Legendary blogger turned venture capitalist Om Malik interviews VMware CEO Paul Maritz at the GigaOm Structure 2011 event.  Below are the notes and commentary from Paul Maritz interview summarized in pre-tweet form.

SiliconANGLE.tv will be covering VMworld this summer in Vegas so anytime Paul Maritz speaks we listen.  As a side note he gave a very strong speech at EMCWorld last month in Vegas.

Notes:

o    1978 worked on taking physical desk and automating it at Xerox Parc

o    Agree w/Steve Jobs…At the beginning of the end of the PC Era

o    More profound is we are in post document era, people digest streams of info, coming in chunks, how to comment on them, recombine them and filter them back out again?

o    No desktop like analogy that we can appeal to yet

o    Everything in the end has to be translated back to hardware, nothing can be completely virtual

o    2 cloud journeys 1) personal cloud – recently underlined by iCloud, increasingly info centric over device centric, info needs to be stored outside of device, stored in ways independent of any one app scheme, must assume apps and devices will come and go

o    Where will this info be stored, who will own monetization rights over this info

o    Apps will have to adjust to the device versus purpose built devices for apps

o    Application transformation that has to happen is profound

o    Cloud is more about how than where…from infrastructure standpoint it is about automation to enable cloud, not where it runs

o    CloudFoundry driven by a couple of guys they recruited out of google

o    Asked guys how many system admins per server google used, came back to 1 to 1000

o    VMware ratio was 1:20 or 1:50…have to get to point where enterprises, regardless of where they are consuming IT, have to do it at similar level of efficiency to free up operations spend

o    If they can’t free up resources they won’t be able to address the legacy code bases

o    Estimate <10% of vSphere code have to do with hypervisor, other 90% have to do with automation

o    To give illusion of highly automated giant compute…this is what they are trying to build to

o    This is tough to do across legacy and Greenfield apps

o    Application renewals

o    New sets of apps have departed from previous ways

§  Developer led revolt against complexity, moved to newer programming frameworks (Spring, Node, etc…)

• Program at fundamentally higher level

§  Developers don’t want to deal with wiring infrastructure together, they don’t want to have to think about how to make app scale

§  Data structured – can write apps that have inflexible schemas that can’t be scales

§  All together these are the departure points for new generation of applications

o    Assumed developer world would come up with cloaking layer for the cloud “linux for the cloud”, creates better chance to migrate applications from one cloud to another…rather than wait for this to happen, VMware went out and did it

§  CloudFoundry = Scalable cluster controller designed for non-stop operation

• Set of interfaces with plug-ins for different programming frameworks
• Binding layer that can bind platform to lower level IaaS
• Want this to become something that industry can be freely used, giving developers abstraction layer that can span the greatest possible spectrum of clouds

o    Competitive landscape

o    Have to strike balance between servicing existing customers and thinking ahead

o    Customers won’t give you the right feedback on what will happen in 3 years time

o    This is big and complex software, not for the faint of heart

o    1000 engineers focused on vSphere

o    Major vSphere release coming up later this year