Shawn Douglass, ServiceMesh CTO discussed cloud management, software defined everything and virtualization trends with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at VMWorld 2013.

When it comes to orchestration and service management, companies like VMware are moving towards the software defined data center and virtualization of everything, Douglass explains. Everyone is also talking about rebuilding the management platform, a platform ServiceMesh is already offering.

“ServiceMesh is a hybrid cloud management platform, we act as a service broker over VMware technology, Microsoft technology and OpenStack,” Douglass said. “You can create one blueprint for your application, and then you can click and deploy it” on top of VMware, Microsoft, or Openstack.

Commenting on the company’s stance on hybrid cloud, Douglass said “where we sit, we sit across public and private cloud. We work in highly regulated Fortune 100 companies,” such as big banks and Telcos. “We fundamentally believe that you need to place the right resources at the right time at the right cost, and do in a DevOpsy way,” while keeping a vendor neutral posture.

“I think OpenStack is the biggest threat to VMware, personally,” Douglass said, as they both offer virtualization of network, compute and storage. “We’re huge fans of OpenStack, we’re going to support it.”

Discussing their experience with customers (a base of approximately 4000 companies), Douglass used a large bank as an example, their position being that “if you bring one of the incumbents to the table, that’s not what we’re looking for”. Companies look to to drive a 30 to 40 percent cost reduction and OpenStack is the solution. The cost reduction comes from license and maintenance cost savings, which are huge.

“IT was always application centric,” Douglass explained. What virtualization is doing is to allow companies to deliver business value really quickly. “In almost every one of our large enterprise customers, we see some sort of network virtualization.”

Asked about the competitiveness in the cloud management market, Douglass pointed out that in today’s landscape, companies have “piles of software that they’ve acquired in the past and they try to glue together. We have a solution today that works today,” while competitors talk about 16-18 month roadmaps. At the same time, what customers ask for is “an open, neutral, management platform.”

Sharing the tech that most excited him, Douglass mentioned I-O Data. “They’re embracing open compute, OpenStack, we’re partnering aggressively with them.” Yet the thing he was most excited about was that the conversations focuses on the software defined data center, hybrid cloud, management platform, “it’s what we’re already doing, while everyone is talking about their roadmaps.”

Asked if ServiceMesh had received buy out offers, Douglass simply commented, “We’re popular, we’re going big.”