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Even though VMware initially called its Amazon competitor vCloud Hybrid Services, make no mistake, it's the company's public cloud (now renamed vCloud Air.)

And, [company]VMware[/company] really wants workloads that might run ow on [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services to come on over, says Bill Fathers, EVP and GM of cloud services for VMware.  That's a tall order. Face it, AWS has been around as, an old boss would have said "Hector was a pup" The first services launched in 2006, and vCloud Air is, what?? a old toddler of two. Fathers acknowledged vCloud Air doesn't have thousands of customers  but said that wasn't the plan. Instead VMware wants a few hundred of key companies to act as bellwethers.

But Fathers point is that a small percentage of total computing is now running on any public cloud -- he thinks it's now 5 or 10 percent up from the two to three percent he thought it was last June at Structure. Which means that there's a ton of work up for grabs.

And while AWS looks to be the enemy for VMware's cloud, the same is not true for Google -- VMware last week announced plans to offer and support four Google services including BigQuery, on vCloud Air.  This week it brought out its promised Integrated OpenStack. 

Fathers positions both the Google relationship and this week's Partner Exchange announcements. And he's clearly not backing away from a fight with the biggest of big clouds.

Bill Fathers, VMware EVP and GM cloud services

Beyond the VMware universe there was a bit of big data moving and shaking with Cloudera buying Explain.io and its self-service query modeling expertise and Datastax picking up Aurelius, the keeper of the Titan graph database. Could this be a sign of even more M&A to come? That's something we'll hear more about at Structure Data from March 18-19 in New York from the CEOs of Cloudera, Hortonworks and other data powerhouses, so book your tickets now.

Ok, the gratuitous plug is now done, it's time to listen.

VMware wants all those cloud workloads "marooned" in AWS

As someone who takes her cues on net neutrality from Gigaom's resident expert Stacey Higginbotham or, failing that, John Oliver, this is hard to admit: Mark Cuban may have a point on why the proposed net neutrality regulations may be a cure that's worse than the disease.

If adopted, he maintained, these regs will open the door to more confusion, more litigation and more overall turmoil, none of which will serve consumers well. Before you throw your device at the wall, just give him a listen. Cuban, the serial entrepreneur who started out as a VAR before founding Broadcast.com which sold to [company]Yahoo[/company] in a $5.7 billion stock deal in 1999. He is now owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-star of Shark Tank and CEO of of AXS TV  and interestingly a star of new AT&T commercials. The hyphens just keep coming.

He sees competition ramping up in both in wired and wireless access -- if these markets are so foreclosed why is Google doing broadband? Why is "AT&T going out of its traditional TV markets where they have U-verse to compete with Comcast and Google? That's one layer. On the other layer you have mobile, with [company]Cablevision[/company] going into Manhattan where [company]Verizon[/company] and AT&T have broadband wireless and putting together an unwired wifi network for $30 a month'

His point is that there is competition, although it may not be the competition we would all like to see.

Cuban is clearly worried about one, well two mega players and neither one is a big ISP. "I would rather see national competition for [company]Google[/company] than no competition for Google. If you put a lid on Time Warner and Comcast and Google just keeps adding more and more markets, who's going to compete with them?"

Google and [company]Apple[/company] constitute a huge countervailing force for all the ISPs because of their mobile might. "The fastest growing access for Internet is mobile. Who controls access to mobile? Google and Apple. The far greater risk is if Apple decides that the Comcast app is not right, Comcast won't be able to reach most of its market to give access to its own broadband. Kind of crazy but it's a possibility." For the record, he isn't recommending regulation to stop that either.

His point isn't that Comcast or Time Warmer or insert-your-least-favorite cable provider here) are so great -- he admits they are not -- it's just that the FCC its regulations are ill equipped to deal with fast-changing technologies. The public would be better served to let the cable companies duke it out with each other and, perhaps more to the point, with far scarier competitors including Google and Apple.

He starts about 10 minutes in. But here is the kill shot: Do you really want the same organization (the FCC) that took 8 years to deal with Janet Jackson's Wardrobe Malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII to be the gating factor in the internet? Ummmm, maybe not.

Listen to the whole thing to find out how you, too, can get in touch with Cuban, such a shy and reserved guy, to ask your own questions on net neutrality; whether the NBA is seeing diminishing returns on data analytics; and why the heck the Celtics let the Mavs steal Rajon Rondo. Whatever.

Businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier 48 on September 8, 2014 in San Francisco, California. 
Businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier 48 on September 8, 2014 in San Francisco, California.
In our intro section, Jonathan Vanian and I discuss all (or a bunch anyway) of this week's Kubernetes news -- where Mirantis was latest into the pool, working with Google to bring the cluster management framework to OpenStack clouds, joining HP and a raft of other tech vendors endorsing the open-source framework. Interestingly, Spotify blazed its own trail,  Helios as opposed to Kubernetes for its own workloads.


Mark Cuban on net neutrality: FCC can't protect competition

If you are confused about Hewlett-Packard's cloud plan of action, this week's guest will lay it out for you. Bill Hilf, the SVP of Helion product management, makes his second appearance on the show (does that make him our Alec Baldwin?) to talk about HP's many-clouds-one-management layer strategy.

The lineup? Helion Eucalyptus for private clouds which need Amazon Web Services API compatibility; Helion OpenStack for the rest and HP Cloud Development Platform (aka Cloud Foundry) for platform as a service.  Oh and there's HP Public Cloud which I will let him tell you about himself.

But first Derrick Harris and I are all over IBM's purchase of AlchemyAPI, the cool deep learning startup that does stuff like identifying celebs and wanna-be celebs from their photos. It's a win for [company]IBM [/company]because all that coolness will be sucked into Watson and expand the API set Watson can parlay for more useful work. (I mean, winning Jeopardy is not really a business model, as IBM Watson exec Mike Rhodin himself has pointed out.) 

At first glance it might seem that a system that can tell the difference between Will Ferrell and Chad Smith might be similarly narrow, but after consideration you can see how that fine-grained, self-teaching technology could find broader uses.

AlchemyAPI CEO Elliot Turner and IBM Watson sales chief Stephen Gold shared the stage at Structure Data last year. Who knows what deals might be spawned at this year's event?

Celebrity_ChadSmith_WillFerrell_cropped

Also we're happy to follow the escalating smack talk in the Hadoop arena as Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly this week declared victory over the new Hortonworks-IBM-Pivotal-backed Open Data Platform effort which we're now fondly referring to as the ABC or "Anyone But Cloudera" alliance.

It's a lively show so have a listen and (hopefully) enjoy.

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