Brian talks with Keith Townsend (@ctoadvisor, The CTO Advisor) and Stu Miniman (@stu, Wikibon | theCUBE) about the upcoming VMworld 2017 event, VMware’s relevance in a cloud-centric world, the Dell merger 2yrs later and the advice they would give Michael Dell or Pat Gelsinger.
Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show, both of you. What’s new in your worlds and what trends are on your radar these days?
Topic 2 - A couple weeks ago The Register forecasted that VMworld is a shrinking event and a stark contrast to the growth of AWS re:Invent. From your perspective, what’s the state of the VMware ecosystem these days?
Topic 3 - With Dell being private but VMware is still public, and their stock being up about 2.5x since the merger ($40-100), is there any sense of how money is flowing within VMware (e.g. R&D) vs. flowing over to pay Dell’s debts?
Topic 4 - You both get access to the VMware executive team during the week of VMworld. What questions do you wish you could ask them, but it’s not appropriate during the interview or Q&A formats that exist?
Topic 5 - Can you explain VMware’s “Cloud Strategy” to us?
Topic 6 - HCI (HyperConverged Infrastructure) is growing very quickly and all the vendors now have an HCI play (Nutanix, DellEMC VxRail, HPE Simplivity/Nimble, Cisco SpringPath, Red Hat HCI, etc.). Does the market need this many similar offerings? Which one of these is non-existent in 3-4 years?