Day three of VMware 2013 kicked off with an interview that had the usual tech talk, the traditional geeky banter as well as a couple of minor blunders and well placed irony. It is highly uncommon that theCube co-hosts do not see eye to eye with their guests, but it just goes to show that sometimes the “tech athletes” might have differences of opinion regarding the maturity of the hybrid cloud.

In the already established line-up, John Furrier and Dave Vellante seized Pat Gelsinger for a good half an hour and picked his brain on subjects ranging from agility and efficiency to open stack and the evolution of the IT worker.

Gelsinger holds six patents in the areas of VLSI design, computer architecture and communications and he is currently the CEO of VMware. He admits to having a passion for technology and a passion for customers, and these two things coming together really make VMworld seem like a cult geek fest, populated by passionate zealots.

Asked what the evolution of the last 24 months was like for the business, he nominated the Software defined data center vision, re-architecting opportunities, and agility and efficiency goals. A very important step in this movement was the acquisition of Nicira, which expanded VMware’s networking portfolio for the cloud and provided a full suite of capabilities for any cloud environment. This has changed every aspect of the data center and, as Gelsinger puts it, “added some meat on the bones.” Of course, the main fields are the usual compute, networking, storage, management and automation, but “software defined everything means taking the power of the engine and applying it anywhere else.”

Enabling innovation

 
Pat Gelsinger states that VMware’s goal is to enable agility: “We are not out to commoditize, but to enable innovation. Enabling that ecosystem of innovation is what we’re all about, and also for customers to get value from that. There are new areas. We’re changing how you’re doing networking. We’re creating a virtual network overlay that has all these services associated with it.”

Watch the full interview below:

Pat Gelsinger disagrees with the statement that hybrid cloud represents the “halfway house,” the stop over to something better. He believes that hybrid cloud is the endgame.

As the infrastructure becomes more agile and more self-provisioned, as well as more aligned to the requirements of the applications, the hybrid cloud is becoming the tsunami of applications. But, luckily, VMware is also “working hard to enable IT to become the friend in the line of business, not the barrier.” Gelsinger says: “We want IT to be faster and enabling, meeting the security, governance and the SLA requirements and enabling these new applications to emerge.”

In Gelsinger’s opinion, the companies who have a very good shot at becoming the large players of the public cloud infrastructure services are: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and VMware itself. “I think we’re miles ahead of Microsoft. The seamlessness and the capability that we’re building with one software stack, not two, gives us significant advantages,” says Gelsinger.

Here’s a very legitimate question Furrier asked: “What happens to the actual physical data center?” Gelsinger responds: “As these things become highly standardized, highly modularized, highly scalable, with a very small number of admins per server ratio, they are becoming very automated factories of cloud execution. Some of them will be on premise, some off premise, but for the most part, they’ll look the same. Our vision is that the software layer is taking away the complexity of what operates underneath it.”

Asked about his input on the Open Stack and the evolution of the IT worker, Gelsinger says,”You have to think about Open Stack in the proper way. Open Stack is a framework for building clouds,” that has to comply with privacy and governance requirements. As for the evolution of the IT worker, it’s pretty clear that the virtual admin has become the center of IT, as well as the virtualization team hogging the spotlight. The roles are definitely changing with the hybrid cloud, but that’s the motto of the whole movement: “Defy convention.” Gelsinger believes “we need the security of the IT guy, but in the right context of a virtualized infrastructre.”

Another forecast was that “the line between Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service will blur. The infrastructure will become more application-aware, and it will have more application developer services associated with it. “