(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here, in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. We're here, remotely, with Nick Halsey who's the CEO of OKERA, hot startup doing amazing work in cloud, cloud data, cloud security, policy governance as the intersection of cloud and data comes into real stable operations. That's the number one problem. People are figuring out, right now, is how to make sure that data's addressable and also secure and can be highly governed. So Nick, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John, thank you. >> So you guys have a really hot company going on, here, and you guys are in an intersection, an interesting spot as the market kind of connects together as cloud is going full, kind of, whatever, 3.0, 4.0. You got the edge of the network developing with 5G, you've got space, you've got more connection points, you have more data flowing around. And the enterprises and the customers are trying to figure out, like, okay, how do I architect this thing. And oh, by the way, I got a, like all these compliance issues, too. So this is kind of what you could do. Take a minute to explain what your company's doing. >> Yeah, I'm happy to do that, John. So we're introduced a new category of software that we call universal data authorization or UDA which is really starting to gain some momentum in the market. And there're really two critical reasons why that happening. People are really struggling with how do I enable my digital transformation, my cloud migration while at the same time making sure that my data is secure and that I'm respecting the privacy of my customers, and complying with all of these emerging regulations around data privacy like GDPR, CCPA, and that alphabet soup of regulations that we're all starting to become aware of. >> I want to ask about the market opportunity because, you know, one of the things we see and the cloud covers normal conversations like, "Hey, modern applications are developing." We're starting to see cloud-native. You're starting to see these new use cases so you're starting to see new expectations from users and companies which creates new experiences. And this is throwing off all kinds of new, kinds of data approaches. And a lot of people are scratching their head and they feel like do they slow it down, they speed it up? Do I get a hold of the compliance side first? Do I innovate? So it's like a real kind of conflict between the two. >> Yeah, there's a real tension in most organizations. They're trying to transform, be agile, and use data to drive that transformation. But there's this explosion of the volume, velocity, and variety of data, we've all heard about the three Ds, we'll say there're five Ds. You know, it's really complicated. So you've got the people on the business side of the house and the Chief Data Officer who want to enable many more uses of all of these great data assets. But of course, you've got your security teams and your regulatory and compliance teams that want to make sure they're doing that in the right way. And so you've got to build a zero-trust infrastructure that allows you to be agile and be secure at the same time. And that's why you need universal data authorization because the old manual ways of trying to securely deliver data to people just don't scale in today's demanding environments. >> Well I think that's a really awesome approach, having horizontally scalable data. Like infrastructure would be a great benefit. Take me through what this means. I'd like to get you to define, if you don't mind, what is universal data authorization. What is the definition? What does that mean? >> Exactly and people are like, "I don't understand security. "I do data over here and privacy, "well I do that over here." But the reality is you really need to have the right security platform in order to express your privacy policies, right. And so in the old days, we used to just build it into the database, or we'd build it into the analytic tools. But now, we have too much data in too many platforms in too many locations being accessed by too many, you know, BI applications and A-I-M-L data apps and so you need to centralize the policy definition and policy enforcement so that it can be applied everywhere in the organization. And the example I like to give, John, is we are just like identity access management. Why do I need Okta or Sale Point, or one of those tools? Can't I just log in individually to, you know, SalesForce or to GitHub or? Sure, you can but once you have 30 or 40 systems and thousands of users, it's impossible to manage your employee onboarding and off-boarding policy in a safe and secure way. So you abstract it and then you centralize it and then you can manage and scale it. And that's the same thing you do with OKERA. We do all of the security policy enforcement for all of your data platforms via all of your analytic tools. Anything from Tableau to Databricks to Snowflake, you name it, we support those environments. And then as we're applying the security which says, "Oh, John is allowed access to this data in this format "at this time," we can also make sure that the privacy is governed so that we only show the last four digits of your social security number, or we obfuscate your home address. And we certainly don't show them your bank balance, right? So you need to enable the use of the data without violating the security and privacy rights that you need to enforce. But you can do both, with our customers are doing at incredible scale, then you have sort of digital transformation nirvana resulting from that. >> Yeah, I mean I love what you're saying with the scale piece, that's huge. At AWS's Reinforce Virtual Conference that they had to run because the event was canceled due to the Delta COVID surge, Stephen Schmidt gave a great keynote, I called it a master class, but he mainly focused on cyber security threats. But you're kind of bringing that same architectural thinking to the data privacy, data security piece. 'Cause it's not so much you're vulnerable for hacking, it's still a zero-trust infrastructure for access and management, but-- >> Well you mean you need security for many reasons. You do want to be able to protect external hacks. I mean, every week there's another T-Mobile, you know, you name it, so that's... But 30% of data breaches are by internal trusted users who have rights. So what you needed to make sure is that you're managing those rights and that you're not creating any long tails of data access privilege that can be abused, right? And you also need, one of the great benefits of using a platform like OKERA, is we have a centralized log of what everybody is doing and when, so I could see that you, John, tried to get into the salary database 37 times in the last hour and maybe we don't want to let you do that. So we have really strong stakeholder constituencies in the security and regulatory side of the house because, you know, they can integrate us with Splunk and have a single pane of glass on, weird things are happening in the network and there's, people are trying to hit these secure databases. I can really do event correlation and analysis, I can see who's touching what PII when and whether it's authorized. So people start out by using us to do the enforcement but then they get great value after they've been using us for a while, using that data, usage data, to be able to better manage their environments. >> It's interesting, you know, you bring up the compliance piece as a real added value and I wasn't trying to overlook it but it brings up a good point which is you have, you have multiple benefits when you have a platform like this. So, so take me through like, who's using the product. You must have a lot of customers kicking the tires and adopting it because architecturally, it makes a lot of sense. Take me through a deployment of what it's like in the customer environment. How are they using it? What is some of the first mover types using this approach? And what are some of the benefits they might be realizing? >> Yeah, as you would imagine, our early adopters have been primarily very large organizations that have massive amounts of data. And they tend also to be in more regulated industries like financial services, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals, retail with tons of, you know, consumer information, those are very important. So let me give you an example. We work with one of the very largest global sports retailers in the world, I can't use their name publicly, and we're managing all of their privacy rights management, GDPR, CCPA, worldwide. It's a massive undertaking. Their warehouse is over 65 petabytes in AWS. They have many thousands of users in applications. On a typical day, an average day OKERA is processing and governing six trillion rows of data every single day. On Black Friday, it peaked over 10 trillion rows of data a day, so this is scale that most people really will never get to. But one of the benefits of our architecture is that we are designed to be elastically scalable to sort of, we actually have a capability we call N scale because we can scale to the Nth degree. We really can go as far as you need to in terms of that. And it lets them do extraordinary things in terms of merchandising and profitability and market basket analysis because their teams can work with that data. And even though it's governed and redacted and obfuscated to maintain the individuals' privacy rights, we still let them see the totality of the data and do the kind of analytics that drive the business. >> So large scale, big, big customer base that wants scale, some, I'll say data's huge. What are some of the largest data lakes that you guys have been working with? 'Cause sometimes you hear people saying our data lakes got zettabytes and petabytes of content. What are some of the, give us a taste of the order of magnitude of some of the size of the data lakes and environments that your customers were able to accomplish. >> I want to emphasize that this is really important no matter what size because some of our customers are smaller tech-savvy businesses that aren't necessarily processing huge volumes of data, but it's the way that they are using the data that drives the need for us. But having said that, we're working with one major financial regulator who has a data warehouse with over 200 petabytes of data that we are responsible for providing the governance for. And one thing about that kind of scale that's really important, you know, when you want to have everybody in your organization using data at that scale, which people think of as democratizing your data, you can't just democratize the data, you also have to democratize the governance of the date, right? You can't centralize policy management in IT because then everybody who wants access to the data still has to go back to IT. So you have to make it really easy to write policy and you have to make it very easy to delegate policy management down to the departments. So I need to be able to say this person in HR is going to manage these 50 datasets for those 200 people. And I'm going to delegate the responsibility to them but I'm going to have centralized reporting and auditing so I can trust but verify, right? I can see everything they're doing and I can see how they are applying policy. And I also need to be able to set policy at the macro level at the corporate level that they inherit so I might just say I don't care who you are, nobody gets to see anything but the last four digits of your social security number. And they can do further rules beyond that but they can't change some of the master rules that you're creating. So you need to be able to do this at scale but you need to be able to do it easily with a graphical policy builder that lets you see policy in plain English. >> Okay, so you're saying scale, and then the more smaller use cases are more refined or is it more sensitive data? Regulated data? Or more just levels of granularity? Is that the use case? >> You know, I think there's two things that are really moving the market right now. So the move to remote work with COVID really changed everybody's ideas about how do you do security because you're no longer in a data center, you no longer have a firewall. The Maginot Line of security is gone away and so in a zero-trust world, you know, you have to secure four endpoints: the data, the device, the user, and the application. And so this pretty radical rethinking of security is causing everybody to think about this, big, small, or indifferent. Like, Gartner just came out with a study that said by 2025 75% of all user data in the world is going to be governed by privacy policy. So literally, everybody has to do this. And so we're seeing a lot more tech companies that manage data on behalf of other users, companies that use data as a commodity, they're transacting data. Really, really understand the needs for this and when you're doing data exchange between companies that is really delicate process that have to be highly governed. >> Yeah, I love the security redo. We asked Pat Gelsinger many, many years ago when he was a CEO of VMware what we thought about security and Dave Allante, my co-host at theCUBE said is it a do-over? He said absolutely it's a do-over. I think it was 2013. He mused around that time frame. It's kind of a do-over and you guys are hitting it. This is a key thing. Now he's actually the CEO of Intel and he's still driving forward. Love Pat's vision on this early, but this brings up the question okay, if it's a do-over and these new paradigms are existing and you guys are building a category, okay, it's a new thing. So I have to ask you, I'm sure your customers would say, "Hey, I already got that in another platform." So how do you address that because when you're new you have to convince the customer that this is a new thing. Like, I don't-- >> So, so look, if somebody is still running on Teradata and they have all their security in place and they have a single source of the truth and that's working for them, that's great. We see a lot of our adoption happening as people go on their cloud transformation journey. Because I'm lifting and shifting a lot of data up into the cloud and I'm usually also starting to acquire data from other sources as I'm doing that, and I may be now streaming it in. So when I lift and shift the data, unfortunately, all of the security infrastructure you've built gets left behind. And so a lot of times, that's the forcing function that gets people to realize that they have to make a change here, as well. And we also find other characteristics like, people who are getting proactive in their data transformation initiatives, they'll often hire a CDO, they'll start to use modern data cataloging tools and identity access management tools. And when we see people adopting those things, we understand that they are on a journey that we can help them with. And so we partner very closely with the catalog vendors, with the identity access vendors, you know, with many other parts of the data lake infrastructure because we're just part of the stack, right? But we are the last mile because we're the part of the stack that lets the user connect. >> Well I think you guys are on a wave that's massive and I think it's still, it's going to be bigger coming forward. Again, when you see categories being created it's usually at the beginning of a bigger wave. And I got to ask you because one thing's I've been really kind of harping on on theCUBE and pounding my fist on the table is these siloed approaches. And you're seeing 'em everywhere, I mean, even in the consumer world. LinkedIn's a silo. Facebook's a silo. So you have this siloed mentality. Certainly in the enterprise they're no stranger to silos. So if you want to be horizontally scalable with data you've got to have it free, you've got to break the silos. Are we going to get there? Is this the beginning? Are we breaking down the silos, Nick, or is this the time or what's your reaction to that? >> I'll tell you something, John. I have spent 30 years in the data and analytics business and I've been fortunate enough to help launch many great BI companies like Tableau and Brio Software, and Jaspersoft and Alphablocks we were talking about before the show. Every one of those companies would have been much more successful if they had OKERA because everybody wanted to spread those tools across the organization for better, more agile business analytics, but they were always held back by the security problem. And this was before privacy rights were even a thing. So now with UDA and I think hand-in-hand with identity access management, you truly have the ability to deliver analytic value at scale. And that's key, you need simplicity at scale and that is what lets you let all parts of your organization be agile with data and use it to transform the business. I think we can do that, now. Because if you run in the cloud, it's so easy, I can stand up things like Hadoop in, you know, like Databricks, like Snowflake. I could never do that in my on-prem data center but I can literally press a button and have a very sophisticated data platform, press a button, have OKERA, have enforcement. Really, almost any organization can now take advantage of what only the biggest and most sophisticated organizations use to be able to do it. >> I think Snowflake's an example for all companies that you could essentially build in the shadows of the big clouds and build your own franchise if you nail the security and privacy and that value proposition of scale and good product. So I got, I love this idea of security and privacy managed to a single platform. I'd love to get your final thought while I got you here, on programmability because I'm seeing a lot of regulators and people in the privacy world puttin' down all these rules. You got GDPR and I want to write we forgot and I got all these things... There's a trend towards programmability around extraction of data and managing data where just a simple query could be like okay, I want to know what's goin' on with my privacy and we're a media company and so we record a lot of data too, and we've got to comply with all these like, weird requests, like hey, can you, on June 10th, I want, can you take out my data? And so that's programmatic, that's not a policy thing. It's not like a lawyer with some privacy policy. That's got to be operationalized. So what's your reaction to that as this world starts to be programmable? >> Right, well that's key to our design. So we're an API first approach. We are designed to be a part of a very sophisticated mesh of technology and data so it's extremely simple to just call us to get the information that you need or to express a policy on the fly that might be created because of the current state-based things that are going on. And that's very, very important when you start to do real-time applications that require geo-fencing, you're doing 5G edge computing. It's a very dynamic environment and the policies need to change to reflect the conditions on the ground, so to speak. And so to be callable, programmable, and betable, that is an absolutely critical approach to implementing IUDA in the enterprise. >> Well this is super exciting, I feel you guys are on, again, a bigger wave than it appears. I mean security and privacy operating system, that's what you guys are. >> It is. >> It is what it is. Nick, great to chat with you. >> Couldn't have said it better. >> I love the category creation, love the mojo and I think you guys are on the right track. I love this vision merging data security policy in together into one to get some enablement and get some value creation for your customers and partners. Thanks for coming on to theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Now, it's my pleasure and I would just give one piece of advice to our listeners. You can use this everywhere in your organization but don't start with that. Don't boil the ocean, pick one use case like the right to be forgotten and let us help you implement that quickly so you can see the ROI and then we can go from there. >> Well I think you're going to have a customer in theCUBE. We will be calling you. We need this. We've done a lot of digital events now with the pandemic, so locked data that we didn't have to deal with before. But thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. OKERA, hot startup. >> My pleasure, John and thank you so much. >> So OKERA conversation, I'm John Furrier here, in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)