 Okay, we're back. I'm John Furrier with Silkenangle.com, and I'm with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Todd Nielsen and Todd Kubellum. I think it's the third time on. You're on twice last year. Yeah, exactly. Welcome back. We were just talking off camera, you were saying. You're just so impressed with the amazing size of the show and the new types of people that are coming to the show. Absolutely, the vibrancy of this ecosystem is incredible, ranging from consumer electronics companies to telcos and everything in between. It's really incredible. LG is up on your sponsor list. They had a nice booth, beautiful booth. So what's changed? Last year you were the Chief Operating Officer. You did the Compellent press conference. We did a couple of interviews. This year you're the President of Application. Give us an update on your role for the folks out there, and we'll jump right in. Sure, yeah, so I'm focusing on our application development platform. Every paradigm or every era in our industry is driven by an application development model, and we think that platform as a service is really going to drive this era. And so I'm heading up our Cloud Foundry and V-Fabric efforts to really reach out to developers and establish the thought leadership and the presence we need to be successful there. How's the reception been? Because we've been monitoring it. It's been off the charts. A lot of red meat in the water and the cloud business. Everyone's going crazy. Is it the right approach? Is pass ready, VMware, competitors? So what's your overall takeaway from the marketplace? We're excited. April 12th is when we launch Cloud Foundry, and that's going to go down as a day that really defined what platform as a service was. Prior to Cloud Foundry, people used to think about, well, proprietary ways to run the cloud and a single language or single framework, and we sort of blew the doors off. We support multiple frameworks. We support multiple cloud instances, either our own service, service provider service, or behind the firewall. And last week, we announced something called the micro cloud, which is essentially, honey, I shrink the cloud and allows you to run your cloud development environment on a laptop, and then when you're ready to deploy, you can push it to a cloud. That's all open source. All open source. So you've been running the business of VMware, now you're doing this. So the question that we've been asking the guests is, is the demand of the marketplace so strong that open source can't catch up? Because there are open stack out there, other initiatives. How do you balance the demand for delivery solutions? And open source is kind of slower. The key part for us is the opportunity we've got with our customers to continue to invest, to continue to focus and deliver value to them. So we think as long as we continue to expand our capabilities, we're going to be able to stay ahead of any competition. Everyone wants the developers. So what's your angle on the developers? Because open stack has got a honey pot out there, great message and everyone's jumping in, Citrix jumped in, HP jumped in. It's kind of building up slow and getting some traction. But people want solutions, and developers don't want a head fake. Developers want real deal. They want an environment where they got distribution for their applications and a stable environment and economics. So what's your strategy for the developer community? The good news is when we acquired the spring source acquisition in August of 2009, we brought into the fold 2.5 million spring developers. So we have a strong heritage working with that community. And we're focusing on both the enterprise developers as well as appealing to the cool new kids that are developing in new types of frameworks to enable we have an offering that allows both to be successful on our platform. Todd, you've been obviously in the application world for a long time, Oracle, BEA, Borland. Can you explain for the lay person, you know, the person who's watching, a CNBC Wall Street Journal crowd. What's changing in application development over the last decade and underscore what's happening now? The amazing thing is it used to be 10 years ago that you were a Java developer or you were a .NET developer. And those were the two choices. And now what's happened is developers have continued to build frameworks that make things easier, that make things more productive, more portable. And really today we could build, you know, a framework, make it open source, and there's another development framework out there. So there's a massive amount of fragmentation going on in the environment that over the next 10 years we'll probably consolidate. But for now you have to be open to everyone's dialect and really support a collaborative open environment. So what's your goals for this year? So obviously Cloud Foundry, you're building up. We talked to your executive there, Jerry Chen, who was on theCUBE earlier. Top priorities for you as a lead executive. So the big thing for us is taking and helping developers and enterprises modernize their existing applications. So taking our v-fabric offering and enabling them to get out of the trapped or the jail they're in with classic, you know, middleware like WebSphere or WebLogic. And two, we want to expand a data offering. This week we announced something called v-fabric data director, which is pretty exciting about what's happening in the database world. And then third, in this platform as a service thought leadership, we're going to drive mind share and adoption and trial with our efforts there. I heard you're a big golfer. You like golf? So you must talk to customers. You got to go golfing with customers. So what are they saying to you when you talk to your customer base, that you're targeting, who are they and what do they want and what are their challenges? These days fortunately at VMware, everyone's a customer. We've got over 250,000 customers and all of them have development needs or trying to figure out how to address their core problems. So it's a diverse set of folks. At this particular show, the majority of the customers are more systems integrators and infrastructure types. This isn't necessarily a developer show. At developer shows, you typically see folks asking for things like more support, more run time, better performance, capabilities to do things that they're trying to do in the cloud that they aren't able to do in middleware. I want to go back to coming, you were talking about the data as a service. Sure. So we're talking about data as a service, databases as a service, right? Absolutely. If I understand it's any Postgres database? Yeah, so essentially what's happened is five years ago, I think we all would have said, you know what, it's Oracle's world and maybe Microsoft and a few others might get the scraps. And there's a tremendous amount of disruption going on right now in the data world. Today people are realizing the relational database is okay for a component. But I also want to have a no SQL option or what's referred to as a big data option. And in Silicon Valley, there's probably 50 startups today focusing on this data disruption opportunity. And so we're excited about how developers are going to build applications that have multiple different database storages, which is what Vfabric data director does with Postgres. Okay, so Vfabric data director, practitioners should think of that as, at least initially, sort of the support for the emerging databases in the Hadoop worlds, for example, you're calling the true big data, but not necessarily an Oracle database, is that right? Essentially today, Vfabric data director allows users to automate and scale and work in the vSphere infrastructure, their Postgres database. We'll be adding in the roadmap support for things like Oracle and Gemfire and Hadoop and those kinds of things going forward. Okay, so I know a lot of guys would love to have Oracle as a service. And you really don't need Oracle to necessarily stand up and say, yeah, we support that, you can just do it in the framework. Now, that might scare people away if Oracle doesn't support it, but still, it works the same way Oracle works in VMware today, right? Yeah, one of the benefits about VMware is we've been really good about being agnostic to the applications. And so you can run your Oracle applications, your SAP applications, your Microsoft applications on our infrastructure. And the data director will apply the same rules. It'll manage, back up, and do the HA that you need. And people are doing that today with Oracle. Absolutely. It's quite, let's say, Oracle digging teals in. Absolutely. Well, Paul talked about the keynote on Monday that over 50% of the workloads are now virtualized and we're seeing more and more customers move their tier one workloads into a vSphere infrastructure. Well, final question for me is, what's the most exciting thing that you're seeing out in the marketplace today, not just within VMware, in the marketplace? You know, in the channel, there's a saying that where there's mystery, there's margin. And what's exciting for me is the transformation that's going on and the opportunity for the new leaders to appear. You know, the likes of Oracle and Microsoft and IBM are kind of last era's leaders. And now there's opportunities for folks like VMware and other companies to step up and be the leaders of this next era of computing. There's another saying, chaos is cash. And there's a lot of craziness going on out there in the marketplace today. So Todd Nielsen, great to have you on again. Thanks very much for taking some time out with us. We really appreciate it. Thanks guys. Good to see you again. How's your handicap? My job is my handicap.