VMware CEO talks software-defined data centers, OpenStack and dueling Amazon

News
Aug 14, 201330 mins

At the helm for a year now, Pat Gelsinger says his company is well positioned

As a top executive at Intel and EMC, Pat Gelsinger helped build the data centers of today. Now, as CEO of VMware, he’s promising to deliver the data centers of tomorrow. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Gelsinger spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant and Network World Senior Writer Brandon Butler about what he’s accomplished one year into his tenure, and why the company is uniquely positioned to deliver on the vision of software-defined data centers. Gelsinger detailed the company’s plans for its upcoming infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and how it will out-duel early leader Amazon in that market. He also discussed VMware’s plans to simplify mobility and explained how, rather than threatening the company, OpenStack is widening VMware’s market. (Oh, one other thing about OpenStack: He doesn’t see it gaining traction in the enterprise.) Gelsinger also shared thoughts on VMware’s competitors and discussed how he’ll work with former VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s new Pivotal spin off.

John Gallant:     What did you set out to change at the company and what have you accomplished so far?

Pat Gelsinger:    Coming into the company, a number of things were obvious.  One was this choreographed plan of the formation of Pivotal and moving the assets from EMC together to do that. I came in here, stepped in to take over as the leader.  That freed up Paul [Maritz] to go develop the Pivotal plan, and then we executed on that plan.  April 1st was the formal launch of it.  But also it was clear that VMware, as we moved those assets out, we needed to simultaneously clarify what it was that we were going to do going forward. We had the core virtualization platform that has been extraordinary for the compute [layer], but we had to lay out very clearly what our next vision was going to be as a company.  And we did that, our three priorities for the company, and then got everything aligned against those priorities.  We restructured the company, we sold off assets.  And really our Q2 earnings call, to me, was sort of the marker: OK, we’re done with all that stuff.  We’ve clarified the earnings, we clarified what’s in and what’s out, where we’re going for the future, and obviously, the good financial numbers helped us sort of snap the line in saying: OK, we’re ready for up-and-to-the-right for the next decade like we did for the last.

[READ MORE CEO INTERVIEWS]

JG:         What does the coming year hold for the company and what are some of the milestones we should expect along the way?

PG:         Well, we’ve laid out a bold agenda. Let’s just briefly walk through the three elements.  Obviously, for software-defined data center, take what we’ve done in compute and now execute on management, storage, network and security, and deliver that whole capability as a suite of integrated solutions, our vCloud suite offering. Really virtualize the data center.  Number two is do that both on-premise and in the cloud.  That’s what our hybrid service is about, launching ourselves into the infrastructure-as-a-service business, but then uniquely binding on- and off-premise, given our core position in the enterprise workloads, and being able to combine that in the cloud. We think that really uniquely allows us to execute on the hybrid value proposition.  The third, of course, is the end-user computing, which we have a good position for virtual desktop.  But the world is moving to mobile. We say that the entire computing landscape has moved from client/server to mobile cloud, and we will be uniquely positioned as the infrastructure provider for mobile and for hybrid cloud on and off-premise. Those three things, to us, form the triangle of complete strategy that allows us to be the infrastructure provider for enterprise. That allows them to both build that new infrastructure, but also we can help them save money in their old, if they’re transforming and building efficiencies in their old environment.  That strategy has been laid out.  We’ve communicated it clearly internally and externally, and now we’ve just got to execute like crazy on making it happen.

JG:         Let me explore one aspect of that in more depth, because I think it’s critical for people to understand.  Talk about the software-defined data center [SDDC].  What exactly do you mean by that?  What are the components of it and where do you stand in delivering on that promise?

PG:         The most advanced [aspect of] our portfolio obviously is compute and we just keep that going. There are still workloads that aren’t virtualized.  We’re not virtualizing Hadoop and big data yet, there are pieces of business-critical that are [not virtualized.] We just keep cranking on that.  That’s obviously the most mature leg of our offerings.  The second most mature leg is management.  I was delighted by some of the recent market analysts who said in the cloud-management space we are the largest provider, and we are the fastest growing provider of management solutions.  There, it really is moving from management to automation, and allowing the policy-driven, self-service portals, big data telemetry aspects in management. That business is well underway for us and we’re quite excited with the business results we’ve seen the last couple of quarters. 

The two nascent areas are networking and storage. With networking I include the whole net stack, everything associated with infrastructure, security, all the Layer 4-7 services.  That’s where [we did] the Nicira acquisition, software-defined networking, establishing what we’ve called NSX.  The network security architecture for us is enormous.  That’s still very early days, and you’ll be hearing a lot more about that at VMworld.  The fourth leg of this is storage and delivering the virtual storage architecture.  Again, you’ll be hearing a lot more about that at VMworld as well.  Those four taken together really execute on the complete software-defined data center — compute, network and security functions, storage, all being delivered through this layer of automation.  And that, to us, is the Software-Defined Data Center.

BB:         So Pat, you mentioned the infrastructure-as-a-service offering that’s coming out.  Tell our readers how this is going to be strategically different from what Amazon and other providers in the market offer now.  What advantages are you going to offer?

PG:         The biggest advantage by far, and the unique differentiator, is the compatibility of the VMware on-premise offerings with the off-premise vCloud Hybrid Service. That’s really what we mean by hybrid. Three or four use cases emphasize that.  Test and dev.  A lot of IT budget is spent on test and dev. They can go do that on Amazon, but they then can’t bring it back and run it internally.  You’re locked into the proprietary Amazon interfaces that you can’t run on-premise.  So it doesn’t really solve your test and dev problem.  Another would be burst.  They want to be able to flexibly run things on-premise, but when month-end or quarter-end or a particular event happens they love to dynamically move things out, but then dynamically move them back.  So this idea of burst capacity.  Another example might be DR [disaster recovery] DR usually doesn’t work well because it’s not operational inside of an IT shop — I didn’t patch this, I didn’t upgrade that and now when the natural disaster happens I can’t really effectively use DR.  But if you’re going to an operational environment like hybrid cloud, I can now make that my DR site.  Those would be some examples that are unique capabilities where they would want this hybrid, this ability to flexibly, compatibly move across those environments. That’s the space where we think VMware is just uniquely positioned. Then over time we expect true hybrid applications to be developed as well.  Some things can be resident in the cloud, other things should be resident on-premise. Those might be driven by regulatory effects, privacy requirements, unique governance, SLAs, etc.  But number one, and we’re just getting enormous resonance from our customers, is hybrid.

[MORE: Why VMware’s hybrid cloud announcement could be a big deal]

The second and third aspects of it would be that [this] is based on our mission-critical SLAs, certified everywhere.  This is a government cloud that’s suitable for enterprise customers.  It has the SLAs, it has the validations, the certifications, etc., for the enterprise use cases. Enterprise customers aren’t finding that from any of the public cloud offerings today.  Also, as you extend further into enterprise use cases, what they want to be able to do is have one management domain, one support call, people who know how to support enterprise customers.  That just takes a long time to build up. We’re 15 years almost into building that enterprise relationship support. Taken all together, this is getting great resonance from customers.  Our Early Access Program that we’ve been in now since early June has been dramatically oversubscribed and you’ll be hearing a lot more about that at VMworld.

BB:         Can you share more about how this is going to be rolled out or what the pricing is going to look like for the vCloud Hybrid compared to others in the market?

PG:         Pricing is available. You can go look at our pricing today. [ED NOTE: VMware vCloud Hybrid Service pricing page] Generally, our pricing policy is to say it’s a value service.  We believe that the value that we’re bringing, because of compatibility, governance, SLAs, etc., that we truly can have a premium over just commodity services in the marketplace.  That said, we are also aggressively using SDDC technologies as part of the offering, which allows us to be very cost competitive as well.  We’re not chasing the race to the bottom, as some of the other cloud vendors believe they have to.  We think here it’s much more about enterprise value. But we do know that customers will look at the Amazon rate cards, and we believe we have to be competitive with them. We think we’ve hit a great compromise that really is highly cost effective for customers.

BB:   How do you see this playing out for VMware?  How much of VMware’s business is going to be in the cloud versus on-premise, maybe in a year, five years from now?

PG:         We’ve not made any formal statements there of size, expectations, etc.  A few generic statements would be:  We’re investing in this to be big.  We believe there are aspects of scale that are necessary to be competitive here, would be point one.  Another aspect that – and I probably should have mentioned it in the earlier question [about what] differentiates us – is the fact that we, as a software provider, can readily embrace partners in building and delivering the vCloud Hybrid Service. We’ve called these franchise partners, and you’ll see us make franchise announcements in the future, where we will go to a service provider, a systems integrator, an outsourcer, and they will become a franchise partner of the vCloud Hybrid Service, which gives us another point of leverage.  If I’m talking to a financial analyst, they’ll probe on capex leverage, but from an industry analyst perspective we think it’s much more about vertical markets, geographic reach, leveraging a unique position across the globe that allows us to be, again, highly differentiated as we go into Asian markets, European markets, etc., that have different regulatory frameworks, different governance, availability of services. We get to build on their infrastructure in a capex-like way and really use their brains as well, in partnership with ours.

JG:         We talked about Amazon, but who do you view as your top competitors?  Who do you worry most about when you look across the competitive landscape?  Is there someone else out there that seems to share that same vision of the software-defined data center?

PG:         When we think about the software-defined data center and the on-premise view of that, the biggest competitor was, is, and – I expect – will continue to be Microsoft. As you know, they make lots of money and they have no problem being persistent. When you go to the hybrid cloud, we think it ends up being primarily around the big cloud providers that have significant intellectual property, and the ones that we think are going to be of that character over time would be Amazon, Microsoft, Google and ourselves.  Of those, the two that uniquely, I think, can deliver on the hybrid value proposition would be Microsoft and ourselves.  Obviously, the very large market share lead we have in enterprise on-premise workloads, we think gives us a substantial advantage versus Microsoft or anybody else.  Then in the end-user space, obviously, Citrix is our key competitor there.  We’re happy with our progress vis-a-vis theirs over the last couple of quarters.

JG:         That’s a pretty diverse set of companies with a pretty diverse set of resources from a Citrix to a Microsoft or an Amazon.  If you’re looking a year out or two years out, who do you think really begins to dominate the landscape here?

PG:         The answer, I think, is fairly obvious.  Am I really concerned about Citrix long term?  No.  Not really.  Today we compete with them very head-on, but I think if we execute well, then at our size we should be able to really open up a meaningful competitive gap there over time.  When I look at the hybrid space, I think that Google is primarily consumer-oriented.  I don’t see them really approaching the enterprise space with as much aggressiveness.  I do see them being very aggressive in the more consumer and born-in-the-cloud application spaces.  The one I think that we all respect as having really made aggressive early moves is Amazon.  They’ve innovated.  They’ve been very aggressive in that regard.  We really think that they’ve set the pace in that space.  But they haven’t cracked the code for enterprise, and we don’t think that that’s an easy code to crack.  Given the 40-million-plus VMs that we’re running for enterprise customers already, if I use that as a metric, that’s just a daunting leadership position for us in the enterprise space that we think gives us a substantial value proposition to build upon there.  But they would be the one.  In the SDDC space, Microsoft was and will continue to be [the one]. They clearly have cash and revenue streams that are going to allow them to invest for the long term, and we fully expect that they will.

JG:         But they also have a number of other challenges to deal with that are not really of this space – the whole mobility market, the transition around operating systems, the other markets that they’re in.

PG:         I would hope that the decline of the PC ecosystem, their focus on the mobility space and competing with Apple and Google, I would hope that all of their competitive attention goes to those two companies.  And let’s throw Amazon into that list as well. I would hope all of their competitive attention goes there.  But practically speaking I think the enterprise is much too important to them. My strategic advisor for most of my career, Andy Grove, said: The paranoid survive.  So we will remain concerned about them in our space, and I expect that they will continue to put focus here.

BB:         Some analysts have said the virtualization software market is becoming saturated.  Some have even been calling virtualization a commodity. Microsoft has been building up Hyper-V.  You see other lower-cost options with open source stuff like KVM.  Do you agree that the market is getting saturated and do you agree with the assessment that Microsoft is really gaining traction in the hypervisor market?

[ALSO: ‘Good enough’ Microsoft Hyper-V starts turning more heads]

PG:         There clearly are competitive dynamics underway and there have been for a number of years.  In our last earnings call, Carl [Eschenbach, president and chief operating officer] made a fairly bold statement in saying: We never lose when we go toe-to-toe.  We continue to watch the competitive dynamics of the market very carefully, and customer win/loss rates and we happily have customers that we’re winning back from Hyper-V. It’s a bundled free hypervisor.  They charge for the OS, they charge for the management tools.  So how do you count market share for something they bundle for free?  How do channels get excited to pay for anything they bundle for free? We think it’s largely a low-end effect, at the low end of the marketplace – SMB, very small, a little bit of test and dev, etc.  When it really comes to an enterprise choosing what their infrastructure is, it’s a small piece of the choice and of the marketplace. 

But the market is clearly shifting the focus to the suite. That is where our attention is, that is where we are gaining great traction.  That’s the entire notion of the software-defined data center, selling the integrated management tools.  Now that I have thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds thousands of VMs running, how do I manage them?  How do I run telemetry on them?  How do I automate their provisioning and de-provisioning?  That’s where the customer focus is shifting, and that’s where we think our lead is pretty substantial.  We think things like networking are quite dramatic in that area as well, as the next area of bottleneck that customers take issue with. We absolutely believe there are competitive dynamics, but our software-defined data center suite offerings have clearly shown the success we’re having with those. We think we’ve gotten the right formula to address that shifting market need.

BB:         I wanted to ask about the virtual networking space as well.  You guys made a big splash buying Nicira last year, I think for what, $1.2 billion.  Talk about what you’ve done with those assets since that purchase.

PG:         Two things have been our focus.  One is, maniacally go win what we call the lighthouse customers, because this whole space of network virtualization, if you’re a baseball fan, the national anthem is still playing in the network virtualization game.  This is still very early and what we’ve said is we’ve got to be very, very focused on: Win customers, get them using the technology, prove it does scale, prove the robustness, the value proposition. We’ve been very direct every quarter talking about our key design wins and who’s on the platform, the production deployments.  The big one for Q2 was NTT Communications. If you’re a telecom aficionado, you’ll know that if you can win the Japanese telecommunications company, now you’ve proven a lot, because when everybody else has done testing, they’re just getting started on the validation requirements, etc.  That was a huge win for us in Q2.  The second thing that we said that we needed to do is really integrate the complete set of networking technologies. There was our organic technology, that we call vCNS [vCloud Networking and Security], and the Nicira platform, and integrate those together for a single offering for our customers, both when they’re using VMware, as well as when they’re in a non-VMware environment like OpenStack. We’ve brought those together and that is NSX, and that will be a big piece of what we talk about at VMworld.

BB:         What really needs to happen to get virtual networking to become as ubiquitous a technology as virtualizing on the compute layer?

PG:         Phase one, as we said, is lighthouse accounts.  These early substantive, at-scale customers, the Yahoos, eBay’s, Rackspace, NTT, ATT, etc., that are proving it really works at scale.  Because then what will happen is the big enterprise customers, like the big financials, the big transportation companies, etc., say: Okay, now I’m ready to give it a try. Now it’s showing value.  With that second phase, you also need to bring the ecosystem along because there are a lot of things that hook up, everybody connects to the network at some point.  The next phase is where the value proposition is consumable from a broad set of enterprise customers. It doesn’t require that very sophisticated decision, it becomes a very easy to consume and deploy technology that has substantial value.  That’s sort of like virtualization was in the 2005 timeframe. That’s the time where you really see the business impact start to occur.  At some point then it just becomes the way that you operate.  That would be the fourth phase of this, where it’s well proven, broadly deployed, broad ecosystem of success for it, and now everybody is operating their networks in this dynamic efficient manner through the virtual networking plane as the primary way that they see their networking infrastructure.

JG:         Last month we interviewed John Chambers and one of the questions was about your acquisition of Nicira and the impact on your joint venture, the VCE [VMware, Cisco, EMC] venture.  I asked if the VCE joint venture has a limited life span, and he said: “No.  Without VCE we would not have the position we have in the data center.  EMC is a very important strategic partner with us.  VMware is a partner at times and a competitor at times.  From a personal point of view, even though I wish VMware had not gone into networking, I actually think it’s the best thing to happen to us.  Because once they did, we took a step back to what we do best – open architecture, support all four hypervisors, not be tied to any vendor for a strategic long-term direction.”  I wonder if you could comment on Cisco as a competitor and partner, and the future of VCE.

PG:         VCE, to us, is an efficient route to market for the delivery of converged infrastructure.  I think in the last quarter they’re at a billion-dollar-plus run-rate now.  So this idea of convergence really is a natural consequence of the success of VMware virtualization.  Once you’ve sort of propped up the applications, now you can re-optimize and integrate the underlying infrastructure, and the answer to that is converged infrastructure. [VCE’s] Vblock has clearly been the success factor in the industry around that. We think that’s great.  We’re committed to it. VCE is incrementally taking advantage of the innovations of VMware as they build a more integrated management solution. 

When it comes to networking, we have a somewhat different perspective. We consider Cisco as a partner, and we are going to do everything in our power to have the NSX solution be great with Cisco infrastructure.  We’ll complement, we’ll take advantage of every SDN interface they offer, every API that we have for it.  But it will be a multi-infrastructure world and the NSX environment will support the network.  Any IP network will be supported by our offering that we’ll be bringing forward.  So that is our strategy and you’ll see that very clearly at VMworld, that this is like hypervisor.  This is a new layer in the stack, and we do not see it as competing with infrastructure.  It’s got to run on something, and we delighted if that’s running through Cisco gear.

JG:         So I wanted to follow up on that, because there seems to be this perception that SDN has the potential to commoditize networking.  Do you believe that?

PG:         I believe that virtualization changes the nature of that industry.  Things used to be done through command line interfaces and scripts that are now going to be done through automated interfaces and OpenFlow APIs.  And that does change the nature of the industry.  It will require new software-driven interfaces.  It will create new efficiencies for customers. We think it’s going to spark a period of software-driven innovation that hasn’t been seen in the networking industry for the last couple of decades.  That’s what excites us about it.  Now, as you spark a period of architectural change, of new innovation, there will be winners and losers.  There will be companies that position themselves well.  And on this point I agree with one of John’s statements. It sort of woke them up.  Boy!  Here’s a new domain of innovation and we’re delighted that Cisco is excited about innovating in that area.  But new areas of innovation, significant architectural disruptions, unquestionably they create opportunities for existing companies to advance, for new companies to emerge.  We’re going to work with them all in making that happen.

BB:         I wanted to get into the end-user computing side of this.  Tell us what that encompasses for VMware now, and how that’s going to be evolving, both over the short and long term for you?

A:           When I talk about [this in] different settings, I say that between Maritz and myself we created an awful lot of sins against humanity, Win and ‘Tel [Windows and Intel]. We have to get ourselves out of purgatory and come up with the exciting user capabilities of the future. There are many things that are just hard about the PC industry: Break, fix, patch, security risks, etc.  And so our [VMware Horizon] View VDI, [Horizon] Mirage assets, really are architected ways to address many of those challenges that face IT.  But increasingly, as I commented earlier, the world is moving from client/server to mobile cloud.  So if we or anybody is going to be relevant in the end-user compute infrastructure, you have to have a very substantive position with respect to mobility. That’s our Horizon strategy, and we have to be aggressive there if we’re going to be relevant long-term.  And that’s very much how we’ve, positioning ourselves, to continue to execute on those PC challenges while the PC industry is in spectacular decline.  That will have a tail that is decades long.  [We want to] build the infrastructure for enterprises to be able to take advantage of the multi-device mobile worlds of tomorrow.

JG:         How do you leverage the EMC relationship?  What comes out of that partnership and that very close relationship that maybe readers aren’t aware about that they should know about?

PG:         Obviously there’s the continuing partnership, but also autonomy and independence.  And in many ways I’ll say that the dichotomy of those two is more extreme.  I want to partner with EMC more closely in many domains, particularly as we do things like software-defined storage.  That’s an area that, boy, disrupts EMC, but also presents EMC bigger opportunities in delivering more software value.  In other areas we’re seeing some of these things like the networking discussions.  There’s a whole new ecosystem of partners that become more important to us going forward. While VCE is important, I’m delighted with HP and IBM and Dell and our relationships there.  And we’re, in many respects, doubling down on those partnerships.  So the dichotomy of that is alive and well.  And I’ll say the genius of Joe [Tucci, EMC CEO] in structuring VMware as he has allows us to operate that in an effective way. I always like to joke about my September 1st experience last year, where I walked on the pitcher’s mound at AT&T Park and put my arm around my new best friend, Tom Georgens, [CEO] from NetApp, with my nice crisp NetApp shirt on, which was happily photographed and Tweeted to the EMC sales force.  Imagine what my inbox looked like that night with ‘traitor’ mails.

               On one hand it’s humorous, and on the other hand it’s very practical.  Because if the customer is a big EMC account, VMware is going to do all we can to go partner.  If it’s a big NetApp, Hitachi, HP account, we’re going to do everything we can to go partner with them as well.  And it certainly won’t be the last time that I get a call from an EMC sales guy asking for my help with an account that they have no business in, where one of our partners is the preferred choice. That tension is alive and well and will continue in the future, even as we do deeper partnerships with them in some areas.

BB:         I want to talk quick about OpenStack.  You have been working with them more recently.  But at the same time, some people view this movement as a threat, particularly when you see reports of companies like PayPal going more into OpenStack, and maybe laying off VMware a little bit.  So let’s set the record straight here.  What’s the relationship between VMware and OpenStack?

PG:         People can define OpenStack two different ways.  One will say OpenStack is open source, and if it is not open source, free software available off a Linux foundation server, an Apache server, it ain’t part of it [OpenStack]. That isn’t the definition of OpenStack.  OpenStack is an open framework for interfaces that allow people to construct a cloud.  Against that definition, we’ve taken a very aggressive view.  We will support the OpenStack interfaces and we will make contributions to those interfaces and technologies, and bind those into our best-of-breed technologies.  That’s what we’ve done with the hypervisor, with vSphere.  That’s what we’ve done with Nicira, and in fact that’s what we’re doing with our management products and our automation center, and you’ll see us continue to do that. We’re finding that customers actually say: I do like the openness of those interfaces, but I find that your component technologies are clearly the best choices I have to build and deploy my cloud.  That’s the case with PayPal.  They chose to use an OpenStack set of management interfaces, in no small part because our products three years ago when they made that decision, really weren’t built and architected for a cloud-scale operation like eBay or PayPal. They essentially did a Nova controller-like solution, and are happy with ESX’s Hypervisor underneath it.  We have a great attach rate for OpenStack environments against the NSX and NVP [Nicira Network Virtualization Platform] and OVS [Open vSwitch] technologies. We’re seeing this as an opportunity to extend our position. 

Where is OpenStack, we believe, going to be adopted?  We don’t see it having great success coming into enterprise, because it’s a framework for constructing clouds. People have largely adopted and have extremely large deployments of VMware, and the switching cost and so on of [moving to] that are not particularly effective. Where we see it being effective though, is very much in cloud providers and service providers, an area where VMware hasn’t had a lot of business in the past.  Thus, our strategy, we believe, opens a whole new market for us to pursue.  So we very much see this as market expanding, or opportunity creating, for us.  As we commented in our Q2 earnings call, we went and looked at the OpenStack customer list.  We looked at everybody who had said they’re an OpenStack customer, if you go up to the OpenStack web site.  And we measured our business on those customers year-to-year, quarter-to-quarter, half-to-half, and however we looked at it, our business increased faster with those customers than the rest of our business.  So clearly, we’d say our strategy is being effective.  We’re not in any way trying to pretend, be a camel and hiding from this, or putting our head in the sand.  We’re embracing it very aggressively, partnering with it and extending our market with that, and the numbers are proving that strategy is being effective.

BB:         So tell us where Pivotal fits in this market and how VMware is going to be working with Pivotal as that ramps up.            

PG:         We moved some of the cloud developer assets that were focused on application development into Pivotal, EMC moved their big data assets. This, we believe, is a big opportunity for the family.  As a 30% shareholder in the entity, we are cheering at every board meeting for Pivotal’s success.  We will continue to be a distributor of the Pivotal technologies that are sold through the VMware sales force.  But also like the EMC conversation, it does free us up to partner more broadly with the industry.  So people like Cloudera, and MapR, and other big data players can now view us as a horizontal platform that they embrace as well. We’ll work closely with them and you’ll see several announcements in this area at VMworld.  But also it enables us to have this horizontal play over each ecosystem of partners as well.

JG:         People tend to use a kind of shorthand to describe tech companies.  Oracle is a database company.  Cisco is a network company.  VMware is a virtualization company.  Is that what you want people to understand about VMware?  What’s the positioning?  What’s the idea, the concept you really want to come to mind when people talk about VMware?

PG:         As a virtualization company, we are proud of that.  The thing with the software-defined data center, the hybrid cloud and end-user computing is to extend the role of virtualization to every piece of infrastructure.  It isn’t just the compute virtualization.  It’s the network.  It’s the security.  It’s the management.  It’s the end-use computing.  It’s the public and the private cloud.  And virtualization software, of which VMware is the unquestioned leader in the industry, is the most powerful way for companies to build their future architecture for the mobile cloud world while building efficiencies and transforming their existing environments. Virtualization is the magic technology, and VMware is the uniquely positioned company for enterprises, for business customers, to accomplish that transition.

JG:         Anything that we didn’t ask about that you’d want to make sure we cover?

A:           Clearly, our focus is really driving the customer transformation. We used to sell to the virtual admin, [we now talk] to the guy who sits at the CIO’s table, to explain how to transition all his infrastructure for the future.  If a week goes by that I don’t talk to five or six CIOs, it’s a slow week.  We are becoming a mission-critical provider to CIOs for the aggregate of everything that they’re doing.