SiliconANGLE theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante opened the tenth annual VMworld conference with an in-depth discussion about VMware, the state of IT and the rise of the software-defined data center.

John highlights that recent executive shake ups such as the departure of Steve Ballmer from Microsoft underscore the massive transformation that the tech industry is undergoing. This transformation is all about defying the convention, Dave chimes in, one of the major themes of the event.

In Dave’s view, VMware is competing on three fronts. The company is trying to maintain an edge over OpenStack and Amazon while simultaneously pushing into the mobile enterprise and the increasingly lucrative public cloud market. This three-pronged offensive is making it increasingly difficult for the firm to avoid friction with its partners:

“Pat [Gelsinger, CEO of VMware] made a big point of putting up all the logo slides of the ecosystem, you had everybody on there – certainly Cisco, and NetApp and IBM and all the other culprits,” Dave says. “But we spent a lot of time this morning hearing about NSX, essentially the Nicira [network virtualization software] with a little bit of VMware organic stuff thrown in, essentially moving from compute virtualization to network virtualization, so bringing in an abstraction layer across the networking component, really going at the heart of the business of one of VMware’s major partners, Cisco.”

VMware is looking to disrupt storage and networking in the same way it revolutionized the client-server model . The vendor is working to create a unified data center control plane that will deliver automation and enterprise-grade management, the two features that helped it secure a dominant position in the server virtualization market. Dave predicts that VMware’s technological edge will enable it to hold onto this lead for the foreseeable future.

Click the video below for the full analysis.