(instrumental music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Velante. Welcome to the special wikibon community event. VMware, VMworld 2018, strong momentum but still choppy waters. How can you say that Dave? How can you say strong momentum but still choppy waters? The data center is on fire. We just came back from VMworld 2018, the eco system is exploding, revenues are up, profits are up, all looks good. Well we agree in general, but theCUBE was there. We had two sets. We interviewed over 100 guests. 75 segments on theCUBE and right now what we want to do in this special community event is share with you our community and hear from you what you thought of the event, what we thought of the event and let's collaborate and come up with some conclusions. So, what were the key points made on theCUBE by Michael Dell, Pat Kellsinger, Ray Ofarell, Andy Bechtelshtein and number of other folks, customers, practitioners, technologists and eco system partners on theCUBE? What did they say and what does it mean for users? AWS and VMware, a big theme on theCUBE last week was is the AWS VMware partnership a one way trip to the Hotel Cloudifornia or is it a boon for the data center? What about AWS with RDS, the data base, on prim, what does that mean? How effective will that be? What does it say about AWS's strategy and what does it mean for VMware and the eco system? What's VMware's play at the edge? What about containers? Containers are supposedly going to kill VMware or hurt VMware's momentum. What does the community think about that? And what about Dell's new capital structure? Dell is going public again. It's taking an 11 billion dollar dividend out of VMware's 13 billion dollars of cash. Is that the best use of VMware's cash? And is VMware constrained in terms of it's RND going forward? We're going to address these and other items with the following format. We're going to show you now highlights from VMworld 2018 from theCUBE and then we're going to come back in the crowd chat and discuss. So thanks for watching everybody. Take a look at these video clips and these statements from senior leaders and then we'll go into the crowd chat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, John Furrier, Stu Miniman at the end of day two of our continuing coverage guys of VMworld 2018, huge event. 25,000 plus people here. 100,000 plus expected to be engaging with the on demand, the live experiences, our biggest show, right. 94 interviews in the next three days, two of them down. >> And evolving over the years. I mean at VMworld's core, it is a technical conference. Right, so I would say that the base of the volume of the program is still catered towards a real hands on, technical practitioner and middle management but we are seeing more business executives come. They want to know what their teams are exploring. They want to understand vision and I think VMware you know, value proposition to enterprises is growing and therefore, it's starting to be more of a business conversation. So that is a segment of the audience that is growing. >> A few questions, I think first of all the Amazon news is already on VMware on premises is earth shattering news at many levels. One, Amazon's never done it before. Two, I think people are starting to understand this downstream a little bit later. But it's going to have a significant impact on the opportunities in multi cloud. So, I think Amazon's relationship with VMware is very deep at the level of technology and stay cold is at the top of both companies. Andy Jaci and Pat Gelsinger are both in this to win it together. It's obvious and anyone who says otherwise really isn't really informed. They're deep in the technical side, they have management at the top approving this, they're going to market together in the field. There is a legit synergy and they're going to win the long game. Gelsinger's making the big bet and remember, three years ago Pat Gelsinger was the gun. What's his role going to be? People were nervous about their cloud. Look it, VMware boxed the cloud and they're kicking ass right now with cloud. So they made the right moves. They steered the ship away from the rocks, they're out in the clear sailing. Love their strategy, Keno with Gelsinger was very specifically around the generational shift around VMware and the industry. He went through the bridging and I love the cleverness of the story telling, bridging tech trends of VMware ethos. He talked about the history, servers ESX, BYOD workspace, network NSX, cloud migration, that was their kind of initial private cloud, but right now its multi cloud and profit and people doing tech for good. So I think Gelsinger's laying down the generational shift that Vmware's going for and their making the huge bet on AWS, so it makes the question. What about Asher, what about Google? Is VMware going to be a one cloud game? Are they going to bridge to other clouds? That's going to be a very interesting tell sign 'cause the relationship on stage with Andy Jaci in fact Gelsinger is pretty significant. I think it's going to be a hard thing to go in to other clouds and say, I want to dig you too. >> Last year Pat said that networking has the potential to be the next decade bigger than what virtualization was for the wave and we are seeing good movement. I think I said it on our intro this morning but when Asira was acquired, the promise that we as a networking industry felt that they could be that inter weaving kind of glue for multi cloud and it kind of got hidden for a few years while they built that intersect, they made it really enterprise ready. They did really well with adoption. But now that vision is kind of back in full and that is what VMware can ride. Not to just be virtualization. V spheres great, they'll drive that for awhile, but the networking and security pieces is why VMware has the right to sit at the table in this multi cloud discussion. Now it was funny, I interviewed Keith Townsen and he said VMware, you know, he's now a VMware employee, VMware is the best position to help customers do that transformation. I said, hey Keith, I hear ya, but Microsoft and Amazon and a whole bunch of other management people might kind of step up and say, we've got a right to be at the table too. >> Of course all the legacy guys are trying to figure out, okay, their cloud strategies. But now all the major cloud guys are betting on Prim. We saw Google next, the on Prim strategy was certainly Assure with Assure Stack. Oracle has bets in cloud and with cloud customers got bets for On Prem. Now AWS throws its Admuring. James Kobielus, you sat in the analyst sessions all day. What did you learn? What were your big take aways? What do we need to know? >> Well first of all it's clear that AWS partnership VMware's all in with them. Look at the past year since they announced the customer adoption, partner enablement. They share variety and depth of the integrations that these partners have put together including today. It's pretty serious in terms of VMware's investment in that relationship, deepening that to the point where, there are no splashy Google partnership announcements or IBM or anybody else. It's clear that they're really, they're each others hybrid cloud partner par excolons. I don't think either of them, or I don't think the VMware is going to go anywhere near as deep with the other public club providers any time soon. But really my take away today from the analysis session was that VMware is going seriously to the edge and it's really interesting, they're building an appliance to take their entire stack and bring it down to edge deployment and distribute that around and then manage that for customer on a global basis with automation, there's going to be AI and machine learning built in so that if VMware will be able as a managed service to drive the software defined data center all the way out to the edges for its clients. And they're putting themselves in a position where they could actually, that could be there next major revenue producing business. As the traditional hypervisor VMworld begins to wane in terms of putting cube and server less and so forth on an appliance. Putting that in the clients sight and managing it for them. And then white boxing it potentially to other cloud providers to provide to their customers. This could be in the future coming in the next year or two. Something that can propel VMware to the next stage where they are everybody's preferred multi cloud management, edge management partner. >> Provide a slightly different version of one of the things you said. I definitely agree. I think what VMware hopes to do, I think they're not alone is to have AWS look like an appliance to their console, to have Assure look like an appliance to their console. So through free VMware, you can get access to whatever services you need including your VMware machines your VM's inside those clouds but that increasingly their goal is to be that control point, that management point for all of these different resources that are building and it is very compelling. I think that there's one area that I still think we need more from. As analysts we always got to look through what's more required. And I hear what you say about broad dimensions but I think that the edge story still requires a fair amount of work. >> Oh yeah. >> It's a project in place, but that's going to be an increasingly important focus of how architectures get laid out, how people think about applications in the future, how design happens, how methodologies for building software works. David, what do you think? When you look out, what is more is needed for you? >> So I think there are two things that give me a small concern. The edge, that's a long term view. So they have a lot of time to get that right. But the edge view is very much an IT view top down. And they are looking to put into place everything that they think the OT people should fit in with. I think that is personally not going to be a winning strategy. You have to take it from the bottom up. The world is going to go towards devices, very rich devices and sensors, lots of software, right on that device, the inference work on those devices. And the job of IT will be to integrate those devices. It won't be those devices taking on the standards of IT. It will be IT that has to shape itself to look after all those devices there. So that's the main viewpoint I think that needs adjustment and it will come I'm sure over time. >> But as you said, there's a lot of computer science, it's going to be an enormous amount of new partnerships are going to be fabricated. >> Exactly. >> Once you make this happen... >> I want to see the road map for Kuhernettys and server less. Last year they made an announcement of a server less project, I forgot what the code name is. Didn't hear a whole lot about it this year but they're going up the app stack. They got a coop distribution. They need a developer story. I mean developers are building functional apps and so forth. And they're also containerized. They need developer story and they need a server less story and they need to bring us up to speed on where they're going in that regard, because AWS, they're predominant partner, I mean they've got LAM dysfunctions and all that stuff. That's the development platform of the present and future and I'm not hearing an intersection of that story with VMware's story yet. >> Actually before VMware's was server installation it was work station. >> Work station, that's right. >> And we were an investor of VMware and we thought that was cool. Anyway, so fast forward to 2013, we go private. 2014, Joe Tuchi and I restart the discussion that we'd had earlier back in 2009 about combining together. 2015 we announced it and we thought that if we could combine everything together, that customers would really like it. And thankfully, as we found that that's been true, it's been more true then we thought. And the innovation engines are cranking on high. 12.8 billion dollars in RND invested in the last three years. And you see here at VMworld and in Dell technologies world the strength of the road maps. And so every turn of the crank, we're just getting stronger and stronger. We never believed that everything was going to go one place or the other. It's actually great that the edge is booming. Now if you said, did you know that five or ten years ago? No, I didn't really know, but you can kind of see some things starting to happen. But look, distributed computing will be even more distributed in the future. >> For your commentary, people at the convention of wisdom on that deal was it was a one way trip to the Hotel Cloudifornia and it's become a boon for the data center. Why the misconceptions? Why are you confident that it continues to be a boon for both companies? >> Yeah, and hey we got to go prove it. At the end of the day we have to go prove it. So, but the analysts were sort of viewing hey, there's this big sucking sound in the public cloud where everything congregates. You know point one, and three years ago that was the prevailing wisdom. Right, so that was going to be the case. Now everybody, you know, and like I had the big CIO who basically said, hey I've got 200 apps. I tried to move them to the public cloud. I got two done. I can build new things there, but this moving was really hard until we had the VMC service. So this ability to move things to the cloud and from the cloud, I call the three laws. The laws of physics, the laws of economics and the laws of the land. The laws of physics, hey if need 500 millisecond round trip to the cloud and the robotic arm needs a decision in 200 milliseconds. You know physics, economics. I'm not going to send every surveillance picture of the cat to the cloud. Ban would still cost, right. And then laws of the land right, where people say, government issues, GDPR, other things. So because of that we see this hybrid world and particularly as edge and IOT becomes more prominent, we fully expect that there's going to be more of that not less and as I showed in my key note last year, this pendulum of centralization and decentralization has been swinging through the industry for 40 years and we don't see that stopping and Edge will be a force of more data and compute pushing to the edge and that's obviously part of our key note as well. >> Yeah John, you know, we sat here analyzing this VMware AWS relationship. Is this a one way move to the public cloud? Is Amazon just going to take those 500,000 VMware customers and get them all to migrate? Even in the start of Andy and Pat up on stage you know, Andy goes, the number on use case is migrating our applications to the public cloud and Pat's like, and the number two use case is you know, bursting and on demand and things like that. So it's an interesting dynamic between what we call, you know, you got the gorilla in the data center of VMware and you've got the 800 pound gorilla in the cloud. Fast as the cheetah as Dave Velante says in AWS. But RDS on premises, this is a big deal. I tell you, I'm surprised, most people here are surprised with the discussion. We were at some shows recently when they're spanning the snowball use case. Snowballs great, it's edge, it's helping to migrate things to the data center. This is an Amazon service running into VMware on premise. Didn't think that we would be seeing this from Amazon who's goal was, we thought to get 100 percent of things in the public lap. >> Decisions on cloud. Okay, Andy Jaci comes on stage. You're personally involved with Andy on the Amazon analysis which is, I think people don't know how big that's going to be. But VMware and Amazon are seriously deep in a partnership. This is a big deal. This feels like a little wind tail kind of easy synergies across the board. >> Well you know, in some ways we'll say number one in public coming together with number one in private. That's a big deal. And you know, yesterday's announcement of RDS on premise to me sort of finishes this strategic picture that we were trying to paint where it really is a hybrid world, where we're taking workloads and giving people the access to this phenomenal rapidly growing public cloud. But we're also demonstrating that we can seamlessly connect to the private cloud and now we're bringing services back from the public cloud onto the private and neuron data center. And that's so profound because now customers can say, oh, I like the RDS API. I like the RDS management model. I can put the data wherever I need it for my business purposes and that hybrid bi directional highway is something that we're uniquely building with Amazon and hey, obviously we're working with other cloud providers. But they're our preferred partner and we're pretty thrilled. >> How are customers going to deal with the multiple clouds? I mean is there an infra ability framework coming? Do you see a real disruptive technology enable that'll have that kind of impact that TCP spawn massive opportunity and wealth creation and start ups and functionality? Is there a moment coming? >> So, TCP of course was the proper layering of an interact between the physical layer, you know layer one, layer two and the routing or the internet layer was just layer three. And without that, you know, this is back to the old internal argument, we wouldn't have what we have today on the internet. That was the only rational way to build a architecture that would actually. And I'm not sure if people had a notion in 1979 when TCP was started, that it would become that big. They probably would of picked a bigger adverspace if they had known. But it was, not just a longevity but the impact it had was just phenomenal, right. Now and that applied in terms of connectivity and how many things shift to interact between point a to point b. The NSX level of network management is a little different because it's much higher level. It's really a management plan, back to the point I made earlier about management plans, that allows you to integrate a cloud on your premise with one of Amazon or IBM or the future Google and so on in a way that you can have full visibility and you see, you know exactly what's going on, all the security policies. But this has been a dream for people to deliver but it requires to actually have a reasonable amount of cold in each of these places, both on user. It's not just a protocol, it's an implementation of accountability right. And VMware is the best solution that's available and I can see for that use case which is going to be very important to a large number of enterprises, many of which will want to have a small connection between on premise and off premise and in the future, to Edge, Telcol, and other things that will run a VM environment today but that will allow them to be fully securely linked >> I think, so we are seeing lots of customer energy around what we're doing in storage. There's huge momentum behind product like Vsend and our customers are truly embracing ACI in very mainstream use cases and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in meaning they're taking ACI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. It's a very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what ACI is about. You know, certainly, we started was virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been believer that HCI is a software architecture. I think now there's more recognition that. And it's also going from just computer storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center is expanding into the cloud as you see from VMCIWS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know we've announced Beta 4, you know V send to become the storage platform for Cupernetis NEV sphere environment. So lots of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI and if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC the boundary among these three is not very clear. I think they're all converging to work something that's very common. >> That's been proposed. Dell came out a while ago and sort of floated this idea of a reverse merger. Street puked all over it. And then all of a sudden they came up with this other idea of I called it the independence vig. Okay, VMware is having to pay a 11 billion dollar dividend. Nine billion of that is going to go to DVMT shareholders to clean that up. And you're going to get cash or prorata shares and the new Dell. Okay, so the question on the table is will that constrict VMware in anyway in terms of its ability to fund RND? My quick thoughts are short term no, long term, Dell has to walk a fine line between taking VMware cash, paying down it's debt and funding the future. Your thoughts. >> Yes, so here are my thoughts on this. So, I think that, first let's explain to the people what you just talked about, I'll translate. What you described is Michael Dell's going private, 60 billion dollars. That number was debt deal he did to buy Dell DMC so he has all this debt. Debt is like heroin, you get addicted to it, hard to get straight from that. So you gotta pay down the debt. He's been knockin' down the debt and big bag of money called Vmware's sitting there. As long as Vmware's thrown off cash flow that's going to be a key consideration. So, the independent vig as long as this cash flow's coming in, I think is fine. It's not going to really hurt it. But I think Dell's been brilliant in this because he's been essentially land grabbing the computer industry on the infrastructure side and he's going to make more money than ever before. He's going to pull it off and the only thing that could hurt him is either some side of force major or downturn or revenue not coming in from the sources whether either it's a public offering, acquisitions he's trying to sell off, and or VMware sputters which I don't think it will. Now with VM is on, even if they just go all in on Amazon and pull off all the other clouds, they'll still make a boat load of cash. >> I think it goes down in history as one of the greatest trades ever. I mean it's just phenomenal. >> Look, I mean Dave, we talked about when EMC bought VMware it was one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. >> 635 million. >> Right but. >> Now it's 60 billion value evaluation. >> Dell buying EMC, most people were like, I'm not sure what's going to happen but Michael will make a lot of money. VMware is doing so well that they can now fund Dell going public again based on this deal. So it's been one of those fascinating financial orchestration pieces to be out there. >> You ever feel constrained writing an 11 billion dollar dividend? Do you ever feel constrained in terms of your ability to fund the RND necessary to do some of those things? >> No. >> Rio said the same thing off camera but I ask you on camera. >> Yeah, generally I mean, am I constrained at how much RND I can do? Well hey, I've got a budget, we build a PNL, we communicate it to the street and everyday possible I'm pushing the growth of business faster so I can shove more dollars into one of two places. More dollars into RND or more dollars into sales and customer facing. Right and if Robin Matlock is here, I keep giving her the table scraps at the end of those things. But build products that are innovated, radical and break through. Sell products and support our customers using them. That's the two thing... >> And I think it's a really interesting point that after a lot of conversations with a lot of folks saying AWS is all going to go up to the cloud and wondering whether that also is a one way street for VMware customers. But now we're seeing it's much more of a bilateral relationship. >> It's moving it to the right place. And that's the second thing. The embracing of multi cloud by everybody. One cloud is not going to do everything. There's going to be fast clouds, there's going to be multiple places where people are going to put certain workloads because that's the best strategic fit for it. And the acceptance in the market place that that is where it's going to go. I think that gain is a major change. The hybrid cloud and multi cloud environments. And then the third thing is I think the richness of the eco system is amazing. The going on the floor and the number of people that have come to talk to us with new ideas really fascinating ideas is something I haven't seen at all for the last three, four years. >> Alright, we've heard from some of our guests on theCUBE and you've heard our teams initial analysis of the news from VMworld. Now we want to hear from you. Please hop into the crowd chat below, give us your feedback, want a community discussion and let's hear about what everybody thinks about VMware and VMworld 2018. Once again, thanks so much for joining us and look forward to the conversation.