Hybrid cloud is the answer to everything, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. He explained his perspective on the future of cloud and other technology trends in a live interview with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at EMC World 2014.

Commenting on EMC’s acquisition of DSSD, announced at the event yesterday, Gelsinger said “DSSD is doing great work, it’s going to prove to be a game changer in the converged infrastructure market. This is a bold move by EMC, it’s going to yield very powerful hardware for software to take advantage of.”

When it comes to cloud adoption, “we are absolutely convinced hybrid is the answer.” Gelsinger said. He explained that “today on premise is 92 percent of IT spend. Eight percent is in the cloud.”

By 2022 Gelsinger’s team estimates that 75 percent of IT spend will be on premise, saying “even from the spend perspective, it’s going to be hybrid. It’s clearly a hybrid world.” All the other big players in the cloud market are following in this trend, with companies like Google and Amazon talking about hybrid.

VMware’s investment & growth strategy

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Asked how the VCloud hybrid service got to scale, Gelsinger explained, “we’re investing, we’re growing very rapidly. We’re very aggressively partnering. We’re going to leverage their capital as well. We have a very powerful strategy, and given our business model of software and services, it’s very unique.” Gelsinger boasted of VMware deploying over 40 million virtual machines (VMs), saying “we’re bringing a lot to the table.”

Commenting on another recent acquisition within the EMC federation, Gelsinger details how AirWatch plays into the overall VMware strategy, first pointing out that VMware has been regarded as a mere hobby in the end user computer space. “Everybody realizes this isn’t a hobby anymore,” he went on, noting VMware’s efforts to redefine the industry rapidly and take shares from Citrix and others in the category. “It’s the mobile cloud era,” Gelsinger explained, and AirWatch enables the secure, managed experience for all mobile devices.

• Software-defined trends

Asked of VMware’s focus from a software-defined perspective, Gelsinger said that his company set their targets clearly – the software-defined datacenter, to virtualize the whole datacenter, hybrid cloud, then go from the datacenter to the device. “That consistency that we’ve laid out resonated to my team,” as well as partners and clients, Gelsinger went on.

Commenting on VMware’s positioning within EMC’s federation of companies, Gelsinger said “we got a lot of benefits from the layer that EMC provides. At the same time, we are accountable to the street for all the accountable measurements. We get the leverage of both sales teams,” better positioning the right services for different customers.

• Innovation in IT

Asked to comment on Silicon Valley from an innovation standpoint,Gelsinger said that the Valley was “the hottest bed of innovation anywhere in the world. No one else is even close to the Valley. But every place in the world is saying ‘I want to be like the Valley.'”

As far as what the future holds for VMware, Gelsinger stated that “we are going from client-server to mobile cloud, this is going to be a tectonic shift.”

Gelsinger expects the amount of people moving to cloud and mobile will be extremely high, saying “people are going to be competing for premise space. The cloud transition is barely on the way. These trends are just starting. The entire business is going to shift.”