The secret to a vibrant ecosystem isn’t success; it’s failure. In a healthy ecosystem, hundreds of products and services appear, most of which disappear just as soon as the customer base shifts. What’s left becomes the core of a strong ecosystem — tested, valued offerings that serve a real need. The VMware Inc. ecosystem is seeing that same period of growth and winnowing as the market discovers what it wants.

To gain some insight on the future of the VMware world, John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the VMworld 2016 event in Las Vegas. There, they sat down with Chad Sakac, president, VCE – Converged Platform Division at EMC.

The VMware journey

The conversation opened with a look at the changes VMware has seen. Sakac described it as a journey, saying the huge community has been a defining part of that journey. He mentioned that looking at the keynotes, it’s clear the conference had to struggle to fit in all the awesome things people are doing. He felt the entire ecosystem has changed, consolidated, to fit a balance between traditional IT, public clouds and private clouds.

Not everyone understands what’s going on inside the industry, Sakac said. He explained that the parts of the industry that are growing center around converged and hyper-converged, turnkey solutions. However, a certain segment of the market also wants variability.

“Just like politics, if you constantly play to the base, you never move forward,” he said.

A clouded future

The future of remote computing is hard to see, but there are trends. Sakac saw a need to make on-premise clouds as easy to consume as public clouds. Workloads will bias some companies toward public, or private, clouds. He stated that it would be unlikely for one cloud to win out, as history has never seen a singularity of one stack.

Cloud management platforms are tough, Sakac said. They represent a fragmented market with little consolidation. Right now, people see clouds that speak to each other, but favor their own stacks. He felt the industry would be in that mode for a long time. He sees the real fun in new data applications, solutions that bridge on and off-premise clouds, and roles for human beings that span functions. That’s the mojo, he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE