Google Cloud Next '24 | Paul Delory | Gartner

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Paul Delory

Research Vice President

Gartner

VMware SKU simplification: Impact and insights for enterprise customers

Over the past few months, there’s been plenty of analysis around Broadcom Inc.’s acquisition of VMware Inc., including on multiple episodes of theCUBE Podcast. During Google Cloud Next 2024, that analysis continued.Since the acquisition took place, interest hasn’t died down, according to Paul Delory (pictured), vice president, analyst and research portfolio manager at Gartner Inc. There have been a lot of people who have been upset.“Their concern prior to the acquisition was that there were going to be large-scale price increases,” Delory said. “Some of that has been borne out. The story is more complicated than that, because the price for your VMware licenses depends on where you started

play_circle_outline Examining Gartner Analyst's Insights on VMware's Acquisition, Price Rises, and SKU Consolidation with Bundle Strategy

play_circle_outline Skills gap and disconnect between IT and business in understanding cloud computing paradigm

play_circle_outline Lift and shift to the cloud may actually be cheaper in some scenarios after VMware acquisition

play_circle_outline Uncovering the Gap: Exploring the Disconnect between IT Leaders and their Cloud Comprehension, along with Urgent Legacy App Replacement

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Paul Delory | Gartner

Paul Delory

Research Vice President Gartner

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(gentle music)

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of Google Cloud Next. We are nearing the end of day three here. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. Savannah Peterson and Rob Stretchy are not at the table, but they are with us here, doing our thing.

What a show. >> Yeah, it's been great. We're winding down day three. This next segment is with a Gartner analyst, these guys are the top shelf in the analyst community. They cover a lot, Gartner Magic Quadrant is the gold standard. They do tons of inquiries, tons of customer activity. They got a good lay of the land, and we're going to get a good scoop on what's going on, infrastructure, DevOps, and what's going on in the landscape.

>> Well, I'm now sandwiched between two fabulous analysts. We are welcoming Paul Delory on the show. Gartner VP Analyst and Research Portfolio Manager. Thank you so much for your first time on "theCUBE," Paul.

>> Thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate it. >> Unbelievable. So, what are you seeing? You've been here now three days.

>> Yes. >> What are you seeing? What's most interesting to you about this show?

>> Well, I've been talking about the boring stuff.

>> There's no boring stuff.

>> I'm probably the only person here who doesn't want to talk about AI. I think that was my impression. But yeah, as John mentioned, my official coverage area for Gartner is infrastructure, automation and DevOps. But all anybody wants to talk to me about lately is VMware.

>> Yes. Well, I mean, look at VMware, we're deep on VMware. We're deep on Broadcom, and, well, it's now VMware. The acquisition, Dave and I had lots of analysis on it. What's interesting is on the software side, VMware was a great company. Broadcom buys them, chops it down, and they're going to bring 'em in and do the software play. We also were deep on the semi side, which was a whole different animal. So you got two companies, you got the semis and you got the software, and then a bunch of other little divisions. Right now the big question is, VMware has a lot of loyal IT customers, and IT is changing. And what's going on around IT, and you guys are covering this, is you got generative AI is changing the supplier equation to the end user customer who's saying, "I'm going to use technology to drive growth, specifically generative AI." Okay, so I need more growth, boards are saying more growth, more growth. So now the technology equation has to change, the data center suppliers, the infrastructure. This is the area that's getting a lot of attention right now. So, Paul, give us the lay of the land on, what are people doing with VMware? Are they stuck? The prices are being increased. Okay, they consolidated the products. We know that 27, down to three. What's the story with VMware in terms of the customer adoption, pricing, optionality? Are people switching? Do they need to switch? Can you share your thoughts?

>> Yeah, my phone hasn't stopped ringing since this acquisition happened, I can tell you that. And there's a lot of folks that are upset. Their concern prior to the acquisition was that there were going to be large scale price increases. Some of that has been borne out. The story is more complicated than that, because the price for your VMware licenses depends on where you started, right? What VMware has done, as you mentioned, is they've consolidated all of those SKUs that they did have down to essentially two. There's VMware Cloud Foundation, which is their top level SKU, and then there's VMware vSphere Foundation, which is kind of the next level down. Both of those are bundle SKUs.

>> Kind of like VM, it's like VCF light kind of thing, right?

>> Yeah, something like that. So both of those include ESXI and vSAN. If you go to VCF, you're also getting parts of NSX. You're getting parts of vRealize, sorry, Aria Suite now, they renamed it. But yeah, so they're both now bundle SKUs, and you know, VMware is sort of pushing everyone into there. And their clear preference is to get you into that top level Cadillac SKU for VCF. So, your reaction to that depends on where you started, right? There were a lot of customers that were already running VCF, that were already on subscription services. There were a lot of customers who were getting their VMware licenses through a cloud provider. So if that describes you, then this may not be that big of a change for you, right? You may not see a big price increase, you may even see a price decrease. The problem is, if you were using one of those older SKUs that got eliminated. So if you were running vSphere Standard, or vSphere Plus, or one of those older, kind of more bare bone SKUs, if you're getting uplifted from that all the way to VCF, that's going to be painful. Those are the customers that are seeing the very big price increases, and those are the customers that are calling me.

>> Because they got basically vSphere, and they don't want to turn on the other stuff. But they have to bundle it, they have to take the bundle.

>> Yep.

>> And so Broadcom wants 'em to turn it on, and then they turn it on and cha-ching.

>> Right, exactly.

>> Exactly what happens then.

>> So if you are just using ESXI, if you're just using the Hypervisor, there's not really a way to get just the Hypervisor anymore. You're going to have vSAN, at least, maybe NSX, and you may not be using those products. So that's something that upsets everybody.

>> A lot of customers, they had a lot of customers that were like that, just doing a little vSphere, that's it. So what's the alternatives? 'Cause I've heard the same thing, and I think Broadcom is focused on the big accounts. I think they're like, "Okay, whatever." But I think, I mean, we'll have to dig into that when we go to VMware Explore coming up. What's the alternative? So, we know it's well documented, the prices are public, it's been well documented in the press that they're switching, looking around. What do you see as, and what are you researching in terms of options for customers?

>> Yeah, you do have actually quite a few options in the space, but I always start out by saying there is not a one-for-one replacement for VMware. There's not something that you're just going to drop in. I say all the time, you've got a VMware-shaped hole in your data center, and there isn't anything out there that's really quite VMware-shaped. So in the conversations that I have, I'm with the Gartner for Technical Professionals Research Group. So my research is really aimed at engineers and architects, the people that I talk to buy are larger engineers, and we're having an engineering level conversation about, you know, what features do I need to replace, what features might be missing in some of these competing products? And then we talk about, can we re-engineer the system to remove this requirement? Can we bring in some kind of a third party tool to bridge that gap? Those are the conversations that we're having. In terms of, what the alternatives are that are out there, to actually answer your question that you just asked me. There's a few kind of different product categories that I would bucket these into. The first one would be hyper-converged. So, if you've got a hyper-converged infrastructure play, like a Nutanix, like Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, like, there's a few other smaller players in the market, like Scale Computing. That's the closest thing that there's going to be to a one-for-one replacement for VMware. Those are the, that's a full stack of software-defined infrastructure. Hypervisor and a storage platform, and a network platform with some kind of infrastructure automation, cloud management layer riding on top of that. So that's sort of the closest analog to VMware. If you don't want to do that, if you don't want to go with that full stack, you can take a look at some of the other Hypervisors that are out there. KVM still exists, right? Xen still exists. Those are still out there as open-source Hypervisors. And you're able to take a look at those. Kind of interestingly, the big Linux distributions, the big commercial Linux distributions aren't really playing in this space too much. Red Hat discontinued their KVM product a few years ago. SUSE is not doing much in the space. So, the players in this space are mostly smaller companies, startups, and that does cause a little bit of trepidation, 'cause you do have to ask the question, is this company going to be able to support, at enterprise scale, what VMware's done?

>> Are we going to see this kind of thing happening more and more? I mean, obviously, this is not the first time that we've seen price increases because of an acquisition, but this idea that you have a VMware-shaped hole in your stack. I mean, that is, wow. Do you think we're going to see more and more of this kind of thing happening? And what's the upshot for enterprises?

>> It's the square and the round hole kind of thing. What he's talking about in the data center is important, because you can't get a replica of VMware-

>> Right, right.

>> In slower moving markets, it's leverage.

And you got, that's what- >> Yeah.

>> How big companies squeeze the customers. And now, we're in a model where there's choice. And so, what's interesting to me, why we're having this conversation is, with all this code generation going on and all this ability to put wrappers around things, whether it's brownfield implementations in IT. So you start to see a lot more creative and faster solutions to solve a problem. And if the problem is, "Hey, how do I get an alternative if I don't like what I have?" That's interesting to me. And so, what I'm really curious is that, and I've seen pitches that have come across my desk from Oracle, Nutanix, Microsoft. And so clearly, and they're vulnerable, Broadcom, because (indistinct) is an acquisition there's always that period of settling in, this churn. It happens in every single big acquisition. You lose customers 'cause the focus is going to be making more money. I will say VMware is still doing marketing, so thank God they have more marketing. But they did kill most of their marketing departments. So, you know, Broadcom clearly is taking over, but I'm curious about more the alternatives. Oracle must be looking at this, Google must be looking at this. I mean, if I'm a vendor, I'm like, I know Nutanix have been on LinkedIn, I saw a bunch of stuff there. So clearly there's marketing to that page.

>> Right, exactly.

>> What do you do in acquisitions as a marketer? You put FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You say, "VMware evil" you know? "VMware." And it's a tried and true B2B tactic, we've seen it many times. The question is, what's real? FUD, and that's where I'd love to get the thoughts on. Okay, got options. What are the customers thinking? What's the psychology?

>> Well, you know, it's an astute question, because there's a conversation that is happening, and then there's a conversation that should be happening, right? The conversation that is happening is, how do I find some kind of alternative to VMware and basically migrate to that and not have any application level changes? The question that I think should be happening is how do I modernize my application portfolio? Because I have to say, and everybody gets nervous when I say this, right? VMware has been a pillar of the enterprise data center, right? There's a lot of people who have made their careers on VMware, including me, by the way, I came up as a VMware admin, right? So it made my career in IT. So people don't want to hear this, but on a certain view, client server does start to look like a Legacy architecture. That's not how modern architecture works. Modern architecture is service centric, it's cloud-based. So I think the conversation that should be happening is, if I have this workload that's running on VMware today, can I make it serverless? Can I containerize it? Okay, can I push that out to the cloud and get in kind of a more modern architecture? Do I really want to be having this conversation of, how do we move from one VM platform to another?

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> I'll say this, when I-

>> That's a reset, by the way. >> Yes.

>> That's not putting Tanzu and Spring on it. They could do a little bit of that, but that's not going to do a full reset.

>> Well, see, and that's the thing, right? Even if you're going to move to a different Hypervisor platform, there is a certain amount of re-engineering that you're going to have to do, right? So when I talk to CIOs, and when I put my CIO hat on, and I think about this at that level, do I want to spend a bunch of money and spend a bunch of time and effort re-engineering onto something that, best case scenario is exactly what I have today, right? Do I want to be running on that treadmill? Or if I accept the premise that I'm going to be re-engineering my applications, do I want to have a conversation about, how do I modernize my application portfolio so that maybe I don't need a VM, okay? That's a conversation that should be happening that I think is not happening enough.

>> Why isn't that happening? >> Yeah.

>> 'Cause we've been hearing a lot of skill gap issues. One big respected integrator, which now does product engineering. It's not your classic IT consultant, they do a lot more than doing engineering. Says that the CIO and the big management has been at the big table doing all the money things, doing all the transformation conversations, but the IT guys have been running things and they've been left out of that conversation. So there's a gap between the IT operator, IT people, and the leadership decision making, and to get people up to speed on that. Is that true? Do you believe that?

>> That's absolutely true. I think both of those things are correct. There's definitely a skills gap. There's definitely a disconnect between IT and the business. I also think there's some more fundamental problems. When I talk to people, even in the IT department, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cloud is, right? People think of cloud as a location. They think that, "I'm going to be running a VM in Amazon's data center, or Microsoft's data center, or Google's instead of mine." And what I find myself explaining to a lot of IT leaders is, no, guys, you don't get it. This is a new paradigm, this is a new model for computing. This is things that are not happening in your data center, right? So if you run down the list, if I'm building an application, my first question is going to be, can I do this Function-as-a-Service, right? And okay, if I can't do it Function-as-a-Service, then, and there's legitimate reasons you wouldn't be able to do that, then I'm going to go to, can this be a step function, right? Maybe it can't be a step function. Okay, can it be a serverless container, right? Can I take this and put it in a serverless container service? No, still can't do that? Okay, let's plan C. Let's go to plan D. Maybe it's a hosted Kubernetes service with something that I'm going to containerize, right? And the cloud providers offer all of these services, and you can go down that list, you can go down that batting order. You have to go pretty far down that list before you are actually building a VM. Build a VM is like Plan W on my list, right?

>> Yeah. >> So ideally, in the year of our Lord, 2024, we wouldn't be talking about VMs at all, or they'd be a lot less prominent. But people have a long tail of Legacy applications that they can't move off of easily, and we need to do something with this.

>> And they have a lock in, basically, it's been a pillar, it's been kind of a lock in. We've all kind of seen that. So now the options are full reset,

I get that. >> Yeah. Lift and shift has been one other alternative. What's your position on the whole lift and shift situation right now? Because, obviously it's been a great 1.0 cloud model, lift and shift to the cloud, lift and shift VMware, put a wrapper around it. I mean, hey, I got AI, just take it from VMware, recreate it, put a wrapper around it. It's acting like VMware, no license.

>> So our guidance, Gartner's guidance, longstanding guidance for years has been don't lift and shift to the cloud, right? It's generally not economically viable. It's sort of the least valuable way to use the cloud. So we've said, basically, don't do it. If you want to move to the cloud, have, you know, transform your applications, make them more cloud native, or at least do a lift and optimize. If you're going to move that app into the cloud initially, 'cause you got to get it there at least then think about how do you optimize it over time, right? I have to say, since the VMware acquisition, that calculus has changed. Because if the price goes up as much as it has been going up for some customers, I think you might find yourself in a situation where lift and shift actually is cheaper, and that is insane. That is insane. The fact that those words just came out of my mouth is nuts.

>> Yeah. >> Right? But if you look at this, I think there are scenarios where lift and shift is actually going to be cheaper. And what I would say is that should be on the table, you should see how that pencil's out for you. It's not a crazy idea.

>> Yeah, it's fascinating to me, because it's like 3D chess, it's part of my kind of MBA, M and A-

>> Yeah. >> You know, case study. This could be a historic switching cost miscalculation by Broadcom. I mean, or a brilliant move or part of their plan, or they already know it and they don't care. So I've seen pitches come to my email box that one click, you can move it over to my cloud. Is that even possible? I mean, that's to me, like, I find that pitch compelling. If I'm like, have cognitive dissonance around where I am right now with VMware, and someone says "One click, less prices, lower price, and no disruption." I got to look at that option.

>> Absolutely. I think there are vendors who could do similar things to that, right? Migration tooling is better or worse depending on the vendor, that's one of the things that you really need to look at when you're evaluating these alternatives. What does that migration path look like? And how much of the migration tooling do you have built in? So there is that. You do have the option to go to a hosted VMware environment in the cloud, all of the major cloud providers offer that. And I mean, that generally is one click, that's a vMotion from your existing on-prem data center into the cloud. So, I mean, yeah, there are ways to do things like that, but your skepticism, I think, is warranted in a lot of cases. And there's usually an asterisk-

>> I'm role playing, by the way, it's not my skepticism.

>> Well, and I know we're not talking about AI

in this segment right here. >> Yeah.

>> But one thing that has been so striking of the show is that we've heard from many guests that so much of the conversation is really being driven by the business. And so, hearing you say that, you're talking to IT leaders who are not, who in your estimation, don't have a deep understanding of the cloud and its potential. I mean, what is the source of this disconnect from your perspective?

>> You know, it could be many things. It could be CIOs who don't consider themselves technical people, or don't consider themselves leaders of IT departments, they consider themselves business leaders. You know, it could be an IT department that doesn't have credibility internally for whatever reason. There's a lot of sources of that disconnect. But, you know, I think what we need to talk about, and what is valuable to the business and IT is technical debt, okay? If you have Legacy applications that are running in VMware right now, today, maybe they're not economically viable going forward, maybe that's not a sustainable architecture. And maybe you need to have a conversation about, can we replace this application? Now, you can always replace the application. There's never a scenario where you can't replace the application. The question is, how much money and time is it going to take me to do that? And I think in a lot of organizations, businesses aren't willing to have that conversation. They don't want to deal with it, they don't want to change applications. They don't want to go through that pain process. Maybe this is a catalyst for having that technical debt conversation, right? Maybe this is a catalyst for having the CIO go to the business unit and say, "Look, this may be unsustainable moving forward. We need to talk about what we're going to do with this app." Maybe that's the less painful approach. So, you know, again, I think that's an example of a conversation that should be happening that maybe isn't happening in a lot of companies.

>> Excellent. I want to ask you about your career too, because I know you've done a lot of different things. You've been an engineer, an entrepreneur, and most importantly, a teacher of philosophy and literature. You have a philosophy background, how, when we're thinking today about the kinds of skills and the kinds of backgrounds that employers are looking for, particularly in this field that you're in now, high tech. I mean, I know you're an analyst, but this is what you live and breathe every day. I mean, the skillsets that you bring to bear as someone who has thought deeply about meaning and why we're all here. I mean, it's really interesting that you don't necessarily have a background in STEM.

>> That's true, that's true. And yeah, I was, I have a Philosophy Degree. My plan was to pursue a PhD in Philosophy and I was going to settle down at a small little college in the mountains somewhere, and write poetry and teach Philosophy.

>> I love it, oh my gosh.

>> That's still my plan, by the way.

That's my retirement plan. >> You can do it.

You could do it. >> Gartner is a great stepping stone for that career.

>> Oh yeah.

>> Honestly, there are so many former academics at Gartner. If you're an academic and you're looking for a job, and you want a very, very peer review focused culture, I actually, I strongly recommend Gartner. But yeah, I was teaching English and philosophy and I was loving it, but I was looking at my paycheck, and that was kind of a problem. So, I started my own company. I ended up with a couple of patents on tools that I had invented. And, you know, I thought I was going to run my company for a couple years and be wildly successful, and sell it to Google or somebody, and that I was going to go live on an island and go back and finish my PhD, and, you know, I'd have unlimited money. It didn't quite work out that way.

I missed it by that much. >> Oh.

>> Could have been a contender. >> Yeah. Exactly, but yeah, I kind of fell backwards into a career in enterprise IT, and what I will say, the skills that have helped me in my career in enterprise IT, I'm a big believer in the humanities. I'm a big believer in liberal arts, obviously, as a method of teaching you how to think. And people who can research, and can think deeply, and can communicate their ideas well, that's actually very valuable in STEM fields, it's certainly very valuable in IT. So, I do take that approach, and I do take things out of my academic training and apply them to completely unrelated scenarios.

>> I'm also very pro-liberal arts, pro-humanities too.

>> Absolutely. >> So I'm glad to hear it. Someone who's actually in the tech industry-

>> Good for you. >> Saying this too.

>> Good for you. Well, it's me and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said the same thing, right?

>> Exactly.

>> So, we're we're in good-

>> You're in good, yes, yes, exactly. Paul, a pleasure having you on "theCUBE." You're now a CUBE alum, congratulations.

>> Pleasure to be here, thank you very much.

>> There'll be a medal coming to you in the mail soon.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Love the confidence. Thanks for coming on and sharing the data.

>> Perfect.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of "theCUBE's" live coverage of Google Cloud Next coming up. You are watching "theCUBE," the leading source for enterprise tech news. (gentle music)

Paul Delory | Gartner

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(gentle music)

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of Google Cloud Next. We are nearing the end of day three here. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. Savannah Peterson and Rob Stretchy are not at the table, but they are with us here, doing our thing.

What a show. >> Yeah, it's been great. We're winding down day three. This next segment is with a Gartner analyst, these guys are the top shelf in the analyst community. They cover a lot, Gartner Magic Quadrant is the gold standard. They do tons of inquiries, tons of customer activity. They got a good lay of the land, and we're going to get a good scoop on what's going on, infrastructure, DevOps, and what's going on in the landscape.

>> Well, I'm now sandwiched between two fabulous analysts. We are welcoming Paul Delory on the show. Gartner VP Analyst and Research Portfolio Manager. Thank you so much for your first time on "theCUBE," Paul.

>> Thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate it. >> Unbelievable. So, what are you seeing? You've been here now three days.

>> Yes. >> What are you seeing? What's most interesting to you about this show?

>> Well, I've been talking about the boring stuff.

>> There's no boring stuff.

>> I'm probably the only person here who doesn't want to talk about AI. I think that was my impression. But yeah, as John mentioned, my official coverage area for Gartner is infrastructure, automation and DevOps. But all anybody wants to talk to me about lately is VMware.

>> Yes. Well, I mean, look at VMware, we're deep on VMware. We're deep on Broadcom, and, well, it's now VMware. The acquisition, Dave and I had lots of analysis on it. What's interesting is on the software side, VMware was a great company. Broadcom buys them, chops it down, and they're going to bring 'em in and do the software play. We also were deep on the semi side, which was a whole different animal. So you got two companies, you got the semis and you got the software, and then a bunch of other little divisions. Right now the big question is, VMware has a lot of loyal IT customers, and IT is changing. And what's going on around IT, and you guys are covering this, is you got generative AI is changing the supplier equation to the end user customer who's saying, "I'm going to use technology to drive growth, specifically generative AI." Okay, so I need more growth, boards are saying more growth, more growth. So now the technology equation has to change, the data center suppliers, the infrastructure. This is the area that's getting a lot of attention right now. So, Paul, give us the lay of the land on, what are people doing with VMware? Are they stuck? The prices are being increased. Okay, they consolidated the products. We know that 27, down to three. What's the story with VMware in terms of the customer adoption, pricing, optionality? Are people switching? Do they need to switch? Can you share your thoughts?

>> Yeah, my phone hasn't stopped ringing since this acquisition happened, I can tell you that. And there's a lot of folks that are upset. Their concern prior to the acquisition was that there were going to be large scale price increases. Some of that has been borne out. The story is more complicated than that, because the price for your VMware licenses depends on where you started, right? What VMware has done, as you mentioned, is they've consolidated all of those SKUs that they did have down to essentially two. There's VMware Cloud Foundation, which is their top level SKU, and then there's VMware vSphere Foundation, which is kind of the next level down. Both of those are bundle SKUs.

>> Kind of like VM, it's like VCF light kind of thing, right?

>> Yeah, something like that. So both of those include ESXI and vSAN. If you go to VCF, you're also getting parts of NSX. You're getting parts of vRealize, sorry, Aria Suite now, they renamed it. But yeah, so they're both now bundle SKUs, and you know, VMware is sort of pushing everyone into there. And their clear preference is to get you into that top level Cadillac SKU for VCF. So, your reaction to that depends on where you started, right? There were a lot of customers that were already running VCF, that were already on subscription services. There were a lot of customers who were getting their VMware licenses through a cloud provider. So if that describes you, then this may not be that big of a change for you, right? You may not see a big price increase, you may even see a price decrease. The problem is, if you were using one of those older SKUs that got eliminated. So if you were running vSphere Standard, or vSphere Plus, or one of those older, kind of more bare bone SKUs, if you're getting uplifted from that all the way to VCF, that's going to be painful. Those are the customers that are seeing the very big price increases, and those are the customers that are calling me.

>> Because they got basically vSphere, and they don't want to turn on the other stuff. But they have to bundle it, they have to take the bundle.

>> Yep.

>> And so Broadcom wants 'em to turn it on, and then they turn it on and cha-ching.

>> Right, exactly.

>> Exactly what happens then.

>> So if you are just using ESXI, if you're just using the Hypervisor, there's not really a way to get just the Hypervisor anymore. You're going to have vSAN, at least, maybe NSX, and you may not be using those products. So that's something that upsets everybody.

>> A lot of customers, they had a lot of customers that were like that, just doing a little vSphere, that's it. So what's the alternatives? 'Cause I've heard the same thing, and I think Broadcom is focused on the big accounts. I think they're like, "Okay, whatever." But I think, I mean, we'll have to dig into that when we go to VMware Explore coming up. What's the alternative? So, we know it's well documented, the prices are public, it's been well documented in the press that they're switching, looking around. What do you see as, and what are you researching in terms of options for customers?

>> Yeah, you do have actually quite a few options in the space, but I always start out by saying there is not a one-for-one replacement for VMware. There's not something that you're just going to drop in. I say all the time, you've got a VMware-shaped hole in your data center, and there isn't anything out there that's really quite VMware-shaped. So in the conversations that I have, I'm with the Gartner for Technical Professionals Research Group. So my research is really aimed at engineers and architects, the people that I talk to buy are larger engineers, and we're having an engineering level conversation about, you know, what features do I need to replace, what features might be missing in some of these competing products? And then we talk about, can we re-engineer the system to remove this requirement? Can we bring in some kind of a third party tool to bridge that gap? Those are the conversations that we're having. In terms of, what the alternatives are that are out there, to actually answer your question that you just asked me. There's a few kind of different product categories that I would bucket these into. The first one would be hyper-converged. So, if you've got a hyper-converged infrastructure play, like a Nutanix, like Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, like, there's a few other smaller players in the market, like Scale Computing. That's the closest thing that there's going to be to a one-for-one replacement for VMware. Those are the, that's a full stack of software-defined infrastructure. Hypervisor and a storage platform, and a network platform with some kind of infrastructure automation, cloud management layer riding on top of that. So that's sort of the closest analog to VMware. If you don't want to do that, if you don't want to go with that full stack, you can take a look at some of the other Hypervisors that are out there. KVM still exists, right? Xen still exists. Those are still out there as open-source Hypervisors. And you're able to take a look at those. Kind of interestingly, the big Linux distributions, the big commercial Linux distributions aren't really playing in this space too much. Red Hat discontinued their KVM product a few years ago. SUSE is not doing much in the space. So, the players in this space are mostly smaller companies, startups, and that does cause a little bit of trepidation, 'cause you do have to ask the question, is this company going to be able to support, at enterprise scale, what VMware's done?

>> Are we going to see this kind of thing happening more and more? I mean, obviously, this is not the first time that we've seen price increases because of an acquisition, but this idea that you have a VMware-shaped hole in your stack. I mean, that is, wow. Do you think we're going to see more and more of this kind of thing happening? And what's the upshot for enterprises?

>> It's the square and the round hole kind of thing. What he's talking about in the data center is important, because you can't get a replica of VMware-

>> Right, right.

>> In slower moving markets, it's leverage.

And you got, that's what- >> Yeah.

>> How big companies squeeze the customers. And now, we're in a model where there's choice. And so, what's interesting to me, why we're having this conversation is, with all this code generation going on and all this ability to put wrappers around things, whether it's brownfield implementations in IT. So you start to see a lot more creative and faster solutions to solve a problem. And if the problem is, "Hey, how do I get an alternative if I don't like what I have?" That's interesting to me. And so, what I'm really curious is that, and I've seen pitches that have come across my desk from Oracle, Nutanix, Microsoft. And so clearly, and they're vulnerable, Broadcom, because (indistinct) is an acquisition there's always that period of settling in, this churn. It happens in every single big acquisition. You lose customers 'cause the focus is going to be making more money. I will say VMware is still doing marketing, so thank God they have more marketing. But they did kill most of their marketing departments. So, you know, Broadcom clearly is taking over, but I'm curious about more the alternatives. Oracle must be looking at this, Google must be looking at this. I mean, if I'm a vendor, I'm like, I know Nutanix have been on LinkedIn, I saw a bunch of stuff there. So clearly there's marketing to that page.

>> Right, exactly.

>> What do you do in acquisitions as a marketer? You put FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You say, "VMware evil" you know? "VMware." And it's a tried and true B2B tactic, we've seen it many times. The question is, what's real? FUD, and that's where I'd love to get the thoughts on. Okay, got options. What are the customers thinking? What's the psychology?

>> Well, you know, it's an astute question, because there's a conversation that is happening, and then there's a conversation that should be happening, right? The conversation that is happening is, how do I find some kind of alternative to VMware and basically migrate to that and not have any application level changes? The question that I think should be happening is how do I modernize my application portfolio? Because I have to say, and everybody gets nervous when I say this, right? VMware has been a pillar of the enterprise data center, right? There's a lot of people who have made their careers on VMware, including me, by the way, I came up as a VMware admin, right? So it made my career in IT. So people don't want to hear this, but on a certain view, client server does start to look like a Legacy architecture. That's not how modern architecture works. Modern architecture is service centric, it's cloud-based. So I think the conversation that should be happening is, if I have this workload that's running on VMware today, can I make it serverless? Can I containerize it? Okay, can I push that out to the cloud and get in kind of a more modern architecture? Do I really want to be having this conversation of, how do we move from one VM platform to another?

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> I'll say this, when I-

>> That's a reset, by the way. >> Yes.

>> That's not putting Tanzu and Spring on it. They could do a little bit of that, but that's not going to do a full reset.

>> Well, see, and that's the thing, right? Even if you're going to move to a different Hypervisor platform, there is a certain amount of re-engineering that you're going to have to do, right? So when I talk to CIOs, and when I put my CIO hat on, and I think about this at that level, do I want to spend a bunch of money and spend a bunch of time and effort re-engineering onto something that, best case scenario is exactly what I have today, right? Do I want to be running on that treadmill? Or if I accept the premise that I'm going to be re-engineering my applications, do I want to have a conversation about, how do I modernize my application portfolio so that maybe I don't need a VM, okay? That's a conversation that should be happening that I think is not happening enough.

>> Why isn't that happening? >> Yeah.

>> 'Cause we've been hearing a lot of skill gap issues. One big respected integrator, which now does product engineering. It's not your classic IT consultant, they do a lot more than doing engineering. Says that the CIO and the big management has been at the big table doing all the money things, doing all the transformation conversations, but the IT guys have been running things and they've been left out of that conversation. So there's a gap between the IT operator, IT people, and the leadership decision making, and to get people up to speed on that. Is that true? Do you believe that?

>> That's absolutely true. I think both of those things are correct. There's definitely a skills gap. There's definitely a disconnect between IT and the business. I also think there's some more fundamental problems. When I talk to people, even in the IT department, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cloud is, right? People think of cloud as a location. They think that, "I'm going to be running a VM in Amazon's data center, or Microsoft's data center, or Google's instead of mine." And what I find myself explaining to a lot of IT leaders is, no, guys, you don't get it. This is a new paradigm, this is a new model for computing. This is things that are not happening in your data center, right? So if you run down the list, if I'm building an application, my first question is going to be, can I do this Function-as-a-Service, right? And okay, if I can't do it Function-as-a-Service, then, and there's legitimate reasons you wouldn't be able to do that, then I'm going to go to, can this be a step function, right? Maybe it can't be a step function. Okay, can it be a serverless container, right? Can I take this and put it in a serverless container service? No, still can't do that? Okay, let's plan C. Let's go to plan D. Maybe it's a hosted Kubernetes service with something that I'm going to containerize, right? And the cloud providers offer all of these services, and you can go down that list, you can go down that batting order. You have to go pretty far down that list before you are actually building a VM. Build a VM is like Plan W on my list, right?

>> Yeah. >> So ideally, in the year of our Lord, 2024, we wouldn't be talking about VMs at all, or they'd be a lot less prominent. But people have a long tail of Legacy applications that they can't move off of easily, and we need to do something with this.

>> And they have a lock in, basically, it's been a pillar, it's been kind of a lock in. We've all kind of seen that. So now the options are full reset,

I get that. >> Yeah. Lift and shift has been one other alternative. What's your position on the whole lift and shift situation right now? Because, obviously it's been a great 1.0 cloud model, lift and shift to the cloud, lift and shift VMware, put a wrapper around it. I mean, hey, I got AI, just take it from VMware, recreate it, put a wrapper around it. It's acting like VMware, no license.

>> So our guidance, Gartner's guidance, longstanding guidance for years has been don't lift and shift to the cloud, right? It's generally not economically viable. It's sort of the least valuable way to use the cloud. So we've said, basically, don't do it. If you want to move to the cloud, have, you know, transform your applications, make them more cloud native, or at least do a lift and optimize. If you're going to move that app into the cloud initially, 'cause you got to get it there at least then think about how do you optimize it over time, right? I have to say, since the VMware acquisition, that calculus has changed. Because if the price goes up as much as it has been going up for some customers, I think you might find yourself in a situation where lift and shift actually is cheaper, and that is insane. That is insane. The fact that those words just came out of my mouth is nuts.

>> Yeah. >> Right? But if you look at this, I think there are scenarios where lift and shift is actually going to be cheaper. And what I would say is that should be on the table, you should see how that pencil's out for you. It's not a crazy idea.

>> Yeah, it's fascinating to me, because it's like 3D chess, it's part of my kind of MBA, M and A-

>> Yeah. >> You know, case study. This could be a historic switching cost miscalculation by Broadcom. I mean, or a brilliant move or part of their plan, or they already know it and they don't care. So I've seen pitches come to my email box that one click, you can move it over to my cloud. Is that even possible? I mean, that's to me, like, I find that pitch compelling. If I'm like, have cognitive dissonance around where I am right now with VMware, and someone says "One click, less prices, lower price, and no disruption." I got to look at that option.

>> Absolutely. I think there are vendors who could do similar things to that, right? Migration tooling is better or worse depending on the vendor, that's one of the things that you really need to look at when you're evaluating these alternatives. What does that migration path look like? And how much of the migration tooling do you have built in? So there is that. You do have the option to go to a hosted VMware environment in the cloud, all of the major cloud providers offer that. And I mean, that generally is one click, that's a vMotion from your existing on-prem data center into the cloud. So, I mean, yeah, there are ways to do things like that, but your skepticism, I think, is warranted in a lot of cases. And there's usually an asterisk-

>> I'm role playing, by the way, it's not my skepticism.

>> Well, and I know we're not talking about AI

in this segment right here. >> Yeah.

>> But one thing that has been so striking of the show is that we've heard from many guests that so much of the conversation is really being driven by the business. And so, hearing you say that, you're talking to IT leaders who are not, who in your estimation, don't have a deep understanding of the cloud and its potential. I mean, what is the source of this disconnect from your perspective?

>> You know, it could be many things. It could be CIOs who don't consider themselves technical people, or don't consider themselves leaders of IT departments, they consider themselves business leaders. You know, it could be an IT department that doesn't have credibility internally for whatever reason. There's a lot of sources of that disconnect. But, you know, I think what we need to talk about, and what is valuable to the business and IT is technical debt, okay? If you have Legacy applications that are running in VMware right now, today, maybe they're not economically viable going forward, maybe that's not a sustainable architecture. And maybe you need to have a conversation about, can we replace this application? Now, you can always replace the application. There's never a scenario where you can't replace the application. The question is, how much money and time is it going to take me to do that? And I think in a lot of organizations, businesses aren't willing to have that conversation. They don't want to deal with it, they don't want to change applications. They don't want to go through that pain process. Maybe this is a catalyst for having that technical debt conversation, right? Maybe this is a catalyst for having the CIO go to the business unit and say, "Look, this may be unsustainable moving forward. We need to talk about what we're going to do with this app." Maybe that's the less painful approach. So, you know, again, I think that's an example of a conversation that should be happening that maybe isn't happening in a lot of companies.

>> Excellent. I want to ask you about your career too, because I know you've done a lot of different things. You've been an engineer, an entrepreneur, and most importantly, a teacher of philosophy and literature. You have a philosophy background, how, when we're thinking today about the kinds of skills and the kinds of backgrounds that employers are looking for, particularly in this field that you're in now, high tech. I mean, I know you're an analyst, but this is what you live and breathe every day. I mean, the skillsets that you bring to bear as someone who has thought deeply about meaning and why we're all here. I mean, it's really interesting that you don't necessarily have a background in STEM.

>> That's true, that's true. And yeah, I was, I have a Philosophy Degree. My plan was to pursue a PhD in Philosophy and I was going to settle down at a small little college in the mountains somewhere, and write poetry and teach Philosophy.

>> I love it, oh my gosh.

>> That's still my plan, by the way.

That's my retirement plan. >> You can do it.

You could do it. >> Gartner is a great stepping stone for that career.

>> Oh yeah.

>> Honestly, there are so many former academics at Gartner. If you're an academic and you're looking for a job, and you want a very, very peer review focused culture, I actually, I strongly recommend Gartner. But yeah, I was teaching English and philosophy and I was loving it, but I was looking at my paycheck, and that was kind of a problem. So, I started my own company. I ended up with a couple of patents on tools that I had invented. And, you know, I thought I was going to run my company for a couple years and be wildly successful, and sell it to Google or somebody, and that I was going to go live on an island and go back and finish my PhD, and, you know, I'd have unlimited money. It didn't quite work out that way.

I missed it by that much. >> Oh.

>> Could have been a contender. >> Yeah. Exactly, but yeah, I kind of fell backwards into a career in enterprise IT, and what I will say, the skills that have helped me in my career in enterprise IT, I'm a big believer in the humanities. I'm a big believer in liberal arts, obviously, as a method of teaching you how to think. And people who can research, and can think deeply, and can communicate their ideas well, that's actually very valuable in STEM fields, it's certainly very valuable in IT. So, I do take that approach, and I do take things out of my academic training and apply them to completely unrelated scenarios.

>> I'm also very pro-liberal arts, pro-humanities too.

>> Absolutely. >> So I'm glad to hear it. Someone who's actually in the tech industry-

>> Good for you. >> Saying this too.

>> Good for you. Well, it's me and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said the same thing, right?

>> Exactly.

>> So, we're we're in good-

>> You're in good, yes, yes, exactly. Paul, a pleasure having you on "theCUBE." You're now a CUBE alum, congratulations.

>> Pleasure to be here, thank you very much.

>> There'll be a medal coming to you in the mail soon.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Love the confidence. Thanks for coming on and sharing the data.

>> Perfect.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of "theCUBE's" live coverage of Google Cloud Next coming up. You are watching "theCUBE," the leading source for enterprise tech news. (gentle music)