what VMware's been building around the software defined data center and then just make it really easy for our customers to go and deploy, consume and maintain over time. So John, let's talk a little bit about the VC EPs. When I look at the underlying technology from VMware of course is virtual sand or v-sand. Some of the packaging and go-to-market and what the partner and ecosystem has changed quite a bit in the last year or so. Can you talk to us a little bit about that journey and how important is EMC to the go-to-market? Yeah, absolutely. And it's been a really important part of our go-to-market but let me just kind of step back and it's just a great point. I think what we've really kind of learned is to focus on is that v-sand is a software product. And when you have a software product you want it to be a platform and you want it to run across a broad set of hardware. And so we came up with this program we call the v-sand ready notes. And that's really what we focus now on for getting that broad adoption across lots of different types of configurations, lots of different OEM providers. But at the same time there's a segment of- And I'm sorry, those primarily server providers, correct? Yeah, server providers. Yeah, so different server configurations, different disks that go inside those servers. Because v-sand is just software that runs on servers. But we also saw that there is a segment of the marketplace that really wants a more tightly engineered solution and something that's really more of an appliance experience with kind of a wrapped around in terms of that appliance user interface. And that's where we've worked so closely now with PC with the VxRail. And I think we've seen a tremendous amount of early success with that since it launched. As that really kind of integrated, tightly controlled experience as an appliance. Yeah, so one of the things as analysts we've looked at is you talk about openness and choice and allowing customers to make their own decisions based on the infrastructure. Can you give us any guidance as to where we are solutions that kind of fit under the Dell and EMC versus your partners, Lenovo, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who have been great VMware partners for a year. But it helps that we're trying to understand as to how much goes v-sand ready node through kind of non-Dell technologies part of that ecosystem versus kind of the in-house. In terms of what the mix is between those or two. Yeah, I don't know exactly what the numbers are right now. But what we've definitely find is that a big part portion of the market is buying v-sand as software. I think that's the kind of the primary sales motion that we still see and it's consistent with how we sell the rest of the set of products we have. So that means it's landing across lots of hardware and probably my guess is in line with what the share of hardware vendor market share is across that. And I would look at VxRail as being something unique and different, which is more of this kind of jointly engineered appliance kind of go to market. And that's a good foundation for this kind of smaller part of the marketplace. And you view that as kind of a good proof point of people wanting to buy that way as we've invested in kind of VxRack and kind of more of a rack scale, fully integrated across networking type solution as well. Yeah, when you talk about building all these agnostic services basically, how important is that for your customers? What are you hearing from them in terms of giving them flexibility and giving them choices and being able to customize their needs based on what you're providing them? Yeah, and I think there's a big segment of the marketplace that remains and will continue. That really is about that flexibility, choice, openness, ecosystem. And that's sort of always been a foundational part of the VMware strategy. So we're going to continue and always continue invest in supporting that very closely. So that's a big part of the market. But I think the market as a whole has seen that there's a still small, but growing and probably growing faster segment of the market that's trying to look into buy things and looking to buy solutions or looking to buy outcomes. And what I remain as we've seen is over time how big that is relative to kind of the traditional IT buying patterns. But that is growing in the marketplace. And I think lots of vendors are after that right now trying to satisfy that buying. All right, so let's shift gears, talk about the cloud portion. So EMC of course gives choice out there. There's open stack activity, there's VMware. There's plugins to hybrid cloud, with the public cloud services are out there. Where does VMware fit into it? What are the software products? How do you differentiate from what's in the marketplace? Yeah, so we're very focused on how do we go deliver fully more software defined approach to all this, right? And so that means we've focused on delivering software based storage at B-SAN. Network virtualization clearly is one of the fastest things happening in the marketplace right now. We grew over 100% in the first quarter with NSX. And also in terms of cloud management, if you realize is the number one cloud management platform at this point. So we've got a complete solution here. We've got all of the great components underneath. But we do recognize that there's segments that are looking at open stack. And so we've invested quite a bit in that. We're one of the top contributors in the open stack project. Now we have an offering that'll run open stack right on top of VMware. We've seen containers grow quite a bit and starting to emerge quite a bit. So we've brought support for containers directly into vSphere as a native kind of capability. So we're really looking to make sure that we can support all the kind of developer and kind of open API models that customers are looking for at this point. So I was actually, John and I were at the open stack show last week and I'm quite familiar with VMware integrated open stack or VIO. I know there were customers there that are VMware customers, some of the big telcos that were talking about the NFV solution to definitely VMware. But I actually didn't hear a lot of discussion at the show about VMware. Do you have any proof points, customers you can talk to? How much traction is the open stack piece getting traction with VMware? Yeah, I think it's still kind of evolving pretty quickly. I mean, we launched it last year, but we are seeing interest from customers and we can have when Kit, I think Kit's going to come talk to you in the next two days, Kit's going to be able to take you through a lot more on what's happening in that space with open stack. By the way, we're a little overdressed, I think for open stack rights too. Yeah, I'm not sure that people are really going to talk to you if you're dressed up. Yeah, and I'm happy to take a little bit of break from a lot of barbecue there. So, John, the cloud piece, how does the integrated solutions that you're working with VMware fit into the overall vCloud Air strategy with VMware? Yeah, so our strategy from cloud is kind of simple, right? It's first and foremost, we want to build a great private cloud solution and then we want to help build a set of kind of compatible clouds in the marketplace. vCloud Air is one, but the big growth we also see is what we call our vCloud Air network, right? So 4,000 plus partners who are building compatible clouds based on VMware and we want to make sure that those are compatible both from a networking, especially from a networking standpoint, but also from a cloud management or kind of ability to manage across those things. But then the third leg, and Ray talked a lot about this on stage just a few minutes ago, is about extending our endpoints, both network with NSX, but also with vRealize Automation into the big clouds, into Amazon, into Azure, into Google, right? And making sure that we can treat those as endpoints and control security policies and control management policies around those applications and those VMs, even as they're running inside those other clouds. So that's kind of our view on VMware strategy, but it all hinges upon us to continue to be successful in delivering that private cloud experience and making that private cloud experience kind of much more simple and kind of much more kind of out of the box and easy for our customers. You know, this is kind of what it is, a philosophical question, just in terms of your approach in general, because you're building a lot of cool toys, right? And cool new, great functionality that didn't exist before. So is that a result of your internal collaboration? Is it external collaboration? Is it looking at the market? I mean, who's driving? What's driving you in terms of these kind of new innovations? And how do you keep from going down a blind alley and spending a lot of time doing something that all of a sudden the market didn't want to go that way? Yeah, that's kind of the challenge of software development today, right? Is how do you make sure that you're staying very, very close to your customers? How do you make sure you're being very agile? How do you make sure you release software quickly? One of the things my team does is we have quarterly releases for our software at this point, right? So we've moved away from a long development process down to something we can deliver very quickly. And that allows us to get very quick feedback from our customers. And then as we bring box market, you get feedback very quickly and then adjust and modify course based on that. So that's kind of in that entire ethos now is about how do you make sure you're building software in a very highly agile development process? So there's a lot of discussion around the Virtus.treem a piece of VMCs portfolio. I liked what you were saying before, kind of what we call the multi-cloud world. So where VMware sits on-prem, some of the off-prem solutions you have, where the public cloud fit, how does Virtus.treem fit into the vCloud Air Network discussion? Yeah, Virtus.treem is part of the vCloud Air Network so they're a partner, they can run compatible workloads. They've very much optimized a solution for particular enterprise workloads. They have a great SAP solution. That's an area where my team again is working with them because my organization is very focused on how do we take technologies and turn those into more integrated solutions for our customers. So we're working with Virtus.treem and with SAP around how we do more SAP automation. How do we make it easy for customers to take SAP instances, provision those out as test environments and then manage them through the entire life cycle into production? And that's something Virtus.treem does very well and something that we can help on top of a virtualized environment. So you bring a great point, the application discussion. I mean, I remember in the journey of virtualization, it was started out as test dev, certain kind of use cases. And today, pretty much any application you could run in the data center, I can run in a virtualized environment. When we add cloud into the discussion, where are we, what's the discussions with your customers as to kind of application affinity for the various solutions? I'm not sure I exactly know what you mean, Stu. So if the vCloud Air Network or you talked about SAP with Virtus.treem is a good use case, what kind of core virtualized versus using cloud solutions more from an application standpoint? Yeah. So far, customers are still kind of testing with the cloud, with kind of the public cloud. And they're using it for particular use cases. And those tend to be kind of what you'd expect, right? So they're doing a lot with DR. Yeah, I talked to quite a few customers, our executive advisory council last week. DR was the number one thing they all identified. We're definitely going to do that right now. They're doing short-term projects in the cloud, things they don't expect to last very long. And then they're looking at things that where they're more unsure exactly if they're going to survive, right? So things that they can start small and then they don't have to invest in infrastructure, but they can scale easily. Those are the things that are running the cloud right now. I haven't seen yet a big push to go bring traditional enterprise workloads into kind of the cloud as production environments. But we'll see. That's something that they're all, my customers are talking about. There's something they're thinking about, but it's not something that they've made much progress in thus far. Yeah, so. I'm sorry, that's it. Yeah, John, I just wondered if you could give us kind of a personal viewpoint. There's been a lot of changes going on. How's the feel inside of VMware? Looking at the Dell on the outside, EMC, it's always been interesting. So I'm just curious from your standpoint what you can share. Yeah, absolutely. It's obviously been a big period of change, right? And changes that brings positive and negatives, right? But as an organization, the one thing I think is people see that we have a pretty clear strategy. And that's what helps you get through these periods of change is having a clear strategy. And that's the good thing about the people I work with day in, day out, believe in what we're trying to do at VMware. And so we're excited about that. But the fact is we do have challenges, right? We have seen a few high profile people who've been with the company move on. We've seen, we have kind of changing landscape, our business kind of structure has changed quite a bit. So we have challenges that we have to work through, but the good news is that we've got just incredible people at VMware who are excited about solving problems and going after these kind of challenges. It wouldn't be any fun though, right John? It wouldn't be any fun, right? Unless you had problems, right? That's what I always tell people is, they wouldn't pay us to come to work every day if there weren't hard things to go through. If it were routine, right? Anybody could do it. Yeah, exactly. Well John, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. Good luck down the road. We know as you said, you got your hands full. But it's a good basket, I think, to have full right now. It is. Good deal. All right, thank you John. Thank you very much. Yeah, we'll be back with more from Las Vegas here, the Sands Expo and EMC World 2016 here on theCUBE in just a bit.