 It's lookinangles.com, continuous coverage of VMworld Live 2010 on the scene at the Moscone Center South, with special guest Pat Gelsinger from VMC, the president, former Intel 30-year veteran. Welcome back to theCUBE. Back with the bloggers, a little upgrade from our last gig, you know what I'm saying? Good day. You guys made it to the big time, man. You're okay. VMworld, VMworld's rockin' here in VMware. So Pat, back at theCUBE, we know you're really busy. So, you've been at EMC now for almost a year. What's it like there? And you just acquired Green Plum. You've been busy since we last met. So tell us, quick update, what you're doing for one year's coming up, and you got Green Plum under your belt, what does all this mean for EMC? And then we'll talk about the keynote. Okay, so well, overall, I think things are going on schedule, if you think about it that way. We said that coming into it, we had certain agendas that we would have implemented EMC, and those are well underway. We did product announcements last week that we'll talk to you all that. I'll cover in my super session today. We've said we're gonna be acquisitive. We did archery early in the year. We just did Green Plum. VMware's continued air-acquisitive nature. They announced two acquisitions this morning. Personally, I said we were gonna be a disruptive entity in the industry, and EMC world, we have 17,000 people. We have EMC world this year, our best ever. So overall, we're really healing the momentum, the excitement of the industry. EMC's a great place to do it, and obviously, with the turbo-charge of VMware, it's a great part to have in play. Well, I think we went to school at the feet of Professor Moritz this morning, and Paul took the first part of the keynote to really lay out a view of the future, the layering of IT, what's gonna happen in terms of this major new consumption model of IT as we move to the cloud. This IT as a service model. He laid out key strategic directions for things like security, and how that starts to implement through the V-Shield directions. Also, this model of IT as a service for IT, as well as for service providers, the key partnerships there, so a major delivery through the Redwood technology that they did, and then Herod followed up with some of the substance to showing the clear, tangible progress against the directions that Paul was describing. I'm very consistent with a lot of the things you've been talking about, sort of in preview fashion for the last several months. It looks like we worked together. Yeah, it's amazing. Isn't it how it's a sort of coincidence comes together at the last minute like that? I just love it. So, Pat, we talked at UNC about the storage is sexy, and that went over real well. Since then, M&A has been off the charts, sizzling hot storage. Now we're here, and what we're seeing is proof points. And you've done some things with Green Plum. Talk about what it all means in terms of proof points. What proof points do you see that absolutely established the reality of cloud, and that this is a mandate going forward as a future architecture, whether it's developers, mobility, and talk about those proof points. Yeah, and I think, you know, let's be careful. I don't want to be too, while I am going to answer your question, I don't want to get too far ahead of my skis in the sense that there's still a lot more cloud washing than there is cloud substance. And, you know, if you go back to the theme, right, you know, virtual roads, actual clouds, right, trying to say there is some substance to it, but still, there's a lot of visionary directions here. You know, that said, right, as part of the vCloud Partner Program that Paul described today, you know, these customers, these partners, are putting up real cloud offerings today. And those are becoming very real. Things like vCloud Director, real tools to implement those in place. Real customers, like the Levi's example there, who they're implementing this and what they do. Yeah, we had Tom Peckon down at Sapphire at CIO Levi's, great story there. Yeah, and you know, I met with customers like Telstra yesterday, who is absolutely implementing services and delivering them to enterprise clients. So I think that we've clearly in the hype cycle, right, you know, the hype rate is often well in excess of the reality, but I think that's been the case for the last two years. And now we're seeing in that hype cycle that the reality is starting to build where real customers, real services, real applications are being deployed against this cloud model and sort of the mantra that we've been laying. And we're seeing increasing industry momentum, saying yes indeed, we all need to rationalize our products, our services, against that cloud strategy. So you've seen a lot of inflection points in your day as have we, where do you see this one rating based on in the context of what you just said, the whole cloud computing inflection point, is it bigger than all the previous ones in your opinion or still remains to be seen? Well, anybody making such a prediction, right, you should think twice about, right, you know, their validity of their claims. But I think there's two aspects to it that I think indicate that it could be bigger than anything before. You know, the first one is just the industry is bigger, right? IT, and as the economy has grown and IT has grown as a percent of the economy, we're just big now. And IT truly is just a huge sector of the economy, and particularly for United States, right, Silicon Valley area, you know, this is our agenda for the world. So as the economy's bigger, and secondly, this is disruptive in multiple dimensions of the industry. It changes the infrastructure, it changes the application model, it changes the service model, it affects service providers, it affects system integrators. Many of the prior changes were not as disruptive across all of the strata of the industry. So because it's bigger, because it is more influential across all dimensions of the industry, I believe, and certainly, you know, as Joe has talked about, Joe Tucci, our CEO, has said, this is the biggest. How big? I don't know, but this one feels like, you know, this is a tsunami class wave if I was a surfer. Yeah, Joe's famous wave slide. We had Microsoft on yesterday who's actually here, but they can't really show anything. And we talked about them, about their hypervisor. I asked a specific question about, is the PC era reached the glass ceiling, the bloated PC, chained to the desk, the PC-centric view? You've lived that generation. It's not so much that it's irrelevant, it's just that it's changing. And we're in a new era. So what VMware is putting forth with this architecture and some of the things you've been working on, you have a platform and you have agnostic devices, that really changes the game on this PC-centric. I mean, what do you see on the user-centric side the key variables in the industry? Well, I think, you know, number one, any of these waves, you know, I predicted in 1990, the end of the mainframe, right? 20 years later, it still hasn't quite gone away, right? In that sense, it's not like these waves become the death of all prior- But you did some damage. Okay. Yeah, you did great over there. It changed it. But it doesn't like immediately eliminate those prior technologies. But the nexus of innovation, the foci of the industry's new capabilities, productivity, applications, has shifted. And I think all of us today would say the PC, right, isn't that foci of innovation. Hey, lots of apps are using it, using it. You know, hey, I am much more productive on my laptop than I am on iPad or iPhone or a Joyad. I mean, you know, I just, you know, just much more productive in that sense. But, you know, I can't carry my laptop around in my pocket, right? Clearly we're seeing the shift of innovation, new application models, new consumer-centric usage models, both the devices and the applications. And I think as Steve Herrod's keynote talked about very much, hey, I want an app store-like thing for my enterprise applications, right? Where you see much of that consumerization coming to corporate IT as well. So it has shifted, right? Applications, usage models will be device-independent, right? They will become more consumer-focused. And essentially, you know, let's just say they're going to be more iPhone-like, right? And how we get them and consume them. At Orlando, we sat down and we chatted about, had a great chat at theCUBE in Orlando. I asked you a question about apps and infrastructure. And I asked you specifically, are apps leading the way in showing the infrastructure? And you answered, no, infrastructure's always was a leading indicator to apps. But apps seem to have more momentum. What is the VMware announcement today? How does that shape that thesis that you mentioned? I mean, obviously it looks like more enablement at the software level. What can you share with it? Because that really was a great point and I want to bring that out again. Yeah, and the point I made there was, hey, you know, us infrastructure hardware guys, we create capabilities and then the apps guys come in and use them inefficiently and poorly, but to enable new things. It's sort of that gap of capability in the infrastructure that then gets filled in by application vendors. And I still believe fundamentally that's the case. You don't write apps for infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. You can't run an application's business that way. So our job as the infrastructure guys is always to create these new gaps, these new vacuums for the app guys to come and fill in. And I think everything we're seeing is very much that case where all of a sudden there's lots of performance that's easily, readily available. You know, think about how easy it is to deploy a VM today, right? Literally, you know, if I would have had to go provision things, buy some new servers, get the ports allocated, get a network reroute, you know, build up a new storage infrastructure. It might be months for me to allow a major new application to occur. Literally now, a few clicks. What do you see in the VMware announcement today given what you guys are doing at the app level as the core enabler, the disruptive enabler that's going to really tip that over in terms of the innovation. Is there anything new there? Well, I think there are two aspects to it. You know, if we take the Redwood, the vCloud director, kind of thing, it really is this idea of being able to rapidly, with essentially no cost, be able to create new virtual data center infrastructure, be able to do it with a security model, with policy based capabilities, with a provisioning environment and the management environments go with it. That is way profound, right? The second thing is all of all the things about spring, right, is not just being able to do infrastructure more rapidly, it's not just encapsulating existing applications, it's also enabling a new developer model for tomorrow's applications as well. And that is truly thrilling to anybody who's doing enterprise application development. Yeah, some of the CIOs we had on were saying that they actually benched themselves against the cloud service providers. Do you see those two worlds, the cloud service providers and big IT coming together, or do you see the cloud service providers always having an edge over big IT? Well, I think there's an aspect to that that, you know, it's not, our job is to make the infrastructure as efficient on both sides of that equation as possible. So that an IT guy isn't making the decision based on cost, he's making the decision based on business relevant factors. You know, this is something, hey, you know, I need to guarantee compliance in this application. This is a business critical infrastructure element for me. I'm going to run into my infrastructure, but I know the cost of doing so is still highly efficient. I might federate it with an external service, right? I might do test and dev externally, and when that's done, I might bring it internally. I might use federation of outside compute capacity so that I don't need to build for peak, I build for average, and I spill over to rent VMs at quarter close or month close. I might say, boy, I want to actually be able to take advantage and federate with some of my key customers or channel partners or business partners I'm going to have, and I'd actually be able to then to be able to view me as their service provider, right? So, hey, just operate and utilize my applications, right, as one of my business partners as well. And that's really the power of the vision that we're laying out. It's not public versus private, it's public and private, and allow them to be federated together into hybrid services that give you the best of both worlds in a seamless, agile manner. Pat, the M&A activity's been hot. You did a Green Plum acquisition, EMC bought Green Plum, which is a nice acquisition. A great acquisition, it's not nice, come on, this is a great acquisition. That is a great team. It was amazing, the application has game-changing acquisition by EMC Green Plum. Very true, I love you, David. Welcome to theCUBE, third time. We treat our guests nicely. So it's hot, so the horses are on the track. I tweeted that and said, hey, everyone's out on the track right now, the big guys, Oracle, EMC, NetApp. So, talk about what's happening. Why is the M&A activity so hot? Is it an indicator to the fact that people have to retool faster? Is it an activity that they're behind? Is it an activity that they need to move faster? All of the above, what is your view on that, and what's next in M&A? Well, I think it's a couple of different factors are at work. And one is, if you show up at my super session later today, one of my slides is the three views of the cloud, right? The Uber cloud model, the Googles, Amazons, I'll call it the vertical cloud model, HP, IBM, and then I'll call it the virtual cloud model, EMC, DMWare, right? And of course, we contrast those three. And what we're seeing, I would say, is those business models, those industry structures, those strategic frameworks are driving the consolidation of all of the medium and small players into one of those pictures. So, I think you can look at that lens and say everybody is taking M&A acquisitions to better implement and solidify their view of that strategy of these three different views of the cloud. So, one is it's industry structure that's going on. Second is, after the downturn, everybody's coming out of it cash rich, right? You know, people got money to spend. Right? Right? You know, in that sense. And, you know, so, right, there is a clear, right, earnestness to people saying, okay, right, I could pay dividends, I could buy back shares. Boy, that's pretty innovative strategy, isn't it? Right? Or let's go start, you know, taking more aggressive steps. I think it also indicates that there are only so many exciting assets available, right? You know, good assets that people could take actions on. So, you know, in any buyer and seller market, right? Prices get crazy when there's more buyers than there are sellers. Look at three parts. People who followed your career know that you, at Intel, you were very pro ecosystem, and we just had some VCs on yesterday, top VCs in cloud, talking about how hot it is, and they're looking for startups, not the angel stuff, but like real money, real technology. Talk about the ecosystem that's emerging in the startup community, because there are guys developing new, cool stuff, that very cloud centric that's new. So, talk about your view there and what you see and what your general opinion is. Well, I think like any of these waves, there isn't just the wave of what goes on in terms of what the big guys do, right? There's new university research that's going on and some of that's exciting. There's also then the venture community, right? And with this wave, you know, it is so disruptive. It changes consumer computing, new consumer devices, new consumer applications, new enterprise infrastructure, new enterprise applications, and, you know, so all of a sudden, we're seeing a new round of dramatic VC activity, again. And they're not going into, you know, startups that are building ASICs and semiconductors sort of rigour up and sort of saying, let's go build new infrastructure components, new applications that live on this new model. And virtualization. Yeah, absolutely. It's all riding this cloud virtualization trend and, you know, it's just stunning. You know, 17,000 people at VMworld, right? 17 million. Dave, I have one final question. I know you want to get a final question. Actually, let me get my final question first, and then you close. I'll give you a last word. So you've been spending a lot of time in New England lately. Do you like it there? Are you going to move east, or can we pry you out of here? We've taken a second home. Oh, fantastic. So we're half-time, and my wife is actually loving this bi-coastal a couple weeks here, a couple weeks there, back and forth, you know. Excellent. Football season's starting. Absolutely. We'll make you a Patriots fan. Hey, you know, maybe the Red Sox still have a shot at this, you know, that final wild-car berth, right? So we had some readers point out on the blog that Pat Gelsinger has the same exact track that Joe Tucci had, COO, president, CEO. Anything you want to announce here? You want, you, I don't want to say anything. Any CEO? I have no announcements on this subject. Pat, that's great. Thanks so much. I know you're super busy and coming on the show. I always love you guys. Thanks very much. Great to have you. Thanks, bye-bye. We'll be right back.