 This is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org and I'm here with my co-host for today, Stu Miniman, who's also with Wikibon. And this is theCUBE. It's theCUBE with Silicon Angles live mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at the VTUG Winter Warmer. The VTUG is an evolution. This is, I believe, Stu, the seventh or eighth year of the VTUG V-MUG, right? Right. Winter Warmer at Gillette, or at least it's been at Gillette the last several years. And the idea is, Chris Arne is bringing together IT practitioners from all over New England, about 1,500 people here. It's a very good event. A lot of energy, a lot of vendor support, a number of local consultants here and the practitioners are hardcore, VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix, Zen practitioners, KVM, a lot of cloud service action going on. And this year, in particular, Stu, they've evolved the event beyond really VMware into the whole realm of multi-hypervisor, which is important. But when I was here, probably two or three years ago, it was all VMware all the time, very deep dive into VMware. Really, it was not the main theme here of this event. A lot of cloud discussion. We've been talking a lot about converged infrastructure and just sort of data center transformation in general. But when you talk to the practitioners, it's still the same old story, Stu. It's heads down, doing more with less. I got stuff, I got assets on my books that I got to get value out of. Yeah, I'm looking at Flash. I'm doing a little bit of Flash. Yeah, cloud, shadow IT is happening at my organization. But my main focus is driving efficiencies and effectiveness for my IT infrastructure and servicing my clients. Yeah, Dave, I mean, this has been a great event. So when we look at Wikibon, one of our core missions is allowing IT practitioners to share with their peers. And theCUBE, of course, is sharing information far and wide. And it fits right in with the vision of this event. Good community, passionate community. Once again, not started by any big company. People that were interested in this technology and how it could make their lives better and how they can learn from other people that are going through some of the same challenges. The eighth year of the Winter Warmer, fantastic location here at Gillette. It's fun, as you said, the vendors have small little booths and technical breakouts. So it's not over the top marketing. It's really where you can learn about what's going on. And as you said, multi-hypervisor is definitely growing. We definitely talked to plenty of practitioners that say, I'm 100% VMware. I'm happy with it. I like it. I'm going to use it going forward. And plenty of other customers that are saying, I'm looking for either multi-source or I'm checking out my environments. I'm using Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, and therefore I'm going to use Hyper-V2. And everybody checking out what's going on with OpenStack and Microsoft. Dave, for me, it was great to get some good end users on here. But the two interviews that stuck with me are Microsoft. Brad Anderson, it was great that he could come spend some time. Really gave a compelling vision of where Microsoft's going in this space, especially for a hybrid cloud. And the Rackspace guys, Dave, I liked you digging in and talking about the reality of where OpenStack is today and obviously an area that we're keeping a close eye on. Yes, so I love the OpenStack discussion. I mean, I think that it's taken some time to evolve, but there's just so much interest and momentum in the developer community and now endorsements from big players, in particular HP and IBM, not just Rackspace and Dell. I mean, Rackspace, great, Dell, awesome, helping the thing get off the ground and really taking it from sort of a NASA project into real production environments. But having HP and IBM backing OpenStack to the degree they are, I mean, HP, we were at HP Discover in Barcelona. I mean, HP is all in. HP's cloud strategy is virtually completely built on OpenStack. Now, IBM's maybe not so much, but IBM's committed to OpenStack. They're committed to OpenStore source and they've got a track record in OpenSource. So we had the conversation. John Furrier and I have talked a lot on theCUBE about does OpenStack need leadership? And my conclusion is it does, but that leadership is going to have to come from the community. I don't see any one vendor stepping up saying, okay, we're going to lead this charge because once one vendor does that, the others are going to pull back. So it's got to be a community-driven effort, which means it's going to take a little longer, but perhaps the foundation will be a little stronger. And of course, OpenStack is not a monolithic product. It is a whole bunch of projects that are out there and I love the line, you and Ken, who we going back and forth said, is it ready for prime time? Yes, but is it, can I just buy it off the shelf and put it in? Well, no, but then again, how many IT solutions really are off the shelf ready to go in end to end? So there are plenty of companies that are putting together full solution, putting, building clouds on OpenStack and lots of companies that are looking to help enterprises adopt that solution. And there's lots of flexibility and obviously it's going to be open and trying to help prevent you from having to spend lots of money on licensing. Yeah, I think Ken summed it up really nicely. I mean, I invoked Jerry Chen's comment from Amazon Reinvent. Jerry Chen, who's a partner at Greylock said, we came back from Singapore, Hong Kong rather, which was the OpenStack summit last fall. And he said, well, look, here's how I would say it. OpenStack is trying to be all things to all people. Amazon is trying to be one thing to all people. And I'd like to have Ken phrase, he said, well, let me, let me, there's a nuance there. OpenStack as a project versus OpenStack as a product. And that product is what you should compare Amazon with, but it's hard, right? Because, you know, there's a lot of different products. Rackspace has a product and others are developing products. So it's going to be interesting to see if that vision of interoperability amongst OpenStack platforms or products, if I should say, shakes out. It's not there today, I don't think. But we heard Cody say it has to be there for this to succeed. And I would agree with that. So that is the vision. And that's sort of a critical execution point that we should be watching. Yeah, and I mean, we've talked about many times on theCUBE, you know, it's exciting times to be in IT. We're really right in the middle of a bunch of big waves. So converged infrastructure has been going on for at least four or five years. Lots of adoption, lots of variety from both the big companies and some of the startups in this space. Flash were five years into this wave and we expect that we will, over the next couple of years, see even more innovation in Flash and new architectures than we saw over the last five. But more customers are adopting it. I remember the first time I came to the VTUG back in about four years ago. And so many of the new companies coming in here had to fight for, well, why am I going to consider something different? And now its customers are choosing their deployments. They're looking at new architectures. They're figuring out how it fits in their environment. They have to consider how cloud fits into what they're doing. And so it's real exciting times. So the other thing, the other observation I'd make, Stu, is as I look forward to 2014, you see all this innovation in things like converged infrastructure and Flash and software defined and cloud. You're seeing, it's really interesting dynamic in the traditional IT space where you're seeing disruptions like Flash, like converged infrastructure. And to a certain extent even software defined. Yes, they're disruptive, but I don't see the big guys, the oligopoly, the cartel, if you will. I don't see them getting flipped on their sides because of this. I'd see them adopting. I think they've got, again, you worked at EMC, big CTO staff. They get their hands in all the standards bodies. They look at companies, they invest in companies. I mean, Pat Gelsinger's out investing in companies. EMC Ventures is out in the West Coast. HP will be back in that game soon. Oracle certainly has been there. Cisco as well, Intel, Microsoft, these guys know what's coming. They're plugged into the trends. And the point I want to make is, I just don't see them getting completely blown away. I don't see the Flash guys wiping out the NetApps and EMCs of the world. I don't see the converged infrastructure startups creaming IBM and HP and Dell. They're going to pick at them. They're going to steal crumbs from the table. But I see those other companies reacting, certainly more slowly and maybe not to the degree of innovation yet, but they'll get there. Where I do see the big disruption is in cloud with Amazon in particular. Yeah, so Dave, the thing I'd say, of course, is storage is such a fragmented marketplace. I mean, EMC and the leader, they've got somewhere between like 30 and 35% of the market. So, you know, you're not going to see somebody come in and within five years have 50% of the market. Just not going to happen. So, you know, can we see 5% swings somewhere? Absolutely. Where the big disruption is, is some of this commoditization of hardware. What's that going to do to margins? You know, all the storage guys today work off x86 boxes. We talked about server-sand a couple of times today and that's driving really commodity server-based hardware. If you look at what's coming from, you know, Quanta and all the Taiwanese guys, it can seriously disrupt, you know, some of the higher margins that storage guys still have. There's more potential to disruption, of course, in networking because Cisco is such a dominant player and nobody has been able to chip at that, so there's much more room for some significant disruption. Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily going to, particularly the server business, it's not necessarily going to be pretty. And the conversion infrastructure, I think, brings opportunities there that maybe don't exist in the pure server market. Storage, you're right, it's very fragmented. There's always been opportunities in storage for companies to participate. There's a lot of money to be made and I certainly don't mean to imply that it's not a good time for startups. I think it's a great time for startups. You know, data gravity just secured another, I don't think 10, 12, $20 million, I forget today, it was announced, and so there's a lot of innovation and activity going on. Where I see the big disruption, as I said, is cloud and SaaS. So you're seeing, when you look at companies like Workday, ServiceNow, certainly Splunk, Tableau, these software slash big data, some are cloud companies as well, particularly, you know, SaaS companies like Workday, those are highly disruptive because they have more software-like marginal economics, yet at the same time, they're stealing some of the hardware share invisibly. And I do think that's something that is going to be interesting to see whether or not some of the large hardware guys respond. I mean, SAP and Oracle have certainly bought SaaS companies. You know, EMC, I guess, with Mozi has, but will they buy application SaaS companies? As a way to maintain some of their infrastructure, large S, that is going to be an interesting question. I mean, the reason for not doing that in the past has always been, well, we don't want to, you know, compete with our partners, you know, we're not in that business, but essentially, if Workday and SAP, for example, and Salesforce are going to get into the infrastructure business, well, why shouldn't the infrastructure guys get into the application business? I think this puts forth some interesting M&A opportunities over the course of 2014 and beyond, where some of the guys that were avoiding the application space are going to start looking at it. Yeah, that's a great point, Dave. I mean, heck, you know, on the infrastructure side, you know, Facebook's doing a roadshow talking about OCP, so, you know, you get people going in totally new directions that you never would have expected. And, you know, we were talking earlier on one of the segments that you say, you know, who might emerge as a leader at this, and, you know, today it's tough to look forward and see somebody, a dark horse could come in and somebody that you wouldn't expect. And I guess that kind of leads us to some of the upcoming events that we've got going on, Dave. Yeah, so Stu, we're going to be end of the month, we're going to be at the OCP summit. Open compute. Yeah, open compute, and so open compute is the standard put forth by Facebook. They said, okay, here's our reference architecture. If you want to sell to us, you're going to have to fit to these, but, as importantly, we're going to give this standard to the industry, so we want it to grow, so it's Facebook's play on infrastructure and converged infrastructure and reference architectures. It competes with, in effect, what Amazon is doing internally. It competes, I guess, with a lot of the ODMs, right? Well, no, no, it leverages the ODMs. It levers the ODMs, but competes with their existing business models. I shouldn't say competes with it. It adds juice to their existing business models, really what's happening there. It kind of competes with the traditional server space. Absolutely. And so it's going to be interesting to see the shifting stands there, so we'll be at that event. I'll be giving, I'll be hosting one of the panels with a number of customers, somebody from Open Compute and George Schlesman from IO. And then, so that's the 28th and the 29th, and then, also in the 29th, we'll be at the Computer Museum. There's an event that is an OpenStack event. Yeah, the OpenStack Enterprise Forum, so that's going to be in Mountain View, California. Registration's still open for that. If you go to OpenStackEnterpriseForum.com, you can find the link for that, and we're going to be having, we've got people from the OpenStack community. eBay is on there as a customer. SolidFire and a couple of other thought leaders in this space. Definitely OpenStack's an area that we're looking to cover greatly, and that's a good event here to talk about, is the Enterprise really ready for it and answer some of those questions that we started here today? And then, yeah, so we'll be doing those two events. Really, that will close out January. And then, we will be doing big data SV. The week of February 11th in Santa Clara will be at the Hilton across the street on the Santa Clara Convention Center, so the Cube will be set up live broadcasting at the Hilton, big data SV, pound big data SV is the hashtag there that we'll be using. It's going concurrent with O'Reilly Strata. We'll also be at IBM Pulse, February 23rd, a great cloud show. And then, obviously a lot of other stuff coming up throughout the year. Last year we did what's due, 32. 32 events, hope to increase that this year, and we're excited. Yeah. All right, everybody, so thanks so much for watching. Appreciate you watching the Cube. Go to siliconangle.com, you'll see blogs of this event and all the news of the day going on in Techland. Go to youtube.com slash siliconangle, and you'll see this playlist and playlists of previous shows. We were just at the MIT Cybersecurity Conference. Last week that playlist is up. Go to wikibond.org, you'll see all the research there. It's all free research. Check that out. Really appreciate everybody watching. This is the Cube. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We'll see you next time.