020: Recorded, LIVE with 8 guests

This week we have no less than 8 people on the show as we promised to record from Cisco Live in Milan. Lot's of (different) content and a great group of guests.

left to right: Tom Hollingsworth, J. Metz, Matt Oswalt, Hans De Leenheer, Blake Krone, Andrea Mauro, Stephen Foskett, Samuel Clements.

Non-stories gone wild

• IBM was supposedly going to lay off 110.000 staff members (26%). In a response IBM said that for this one time they would brake their policy of not responding to rumours but it was too ridiculous to let go. (wth J.Metz)
• The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) finally got an official statement out on the whole Marriott Hotel chain that got ‘caught with their hands in the cookie jar’ by blocking MiFi on their premises. (wth Blake Krone). 

Cisco Live & TechFieldDay

Everyone one the show, except for J. Metz was at Cisco Live as a TechFieldDay delegate and the sessions will come online soon on the event’s portal. One of the sessions we like most was the Meraki people. According to us, a startup within the behemoth. (wth Matt Oswalt, Samuel Clements & Tom Hollingsworth). 

Sidenote 1: mind that ‘murican Samuel is using the word premises properly! :-)

Sidenote 2: Samuel and Blake run their own WiFi podcast TheNSAshow

Adoption of VMware new market products (VSAN & NSX)

Apparently, at least according to the Q4 earnings call which should be the truth and nothing but the truth, VMware is not doing too shabby with both VSAN (1000 customers) and the SDN play NSX (400 customers). (wth Andrea Mauro & Matt ).

Merger, Acquisitions and Investment rounds

• We get some more insights into Pluribus Networks of which we reported a $50 million D-round in last-weeks episode (wth Stephen Foskett, Tom and Matt).
• Stephen helps us understand what happened with NexGen of which we reported in episode 18 a spin-off out of SanDisk (after being acquired through FusionIO). A good conversation we have here is about is there actually such a thing as a “hybrid array market” or an “all flash array market”? 
• Which was a perfect segway into Kaminario raising another $15mln round after there $53mln E-round of last december (episode 12). (wth J. Metz)
• We all chime in for our final topic, being Symantec spinnout out the complete Data Protection portfolio back into Veritas Technologies. Is it not too late to try and get the Symantec backup products back on track? And is it even about technology or more about splitting up the branding towards selling the pieces?

AND - we do have a gift from the home-team as there is a new Secret Windows Phone App to close the show.