Jamie Shepard (pictured), senior vice president at Dallas-based Lumenate, a VMware partner, on the vendor's plan to acquire Wavefront, a big data startup that develops a real-time analytics platform that businesses use to monitor and manage the performance of their IT systems.

"We're now going to be able to get a live-streaming look at all of the data from the cloud and from the applications in the cloud – it's going to look at end-user behavior, it can handle a multi-cloud strategy, it's really a cross-cloud management platform."