Cube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down to reflect on the main highlights from Day 1 of VMworld 2012, providing an overview of the company and the rest of the market in this emerging era of data infrastructure.

Vellante first brings up the CEO Roundtable, which featured EMC’s Joe Tucci, VMware chief Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell among others, as the biggest highlight of the gathering so far. The Wikibon founder also shared a personal prediction  about the virtualization giant, which he believes will eventually surpass the size and value of EMC, its parent company. Furrier went back to the C-level keynote and pinpointed the key components of Gelsignar’s plan to realize this prospect:  the newly appointed VMware CEO is veering his company away from the PC to the mobile end user, getting serious about this concept of data infrastructure.  It’s management software that’s playing a central roll across all layers of the data center, facilitating reduced complexity and the ability to capitalize on other technologies, such as analytics.

Vellante continued this line of thought. His take is that in the past 10 years IT has been about cutting costs, and now the technology is there to take things to the next level and generate tangible  business value. If VMware’s vision for the data center is to come true, his opinion is that it’s going to change the face of IT as a whole.

The two also stopped to look at the other major players that made an appearance at VMworld. “Dell is dangerous” according to Vellante, simply because the vendor has the resources and –by the looks of it also the willingness – to get on top of all these new trends.

Furrier believes that Dell and HP need to get more aggressive with their hardware strategies. He says that these companies are in a position to become the Apple of the enterprise: with the consumerization of IT, wrapping high-margin services around user experience is becoming increasingly viable in the workforce.

See the entire recap below: