At the end of day one of the VMworld conference in San Francisco, Wikibon’s John Furrier, Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante discussed several of the topics discussed in presentations and in interviews conducted on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

Vellante started off by highlighting the keynote presentation offered this morning by Pat Gellsinger, stating it was very meaty with a lot of product detail being discussed. As Vellante noted, “We are seeing VMware going from novelty to conventional.” To achieve market conventionality, they are focusing solely on implementation within the cloud. As he stated, VMware is currently head and shoulders above their competitors.

While big providers like Amazon were hardly mentioned today, a recognition that organizations are starting to embrace hybrid cloud has allowed other providers like OpenStack to resonate with current and potential clients. The biggest hurdle, it would seem, is bridging the fear associated with adopting the cloud. And VMware’s current pressure is to become a viable and recognized enterprise supplier.

Of course, without strong venture capitalism, this new trend will be limited in its takeoff. Unfortunately, the Wikibon analysts believe most VC’s in Silicon Valley don’t fully understand this new enterprise. This is, in their opinion, because they are trying to evaluate a fundamentally new strategy by utilizing metrics of old.

With the complexity that surrounds storage and networking, it will not be enough to simply put in a layer to virtualization. There is no silver bullet. This fact means it may take a while for the technology to mature.

The field will, in the very near future, see its share of winners and losers. In fact, it was noted some are betting all in on an all hardware system, leaving software out of their platforms. However, with the lean toward virtualization, if they are wrong on this fact they can expect to experience a huge loss.

The three also spoke about the advance of flash in the storage market. They stated that unlike deduplication, which they claim was more of an add-on feature, the movement towards flash is much bigger. This is evidenced by moves by the big providers like EMC and IBM who it is believed will come out on top as flash becomes more ubiquitous in the storage market.

It is predicted, however, there will be a bubble where several players in the flash market will lose out while a few will strongly succeed. Aside from the legacy players like EMC and IBM, there will be room for a few of the more innovative providers of flash to also enjoy widespread success.

Virtualization is the ascending trend that is here to stay. This is due, in no small part, to the relatively recent recognition by CEO’s that a strong IT department can offer a competitive advantage. While in the last decade many IT budgets were drastically slashed, the advent of big data analytics can ultimately fortify a company’s bottom line.

SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is broadcasting live this week from the VMworld Conference in San Francisco. Be sure to join us live or watch any of the rebroadcasts on our YouTube channel.