 We have another guest, Nathan Biggs, who is the CEO of House of Brick. The House of Brick is probably the foremost consultant in the area of VMware for Oracle. We talk about Oracle a lot. Hi, Nathan. Hi, Dave. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. This is my co-host, John Furrier. Nice to meet you, Nathan. Oracle. Me too. House of Blues, House of Bricks. We love Oracle. Oracle, Brick. We love VMware. Oracle, VMware, kind of different strategies, right? So Nathan's company, House of Brick, basically, as I say, is the foremost VMware Oracle consultant on the planet. You guys have done an incredible job. We have some of the smartest people that we've met. But basically, you specialize in taking business-critical and mission-critical applications that are Oracle-based and running them on VMware. That's right. We all know the success that server virtualization has had. Server virtualization has really exploded. It has allowed us to cut costs, to really improve operating efficiencies and improve agility. And now we're seeing more and more of the application portfolio kind of chunk into VMware. Right? So we talked to customers maybe three or four years ago. A very small portion of the application portfolio was virtualized. And now today, it's much, much higher. Can we set the stage first? We have a lot of audience out there that might not know the inner workings of Oracle VMware competition. So let's just, Dave, set the stage for the folks out there about Oracle. I mean, I have my own opinion. But you know, you get Oracle, the big, Larry, Allison, Onze, Yacht, Big Power, Iron Fist, VMware, the new EMC, Spinout, Virtualization, Open, Ecosystem, Palmaritz, Wintel, Pat Gelsinger. Oracle is like the big bad bully, right? And VMware is the up-and-comer. So here's the deal. It's pretty straightforward now, especially since Sun was acquired by Oracle. Oracle essentially wants to own the world. And they understand that by vertically integrating as many pieces of the stack as possible, it can increase its revenue, increase its profits, and its competitive advantage. That's clearly Oracle's strategy. Now, one of the things that Oracle did probably about two years ago is went out and bought a small company in Massachusetts called VirtualIron. VirtualIron essentially is a little virtualization platform, not nearly as robust as VMware, but it allowed Oracle to say, hey, we have that too. Buy ours. It's better because we're Oracle. They say everything that they have is better. They're very brilliant marketeers. Now, so what they've done is they've bundled essentially everything into their stack, the hardware, the software, the applications, and of course, very importantly, the database. Here comes VMware. VMware is a software company. Any software company is essentially the enemy of Oracle because Oracle wants to own the software business. So VMware is now starting to somewhat democratize the software business by consolidating, lowering the number of servers, making Oracle potentially less expensive. Oracle doesn't like that. It's going to lose control of that place. Oracle tries to fight it a little bit. At the same time, Oracle realizes a lot of people want to go to VMware, so it has to provide support. There's nothing technically about VMware that won't support Oracle. But Oracle wants to get as much of that pie as possible. So it'll maybe trip the competition, maybe throw them a little elbow as they're running into the boards, and Oracle's being very aggressive trying to buy time while it can build up the robustness of its platform. Enter companies like House of Brick. You know VMware inside and out. You know Oracle inside and out. You've got great customer relationships, and what you say is, look, we can make this stuff work. We can help drive business value. That's who we are today. Well, the biggest reasons that people are not virtualizing Oracle on VMware are not technical, like you said, Dave. The reasons that people are not virtualizing Oracle are emotional. They're political. And Oracle does a good job, as the reasons that you mentioned, that they like to preserve their license revenue. And so there are reasons why they don't want people to virtualize. But there are so many great advantages for virtualizing Oracle stacks on VMware that really people need to consider that. Like what? The number one reason that people consider is cost savings. And so that's a big driver for people. That has been with VMware for a long time. People have been consolidating servers, and they're realizing some tremendous cost savings. But there are other advantages when you consider virtualizing tier one applications, such as high availability, even working hand-in-hand with Oracle real application clusters. An Oracle Rack and a VMware-HA combination together is just a sweet solution for HA, for tier one customers. There's the optimization of the application development lifecycle. People can dramatically reduce their lifecycle time, but also improve the quality of their application releases. So those are just a couple that... Yeah, so we had a peer insight on wikibon.org last week. Nathan, you participated in that. We had a bunch of users on that were participating in the call. And the findings out of that call, we were presenting some research from wikibon.org, from David Floyd's research. And our findings were that the vast majority of applications out there are candidates for virtualization, including Oracle applications. Now, there are some that don't make sense to virtualize. The highest, most mission-critical applications probably don't make sense, although you would debate that, so we should have that discussion. But generally speaking, the vast majority makes sense. We agree on that. We also found that Oracle sometimes will certify VMware on Oracle, Oracle on VMware, especially if you pay them through the nose, like in the pharmaceutical industry. Other times, maybe they're not so supportive. They'll drag their feet, especially for smaller customers that don't pay them as much. You guys have had some success there, I realize that. So there's a lot of research on wikibon around this that shares our findings. But what are you seeing? This whole notion of actually bringing mission-critical applications to VMware. A lot of people say, hey, unless the ISV supports it, straight out and certifies it, there's no way I'm doing it. It's too risky. What's your angle on that? Well, you need to pay attention to the difference between support from Oracle and certification from Oracle. Oracle, in their support statement, it's on MetaLink or MyOracle support, it's 249212.1. That's the VMware support statement from Oracle. And it says that they will support all Oracle technologies running on VMware. But they say they don't certify. And so there's a difference between certification and support. Our customers are getting great support from Oracle. We've heard of cases, although we haven't experienced it ourselves, where Oracle has asked them to re-platform their Oracle workloads onto physical. When there's a problem, re-platform onto physical, recreate the problem onto physical, and then we'll support it. But you've certainly heard cases directly. We have heard cases, yes. But with our customers, and maybe it's just the way that we work with their customers, but they're getting good support from Oracle. See, I have a theory on this. I've been thinking about this. Experts in Oracle virtualization, particularly on VMware, I said, how come you're not seeing this? And I think I have the reason. The reason is because your stuff works. You know how to make Oracle work in VMware. So you're not having the same types of problems that many other customers are having. I think that's got to be a big reason. So you guys are getting great support. Because you know what you're doing. A lot of customers are running at blind. You need to get help. Either you need to have in-house people or you need to go outside. That's the bottom line. The benefits will certainly offset the cost of hiring that consultant in many, many cases. Yeah. And we're always willing to come in and help, obviously. But just for your listeners, give you a little hint here. If you run into a problem, don't presume it's VMware. Presume first that it's Oracle and work on tuning Oracle and optimizing the performance of Oracle. More often than not, you're going to find where the problem is. A lot of times people presume that the problem is in the configuration of VMware. And so they go there first. And that's where they run into problems. So maybe the advice is if you're running Oracle and VMware, start with, okay, call Oracle. Say, hey, I got a question on how to configure Oracle. What the best practice is on Oracle. Now, of course, they're going to say, what are you running? Well, I'm running VMware. Okay, but maybe ask questions about Oracle and find answers about Oracle and try to attack that side of the equation before you even go down the VMware rat hole. And that's been our experience. House of Brick started out 13 years ago as an Oracle Performance Company, as an Oracle Optimization Company. And so that's what makes us good. And it's what makes us good now, even running on VMware. Yeah, so you're here at EMC World. I mean, EMC World obviously has an interest in virtualizing Oracle applications. EMC is doing that in-house. Sanjay Mershandani on tomorrow. EMC's doing a lot with Oracle. Applications doing a lot with SAP applications as well. They're sort of, I think, one of the leading edge companies. I mean, it's their business, so they did a lot better. So what's your relationship with EMC? What are you doing here at the event? Our relationship with EMC is a great one. Good partnered relationship. We have a subcontract relationship. So what EMC does is when they run into opportunities where their customers are running Oracle, where their customers have application stacks that are running on Unix, whether that's Solaris or AIX, HPUX, and they want to replatform onto an x86 architecture to take advantage of some of the cost savings and the performance improvements, then they bring in House of Brick to enter that conversation, because we know how to take those applications and bring them onto the new hardware and the new virtualized infrastructure and really make them perform well. So EMC recognizes the value that House of Brick brings in enabling them to do their business better. We enable them to sell V-blocks. We enable EMC to sell storage. We enable the VCE company to sell their product. So we don't get in the way. We enable their sales. And I think that's what makes a good partnership with House of Brick and EMC. You've met David Floyer, one of our lead analysts, and he has said flat out that VMware is the most robust platform for enterprise applications. I presume it's safe to say you concur. We do. Is that right? And he said it's, look, it's just far more mature than Oracle VM. That's just the way it is. Hands down. He has said that. Why? What makes it hands down better than say, for instance, Oracle VM? I sat in the keynote from Paul Moritz for CEO of VMware this morning. And Paul talked about how the ESX hypervisor is the component of VMware that's becoming the least prominent, if you will. I don't remember the words that he used, but he talked about all of the other tooling and all of the other advantages that VMware brings. And so the ESXI, which is VMware's free hypervisor, might compare to something like Oracle Virtual Machine. But VMware has done so much to put tooling and application support and other things around their hypervisor that really make VMware much more mature. The operational benefits of VMware far outpace what we're seeing on Oracle Virtual Machine. We have customers who, for support or certification reasons, want to try Oracle Virtual Machine. And many times, of course, we help them with that, but many times they find that they're not getting the performance, the tooling that they need, and so they ask for our help to then migrate back onto VMware. You can understand, based on my intro where I was talking about Oracle wanting to own the stack, you can understand why Oracle doesn't want to appear to be overly supportive of VMware. They're trying to freeze the market so that they can get their act together in Oracle VM to the point where they can compete more effectively. Companies do that all the time. There's no distribution today that won't be available for many months. Well, why pre-announce something? Well, you pre-announce something so you can build up market momentum and maybe freeze some of the momentum of some of your competitors. And Oracle is very, very good at that. So you can understand that. But I think that, as David Fleurer has pointed out, this is an inevitable trend and VMware seems to be at the heart of it. But the other, so, and now we had some people on the call last week. Bill Santilli in particular said, you're going to do it unless Oracle certifies it. And, or at least, you know, guarantees that they're going to support it forcefully. Now, that's the other end of the spectrum. A lot of the customers that we have have said, look, I'm going to do Test and Dev. And Bill agreed, Test and Dev, no brainer. Start there, gain experience with the platform. And you wouldn't disagree with that, would you? I would not disagree. Test and Dev is a great thing to do with Oracle on VMware. And that's a great place to start. If customers truly are concerned about certification, then House of Brick has some best practices where we can configure the virtualized infrastructure to quickly migrate to a hardware. If that's what they want in their infrastructure so that they can move quickly from virtual to hardware, we have some best practices to make that happen in a matter of minutes rather than a long, protracted period of time. Well, we've seen today from, and we saw yesterday from Pat Gelsinger, statistics, I think there are IDC numbers that showed that there's more physical, more virtual servers shipping now than physical servers. There are more virtual applications than physical applications, or more applications that are virtualized. So we're seeing that tipping point. It's happening, it's inevitable. VMware's not the only one. Hyper-V's out there, and they're doing a good job. They're growing very fast. You know, it's free. They changed the whole model and taken a playbook out of the old Microsoft. Now, of course, VMware executives know the Microsoft playbook, so they see what's coming there. But that's a fast-moving game. Citrix, obviously very, very strong in the desktop. But Zen is a force as well. So you've got three prominent players out there, and others. IBM's got its own technology, now, of course, Oracle. So there's a vibrant market out there. VMware clearly is the leader, and I think you've backed the right horse, in our opinion. But what advice would you give to those practitioners that are saying, look, Nathan, I'm really nervous. I don't want to bet my business on... I think I'd get fired for not doing VMware. I mean, I might eventually, if I don't cut my cost, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid not to go or to go with VMware because Oracle's not going to certify it. What would you tell those guys? Well, what I would suggest is starting small. If you haven't virtualized your test and dev environments with Oracle, start there. Start by putting test and dev on to a virtualized infrastructure and look at the advantages that you're getting out of that. The next thing to try is maybe identify a small project where you could take something into production and start to see what advantages you can get out of a production grade Oracle installation on VMware. It's our assertion that there are some tremendous advantages that you can get by doing that and it will outweigh some of the other concerns. But I understand that certification is an issue for some organizations. The next thing I'd suggest for the Oracle customers out there is to go on to my Oracle support or MetaLink and do a search and search for VMware. Look for all of the cases that are VMware-related and look at how many were bugs related to VMware. We haven't found any out there in Oracle's database. We haven't found any VMware-related bugs that people have reported. And we have a lot of customers that are working with Oracle support. So start to satisfy your own concerns about this issue of support versus certification. Oracle does support VMware. And we've seen that time and again with our customers. The last thing I'd recommend is take a look at the Oracle certification matrix. The Oracle certification matrix certifies operating systems on chip sets. Oracle doesn't certify any particular brand of hardware. And so on the Oracle certification matrix, VMware lives underneath that operating system level where Oracle typically certifies down to that level. That may be a way that you can satisfy yourself. That support, the Oracle committed support is sufficient. I want to make it clear. Oracle will certify VMware. This is one of the findings that we came out of the study in the pharmaceutical industry. It's well-known that Oracle certifies VMware. You got to pay them to the nose. But that just underscores that there's no technical reason. We're talking to Nathan Biggs, CEO of House of Brick Technology, the foremost VMware Oracle consultant. If you need help configuring Oracle and VMware, Nathan's your man. You got a great team. Nathan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Dave.