 Live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, this is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010, now Inside the Cube. We're back at the Cube, ending day three here in Moscone Center, live in San Francisco, California, VMworld 2010, I'm here with Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier with siliconangle.com. Our continuous coverage, Dave, wall-to-wall, blanket coverage. It's been fantastic, hasn't it, John? A lot of energy here. Send it this way. We need some energy, we've been going non-stop since Monday all day, but we had some great interviews, we had, I mean, I can't even count, I can't remember the names at this point. What's your name again? Jim McNeil, Jim on Monday, like a zillion guests ago, from Balcony stores. 16 days ago. The chief strategy officer back. We're going to do a little review, I mean, I thought it would be good right now to just review kind of what's transpired with the show, and some of the themes, Dave, we've talked with cloud service providers, we've talked to senior executives at VMware, senior executives from the key partners, and entrepreneurs, ecosystem partners, press analysts, I mean, we've covered it all. Yeah, and the big themes here around infrastructure, right? I mean, obviously that's VMware's home court infrastructure, and then we're starting to see more platform activity, you're starting to see the spring source acquisition really bear some fruit, at least in terms of strategy and platform and now products. And we even had Zimbra on, right? Zimbra, I mean, Zimbra was cool, I learned a lot and demystified it a little bit, I think I see their strategy. I mean, you're ready to move from Gmail to Zimbra, is that clear to you now? I think Zimbra's the Gmail wannabe for the enterprise, and I think they have a good plan from what they say in the numbers, I mean, I need to look into those numbers, they said 60 million seats. So two million for Google, now they're talking about paid, right? I think they're talking about enterprise, not total consumer. So that's enterprise Gmail, two million, and they're 60 million seats. So, and the capability sounded pretty impressive. Dave, what were some of your highlights? I mean, for me, I mean, some of the interviews were really very diverse, you know, from Todd Nielsen, the chief operating officer from VMware, I thought was fantastic. Yeah, it was very impressive, Todd. DL Rod Johnson was fantastic from Spring. Yeah, so for me, I think that the VMware momentum is just unbelievable, almost 50% growth. It's the place to be, that's sort of point one. The other is the cloud service providers. I mean, that is a very clear trend. We've had this premise that we've been talking about now for a while at Wikibon and Silicon Angle, that these cloud service providers are going to be ahead, they're probably going to maintain that lead. Why? Because they're in business, right there. They're for a profit and they're better at doing transactions and operationalizing IT. It's funny, you know, the same kind of themes come back, and Jim, we want to get in with you on this because of your experience in the industry. We're just talking about the computer industry, how that grew up. The same kind of themes always come up. Agility, speed, performance, ease of use, value to the user. But now it's a different world, the consumerization aspect. So to me, the key theme that I heard over and over again is speed, speed, speed, everything, everywhere, anytime. Seems to be the cloud key endpoint for messaging. Well, with all the customers looking for simplicity. Speed's great, but if you can't, if you can't manage it, if you can't look at how it's going to be accomplished, it becomes really difficult. Total cost. Total cost of ownership is another buzzword. Total cost of ownership, in return, return of investment is still a major issue. And simpler IT is faster. I mean, I think that's the one thing that Google has really shown us, right? Jim, what have you seen? So you've been, I mean, you've obviously been doing a lot of announcements. We covered our conversation on Monday. You're out on the floor, you're talking to customers, you're talking to all the executives at VMware. You just mentioned that last night there, having a good time, celebrating. But what are you seeing? I mean, you've seen a lot of this movement before in other industries. What's your take of the show? And what are some of the things you've seen? Well, I think there's going to be a reality check. We're starting to see the proof that many applications are operating in the cloud. We talked about, you know, mail is obviously the easy one. You have people on theCUBE that are talking about business continuity and disaster recovery. You know, that's a viable business model. People are making money doing that today. And I think that's going to continue because that's one of the things that customers can easily buy into, which is move my critical data into a safe place because they've been doing that for years. It's not the iron mountain anymore, it's the iron cloud. So that's a viable thing to do. You know, one of the trends we talk about, things repeat themselves over and over again. You know, we go from centralized to decentralized and now we're going back to centralized again and we're distributing the thin clients and everyone's going to move into the cloud and keep a thin client and keep their costs down. So how are we going to get back to distributed again in 10 years? I don't know, I have to figure that out. Well, these devices are trying to help us, right? About the iPhones and so forth. But so let's talk about VDI a little bit. I mean, you heard or now what VMware that's calling end user computing, right? They're not even use the desktop term so much anymore. You guys, what do you think about that? Are you sold on that, John? And Jim, I'd like your perspectives on it. I mean, I'm not fully sold on it. I mean, I like, you know, I see Zimbra up here trying to tout some stuff. I get a little nervous because I just don't think they have that much traction in my mind at this point. And I mean, again, I'm going to do some more analysis on that, but I like the trend of what they're talking about. I think clearly virtualization at the desktop is going to be a major, major force. There's no doubt about it. I just don't know enough about, I don't see the proof points in terms of evidence in the marketplace, but clearly the proof points we heard was people are using a Windows 7. Anything that keeps you from doing the job that you want to do on your platform is obviously a nuisance and it's a distraction. So if an individual user has to worry about backing up their system or if they have to worry about moving files in a certain way or launching an application it becomes a hindrance and it becomes an obstacle. And when you have the ability to deploy desktops from the cloud on an on-demand basis that are customized and configured for specific uses and do it at a very cost effective level which is less than what an ordinary laptop or desktop would cost, it's a very compelling story. So I think that, we definitely heard that from some customers this week, but in pretty narrow use cases, call center or claims desks, things like that. And I get the sense, John and Jim, that VMware is really still struggling to find that tipping point and I think they've, they've, they're betting the house on the device. That's the low hanging fruit, right? It makes perfect sense. It's the same desktop across a thousand seats. It's really easy, but if you look at some of the business propositions from say a software developer, you know, we've got over 500 employees. We've got hundreds of developers in China, hundreds of developers in New York. From a security standpoint, what can I gain from VDI? I can give a developer a workstation that has all the compute power they could possibly hope for in terms of doing compiles and makes and builds, but there's no USB output. You know, they can't put it on a key. They can't walk away with it. You know, they can't, you know, send, they can't access an email client. They can't send it, you know, just to their cousin in Shanghai. So there's a lot of value from a user standpoint or customer standpoint to deploy that. I think Dave, I mean, I'll rephrase kind of what I said, I didn't want to come across too pessimistic about VDI or virtualized desktop environment, but I think what I'd say is this. I'm convinced that it's not hype. I mean, we talk about reality in the cloud, hype, no hype, only proof points. I'm convinced that, you know, virtualized desktop is definitely real. It's not hype. There's some proof points. I just don't, I don't yet know what the level of growth will be. So that's just, I don't have enough data. And I think that my sense at this event is that VMware is looking at the consolidation of those devices or at least the data on iPhones and iPads. If I can have a consistent user experience on those devices, that may be the tipping point. And I think that's a lot of potential growth, right? We need that kind of consolidation of data. What do you think about the growth? I mean, do you think the adoption and the growth rate will be? I mean, not number, but I mean, like massive, slow uptake, steady organic curve. What's the cycle going to be, right? You've got, you know, 10,000 desktops in an enterprise. They have a certain, you know, life cycle. They're going to end of life. Where are you going to go? Windows 7 is happening now. So that's an interesting trigger, right? Are you going to move towards, you know, another Dell desktop? Or are you going to move to another laptop? Or are you going to go to a thin client? And, or are you going to say, look it, here's a VDI that I'm going to deliver to whatever platform you as a, you know, employee wants to use. Here's a thousand dollar credit. Go buy whatever you want. I think the asset test to me will be how Windows 7 rolls out. Because Dave, that was a consistent theme. Windows 7 was almost mentioned in almost every conversation we had with customers when they talked about VDI. It was, but see, I think, this is where I think VDI has the, or whatever we want to call it, end user computing now, virtual desktop, virtual devices. The real disruption I think comes with these devices. Because if it's Windows 7 based, then Microsoft is going to maintain, you know, its control. It's going to turn the pricing knobs. And I think Microsoft can't control the iPhones, the iPads, all these devices. And I think that's where the real potential is. And I think that's where the growth is going to be. How does that play into the VDI story when you talk about iPhones and iPads? So I think that I see that. I would synchronize all that data. So I see that VDI story evolving to one of end users, where the user is the center of the universe. That's what I see. I think the Zimbra story, I think is a tease for us. I don't think they're unleashing yet. That's why I was trying to get out of them. What's the roadmap? Because I think there's more to Zimbra. You know, I think it might be more of a stalking horse around that kind of ubiquitous edge independent service layer to devices. I mean. So, you know, and go back to actually, Maritz came to EMC, believe it or not, through a company called Pi, which stands for personal information, right? It was taking all that personal information that we have and somehow consolidating it, making sense of it. We heard from Mosey that they're sort of, you know, still have that IP, but I actually think that maybe, maybe that vision is coming through in VMware in a much, much grander scale. So is VMware going to deliver the mobile me in the client? Yeah, exactly. Right, maybe that's what the play is here. And that, to me, has much more to do with potential. If your VDI client does the best job of managing your personal data, you know, both private and commercial. Now that gets interesting. Then you've got something really compelling. And I think that's the tipping point that these guys got to get. Otherwise, like I said, Microsoft, I think controls it and can play, you know, pricing games and, you know, maintenance. And Citrix is dominant in the VDI space as well, and so they're going to continue down that path. Jim and Dave, I mean, I'd like to get your perspective on something because I've been bringing it up in questions all week about the white spaces. You know, where are the white spaces and trying to get VMware folks and the cloud service where I talk about the white spaces? Where do you think, like, the areas that really need to be improved? Because, you know, let's take the cloud and let's smoke the peace pipe for a minute and say, hey, cloud's great. You know, we all agree. What are the areas under the covers that need a lot of work right now that, you know, that are obvious? I mean, I see security. We don't want to talk, I don't want to talk about security so much, but, you know, outside of security, what are the areas? We talked about backup and edge storage and Dave, we talked about networking with Juniper. Well, I want to make one point, actually, in security. One of the things that I'm getting a sense in talking to the cloud service guys is that security actually has the potential to be better in the cloud. And I'm actually beginning to- It has to be better in the cloud. To believe that, right? It's a differentiator for these guys and they are- No, it's not a differentiator, it's minimum. It's a must-have because you're not going to move your data in the cloud if it's not encrypted. It's the number one reason- When I say differentiator, I mean amongst cloud service providers, they're going to say, well, I got better security than anybody, right? But it's an ante, it's a cost to play. It's a table stage, right? And so they're pouring money into it. So I feel like security, we're going to be able to check that at some point in time. We heard the cloud service providers, especially from Verizon, but then Randy Byas, who's in the trenches, was kind of dismissing it. So it's kind of too into the spectrums, but they're bundling security and compliance kind of as one, like we got it covered package. That seemed to be a trend that I saw. So I want to talk about data protection because that, Jim, in part now, your expertise, your chief strategy officer, you're looking out at these trends, that's one area that I think is ripe for change. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think, you know, the first thing I have to give John, you know, Kudo, I think what we have to do is write a book for software vendors called in search of white space. You know, because that's what we do. As independent software vendors, we're always looking for that place where we can add value and differentiate and be ahead of the VMworlds, the Microsofts, the Citrix. You know, it's like running in front of a steamroller. You know, that's our job, right? That's what we do. So in the case of data protection, the reason that's always been a very fertile area for independent software vendors is because it's absolutely critical and essential, right? It's a must-have. It's like security for cloud is a must-have, you know, data protection universally has got to be there. And just like security has to be in the cloud, data protection is a guarantee. You have to have it. If your cloud provider can't tell you that your data is more secure and better protected in the cloud than it is in your enterprise, end of conversation. And VMware doesn't mind partnering there, too, because they have bigger fish to fry. I mean, they got a platform they're rolling out. It's very similar to Windows, right? Like Windows is a massive platform for the desktop. And they really look to their partners to fill in some key, you know what I'm saying? It's kind of similar. It wasn't until Microsoft said, we no longer do backup in Azure. We're just always up. In some ways, that was kind of the first way Microsoft really said, okay, we're in the data protection space in a big way. But it's in their cloud, you know? It's not five nines with Azure. It's always everything, all the time, you know? So it's a very different conversation. In the case of the cloud, when you're moving data, you're always going to have data in the private cloud, in the enterprise, then you're going to have data in the public cloud. So one of the big questions you have to think about when you're picking a data protection solution is how are you going to get it back out? You know, a lot of these clouds are going to become like Hotel California. You know, you can check in, but you can never leave. And if you want to move from an Amazon cloud to a Google cloud, because you're going to save a nickel a gigabyte, which turns into a couple of million dollars a year, how are you going to move it? So you're saying diversity of cloud usage. Mobility, mobility, mobility, interoperability. So I have data in one cloud, data in another cloud, data over here. So basically, disparate data. Portability and mobility have to be baked into everything you do in terms of how you're going to manage and organize your data, how you're going to move it into the cloud. So you don't want to get in a situation where you get in and you can't get out. How does that work? So just take me through that, because I'm not connecting the dots on that. So I get the concept like, okay, I signed up a Gmail or whatever. I'm on these different services. I got data everywhere, my personal data. I might have data that I might be leveraging from another app or whatever. So they're on different clouds. How is all that protected and aggregated or rolled up? You know what I'm saying? Take me through that. In the Gmail sense, you got to go behind the curtain and find out exactly how Google's protecting all their data because personally, I don't know. It's a massive clustered environment. Yeah, you don't care because you're confident that it's happened. In the case of, are you going to move to Zimbra? We talk about data portability. How do you get from Gmail to Zimbra? Well, I'm sure VMworld's going to have to figure that out or VMware, because unless you have a painless and simple way to get all of your data out of Gmail and into a Zimbra environment, you're not going. It's not going to happen. So it's incumbent upon all these cloud providers to be able to move data. So what you can do obviously is you can pull all your data out of that Amazon cloud and pay to do that and then pay to move it up into the next cloud. But that's not going to be brilliant either. So we have to have standards that allow for interoperability and portability between clouds for data. And that's something the industry has to step up to. And the closest thing we have to is a REST interface. You open a bucket, you put the data in, you get it out, it's not that clean. Could you summarize for me where Falcon Store fits into all the post-VMworld activity? Because all the post-VMworld... Because it all unfolded in front of our eyes. We talked on Monday. But now, take another shot. Lay it on top. Point to the key proof points that say, hey, the Falcon Store, our focus is relevant. And wipe out some care. And I could be self-serving, right? Yeah, be self-serving. It's a Falcon Store conversation. I mean, people want to know... Yeah, help people understand. Well, I think... How are you going to deploy those assets? Falcon Store's position on this is that when you're working with IBM, you're working with VMware, you're working with Microsoft, they have an agenda, they have value to bring to the table, and they want to sell you solutions. Obviously, we want to do the same. But our focus is on the protection and the preservation and the integrity of your data. And we're the one vendor who's 100% focused on that. So when you're talking about moving from a virtual environment, or from a physical environment to virtual, how are you going to bridge that gap? And how are you going to make sure you can go from one to the other and make sure your data's protected and secured? So everything we do is around that conversation where it's got to be available. If it's not available, it doesn't need no good, right? I've got to be able to manage it cost-effectively. You know, that's what the cloud director's about, right? How it's going to be the operating system for the internet. I mean, is it possibly going to be that? And it's a really exciting thing, but what does it come down to? Management, management, management. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's what they're focused on. We want to be the management player on the storage and the data protection side. So we've got to do the management piece. And you have to be able to protect data based on what you can afford to pay for and what you can afford not to lose, right? So if you could have fault-tolerant systems that are always up, that's great. And if you get paid for it, that's great. In a financial transaction environment, you're going to do that. But if you want data that's 10 minutes away or an hour away, you could do that too. Because every time you go down, it becomes less expensive. You have to have a solution that provides that solution. Right? You've got shorter RPO requirements. We've been hearing that a lot this week, right? RPO came up a lot. The concept of a backup window, it's an endangered species. That's our thing. This thing isn't a backup window anymore, right? And you can't move all the data. Used to be a backup window was, how much data can you move in a 24-hour period of time? Well, there's so much data you can't do it. So now we have to back up continuously all the time. We have to replicate, snapshot, do it all the time. So that's the way people have to think about their solutions for us, what's going on in the cloud. We think about getting the data in, getting it out, protecting it when it's in the cloud management, that's important to us. And then what's happening at the remote site? Like you're moving data in the cloud, but you still have physical data locally. You got to protect that as well. So disk to disk to cloud, that's probably where we're going. Yeah, disk-based backup is another big theme, right? We're seeing that disk to disk is taking over, right? Right. We've seen that now for a number of years. But I liked the notion that we were talking about before of Apple Time Machine for the data center. I mean, I think that's the model that the industry really has to get to. Right, and that's a direction where we're going. And actually we do that, one of our customers says they no longer do backup, they pre-stage potential recovery points. Right. And so when you queue up all those snapshots, you're able to go back in time, just like Time Machine does, and say, hey, Mr. Engineer, here's that system from last week, you're up and running and going. So that recovery. And when you deliver that as a virtual machine, it's instantaneous. And that recovery model is the sea change that I see. And it's being done right now. Change is the key. I heard change, change, change, change. Disruption, I heard. Consistently, the word change, change. They're changing the way it's been done. It's broken. It's got to be fixed. That was another big thing. Well, you know what else is broken? If we start talking about disk to disk to cloud, which is, you know, wonderful Nirvana from a user standpoint, because you don't have to worry about tape libraries and it's gone off to this happy, safe place. It's like retirement home for your data. And it's going to, you know what's being cared for and it's going to come back, right? But the thing is that people don't really think about this when you move data into an environment and it's sitting on a disk and it's idle. There's this horrible nasty thing called bit rod. You know, what about data preservation? What about data that has to be around for a hundred years? You know, what about, you know, application obsolescence? So we don't talk about that. You know, because tape is around. I got bit rod all in my house because I got disk drives that can't even be plugged in. You can't plug them in anymore. I thought I had all my family clothes on that disk drive. It's not booting up. By the way, I've got all my letters on three and a half inch floppies. I'm going to read those, right? But we won't throw them out. But those are the realities of data and many companies that have really valuable archive data. Like I said the other day, we're talking about the Wizard of Oz. I mean, this is a global treasure, right? You don't want to lose that stuff. It costs money to store it. Sempty, you know, society for motion pictures, television arts, they say that it costs half, it's a half a million dollars a year per gigabyte. I mean, come on, to store this stuff, you can't do that. So we have to get to data preservation as part of our conversations. And we have to get to data shredding because anybody who's ever had a really lengthy discovery process in a legal case would say I really wish I had destroyed that in relation to the head of chance. Yeah, how do you defensively delete data? And this comes to data classification. Yeah, exactly. Did I talk about white space? I mean, this has been a real challenge. That's the white space. So how do we organize, categorize, and manage all this data in a cross-effective way? And that's a service offering. You see that as a service? Well, for us, for us, obviously, we see it as a solution and application we're going to deliver to our customers. And the cloud providers are going to provide it as a service. And it's got to be automated. I mean, this is something we've talked about a lot in the Wikibon community, is automating data classification at the point of creation or use. Because if you can't automate that classification, you'll never scale. And humans can't automate it. We can't tag it, right? Humans are terrible. Well, you know, we've got to get better at that. We have to create metadata. You know, we've got to tag it. I heard software, too. Key to success is software. The hardware is going to be essentially, that was a big message. Obviously, virtualized machines over physical. I heard software was a big IP case. We've got to think about how frustrating virtualization is to hardware companies, because what's it about? It's about abstraction. It's about democratization. Well, that's why Intel is going to put security in the chip. Intel stops. It's got to be plummeting on this. But I think you're right. You're onto it. It's metadata. That is the key. Metadata is the answer. It's in metadata repositories. And you know what that creates? More data. More data. More truckloads of data. The metadata, metadata. There's two metadata, multiple levels of metadata. So now you're going to have your personal device. And what it's going to actually show you is your metadata. It's going to give you an index of all your phone numbers. So here's a philosophical question for you. So the future, is there reasoning involved? I mean, we talk about learning machines. And is there meta-reasoning involved? I mean, actually, you've got to be a bit rot. I mean, that implies stale. But you've got to be learning. I mean, can these machines really be smart? We got into this great philosophical conversation the other day about defining data. We started talking about defining data protection. And someone said, well, what the hell about data protection? What about defining data? Who defines data? And the answer is, well, the creator of the data defines the data. Who owns the data? Whether the data is the application or the data is a physical file or a picture or photo, the creator, the application, or the individual user is the one who's created that data. They are the creator, and they define what it is and how it's going to be cared for. And we have to really start at that conversation. Dave, I wrote a post a year and a half ago called Data is the New Development Kit. And it was part of our research in the labs when we were looking at Twitter and Facebook. And what my thesis was was that available data that can be leveraged in a software way is the new development environment. And we heard that from the Dallas Cowboys to the spring guy, CEO of Spring, that the data is going to drive new applications, the feedback of data, so access to data. Whether it's gestural data or data from applications and that's what people are going to be developing on is that data is more central to refining intelligence and if you can't find it and you can't access it and you can't organize it, then it's not even going to be a conversation. I mean, the Dallas Cowboys are going to run basically the notion of having data available so that based on whether they win or lose, the prices of materials, shirts, and the gift shop will change. Or if they have a family event, maybe it's not as high as a Super Bowl. So they can adjust on the fly spot prices based upon the venue. So John, that's real time. So John, we're out of time, but I think this is something that we should take up within our communities, our respective communities, and really start to set forth the model, the data model, the data protection model, how the cloud and virtualization changes that and really try to get our communities behind what that model looks like and lay that out and put some precise definitions around. If we define that in the Wiki, we'll build it. Yeah, I agree. That's what we need to do. And let's get the input of the users, of the technologists, of the analysts, the consultants and let's see if we can put that down. I know we can do it. And hopefully this force rank it by priority so I can actually get something done before 2020. Right, and let's challenge the vendor community to- No hype-proof points. To deliver. Right, exactly. No hype-proof points. Great. Jim McNeill, it's great having you on again. Thank you very much. Great to see you. And we're going to wrap up day three. Whoa. Day three of theCUBE. Fly by. Day three. Day three on today is Friday. I mean, what day is today? Wednesday. Wednesday at theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage here at VMworld Live 2010 theCUBE. A place where we acquire knowledge. It's growing. We have zillions of pieces of content. Dave Vellante, thank you very much. Thank you, John. Great day. Shout out to Michael Sean Wright. Nice fish films directing. Mark Hopkins, producer. Shout out to Ricky with the photos and keeping us on schedule. Kristin Nicole doing the news. Kyle Owen with the photos. My nephew, Joe Sinar. Thanks a lot. Guys, great job today. It's a wrap. See you guys tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock for a CIO customer round table. And then we're going to wrap up with a bunch of community podcasts. A lot of social media tomorrow. So come back Thursday to the final day of VMworld 2010.